Red Blood, Yellow Skin by Linda L.T. Baer
Publisher: River Grove Books (June 2015)
343 pages, eBook (provided by the publisher for review)
Book Rating: 4 Stars
Content Note: Includes Violence and Sexual Situations
This is a memoir of a young Vietnamese woman’s experience during the hostilities between France and Vietnam, then later between North and South Vietnam. Loan’s father was killed during the hostilities when she was very young, and after her mother remarried, her family was constantly on the move trying to escape the war-torn areas, while struggling to find enough food. Loan eventually sets off on her own to relieve her family of another mouth to feed and heads to Saigon looking for work, at the age of 13. Loan describes a harsh, yet simple existence in the countryside as a youth prone to getting in trouble, and a corrupt, chaotic lifestyle she was drawn into in the big city of Saigon. Very interesting to read from a Vietnamese point-of-view about a time period that we usually only hear from the American GI that was stationed there. Easy read, not overly encumbered by statistics or political history, but very focused on the story of a people caught in the middle of someone else’s fight.
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