From award-winning author Andrew X. Pham, a son's memoir of his Vietnamese father's experiences over the course of three wars. Once wealthy landowners, Thong Van Pham's family was shattered by the tumultuous events of the twentieth century: the festering French occupation of Indochina, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the Vietnam War. Told in chapters that alternate between events in the past and those closer to the present, the book...

"Born blind in Vietnam, Julie Yip-Williams narrowly escaped euthanasia by her grandmother, only to then flee the political upheaval of the late 1970s with her family. Loaded into a rickety boat with three hundred other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon at UCLA gave her partial sight. Against all odds, she became a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, a life. Then, at age thirty-seven, with...

In his long-overdue first collection of essays, noted journalist and NPR commentator Andrew Lam explores his lifelong struggle for identity as a Viet Kieu, or a Vietnamese national living abroad. At age eleven, Lam, the son of a South Vietnamese general, came to California on the eve of the fall of Saigon to communist forces. He traded his Vietnamese name for a more American one and immersed himself in the allure of the American dream: something not...

Saigon fell to the Viet Cong on April 30, 1975. Kien Nguyen was there. He watched the last U.S. Army helicopter leave without him, without his brother, without his mother, without his grandparents. Told with stark and poetic brilliance, this is a story of survival, a story of hope--a moving and personal recorded of a tumultuous and important piece of history.

A former Vietnamese refugee retraces his life in order to come to terms with the Vietnam War and with his father, a South Vietnamese pilot shot down and left for dead, and describes his surprise reunion with his long-lost father.

Chronicles the experiences of an orphaned Amerasian boy from his birth and early childhood in Saigon through his departure from Vietnam in the 1975 Operation Babylift and his subsequent life as the adopted son of an American family in Ohio.