"A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Duong Van Mai Elliott's The Sacred Willow illuminates recent Vietnamese history by weaving together the stories of the lives of four generations of her family. Beginning with her great-grandfather, who rose from rural poverty to become an influential landowner, and continuing to the present, Mai Elliott traces her family's journey through an era of tumultuous change. She tells us of childhood hours in her grandmother's silk shop, and of hiding while French troops torched her village, watching while blossoms torn by fire from the trees flutter ""like hundreds of butterflies"" overhead. She makes clear 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 in jungle camps with her infant son, 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. Based on family papers, dozens of interviews, and a wealth of other research, this is not only a memorable family saga but a record of how the Vietnamese themselves have experienced their times."
By:
Mai Elliott
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: 2nd Revised edition
Dimensions:
Height: 152mm,
Width: 226mm,
Spine: 31mm
Weight: 1g
ISBN: 9780190614515
ISBN 10: 019061451X
Pages: 496
Publication Date: 18 August 2017
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Preface Acknowledgments Maps Family Tree 1. A Burial in the Night 2. Shut Gate and High Walls 3. The Silk Merchant 4. French Veneer, Confucian Soul 5. Taxes, Floods, and Robbers 6. The Third Month in the Year of the Famine 7. The Head on the Roof 8. Into the Resistance Zone 9. Poison and Bribes 10. The Fall of a Border Garrison 11. Sifting Through the Rubble 12. The New Mecca 13. Just Cause 14. Short Peace, Long War 15. Flying Into the Unknown 16. The Spoils of Victory 17. The Hours of Gold and Jade Epilogue: Across the Four Seas Bibliography Index
Mai Elliott was born and raised in Vietnam and attended Georgetown University on a scholarship. She lived in Vietnam again from 1963 to 1968 and worked for the Rand Corporation interviewing Viet Cong prisoners of war. She returned to the U.S. in 1968 and now lives in California.
Reviews for The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family
This family's saga is as engrossing as fine literary fiction and is, besides, indispensable to understanding Vietnam from a Vietnamese perspective.--The New Yorker [Elliott] reverently weaves the tale of a century of tremendous upheaval...and shows how the tragedies of her family are a window to understanding the Vietnamese century. It is a wonderful book, written with care, and it is extremely suggestive. --Touchstone This is an excellent text which provides an insightful, personal history of a Vietnamese family. Through one family the reader discovers the real ramifications of a country at war for most of the 20th century. --Seth Bardo, Phillips Academy This is a family saga sweeping you along 4 generations of recent Vietnamese history. This should at last allow the American student of the war to understand 'the other side'--both its steely willpower and tender hearts. --Guenter Bischf, University of New Orleans Those of us who reported from Vietnam during the war never fully understood the Vietnamese and the hardships they endured. Duong Van Mai Elliott's account of her family's experiences is a vivid, poignant, often inspiring story that I wish we could have read before we became involved in a conflict that was tragic for both Vietnamese and Americans. --Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History [This] story could not be more compelling.... Voices a perspective until now missing from the English-language body of work on the Vietnam conflict.... Objectivity marks Elliott's book and makes it the best kind of history, [one] we may escape from repeating by reading of this remarkable family. --Beth Hughes, San Francisco Examiner
- Winner of Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
