Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family

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Description

In 1968 Nguyen Qui Duc was once nine years old, his father was once a high-ranking civil servant within the South Vietnamese government, and his mother was once a school principal. Then the Viet Cong launched their Tet offensive, and the Nguyen circle of relatives’s comfortable life was once destroyed. The creator’s father was once taken prisoner and marched up the Ho Chi Minh Trail. North Vietnam’s highest-ranking civilian prisoner, he in the end spent twelve years in captivity, composing poems in his head to care for 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 fatherland and parents he needed to leave in the back of. The creator’s mother stayed in Vietnam to look after her mentally unwell daughter. She endured poverty and “reeducation” until her husband was once freed and the Nguyens could reunite.
 
Intertwining these three stories, Where the Ashes Are shows us the Vietnam War through a child’s eyes, privation after a Communist takeover, and the struggle of new immigrants. The creator, who returned to Vietnam as an American reporter, provides a detailed portrait of the nation as it opened to the West within the early 1990s. Where the Ashes Are closes with Nguyen’s thoughts on being pulled between his adopted country and his fatherland.

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