I like how she shows how complicated the situation was for her parents. Her father talks about the general who killed the Viet Cong in the head (the famous photo) and about how he hated that the military treated the people like criminals, but then also talks about how that Viet Cong had murdered his family a few hours earlier. There aren’t really sides here, it’s more complexities of nuance and gray and surviving.

War turns citizens into enemies of the state, relatives into black market profiteers. Nobody really changed, just their function and how they’re perceived.

Must be interesting to see what her parent’s reaction is to this book considering they’re telling her how they really felt about each other – one wonders if they ever said any of this – such as her thinking her mother thinking Bo probably wouldn’t live long anyway – to each other? Maybe it’s through the kids that the parents can finally communicate?

Her mother reminds me of my grandmother who also wanted more than what a woman born in 1919 and came of age during WW2 could have had. Sometimes the events of the world dictate your life more than you do, like being part of that chessboard where you don’t get to move the pieces, you can only get out of their way.

She says it’s hard for her to accept that her mother was happiest without having her family (the time before she met her husband), but I think that’s true for a number of people who could have had a career or something better instead of starting a family for practical reasons.

She makes a good point about how the chessboard of war never contains the people who are most effected by war: the regular people. It’s always generals and politicians and partisans, but not street vendors and grandmothers selling opium to make ends meet, even though it’s their lives that are the most effected by the wars.

“Even standing right in front of our ld house, I had to rely completely on my family’s stories to picture how it was when we lived there.” Funny how memory works as something handed down when we don;t have our own.

Her grandmother was growing opium to make ends meet. Meanwhile the mafia is fighting the new government, Diem, which didn’t ave full control of the south. You can feel the country falling apart.