Dear Da-Lê: A Father’s Memoir of the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution

In an intensely revealing memoir written for his Canadian daughter, a man breaks a lifetime of silence about the traumas of his childhood in war-torn Vietnam and his years as a refugee in revolutionary Iran.

Spanning decades and generations, this heartfelt memoir began over ten years ago as a series of letters from a worried father to his daughter. Anh Duong had witnessed countless menacing and terrible things as a child during the Vietnam War, and later as a refugee in Iran during the revolution of the late 1970s. But like many in the Vietnamese diaspora, he had remained silent about his experiences for years, believing that trauma was better left unspoken.

When his daughter, Ashley Da-Lê Duong, became involved in the 2012 student protests over tuition hikes in Quebec, he felt compelled to speak. For years a deeply reserved and laconic man, he now allowed the floodgates of memory to open as he warned his child of the ways that earnest activism can descend into violence, just as he had seen in his youth in Vietnam and Iran.

In precise prose, Dear Da-Lê moves along a taut narrative thread that begins with Duong’s birth in 1953 and ends with his arrival in Canada, frayed and broke, in 1980. With surprising moments of hope and tenderness amid brutal divisions, the author creates a coming-of-age story intertwined with the human costs of war and exile. Its revelations are sure to resonate not only with the generation born to refugees of the Vietnam War, but with anyone seeking to understand the lasting, often hidden torments of violent conflict and the healing that can take place in the act of telling.