Published in the Minnesota Asian-American Press, 1999

Duong Van Mai Elliott. The Sacred Willow: four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family. Oxford University Press. 1999. Illustrations.

This is the first book in English to narrate the history of a Vietnamese family from the occupation of the French in the 19th century, to market socialism a hundred years later.

Mai Elliott's family were high ranking mandarin officials in northern Vietnam. Born in Nam Dinh province in 1941, she heard both heroic and unflattering stories of the activities of her ancestors. Her great-grandfather was an able official who fought off bandits, repaired dikes, and after his death was honored with a large ancestral tomb and shrine. At home he was the traditional Mandarin who demanded total obedience, and who fathered 30 children with four wives. Mai's grandfather was caught in the transition between actively supporting the French while secretly maintaining Confucian values. Her father achieved great prominence under French rule in the north. He eventually became Mayor of Haiphong. After the Geneva Accords he fled to Saigon. There he worked with the Saigon regime until his retirement and escape by helicopter to an American air craft carrier in the last days of the war.

The enchantment of this book's story is that Mai's hundreds of relatives (40 applied for exile in America) have lived and worked in many areas of Vietnam. The reader learns about relatives who are landlords in the north, about magistrates who meet with Emperor Bao Dai in Hanoi, about officials who are assigned to work with the French in administering several northern provinces, about Mai's sister who joins the Vietminh in the border regions, and about the politics of serving in Saigon before the collapse of that regime. Throughout these narratives we hear personal evaluations of the Chinese, the Dai Viet, the Japanese, the French, the rulers in Saigon, and the Americans.

Throughout the saga of this family is the underlying philosophy that loyalty to family and to an independent Vietnam are the most important principles in one's life. Mai presents her family members as always struggling to accommodate the foreigners but with the eye on eventual national freedom and family reunion. Without anger or blame, Mai Elliott narrates how her family members chose different paths–pro-French, pro-American, pro-Communist. Yet, for her, many of these decisions were naively made, and many of the consequences were unexpected. She provides sympathetic accounts of experiences in re-education camps, in aborted and successful attempts to escape abroad after the war, and in life with the Vietminh.

Mai Elliott also provides the reader with an amazingly personal account of her life as a woman. She recounts the marital problems of her grandmother and mother, her sister's unhappy arranged marriage with an abusive husband, and another sister's wonderful, marriage with a communist cadre in the north. She describes her own coming to maturity at her Catholic high school in Saigon, and her years at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. The story of her relationship with and marriage to David Elliott is one of the most emotional stories in the book. Perhaps the power of her story with Mr. Elliott is because inter-marriage between Vietnamese and Euro-Americans will be the major tale of the next generation.

One is elated by the splendor and ambition of this family. Reading about Mai's family provides an excellent understanding of the nature of the war, and the possibilities of peace. Slowly, as more Vietnamese write their memoirs, we will learn more about Vietnam and the personalities and lives of its people. These works will ultimately replace the current movies and writings which focus on the Americans at war, and which provide negative stereotypes of the Vietnamese.