Description
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Duong Van Mai Elliott's The Sacred Willow illuminates recent Vietnamese history by weaving together the stories of the lives of four generations of her family. Beginning with her great-grandfather, who rose from rural poverty to become an influential
landowner, and continuing to the present, Mai Elliott traces her family's journey through an era of tumultuous change. She tells us of childhood hours in her grandmother's silk shop, and of hiding while French troops torched her village, watching while blossoms torn by fire from the trees flutter
like hundreds of butterflies overhead. She makes clear the agonizing choices that split Vietnamese families: her eldest sister left her staunchly anti-communist home to join the Viet Minh, and spent months sleeping in jungle camps with her infant son, fearing air raids by day and tigers by night.
And she follows several family members through the last, desperate hours of the fall of Saigon-including one nephew who tried to escape by grabbing the skid of a departing American helicopter. Based on family papers, dozens of interviews, and a wealth of other research, this is not only a memorable
family saga but a record of how the Vietnamese themselves have experienced their times.
Author: Mai Elliott
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 09/01/2017
Pages: 496
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.50lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 1.20d
ISBN13: 9780190614515
ISBN10: 019061451X
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs
- History | Asia | Southeast Asia
- Biography & Autobiography | Women
landowner, and continuing to the present, Mai Elliott traces her family's journey through an era of tumultuous change. She tells us of childhood hours in her grandmother's silk shop, and of hiding while French troops torched her village, watching while blossoms torn by fire from the trees flutter
like hundreds of butterflies overhead. She makes clear the agonizing choices that split Vietnamese families: her eldest sister left her staunchly anti-communist home to join the Viet Minh, and spent months sleeping in jungle camps with her infant son, fearing air raids by day and tigers by night.
And she follows several family members through the last, desperate hours of the fall of Saigon-including one nephew who tried to escape by grabbing the skid of a departing American helicopter. Based on family papers, dozens of interviews, and a wealth of other research, this is not only a memorable
family saga but a record of how the Vietnamese themselves have experienced their times.
Author: Mai Elliott
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 09/01/2017
Pages: 496
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.50lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 1.20d
ISBN13: 9780190614515
ISBN10: 019061451X
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs
- History | Asia | Southeast Asia
- Biography & Autobiography | Women
About the Author
Mai Elliott was born and raised in Vietnam and attended Georgetown University on a scholarship. She lived in Vietnam again from 1963 to 1968 and worked for the Rand Corporation interviewing Viet Cong prisoners of war. She returned to the U.S. in 1968 and now lives in California.
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