Customer Reviews

Daughters of the River Huong (2005 publication)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Daughter of the River Huong is a great story. It is very well written. It made me paused occassionally to think about of the events that Ms. Uyen(Judge Uyen!!) lead us to the earlier rich history of Vietnam, which I do not know much of.

I hope this story will make to a movie or film someday near future. If you appreciate the history of Vietnam, this is a book for you.

I can't help when reading the book that Vietnam, as a country been through set back and suprised opportunities via the past century, colonized by the French, and last America get to where they are today of the economic opportunity.

The story is a heart broken but also revealed of the tenacious woman who is determined to define her own destination.

Tony T. Tran
San Francisco, CA

DAUGHTERS OF THE RIVER HUONG: A Vietnamese royal concubine and her descendants by Uyen Nicole Duong
ISBN 1-928928-16-I, U.S.:RavensYard Publishing, Ltd, Trade paperback, 271 pp.
SRP $17.95



Uyên Nicole D??ng's "Daughters of the River H??ng: A Vietnamese royal concubine & her descendants" is a historical work that I've just discovered and feel compelled to say is among the ranks of great contemporary epic novels. If it weren't for the fictionalized aspect of this true-to-life love story, it could well be an interestingly humanist, thoroughly researched female study that delves into a century of tumultuous history in Vi?t Nam: from French colonial time to the revolutionary struggle for independence to today's socialist cum capitalist society.

Hers is a refreshing voice adding to our understanding of the Vietnam conflict.

While good writers transcend their geographical origins with the universality of the human condition, their literary style depends in large measure on the skillful hand of translators. D??ng's original English work faces no such barrier; her poetic prose stands on its own.

Yet, few of the current Vietnamese American writers have lived through the period that they have written about, nor have the breadth of their novels reached the historical scope or touched the height of human emotion as this work.

What separates it from her earlier contemporaries, such as B?o Ninh's "The Sorrow of War" and D??ng Thu H??ng's "Paradise of the Blind," is her novel's mass appeal. What we have here is the making of a movie that spans four generations and three continents, from present-day Manhattan to ancient Hu? to romantic Paris, to Texas, and back to Sài Gòn.

The book, from RavensYard Publishing, progresses from the French empire in Vi?t Nam to the dying days of colonialism, when descendants of royal concubine Huy?n Phi began to take roots in the mystical Violet City of Hu?, to the American involvement and its untimely debacle.

At the center of the action, the main character transforms from a humble paddle girl on the river H??ng to matriarch of her bloodline.

The novel's early plot reminds us of "The Year of Living Dangerously" and "The Killing Fields," in which brave and endearing foreign reporters stay back to witness the fall of the city, as it changes hands, as well as to see the plight of the people. In this case, Christopher Sanders, an American journalist with a major news network from New York, is the hero who saved the beautiful and virginal Vietnamese Lolita from an uncertain fate and brought her to his country.

The tale of survival is told from several women's point of views, all inexorably connected to the uncrowned empress Huy?n Phi and her extinct kingdom of Champa.

Multigenerational as the saga maybe, the heroine shines as the thread that links all her descendants' trials and tribulation and helps make sense of their complex history. No doubt, the scholarly and methodical training of the author's law background helped her to structure her work, with the result being a systematic, albeit cinematic, presentation of nuances and themes.

I cannot help but think of this story as autobiographical, given the parallel in the author's life and the beautiful and hopeless romantic Si (or Mi Uyên) as the novel's heroine. So much so that readers of the Occident camp may want to claim her (the heroine, not the author) as their own given her unabashed and persistent love for her French Romeo (Andre Foucault) and her wish to rejoin her benign American husband (Christopher Sanders).

"Why did you come to me in New York City? You owed me no obligation..."

"Because," I (Si) whispered, "I wanted to know with certainty I had boarded the plane." Somewhere I still heard the angry roaring sound of the last helicopter atop the U.S. Embassy... Standing in the heart of the new Saigon I began to rediscover my feelings for Andre, persistent and haunting since childhood... He was the only one outside of the culture who understood the bond between my soul and those of all the women in my bloodline."

Perhaps her book, through its first person narrative, would speak directly to those secret fantasy and dark yearnings, while readers of the Asian camp may wonder why - except for an ephemeral treatment of emperor Thu?n Thành - other Asian male characters take such minor and roles in her book.

