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.

Brother Number One: A Political Biography

David P. Chandler

In the tragic recent history of Cambodia - a past scarred by a long occupation by Vietnamese forces and by the preceding three-year reign of terror by the brutal Khmer Rouge - no figure looms larger or more ominously than that of Pol Pot. As secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) from 1962 and as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), he was widely blamed for trying to destroy Cambodian society by implementing policies whose effects were genocidal. Based on interviews and on a wide range of sources in English, Cambodian, and French, this study seeks to cast light on the ideas and behaviour of this enigmatic man and his entourage against the background of post-World War II events, and to provide an understanding of this horrific, pivotal period of Cambodian history.

The Girl in the Picture: The Remarkable Story of Vietnam's Most Famous Casualty

Denise Chong

On 8 June 1972, nine-year-old Kim Phuc, severely burned by napalm, ran from her burning village and into the eye of history. Her photograph, seen around the world, helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War and is one of a handful of images that remain branded in the public consciousness. This book is the story of how that photograph came to be - but also of what happened to Kim Phuc after it was taken. It opens up to readers an unknown world - the world of Vietnam after the US army left. Kim became a pawn in the Communist regime's propaganda campaign, even as her own family fought a losing battle to support itself in a physically and economically devastated country, now plagued with corruption. Kim's recovery and rehabilitation from her terrible wounds was long and arduous and, after years of manipulation by Vietnamese officials, she made a dramatic escape to Canada, where she now lives. Denise Chong has written a detailed, humanistic account of ever! yday life in the wake of the Vietnam War, as well as a meditation on the aftermath of celebrity, and the power of an image.

The Gate

Francois Bizot

French ethnologist Francois Bizot's The Gate is a unique insight into the rise of the Khmer Rouge. In 1971 Bizot was studying ancient khmer traditions and living with his khmer partner and daughter in a small village in the environs of the Angkor temple complex. The Khmer Rouge was fighting a guerilla war in rural Cambodia and during a routine visit to a nearby temple, Bizot and his two khmer colleagues were captured and imprisoned deep in the jungle by the Khmer Rouge on suspicion of working for the CIA. On trial for his life, over the next three months Bizot developed a strong relationship with his captor, Comrade Douch, who would later become the Khmer Rouge's chief interrogator and commandant of the horrifying Tuol Sleng prison where thousands were tortured prior to execution. The portrait Bizot gives of the young schoolteacher-turned revolutionary and their interaction is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying.

Heaven and Earth: When Heaven and Earth Changed Places

Le Ly Hayslip, Jay Wurts

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places" is the haunting memoir of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of a child who survived the horror. With the voice of a natural story-teller, Le Ly Hayslip tells the story of a young peasant girl's struggle to survive. Pressed into service by the Viet Cong, Hayslip was captured and tortured by government forces; then she was raped and almost murdered by her "comrades" in the VC. Later she lived with and loved several GIs. Finally, she married a kind-hearted American to escape the terror and insanity of the war. Once she arrived in the US in 1970, Hayslip lived the American dream to the hilt: she studied at night, worked during the day in an electronics factory and eventually became the owner of three houses and a restaurant near San Diego. Twice widowed and now unmarried, she has raised three sons. Meanwhile happiness proved elusive, the traumas of the war years lingering on in nightmare memories. In 1986 Le Ly went back to her homeland and was shocked to see the country and the people still profoundly scarred by the war. She subsequently sold the bulk of her property to start a foundation dedicated to building health clinics jointly staffed by Americans and Vietnamese.

When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge.

Chanrithy Him

This is one of the first childhood memoirs to emerge from the hell of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Capturing the overwhelming immediacy of the baffling events, Chanrithy Him writes through the eyes of her younger self in the present tense. She vividly recounts her trek through the hell of the "killing fields" and gives a child's-eye view of a world where rudimentary labour camps are the norm and modern technology no longer exists. Death and illness become companions in the camps; yet throughout, her family remain loyal to one another.