Published in Minneapolis Star Tribune 1999

The history of the Duong family will forever change the way you look at Vietnam, the Vietnamese, and the Wars in Indochina.

Many Vietnam War veterans have bitterly complained that "You don't know who the enemy is." All Vietnamese, women, children, peasants, and Saigon officials were considered to be potential terrorists. Films like Full Metal Jacket portrayed a beautiful Vietnamese woman as a sniper, willing to sacrifice her life to take out American soldiers.

Duong Van Mai Elliott's compelling history of her Vietnamese family reveals the way Vietnamese looked at themselves. For many Vietnamese, on both sides of the war, they were just six degrees of separation from each other. They could say, "You don't know who a relative is."

In her historical family narrative of four generations, she sympathetically describes the lives of dozens of ancestors and close family relations. Beginning with her great-grandfather Duong Lam who held significant political posts in and around Hanoi during the turn of the 20th century and who fathered thirty sons and daughters, she weaves her family's experiences into the last hundred years of Vietnamese history. Her father, a Mayor of Haiphong under the French, and an official under the U.S. supported Saigon regime, had eleven children. Some became Communists, some anti-communists, and, eventually, and some fled to safety in America, France, Canada, and Australia.

Her book begins with her great grandfather's heroic life, and ends with a visit to his grave, just a few miles from Hanoi. The villagers welcome her with a fondness that reflects their pride in sharing the past with a descendant of a great Vietnamese scholar and political leader.

Throughout the Indochina Wars, the French and the Americans were aware that their Vietnamese allies had hidden agendas. This suspicion led many to presume that the Vietnamese were two-faced. In fact, the Vietnamese were loyal to a common goal: loyalty to their families and commitment to an independent Vietnam.

Mai's family history provides moving examples depicting how her relatives attempted to maintain their traditions and identity while serving alien masters–the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, and the Americans. The psychological consequences of this behavioral and historical dilemma is at the heart of this book's narrative.

This book's major contribution to the debate on the Indochina Wars is that it presents the war almost entirely as a Vietnamese and Asian tragedy. The Communist Revolution and the French-American Wars are treated equally as a destructive plague on the families and villages of Vietnam. Mai Elliott's odyssey into her own family history revealed surprising revelations about the humanity and struggles of her ancestors to retain their dignity and position in a hostile environment. "Looking back over this narratives," she writes, "one of the themes I see in it is the irony and unpredictability of history. The choices each person made had unforeseen consequences that, at times, made losers out of winners. I see also the tenacity of family bonds that, though strained, were ultimately stronger than any political differences. I find it heartening that [my family] and the Vietnamese people, have survived through the turmoil"

Without rancor or prejudice, Mai describes the experiences of her family in both war zones. In a dramatically written account of her family's evacuation from Saigon she describes the crushing crowds, her nephew's fall from the runners of an ascending helicopter, and her parents' amazing escape to the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hancock. Even more startling is her account of the re-education camps, and attempts to escape from Saigon. All of this is balanced by her obvious affection for her sister and brother-in-law who found purpose and marital fulfilment while working in Hanoi.

Mai Elliott's natural abilities were enhanced by a rich personal life. Born in northern Vietnam in 1941, she was schooled in Hanoi, Saigon, and attended Georgetown University in Washington D.C. Her family's rich traditions and her own eyewitness accounts have created a well-documented work on the life of an elite Vietnamese woman. She comments critically on her ancestors' sense of male chauvinism, and describes her own problems of coming to maturity. By giving examples of the fate of her sister's arranged marriage to an abusive husband, and by discussing the marital problems of her grandmother and mother, we can strongly empathize with her as she discussed the joys and difficulties of meeting and marrying her husband, David Elliott.

For a generation brought up watching the "Deerhunter" or reading Rumor of War, the Vietnamese appeared sordid and inhumane caricatures of evil. Mai Elliott provides us with an opportunity to adopt another, more humane vision of Vietnam and the Vietnamese. If we can sympathize and even identify with the heroics and foibles of her extensive family, we can transcend the limited and negative images of the war. With so many Vietnamese in America, and with normalization between the U.S. and Vietnam, we will discover that we are all within just six degrees of separation from each other.