Southeast Asia Collection Blog

Nguyen, Nathalie Huynh Chau. Memory is another country : women of the Vietnamese diaspora. Santa Barbara, Calif. : Praeger, c2009.

One of the most well documented events of the American war was the mass exodus of South Vietnamese (as well as political dissidents from the north) following the fall of Saigon in 1975. Drawing largely from oral narratives, the present volume recounts this chapter in Vietnamese history from the perspective of Vietnamese women. Similar in style to Jung Chang’s enthralling accounts of revolutionary China (Wild Swans: three daughters of China, 1991), this book revisits the final days of the American war through the eyes of Vietnamese women. The stories are deeply personal, compelling, and eloquently retold.