ABOUT
THE BOOK

For the first time in fiction, the un-mapped territory of the Vietnamese American immigrant experience is examined in this hauntingly beautiful tale of a young girl’s coming-of-age in the United States in the aftermath of war. Mai Nguyen’s journey begins when she leaves Vietnam in February 1975, just before the withdrawal of US troops from Saigon. She enters the “Little Saigon” of Falls Church, Virginia, a community which encompasses refugees and veterans, reinvented lives and entrepreneurial schemes, and secrets and lies about the war-torn past. Finding some diaries hidden in her Mother’s dresser, Mai is drawn back to Vietnam, retracing her own earliest experiences and the histories of her mother and grandmother, and a story that began in the rice fields of the Mekong delta a generation before. Lan Cao lives in New York where she is a professor of international law at Brooklyn Law School.