Dear Da-Lê

At 14, Duong rode his bike through Viet Cong lines into Huê' during the bloody Tet Offensive to visit his father’s besieged army unit. On school nights, Viet Cong and American forces moved through his backyard in search of one another. Working in rice fields or scavenging for food on weekends, Duong occasionally attracted fire from American aircraft and unidentified snipers. One night at age 15, Duong was forced by the Viet Cong to haul rice and weapons along a jungle trail under threat of death yet returned in time to attend school the next day.

While most of Duong’s peers gradually dropped out of school to join the fighting, he persisted with his studies, eventually moving 1,000 kilometres to the University of Saigon, where he struggled financially and academically. At age 21, he finally caught his first glimpse of a country at peace when he moved to Iran to study engineering just months before the South lost the Vietnam War. (Ironically, he graduated at the start of the Iranian Revolution and immigrated to Canada just as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power.)

Years after the tumult back home ended, Duong, like many in North America’s large Vietnamese diaspora, scrambled his way into middle-class success while hiding the trauma of Vietnam’s war years from his family. He eventually broke his silence in 2015 in a heartfelt letter to his university-aged daughter, Ashley Da-L. Duong, which tried to explain his “long-held wall of silence.” His letter eventually grew into this austere but gripping memoir. 

Duong’s matter-of-fact narrative has little room for regret even though he grew up in the shadow of some of the war’s most vicious fighting. Like the small scar beside his left eye, he always felt his childhood was best ignored. As readers, we are fortunate that he changed his mind.