Yet the appeal is precisely that transcendental need for empathy which reaches across cultural and geographical boundaries in spite of its nationalist fervor that's steep in folklore. This universal theme of love and loss, of eternal waiting, of heroic female struggles becomes the cry, wailing out for human connection in our war-weary world.

Nguyen-Khoa Thai Anh

The book starts with two failed "marriages", one in the early 20th century between the puppet king of Viet Nam and his "Mystique Concubine", the other at the end of the century between the concubine's great grand daughter and the older man whom she seduced into getting her family out of Viet Nam at the end of the war. In between is the story of a line of strong women, princesses reduced to running a silk farm in a village on the River Huong, the perfumed river that runs through the book, contrasting the sensuous beauty of Viet Nam with the brutality of the endless war. It is both beautifully written and an easy, smooth read. The women of the different generations are easy to keep straight. I'm glad to know from other reviewers that there are apparently even better books about women in Viet Nam during the war; this one is certainly moving, subtle, and well-crafted.

During the Vietnam War, propaganda, disinformation, and ignorance tore America more than any other war in American history. Mr. Jones' review of the novel "Daughters of the River Huong" offers a concentrated example of this prejudice. Readers may be misled by Mr. Jones' review. Clarification is needed especially in the month of the anniversary date of the fall of Saigon - an important date for Vietnamese Americans and for America.
Let's start with Mr. Jones obvious bias. Mr. Jone uses Vietnamese communist rhetoric to criticize the creative literary work of an accomplished South Vietnamese American author. He calls the Vietnam War the "American War," the terminology of Communist Vietnam. (Perhaps he should also call the Korean War the "American War" and the Cuba Revolution the "Anti-American Revolution.") He also calls the author a "revisionist" of history. He forgets that only those in power can do the kind of revision he attributes to her. Here is one concrete example:
In typecasting Vietnamese Americans as "Vietkieu," Mr. Jones also suggests that the millions of Vietnamese boat people just "emigrated" (his choice of word). No, they risked their lives at sea to seek freedom and a better society. Boat people were once called criminals fleeing the country; then, once the Berlin Wall and the Soviet have disintegrated, and the U.S. dollars are desired, they immediately become "Viet-Kieu," beloved expatriates welcomed by the very government from which they escaped. The author explained the undesirable meaning of this term in her novel, but Mr. Jones just ignores that. The term has its semantic origin: Vietnamese call Chinese expatriates living in Vietnam "Hoa-Kieu," American expatriates "My-Kieu", Indian expatriates "An-Kieu," and French expatriates "Phap-Kieu." All these expatriates live in their host country (Vietnam) away from their homeland, and that's why they are called "Kieu" by native Vietnamese. Thus, in Vietnam, calling Vietnamese who live in America "Viet-Kieu" is linguistically incorrect. Yet, this inaccuracy has been accepted in Vietnam as part of the post-1975 large-scaled "revision" by the Communist government. The "revisionary" term Viet-Kieu is accepted by Mr. Jones, who apparently does not know Vietnamese linguistics. Who is the "revisionist," then, Ms. Jones or Ms Duong?

I am also disappointed that Mr. Jones claims authority over matters that he does not have. There are more major inaccuracies in his 5-paragraph review than in the 400+page novel. Here are some of his rudest:

1) "There is the "Cinderella" aspect of the story, as told by Jackie Collins. The great grandmother was a humble boat rower on the Perfume (Huong) river in Hue, who was "discovered" by the Emperor..." Mr. Jones does not know that this "Cinderella" story is part of Vietnam's anecdotal history concerning Emperor Thanh Thai and his "Paddle Girl" bride, not "Jackie Collins" in America or Cinderella! This anecdote is so popular in Hue that there are the famous folk verses expressing the Emperor's sentiments: "Kim Long có gái m' mi'u, Tr'm yêu tr'm nh', tr'm li'u tr'm 'i." Even the Communist government has documented this tale (see published works of Ton That Binh and Nguyen Dac Xuan in Vietnam). Emperor Thanh Thai was a real historical figure.

