We received several titles for recommended reading before our trip to Vietnam. I thought I'd mention them here in case any blog readers are inspired to read beyond our blog (!) or in case any readers want to make further suggestions in a comment.
I was riveted by Duong Van Mai Elliot's The Sacred Willow: Four Generations of a Vietnamese Family published in 2000. The book description provided by the publisher (shown below) is excellent. For me, hearing the story of families separated by choices and geography and accounts of the manifest spirit and drive for independence of Vietnamese people against the pressures of politics, war and its aftermath provided a textured introduction to underlying elements of our journey. My understanding could not have been the same without this book.
David Lamb's Vietnam Now provided a great foundation for rethinking my understanding of Vietnam from my early exposure during the American war. Lamb was here during the war and then returned twenty years later. His journalist's eye brought both the changes and the enduring themes in Vietnam's culture alive and placed the country on a contemporary trajectory I could begin to comprehend.
I have only read the first chapter of Neil Jamieson's Understanding Vietnam but hope to complete it. He establishes Confucian yin and yang as the metaphor for competing/complementary forces in Vietnamese society (an example might be cybernetic and organic growth) and I want to know how it plays out.
Book description taken from Amazon: "Duong Van Mai Elliott's The Sacred Willow, an extraordinary narrative woven from the lives of four generations of her family, illuminates fascinating--and until now unexplored--strands of Vietnamese history.
Beginning with her great-grandfather, who rose from rural poverty to become an influential mandarin, and continuing to the present, Mai Elliott traces her family's journey through an era of tumultuous change. She tells us of childhood hours in her grandmother's silk shop--and of hiding while French troops torched her village, watching blossoms torn by fire from the trees flutter "like hundreds of butterflies" overhead. She reveals the agonizing choices that split Vietnamese families: her eldest sister left her staunchly anti-communist home to join the Viet Minh, and spent months sleeping with her infant son in jungle camps, fearing air raids by day and tigers by night. And she follows several family members through the last, desperate hours of the fall of Saigon--including one nephew who tried to escape by grabbing the skid of a departing American helicopter.
Based on family papers, dozens of interviews, and a wealth of other research, this is not only a memorable family saga, but a record of how the Vietnamese themselves have experienced their times. At times haunting, at times heartbreaking--it is always mesmerizing."
PS: Another book recommended by fellow traveler Debra is Paradise of the Blind by Thu Huong Duong, writing of three women during the hardships in the slums of Hanoi during the tumultuous time of land reform.
I was riveted by Duong Van Mai Elliot's The Sacred Willow: Four Generations of a Vietnamese Family published in 2000. The book description provided by the publisher (shown below) is excellent. For me, hearing the story of families separated by choices and geography and accounts of the manifest spirit and drive for independence of Vietnamese people against the pressures of politics, war and its aftermath provided a textured introduction to underlying elements of our journey. My understanding could not have been the same without this book.
David Lamb's Vietnam Now provided a great foundation for rethinking my understanding of Vietnam from my early exposure during the American war. Lamb was here during the war and then returned twenty years later. His journalist's eye brought both the changes and the enduring themes in Vietnam's culture alive and placed the country on a contemporary trajectory I could begin to comprehend.
I have only read the first chapter of Neil Jamieson's Understanding Vietnam but hope to complete it. He establishes Confucian yin and yang as the metaphor for competing/complementary forces in Vietnamese society (an example might be cybernetic and organic growth) and I want to know how it plays out.
Book description taken from Amazon: "Duong Van Mai Elliott's The Sacred Willow, an extraordinary narrative woven from the lives of four generations of her family, illuminates fascinating--and until now unexplored--strands of Vietnamese history.
Beginning with her great-grandfather, who rose from rural poverty to become an influential mandarin, and continuing to the present, Mai Elliott traces her family's journey through an era of tumultuous change. She tells us of childhood hours in her grandmother's silk shop--and of hiding while French troops torched her village, watching blossoms torn by fire from the trees flutter "like hundreds of butterflies" overhead. She reveals the agonizing choices that split Vietnamese families: her eldest sister left her staunchly anti-communist home to join the Viet Minh, and spent months sleeping with her infant son in jungle camps, fearing air raids by day and tigers by night. And she follows several family members through the last, desperate hours of the fall of Saigon--including one nephew who tried to escape by grabbing the skid of a departing American helicopter.
Based on family papers, dozens of interviews, and a wealth of other research, this is not only a memorable family saga, but a record of how the Vietnamese themselves have experienced their times. At times haunting, at times heartbreaking--it is always mesmerizing."
PS: Another book recommended by fellow traveler Debra is Paradise of the Blind by Thu Huong Duong, writing of three women during the hardships in the slums of Hanoi during the tumultuous time of land reform.
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