SING FOR YOUR FATHER, SU PHAN

Su Phan, the daughter of a prosperous rural village merchant in North Vietnam, sees her wonderful life ruined by the Communists and the war. When her father's trading boats are confiscated, he sets up a store, but the Communists destroy it and Su Phan's home, and imprison her father for years for re- education. When the village is bombed, her mother moves the remaining family into the jungle, where they build a hut and eke out a meager existence. With Pevsner (Would My Fortune Cookie Lie?, 1996, etc.), Su Phan, now called Fay Tang, tells the true story of her lost childhood and opens up an unfamiliar world, that of the North Vietnamese peasants in the years before and during the war. For US readers, it will be a compelling portrait of the life of a child for whom terrible hardship was an accepted part of reality, and it will linger in their minds. (Memoir. 8- 10)