2) "Each generation is told in the first person, so there are sentences like: "My skin was burning when he kissed me one, twice, and then too many times to count," and "...even though the cells of my skin danced under his fingertips." (narrative by the Mystique Concubine of the early 1900s). Apparently, Mr. Jones does not know Vietnamese creative literature well enough to realize that this is the way Vietnamese women and literary protagonists talked in the first part the 20th century. When flying over "Dien Bien Phu" or admiring the work of photojournalist Tim Page (who donated publicity material to the Communist government), Mr. Jones should ask the Vietnamese cadres about "N'a Ch'ng Xuân," the famous novel written by the famous Vietnamese writer Khai Hung during the first half of the 20th Century. There, Khai Hung's female protagonist said, "tôi ch' yêu có m't ng''i và ''i tôi nh' th' là h't, dù r'ng tôi ch' m'i n'a ch'ng xuân." ("I only love one man, and my life is considered over, even though I have gone through half of my spring time"). Yes, that was the archaic, stylized speech of Vietnamese women back then! (In fact, if Mr. Jones asks about Khai Hung, most likely he will not be able to get an answer or translation of text from any government cadres, because Vietnamese communists assassinated Khai Hung, and his idealistic novels were only read and studied in the South by young Vietnamese women like Ms. Duong (who, based on her bio, attended high school in Vietnam)!

3) "Three generations later, you have a "Lolita," starting at six, and within a few more years, taking a Frenchman, the grandson of the Resident Superieur who exiled her great grandfather, away from his wife. (Marguerite Duras [sic] novel The Lover plays the Indochina Lolita gamut infinitely better)." What a sexist distortion of the plot: 10-year-old Simone took Andre away from his wife? Where in the novel? I recall just the opposite: that Andre left Vietnam to marry someone of his own age and race! Further, didn't the Frenchman have to take any responsibility over his own action? Why does Mr. Jones blame the child on behalf of the Frenchman? (In his review, Mr. Jones also states that the child was...Ms. Duong, who tore pages from her grandmother's book and revised it! Incredible accusation!). Mr. Jones' stacking of Duras next to Simone is even more offensive -- the worst stereotype: Duras - the white girl in French Indochina -- was financially dependent on, and had a steamy sexual relationship with a Chinese man - the "yellow" lover. A quid pro quo? None of those elements existed in Ms. Duong's novel. Every seemingly "taboo" love story that took place in Vietnam is immediately placed next to Duras' steamy sex scenes although Duras is not even Vietnamese!

4) "There is also: "He even wanted to go to Japan to study the Japanese experience of industrialization and decolonization. Was Japan ever colonized?" By picking on this detail (from the narrative of Dew, a young girl, less than 10 years of age), Mr. Jones reveals his ignorance about Vietnamese history. After the "Support-the-Emperor" movement (C'n V''ng), the Dong Du and Duy Tan movements were initiated by Vietnamese mandarins who believed that going to Japan would enable them to learn how to decolonize Vietnam. Only an uninformed Westerner like Mr. Jones does not know this. Among those mandarins was the famous Phan Chau Trinh, who might have taken the young Ho Chi Minh under his tutorage during their time in Paris in 1917). Mr. Jones assumes that these Confucians (nhà nho) would rather learn the lesson of decolonization from another....colonized country! Why would they want to send young Vietnamese to neighboring Laos or Cambodia, where everybody would be oppressed by the same French colonists? These mandarins believed, as youngsters like Ms. Duong in pre-1975 Vietnam must have been taught, that the lesson had to be learned from Japan, which developed itself into a superpower and escaped colonization from the West. These are the ABCs of Vietnamese history of the 19th and early 20th century.

5) "...[T]he novel would have the reader assume that the author's principal source of knowledge about the war was Hollywood movies, and not one who had lived through it." Another condescending stereotype! Mr. Jones, who was not born and raised in Hue, nor evacuated from Saigon like Ms. Duong, feels the need to use the stereotypical "Hollywood movies" jargon to typecast Vietnamese American authenticity. Mr. Jones should have researched the history of Vietnamese Americans' settlement in the U.S, or simply read the author's bio. Many Vietnamese, including those in Vietnam today, consider the novelist (formerly Judge Duong) a role model for our younger generations. She also writes abundantly on technical matters related to Vietnam that only an expert can produce. Many of us - now in our 60s and 70s - may still remember her as the teenager who received South Vietnam's National Honor Prize in Literature awarded on the Trung Sisters' Day. In March 1975, one month before the fall of Saigon, the skinny young girl walked in the national park Tao Dan downtown Saigon, together with her fellow honorees: widows of South Vietnamese soldiers and female officers of the South Vietnamese armed forces. The young woman was then interviewed on South Vietnam's national TV. When somebody like her decides to write a novel in America, it is not to "to make the story palatable to an American readership, as well as exciting, and "marketable" of the Jackie Collins style as Mr. Jones prejudicially asserts.

