The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family

Mai Elliott

Charting the lives of four generations of her family, the author traces her family's journey through tumultuous change, exploring different strands of Vietnamese history. It begins with her great-grandfather who rose from rural poverty to become an influential mandarin. She tells the reader of childhood hours in her grandmother's silk shop, and of hiding while French troops torched her village, watching blossoms torn by fire from the trees flutter "like hundreds of butterflies" overhead. She reveals 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 with her infant son in jungle camps, 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.