nonfiction

My mother and her family first arrived in Sydney from French Indochina in 1946, after being held in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Saigon. They stayed only briefly in Sydney before returning to Vietnam. In 1950, with conflict between the Viet Minh and French colonists intensifying, the family left for Australia permanently. Desperately homesick and unable to return to Saigon, at age 36 my grandmother took her own life.

Creative nonfiction and memoir are the vehicles through which I explore my French-Vietnamese heritage and the story of the women who came before me.