Courtesy christinavo.com
Vo and her father Nghia co-wrote their new memoir—the first of its kind—based on their disparate experiences of Vietnam.
Vietnamese-American writer Christina Vo has lived in Santa Fe for the past three years, a situation she credits with giving her the space to write.
“I think it’s the spaciousness of the land,” the author tells SFR, “the expansiveness.”
Something is working. Vo has finished two memoirs while in town, the second of which is My Vietnam, Your Vietnam (Three Rooms Press, Apr. 16), a piece written as a dual memoir with her father Nghia M. Vo. The book braids the story of Vo’s father’s youth in South Vietnam, and the trauma of being forced to flee his country after the fall of Saigon in 1975, with her own experience as a 20-something expat returning to Vietnam in the early aughts.
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The dual memoir is the first of its kind in Vietnamese diasporic literature, a structure Vo finds singularly well-suited to the story of Vietnam itself, a country with a long history of division and duality beginning with its own origin story: the divorce—the first recorded in history—of the ancient king Lạc Long Quân and the mountain goddess Âu Cơ, whose descendants split into two groups: the highlanders and the lowlanders. From this legendary split to the rules of the northern Trịnh and southern Nguyễn lords; the French colonization of the south; the post-WWII division between the communist-controlled north and the democratic south; to the 1975 fall of Saigon, Vietnam’s history has been, to say the least, complex.
Vo’s father has his own complex history. A retired physician, he’s penned a number of books on Vietnamese history and culture, including The Pink Lotus, a self-published, fictionalized account of his time as a doctor in the South Vietnamese Army and his escape to the US at the end of the war. While she was living in Vietnam, Vo began to toy with the idea of finding a way to share his story more broadly. But it wasn’t until years later when she’d completed her first book, The Veil Between Two Worlds: A Memoir of Silence, Loss, and Finding Home, that she realized the stories behind her and her father’s divergent experiences in Vietnam could intertwine.
She recalls attending a 2023 conference with her father at Texas Tech University, at which he presented his ideas about the “two Vietnams.” She describes it as an epiphany: “My dad spoke so passionately about Vietnam, and I thought it was so unfair that most of the voices at that conference were not Vietnamese.”
That talk motivated her to share his story, and gave her the idea to frame the book across intergenerational perspectives on the same country. One might expect the writing process for a dual memoir to be heavy on communication between co-authors. Not so for Vo and her dad. She got his permission to rework The Pink Lotus, but didn’t share her intentions for the nature or structure of her project as she began to craft the story using his book as well as her own past writings.
“I didn’t actually show him the completed book until I already had a publisher,” Vo says. “I was so scared to show it to him because I really wanted this to be out there in the world and I was so afraid that he was going to object.”
Far from objecting, her dad’s response was positive, though characteristically laconic: “Christina, this is a good book. Thank you for writing it. Attached is the revised copy. Good luck.”
The result is a profoundly tender narrative chronicling the rifts that run through the history of Vietnam and reverberate in the lives of Vietnamese people in and beyond the country to this day. While her dad’s stories lend the book historical depth, Vo’s bring it to life with reflections on her time in Vietnam seeking to ground herself in her cultural identity.
“Being part of the Vietnamese diaspora, it makes sense to speak in terms of two Vietnams,” Vo explains, mentioning the division that exists in many Vietnamese families whose older generations carry a burden of trauma from the war, and whose kids and grandkids often long to return to the country. “I think it’s part of our healing, understanding where we came from.”
With the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon approaching, My Vietnam, Your Vietnam is an opportunity to reflect on the past and reconcile the present.
“We come from a divided country—that’s part of our lineage,” Vo says. “That was also true of my relationship with my father—there was a disconnect in opinion about Vietnam. But in the end, it’s also a way that we both speak that same language, this language of loving Vietnam.”
My Vietnam, Your Vietnam reading and conversation: 2 pm Saturday, May 11. Free. Santa Fe Public Library (Main Branch), 145 Washington Ave. Register online at tinyurl.com/VoConvo