6) "The Paris Peace treaty occurred in 1973, not '72." Mr. Jones is wrong. The Paris treaty negotiation occurred in 1972 and the treaty itself was signed on January 27, 1973, in the Centre de Conférences Internationales, Avenue Kléber, Paris. As South Vietnamese, many of us knew that the death of our country predated the signing of the treaty, the final touch to a farce. 1972 was the year of the Eastertide Offensive and the battle of An Loc. In July, 1972, the Paris peace talk resumed, carried out to the desired result: the exclusion of the South Vietnamese interest. I need say no more, since I don't think a novelist like Ms. Duong has the duty to give Mr. Jones a whole chapter on what happened in 1972 in Paris, in Washington, D.C., Hanoi, and Saigon!

7)"The "Renovation" policy was announced in '86, not '85, and the US Trade embargo was lifted in Feb., not April '94." Many of us, Vietnamese Americans, know that "Renovation" was not just announced overnight in 1986. We know that in 1985, party-member Nguyen Van Linh was reinstalled in Vietnam's Politburo, after he had been removed from there in 1982. As soon as he became General Secretary, Renovation was officially announced. That does not mean Renovation was not formulated earlier, or that Linh spoke for the first time about "free enterprise" in 1986! Linh responded to Vietnam's economic crisis in the mid-1980s, after hints of reforms had emerged in the former Soviet as early as 1983. (Prior to Renovation, at the beginning of 1985, Vietnam also broadcast its bloody oppression against "resistance" while "Renovation" was being orchestrated. During the same year, the Foreign Investment Law - the frame for Renovation modeled after China's -- was being formulated.

February 1994 might be the date for Washington's embargo lift, but those of us Vietnamese Americans who shared in that historical event "on the ground" knew that the real implementation - the signing of some huge foreign investment contracts between Vietnam and major U.S. companies - actually occurred in April and May, 1994, when roadmaps for diplomacy and the Consular Agreement also came about. I examined the author's publicly posted CV, and found that the author was a lawyer for Mobil Corporation in Southeast Asia during this period of time. No doubt in my mind the author wrote about Vietnam's early days of globalization from her own experience.

8) But Mr. Jones' most offensive act was his accusation that the author described the Vietnam War as between two sovereign states. What if she did? I see the novel not as political fight, but a humanistic painting of a generation during a tragic period for both Vietnam and America. While the United Nations might not have recognized two states of Vietnam before 1975, that does not mean in our hearts and minds, South Vietnam isn't/wasn't a sovereign state. Is South Korea a sovereign state? Is Taiwan a sovereign state? Ms. Duong is an international lawyer. Why not ask her what a sovereign state is, or should we ask Mr. Jones?

9) "The circumstances of the family's final departure from Vietnam in 1975 are highly improbable, as told, and certainly the biological timeline is impossible." Which circumstances? Which "biological timeline"? I suggest that Mr. Jones reread Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval" to find some of the "circumstances" described by his CIA compatriots about the months and days leading to the fall of Saigon. Mr. Jones should also find some Vietnamese elderly who can tell him more about the Vietnamese extended family structure and "biological timeline" concerning Vietnamese women, in their time and place. For example, ask about "t'c t'o hôn" and the marrying age of Vietnamese women at the turn of the 20th century.

10) "In the novel itself, the second largest city in southern Vietnam, DaNang, is described as: "...the military base of the American..." In speaking of O-Lan, the author says: "I was born in the foothills of the Truong Son range, which later became the Ho Chi Minh trail." Is the child character supposed to give Mr. Jones a better geographical and socio-political description of DaNang? And, should the character O-Lan -- an illiterate noodle peddler who does not know (and does not care) who her father is - give Mr. Jones some...200-page explanation of her origin and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in a scene that occupied approximately 10 pages out of a 400 plus-page novel?

