Dear Da Le

In spare, evocative prose, Anh Duoung breaks a lifetime of silence to share a rare firsthand account of growing up in war-torn Vietnam and living as a refugee in revolutionary Iran.

Why, Ashley Da-Lê Duong wondered, did her father Anh name her after his childhood village in Vietnam (Da-Lê, pronounced Ya-lay) when in all other ways, he kept as much distance from it as possible? It wasn’t until college, when she began participating in student protests, that Anh began to fill in the gaps of his life story, revealing for the first time his own experiences protesting in Iran and the details of his childhood in Da-Lê. Those letters became this memoir.

Dear Da-Lê is Anh Duong’s story, beginning in 1953 not far from the seventeenth parallel that divided North and South Vietnam, surviving the horrors of the war, escaping to revolution-wracked Iran in the late 1970s, and finally arriving in Canada in 1980. Like many in the Vietnamese diaspora, he had long remained silent about his experiences, believing that trauma was better left unspoken. Now he reveals his coming-of-age story, intertwining moments of hope and tenderness with a brutal account of the human costs of war and exile.

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Dear Da-Lê demonstrates how one family processed intergenerational trauma and found healing through storytelling.