Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family

In 1968 Nguyen Qui Duc was nine years old, his father was a high-ranking civil servant in the South Vietnamese government, and his mother was a school principal. Then the Viet Cong launched their Tet offensive, and the Nguyen family's comfortable life was destroyed. The author's father was taken prisoner and marched up the Ho Chi Minh Trail. North Vietnam's highest-ranking civilian prisoner, he eventually spent twelve years in captivity, composing poems in his head to maintain his sanity. Nguyen himself escaped from Saigon as North Vietnamese tanks approached in 1975. He came of age as an American teenager, going to school dances and working at a Roy Rogers restaurant, yet yearning for the homeland and parents he had to leave behind. The author's mother stayed in Vietnam to look after her mentally ill daughter. She endured poverty and "reeducation" until her husband was freed and the Nguyens could reunite. Intertwining these three stories, <i>Where the Ashes Are</i> shows us the Vietnam War through a child's eyes, privation after a Communist takeover, and the struggle of new immigrants. The author, who returned to Vietnam as an American reporter, provides a detailed portrait of the nation as it opened to the West in the early 1990s. <i>Where the Ashes Are</i> closes with Nguyen's thoughts on being pulled between his adopted country and his homeland.

Publishers Weekly,The Nguyens were privileged Vietnamese: the author's great grandfather was a regent during the reigns of three kings, his grandfather was a mandarin and his U.S.-educated father was a civilian deputy to the military governor, based in Da Nang. Loyal to South Vietnam, the author's father was seized in 1973 by the Viet Cong and imprisoned for 16 years. Although the then 10-year-old author continued to attend school amidst the terrors and disorders of the war, the family's life was so altered that his mother, a schoolteacher, took to selling noodles in the streets. Their large extended family remained supportive, however. At 18, the author joined his brother and sister in the U.S. where, eventually, he became the manager of a San Francisco radio station and a reporter for National Public Radio. He relates in disciplined, moving prose his family's travails during the war, his father's imprisonment and release, his mother's courage, the ambience of the country he still misses and the differences between life in the U.S. and Vietnam. In 1989, while visiting Vietnam to film a PBS documentary on Viet Cong vets, the author located the ashes of a sister who died during the war and brought them to the country that is now his family's home. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Book format	Paperback
Fiction/nonfiction	Non-Fiction
Genre	Biography & Memoirs
Publication date	December, 2009
Pages	280
Subgenre	General
Series title	No Series
Number in series	0
Edition	1
Publisher	Bison Books
Original languages	English
Language	English
Awards won	Citation of Excellence from the Overseas Press Club of America, Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists
Is collectible	N
Recording time	0 min
Retail packaging	Single Piece
Assembled product dimensions (l x w x h)	6.04 x 0.59 x 9.00 in
Assembled product weight	0.85 lb
Bisac subject heading	Biography & Autobiography