Kim Fay

I met Duyên Nguyễn in 1995, when I was working in Saigon as an English teacher and her younger sister was one of my students. Our friendship flourished during the time I lived in Vietnam, but when I moved back home (even though we kept in touch) the sisterly closeness we had known when we lived just around the corner from one another inevitably faded. Then, a few years ago, she moved to Santa Ana, just an hour south of L.A., to get married and work as a fine artist. Our friendship resumed, and one day she honored me with the request to help her write her memoir.

I have known Duyên and her family for ten years, and I have always considered them extraordinary people. Especially Duyên. A typical middle-class teenager when Saigon fell in 1975, she lost everything in the following years. She was twice caught trying to flee the country and was imprisoned both times. Her family lost its home, as well as all rights as citizens in Communist Vietnamese society. But rather than feel sorry for herself, or simply give in to the poverty and hopelessness that engulfed her country during this time, Duyên taught herself to play guitar, braved the weird world of professional music in a Communist country and eventually became one of Vietnam's first post-war leading female rock guitarists.

Duyên and I are currently working on Song of the Phoenix: Rising from the Ashes in Post-War Vietnam, which explores her life from 1975 to 1985. We have written a full proposal and hope to sell the project to an editor who will understand the story's significance and can help us shape it into the book it deserves to be. Below you will find the introduction for our proposal. Excerpts are on the way.

A darkness that can only be found in a nightmare. Streetlights shut off, and the lamps in our house: light attracted the missiles. Old towels and clothing were stuffed into the cracks around the front door, and the living room stank of closed-in heat and too many bodies. I lay on the floor, my hot limbs pressed between sleeping aunts, uncles and cousins who had fled the fighting in the countryside.

My skin itched with sweat, but as the artillery prowled closer, pounding in time with the tread of military boots in the streets, I held still and hoped my parents were right, that huddling on the ground in the dark would protect us from the stray bombs and shrapnel dropping on the city. I wanted to sleep, but how could I? The Communists were coming.

What did that even mean? I was fifteen and had never seen a Communist, not that I knew of. Had only heard the word spoken, sparingly, by adults, during the Tét Offensive, during the attacks of the past month. The house was quiet, and I stared into the blackness that engulfed the room and my thoughts. During the last weeks of April the city was under a desolate curfew, but this night, the night before the fall of Saigon, felt darker to me than any of the others that had come before it.

The following day, when South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese Communists, fifteen-year-old Duyên Nguyễn began a journey unlike any you have read about before—from sheltered Catholic schoolgirl to reeducation camp prisoner to rock star. Throughout the next ten years, she lost everything including her freedom; she tried to flee twice and was imprisoned both times. But ultimately, she chose to stay in Vietnam. Unlike many of her countrymen, she made the decision not to be a refugee in a foreign land. Instead, she fought despair and hardship, and pursued a passion, becoming one of Communist Vietnam’s first leading female rock guitarists. This captivating memoir unites a young woman’s coming of age with the evolution of an artist in a repressive regime. Interwoven with the complex, sorrow-filled story of Vietnam’s lost decade, Song of the Phoenix reveals a history that is personal, universal and completely unknown to the American reading public.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, American readers have consistently embraced books about Vietnamese women. Most notable are tales of wartime hardship, such as When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Le Ly Hayslip), and family sagas, such as Sacred Willow (Duong Van Mai Elliott). In addition, popular history books and travel memoirs have explored the lives of Vietnamese women in post-1985 Vietnam, including After Sorrow (Lady Borton) and The House on Dream Street (Dana Sachs). Such books can be fit together like the pieces of a puzzle to make a picture … a picture in which one crucial piece is missing. Song of the Phoenix: Rising from the Ashes in Post-War Vietnam is that missing piece: the first book to explore the survival and triumph of a South Vietnamese woman in Vietnam after the war.

Taking place in a reunified country where former citizens of South Vietnam were persona non grata, and where those who tried to escape were declared criminals, Nguyễn’s ultimate success may seem miraculous. It is not. Phoenix is, fundamentally, a timeless story of human endurance—a mosaic of perseverance, disappointment, spirit, setbacks and the evolution of character.

Nguyễn wrote Phoenix in 2001, as she prepared to leave her a career as a musician and embark on a new journey as a visual artist. It is her meditation on her profound transition from innocent, carefree girl to strong, independent woman, her reflection on the past as she embraces a new future. She wrote her story not as many Vietnamese have, in exile, but in her native land, in a place of triumph, her art studio in the very home that was confiscated by the Communists so many years before. As a result, Phoenix is a poignant memoir as well as an essential addition to American literature.