cover image Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family

Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family

Qui C. Nguyen, Nguyen Qui Duc, Qui C. Nguyyen. Addison Wesley Publishing Company, $24.33 (265pp) ISBN 978-0-201-63202-6

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.)