My Father’s War
da: The New York Times
Do we really need yet another Vietnam memoir? Yes, as it turns out. True, every second American who debarked in Saigon has written about the experience, but there are far fewer accounts of the war by Vietnamese in English, and much of what exists, on both the northern and southern sides, is marred by propaganda. Few books have combined the historical scope and the literary skill to give the foreign reader a sense of events from a Vietnamese perspective. Le Ly Hayslip’s “When Heaven and Earth Changed Places” gave us the war through the eyes of a South Vietnamese peasant girl turned sex worker, while Nguyen Qui Duc’s “Where the Ashes Are” told us what it was like to watch his father, a high-ranking official in Hue, be taken captive by the Vietcong. Bao Ninh’s autobiographical novel “The Sorrow of War” gave us the viewpoint of a disillusioned North Vietnamese grunt. And now we can add Andrew Pham’s “Eaves of Heaven” to this…