11) "...[O]ne of the major hardships that the family faced during the American war was the inflation in Saigon, and having to give up their domestic help ...The impact of the war on the author's three million compatriots who lost their lives is virtually unmentioned. Yet shortly after giving up their domestic help, they can send their daughter to Paris for schooling! Mr. Jones likes terminologies popularized by the current Communist government: from the "American War" to "Vietkieus" (he Americanized the term into one word). Yet he seems to understand "domestic help" the American way, not the Vietnamese way. Middle-class or petit-bourgeois Vietnamese households are what "free enterprise" hopes to create and communism wants to wipe out! Mr. Jones must not have heard of "u già,`" "bà vú," or "ch' gái," those young ladies or old women who became part of the household, although not related by blood, just like the special relationship between the enigmatic Nanny Mai and the suffering Madame Cinnamon. Frequently distant relatives also became domestic help. In the novel, the aristocratic grandmother, Madame Cinnamon, took the place of domestic help. But Mr. Jones doesn't just stop there. His mischaracterization of Simone's "French schooling" is another huge distortion of the plot.

More importantly, Mr. Jones refuses to see that in pre-1975 South Vietnam, there was a societal structure "normal" in all aspects. Yet, overnight, that structure collapsed after some 20 years of building of a defense wall around the normalcy of South Vietnamese lives. True, many people died, but Vietnam was not just about black-pajama bodies and Agent Orange. In Mr. Jones' stereotypic, jaded view, every book about Vietnam's got to portray the deaths of millions of people, as though a literary fiction writer were supposed to be a war correspondent. This novel describes the normalcy that constituted the hopes of the Vietnamese middle-class, and how it came to an end in April, 1975. Millions of lives were lost so that Saigon and South Vietnam (and Ms. Duong's characters) could hold on to the structure of normalcy, the impetus that could have pushed a free (or freer) Vietnam to the economic development that today characterizes Vietnam's neighbors: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and even Japan!

12) The Tet offensive of 1968 had a major and devastating impact on Hue, and that is the subject of the novel, but the impact of Tet on Saigon is essentially omitted. Another distortion! Is this novel only about "the Tet Offensive impact" on Hue, or does it present the odyssey of a family originated from Hue? Should we condemn Ms. Duong for not making her novel into a 1,000-page treatise or encyclopedia on the war?

So, Mr. Jones' repertoire of the Vietnam literary genre allows him to mix autobiographies with creative fiction. (He cites three books; two out of three were not written by Vietnamese Americans; two out of three were not even literary fiction.) And then he acts surprised that Ms. Duong's novel is...a novel.: "...[F]or some, that means anything goes. For me, great or even good novels have to be authentic to time and place as well as ring truthful concerning the human condition." In a novel, a standard of aesthetics is used, not "everything goes." That "everything goes" occurs when Mr. Jones changes the novel into an autobiography: "So, it does appear that the granddaughter, the author, pulled a page from her grandmother's book, and revised so many aspects of what could have been a good story..." Why the writer chose the fiction form in a time of "reality shows" is something readers must respect. For one thing, if facts in the novel are true, there is no privacy concern because the participants have been made into novel characters. This novel should help Mr. Jones learn the "time and place" and the "human condition" of middle-class South Vietnamese, but he refuses to see that because of his own political bias. Yes, in Vietnam, pre-1975, there was a middle class, and their voice, too, should be heard!

Who is Mr. Jones? A pseudonym mouthpiece for those anonymous faces who want to downgrade this novel and its South Vietnamese perspective? After all, it is Mr. Jones' "Vietkieus" who have poured billions of their hard-earned U.S. dollars into the economy of Vietnam before, during, and after "Renovation." The unbiased and truly curious readers of Amazon will determine the literary value of this novel. Such literary value is not assessed based on esoteric likes or dislikes, let alone hostile distortions and political bias!

This is a well researched story that uses the historic elements of the ancient Vietnamese culture to tell a story that works on a contemporary level. Very vivid and interesting.

In these pages...in the stories of these women...I found myself. Each woman's story drew new tears to my eyes - tears for the sorrows of generations of an entire nation - tears for the joys and disappointments, hopes and fears, burdens and aspirations of a single woman - a woman I see reflected in myself.

These stories have given color, a voice, and a form to the ghosts of hopeless hope. I find myself asking, is there anything we can ever do that will be enough? Enough for myself, enough to restore what was loss, enough to bring pride, honor, contentment, and unity to a people - a nation. Is it possible?

