Recommended Reading
Lonely Planet Vietnam
At Lonely Planet, we see our job as inspiring and enabling travelers to connect with the world for their own benefit and for the benefit of the world at large. Buy the book
Vietnam: A History
This monumental narrative clarifies, analyzes, and demystifies the tragic ordeal of the Vietnam war. Free of ideological bias, profound in its understanding, and compassionate in its human portrayals, it is filled with fresh revelations drawn from secret documents and from exclusive interviews with the participants - French, American, Vietnamese, Chinese: diplomats, military commanders, high government officials, journalists, nurses, workers, and soldiers. Vietnam: A History puts events and decisions into such sharp focus that we come to understand - and make peace with - a convulsive epoch of our recent history. Buy the book
When You Were Born in Vietnam: A Memory Book for Children Adopted from Vietnam
When You Were Born in Vietnam: designed and written by Therese Bartlett with photography by William Bartlett, is the illustrated account of a Vietnamese adoption story as told to your adopted child. This is a unique book in adoption literature - a generalized international adoption which is professionally photographed and annotated. Combine the artistry of a talented couple - a skilled professional photographer and a creative graphic artist - with the lush beauty of Vietnam, and you will have a creation anyone would be proud to own Factual and thorough, When You Were Born in Vietnam takes your child through the Vietnamese adoption process and introduces them to the many people involved along the way. It is clear that a lot of thought has gone into this book; the concept of an adoption story is introduced on the very first page. Next, the evocative beauty and variety of Vietnam is portrayed - from sea to mountains to rice fields and into the cities. The accompanying text provides background on the jobs that people do, selling on the streets, fishing, and cultivating crops and animals. Despite this voluptuous land, many people are poor. This leads into the discussion of birthparents and abandonment. Following this indepth discussion, we are introduced to the orphanage. Many aspects of life in the orphanage are illustrated - food preparation, babies in cribs, children folding linens, older children waiting... Little scenes that make up a baby's life in the orphanage are illuminated, including the care the children might receive from nannies and others in the orphanage. Meanwhile, the adoption family is preparing for their time of arrival and first meeting. After the meeting with their new family, and a rather formal Greeting and Receiving Ceremony, preparations are made to depart. Documents are checked, medical evaluations are completed and all is in order. The book concludes with happy scenes of parents with their children coming home to celebrations with friends and family. Buy the book
Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam
A great memoirist can burnish even an ordinary childhood into something bright--see, for instance, Annie Dillard's An American Childhood. So what about a really good writer with access to a dramatic and little-documented story? This is the case with Catfish and Mandala, Vietnamese American Andrew X. Pham's captivating first book, which delves fearlessly into questions of home, family, and identity. The son of Vietnamese parents who suffered terribly during the Vietnam War and brought their family to America when he was 10, Pham, on the cusp of his 30s, defied his parents' conservative hopes for him and his engineering career by becoming a poorly paid freelance writer. After the suicide of his sister, he set off on an even riskier path to travel some of the world on his bicycle. In the grueling, enlightening year that followed, he pedaled through Mexico, the American West Coast, Japan, and finally his far-off first land, Vietnam. The story, with some of a mandala's repeated symbolic motifs, works on several levels at once. It is an exploration into the meaning of home, a descriptive travelogue, and an intimate look at the Vietnamese immigrant experience. There are beautifully illuminated flashbacks to the experience of fleeing Vietnam and to an earlier, more innocent childhood. While Pham's stern father, a survivor of Vietcong death camps, regrets that Pham has not been a respectful Vietnamese son, he also reveals that he wishes he himself had been more "American" for his kids, that he had "taken [them] camping." Catfish and Mandala is a book of double-edged truths, and it would make a fascinating study even in less able hands. In those of the adventurous, unsentimental Pham, it is an irresistible story. Buy the book
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