The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family [Hardcover]

Duong Van Mai Elliott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 8, 1999

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--The Sacred Willow will forever change how we view the history of Vietnam and our own role in it.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Most books about Vietnam focus on the French who colonized it or the Americans who sought to "save" it. This combination of memoir and family history shows the Vietnamese "as they saw themselves as the central players in their own history." The author's perspective is particularly enlightening because her relatives, though unquestionably better-educated and better-off than the typical Vietnamese, made a variety of political and social choices over the course of the turbulent century she chronicles. Her great-grandfather was a mandarin and member of the imperial court; her father was a government official under French rule; her older sister married a Communist. Elliott herself enrolled in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service in 1960, married an American, and supported the U.S. crusade in Vietnam until her experiences interviewing Vietcong prisoners of war for a Rand Corporation study convinced her that the corrupt Saigon regime failed to offer a convincing alternative to Communism. Because she had family on both sides, Elliott's portrait of the war is subtler and less didactic than previous accounts by proponents of either ideology. Her prose is a bit formal and dense for the casual reader, but by telling her relatives' personal stories and explicating their culture's traditional values, her reflective narrative makes humanly complicated a history too often oversimplified. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

In this deeply moving family saga, Elliott offers a microcosm of the history of modern Vietnam. Her great-grandfather passed the grueling tests through which unpropertied Vietnamese men tried to advance by entering the government as mandarins. More than half a century later, in 1947, when the author was six, her family fled their smoldering ancestral village while Ho Chi Minh's troops battled the French. After spending her childhood in Hanoi and her adolescence in Saigon, she studied at Georgetown University in the early 1960s. She and her future husband, David Elliott, moved to Saigon, marrying in 1964; there Elliott took a job with the Rand Corporation in a U.S. Defense Department-sponsored project, interviewing communist prisoners and defectors. Though her parents were staunchly anti-communist (her father served as governor in the puppet kingdom run by the French and later worked in South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem's regime), the author scorned Diem as well as the communists and, by 1969, called for an end to U.S. intervention. Family loyalties were divided: her eldest sister became a hard-core communist, while one of her brothers spent more than three years in Vietcong "reeducation" prison camps. Elliott writes with unsparing candor about forging a new identity, about her nation's destruction and its partial revival with the reintroduction of free-market mechanisms and, above all, about her family's harrowing passage through a long and difficult history. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1ST edition (April 8, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195124340
• ISBN-13: 978-0195124347
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #431,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Vast fascinating saga, but limited outlook, September 17, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (Hardcover)

This book is indeed what most critics say that it is: an ambitious, sprawling saga, paralleling the life and history of one family with the history of Vietnam in the last 130 years. And it does make fascinating reading. However, one other critic rightly made the point that this history is limited to the upper-middle-class, with very little on the rest - the farmers, the urban working class, the fighting soldiers, the intelligentsia. To which I will add: the view Mai Elliott gives of the sweeping events her family lived through was in fact rather comprehensive as long as it took place in the North, where she was born. Once the family moved South to Saigon, they pretty much kept to themselves and were out of the loop as far as decision-making was concerned (whereas ther father had been Governor of Haiphong and right there in the thick of things in the North). Being myself a Southerner Vietnamese, I do admit that, in general, the refugees from the North were not made warmly welcome. But some did reach out and eventually made friends, which the Duong family does not seem to have done. When they were still high officials in the North, the Duongs were influential and knew almost every aspect of what was going on. Once in the South, they were pretty much out of the loop, and Mai falls back on sweeping generalizations based on prejudices and hearsay, like "the Southern landowners were absently landlords who lived it up in Saigon, leaving their lands to caretakers". Being myself from a landowning family, I can vouch that that was far from true. Same thing about the South Vietnamese armed forces and the contempt in which they were supposedly held by their American allies. Would Tiger Woods' father have named him after a South Vietnamese Ranger if he despised him and his companions as cowards? She also fails to note that, very often, a South Vietnamese military operation would fail because Americans would not listen to their SVN counterparts, thinking they knew better. And Mai was so busy interviewing VC prisoners of war and trying to understand them that she never took the time to find out what the South Vietnamese working class, farmers, and fighting men, were like. Or why they stuck with a "corrupt" and "tyrannical" government, not to mention nasty imperialist Americans without rising up and going to the other side. Her account of the fall of Saigon and its aftermath is told solely from the point of view of her relatives who stayed there, or other former Northern refugees, and from a strictly "bleeding-heart liberal" perspective. General Loan is stigmatized when he shot a VC in public (he had heard that very day that the VCs had massacred a whole bunch of his relatives), but widespread cases of the so-called Liberation Army summarily shooting thieves in the street is related without so much as a metaphorically raised eybrow. There is no mention whatsoever of the South Vietnamese underground resistance that went on for over 10 years after Saigon fell, and only a grudging, one-sentence acknowledgement of "acts of heroism" by the South Vietnamese army and people. Her extensive bibliography is limited to North Vietnamese and American books, magazines and papers when she could have gained a different insight from books or articles by South Vietnamese or French writers and journalists, among others "The Vietnamese Gulag" by a South Vietnamese who stayed on after the "liberation" to help rebuild the country. I still recommend the book as an interesting work, giving a perspective that Americans in general have not seen - the "Vietnam War" viewed from the point of view of a Vietnamese family. But for that, Le Ly Hayslip's "When Heaven and Earth Changed Places" was closer to the people - and Mai Elliott's point of view is only that of a small part of Vietnam. But do read it anyway. You will still gain facts and insights you did not get before.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A family history that also tells the history of Vietnam., October 26, 1999

By 

Sara (Alexandria, Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (Hardcover)

The Sacred Willow is an excellent family biography and historical analysis of the origins of, and events surrounding, the Vietnam War. If you have shied away from histories of Vietnam as you are not interested in military history, I would highly recommend this work. This book is a social, rather than a military, history. Tracing the history of Vietnam from the era of the mandarins, through the French colonialization, through the communist insurgency, to the fall of Saigon and beyond, the author writes a history of her own family and in so doing, beautifully and subtly details the complexities and nuances of the origins of the Vietnam conflict and America's participation therein. The author's use of spare and straightforward prose enables the reader to look beyond the sheer horror of the war and its aftermath and reach a level of understanding as to how this tragic conflict could have occured.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great way to learn about Vietnam, August 30, 2000

By 

Terry Blagden (Sarasota, Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (Hardcover)

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about Vietnam. Well-written, the book is a history of how one family lived in Vietnam over several generations. The reader will learn the conflicts (politcal, cultural, and military) that each generation faced and how they responded to them to survive.

What is also interesting in this fine book, is that Mai Elliot showed how important it was to the Vietnamese that the Japanese (for a time) ruled the French in Vietnam during World War II. It showed that the French could be defeated and raised the morale of those Vietnamese who wanted to drive the French out of Vietnam. Not many other books highlight this particular role of the Japanese on Vietnamese history in the second half of the 20th Century.

Overall, this book will give beginning and advanced students of Vietnam both a relatively unbiased and informative view of Vietnam over the years. Furthermore, parts of the book are an adventure and demonstrate the hardships that many in Vietnam had to endure for so many years regardless of social status and education. Mai Elliot has made a solid contribution to the literature on Vietnam. One of the best Vietnam books out there.