In these pages, you too may find yourself and glimpse a beauty once lost; like pieces of your soul waiting to be found.

A good book creates it's own universe; an excceptional book has characters I care about. I found being immersed in the romantic and lyrical culture of these Champa descendants of Viet Nam to be a fascinating journey.

The stress of living under the sixth sense of fate which the author calls the "Face of Brutality" haunts four generations of Vietnamese women beginning with the Mystique Concubine living in 1910 Hue and extending to Simone Mi-Uyen who lives in New York City during the last decade of the Twentieth Century.

The story moves from Viet Nam to Paris to New York City. This personalized history of Viet Nam gave me an intimate understanding of Vietnamese culture by the time I finished the riveting story of this novel. It was like finding a black rose.

I had a hard time warming to the heroine of the novel, in part because I ended up reading the second book in the series first, and found her younger sister to be a much more vivid character with an interesting life. The heroine also seems too passive and there is little of the magical quality of the second book in this stark story of a Vietnamese family who seeks to escape their homeland during the fall of Saigon. Each child in the family needs to make a choice about how to break free of the past and carve a new life for themselves in America, and as the eldest, there is a great deal of burden on her to help her parents and younger siblings.
The betrayal she feels over the bargain she makes in order to get herself and her family air-lifted out is real, but I found her too miserable and over-dramatic at times. What she endures is not as horrendous as her sister's experiences, (see Mimi and her Mirror) yet she does not ever seem to want to rise above the tragedy.
The writer is clearly talented and as a first novel, the world she creates is a compelling one, but I wish I had liked her heroine more.

I LOVED this book. Really really loved it! I picked it up and couldn't stop reading no matter what else was going on around me. It's poetically written, passing between generations like a dream. The writing was very colorful, in vivid greens and violets. Every sense is stimulated. The stories travel from Hue to Saigon to Paris to New York City, following the lives of the last Vietnamese King's beloved concubine, to the twin daughters that are born of their union, to young Simone, who grows up in the midst of the Vietnam/American War. [In Vietnam, they call it "The American War", while we Americans call it "The Vietnam War", so I will split the difference here.] This family is a very special family, with history back to the ancient Champa culture, scholars and silk-makers. Their life in Vietnam is not similar to other books about Vietnam I have read. So, if you are interested in Vietnam, be sure to pick up this book.

I hate to make the obvious comparison, but if you like books like Amy Tan's "Joy Luck Club", you will enjoy this book. It is in that genre of books about Asian women across the generations. This genre is one of my favorites and it never gets old, but this book is particularly original with the "Mystique Concubine" and the way she is conflated with the spirit of the Perfume river, and the way her essence is conveyed down the generations to the contemporary Simone. Simone's story is like a Lolita story, but written from the perspective of Lolita - very relatable for anyone who has been a teenage girl.

Overall, it's a very enjoyable book of a family of strong women and there are some powerful romances herein as well.

Daughters of the River Huong, I believe, offers an archetypal remedy for an incompleteness and a longing deep in the American collective consciousness.

Two weeks ago I took a boatride on the River Huong, serenaded by musicians playing traditional music from Hue. It was the fulfillment of a desire I've had for many years--much enriched by the images and feelings described in Uyen Nicole Duong's exquisite book.

At one point, the musicians sang a well-known and enchanting song about the ten virtues of the Vietnamese woman. Under the full moon, in that boat gently rocking on the River Huong, I was overwhelmed by the sentiments of that song sung by those seven women singers. I was reminded of a comment made by historians Will and Ariel Durant, who wrote that if the sins and good works of the Middle Ages were measured on a scale, the balance would be tipped in favor of goodness--tipped by the weight of the noble works done by the women of that period. I was also reminded of a comment by a Vietnamese friend and social observer, who recently told me that he gives all credit for the preservation of van hoa Viet Nam (Vietnamese culture), from time immemorial, to "the Ladies of Viet Nam."

I think that most readers of Daughters of the River Huong will be inspired by the remarkable grace and strength of Vietnamese women and by the beauty and profundity of Vietnamese culture. Readers, too, will be left with a better understanding of why, transcendental to issues of politics and economics, we Americans remain fascinated by Viet Nam to the present day.