In her memoir, the author, Rose Bui, recounts the experiences of her true real-life narrative of how, she, a poor young villager from a family of farmers, became trapped between the ongoing pillars of guerilla warfare.
"We needed a substantial meal to keep us going in case we needed to flee as soon as the French planes sounded in the distance, ready to bombard. We ran until we reached the holes in the backyard of our home. Each hole could only fit one person and was about a man's head below ground level."
Political, military, diplomatic, economic, and socio-cultural issues all contributed to the French loss of its Indochinese possessions. The French lost power with the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. During a period when Vietnam was at war with France, the French invaded the urban areas, while the Viet Minh party controlled the countryside. On the eve of the Geneva Conference, General Vo Nguyen Giap and his Viet Minh triumphed. Before 1954, times were drastically different.
"My parent's extensive orchard supplied us with an assortment of fruits throughout the year. When mango season arrived, my siblings would collect the green mangoes that fell to the ground after a rainstorm. Everyone relished green mangoes dipped in a mixture of fish sauce and sugar. We often fished along the ditches in my parent's orchard during the summer. We relaxed in the cool breeze, beneath the trees, savoring the tranquility and mangoes."
Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh forces decisively beat the French at Dien Bien Phu, a French bastion besieged by Vietnamese communists for 57 days in northwest Vietnam. The Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu heralded the end of French colonial influence in Indochina, paving the door for Vietnam to be divided along the 17th parallel at the Geneva conference.
"Nonetheless, upon his return to Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, the party's leader at the time, exploited the patriotic will of the Vietnamese people and transformed the party into a communist party, the Viet Cong. When it rained and we were unable to remove the water from the holes before the planes came over, we had no alternative but to remain submerged inside the hole. Thanks to a wooden ladder propped against the hole's wall, we could always escape. During the air strikes, I recall how, after a particularly bloody battle, the peasants fled with their relatives to adjacent towns for safety."
In her heroic and desperate attempts to escape Vietnam, she is caught between sacrificing her and her three children's lives in order to cross the ocean to attain freedom. Despite the odds being stacked against her, she outwits the Viet Cong and finds herself responsible for a vessel full of Vietnamese refugees.
"Several days had passed while we were at sea. The entire time, I was unable to detect any changes on the horizon and questioned whether we were traveling in the correct direction. It had been days since our last sighting of the land, and I had no idea where we were headed."
This book offers previously untold stories about the author's life, beginning with her youth and leading up to her courageous escape, and how she and her three out of four children managed to flee Vietnam and seek refuge in the United States.
Since its inception, after 13 years, this book was eventually completed. In this time period, the author has aged, resulting in a decline in her health that has nearly prevented her from completing her story for this book. As a result, it took her close to seven years to chronologically recount all the events in her handwritten journal entries, which she contributed to every so often, for her memoir. It took an additional three years to translate and complete her Vietnamese memoir into English. This memoir should serve as a reminder to all of us that we are capable of overcoming our failures, no matter how difficult the challenges may be.
