Hello I'm Joan and this book is called Dust Child by Nguyen Phan Que Mai. It tells the story of the Vietnam War from an unusual perspective, from that of the AmerAsian children who were left behind when the American soldiers returned home. And it tells of the shame and the guilt that many of those soldiers felt at having abandoned their children back in Vietnam and for some of the actions that they carried out while they were there. In 1969 two young sisters from a rural community moved to Saigon where they’ve been promised the lure of work but the work that they end up doing is not at all what they thought they were going to. One of them Trang, her anglicised name was Kim meets a young soldier and they have a child and he then treats her badly and leaves. And 40 years later he comes back to Vietnam with his wife wanting to find some peace and redemption for what he did all those years back then and to try and find both Kim and his child. It’s a deeply moving piece of human history and it gave me a whole other perspective that I hadn’t actually thought about terribly much from the war. And I was greatly moved by it.

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