MY VIETNAM, YOUR VIETNAM

A generational tale of division, misunderstanding, and reconciliation.

Though some historians argue that the separation of North Vietnam and South Vietnam was born in the wake of World War II, that schism really goes back centuries, including the struggle for suzerainty between Trinh nobles in the north and the Nguyen aristocracy in the South. “The north was more disciplined and cautious,” writes the elder Vo, “while the south was more individualistic and entrepreneurial.” A southerner, he became a doctor and was drafted into the military. With the fall of the Saigon government in 1975, he became a refugee and fled to the U.S., where he had to start life anew and hide the old one away. His daughter, for her part, grew up Americanized and not quite sure what to make of her parents, especially her father and the “boiling depths beneath his quiet disposition.” Long periods of living in Hanoi, learning the (albeit northern) culture on her own terms, gave her greater understanding of both her father and herself, a narrative trope that is the stuff of the classic first- and second-generation immigrant narrative—this book combines the fraught tension of Ava Chin’s Mott Street and the tenderness of Elliot Tiber’s Taking Woodstock. The younger Vo’s experiences include the death of her mother and long absences away from home, during which her father, too, took some of that boiling anger and became an effective advocate for the Vietnamese community. In alternating narratives, father and daughter sometimes speak past each other, but eventually their stories work toward accommodation. Over decades of mutual incomprehension, the younger Vo in particular has come to an understanding: “Our father-daughter relationship embodies the duality of Vietnam—we are separated by a divide, and yet somehow, we are still one.”

A nuanced contribution to the literature of the Vietnamese diaspora.