The Bridge Generation of Vietnam: Spanning Wartime to Boomtime is a compilation of profiles and essays relating to three critical time periods in Vietnam's recent history. The focus is on a group of people who grew up during wartime, lived through a devastating period of famine and hunger, and are now leading the country in its economic boom. We divided these experiences into three parts, mirroring the time periods. Part 1, War, includes experiences during the American War, as well as the conflicts with Cambodia and China which lasted into the 1980s. Part 2, Hunger, focuses on the subsidy period, from 1975 until 1986, but continued mostly until the end of the 1980s. Part 3, Launch, spans the time from the official start of Doi Moi, or economic renovation, when the country began to shift toward a market economy, to the present. Although it began officially in 1986, Doi Moi's impact started to take major effect toward the mid 1990s and beyond.

The twenty six members of the Queer Imaging & Riting Kollective for elders (Quirk-e) chronicle their journey from no rights to civil rights in this, their sixth anthology. For further information or to order more copies visit us at www.quirk-e.com Every brave voice deserves a hearing. If you have ever felt you have been targeted as 'the other, ' ever felt abandoned, mocked for being different, here are individual voices that may connect with you. -Wayson Choy, author of The Jade Peon

Presents a healing vision of the heritage of the Vietnam generation.

Tied in to Ken Burns' forthcoming (2017) TV series on Vietnam, to which the author is a major contributor, the reissue of a Pulitzer finalist memoir of a Vietnamese family in the 20th century

My name is George Watson. I am 24 years old from Portland, Maine. It is late summer 1968 and although I have been accepted to a Ph.D. program at The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., I am about to be drafted. How did I get in this situation? And what do I do now? This book provides my personal account of the difficult choices that confronted the U.S. Vietnam War generation. Faced with the dilemma of whether or not to serve in an unpopular, undeclared war, my generation was forced to make choices that were not in tune with those made by our parents’ generation. The so-called “Greatest Generation” of World War II veterans had returned to reap their deserved rewards from the GI Bill and the burgeoning post-war economy. They insisted that we follow in their footsteps and step up to the war demands of the nation. But the times and the issues and the stakes were different. My memoir portrays the realities of those choices, depicting the time and values that caused the generations to clash head on. I track the evolution of my value system beginning in Catholic elementary and high school through college and graduate school, giving insight into the choices I faced and the decisions I made. My personal confrontation with choices during a turbulent era should resonate with members of the Vietnam War generation. Much has been written about the generation that struggled during the Depression and fought in World War II, referred to by former NBC announcer Tom Brokaw and others as “The Greatest Generation.” I felt compelled to write about the generation it spawned. Ironically, it was the progeny of the World War II survivors who would be confronted with the choice of whether to fight in an ambiguous war that was really an unfinished product of the allied victory of World War II. How did we get involved in Vietnam in the first place? Following the “Greatest Generation’s” war, independence movements confronted European colonialism all over the world. Vietnam was but one example of the war’s unfinished business. After the Japanese defeat, the returning French made critical mistakes. They retained the former Japanese police infrastructure for a time and denied university-educated Vietnamese citizens proper opportunities in their own civil service, reserving the key positions for themselves. Because they were reluctant to give up control, the French were confronted with a Nationalist movement that happened to have Communist affiliations. The French lost their war and Vietnam was split in two, between a Communist north under the inspirational leadership of Ho Chi Minh and a supposedly capitalist and Catholic south controlled by the Diem family. Political corruption and nepotism in the south did not inspire widespread allegiance to the Diem regime. With the French defeat at Diem Bien Phu in 1954 the United States, which had recently fought the North Koreans and Chinese to a draw, became more involved with the south at first diplomatically and then militarily. Simply stated, our initial advisory role of the late fifties and early sixties soon expanded. We gradually assumed control of the war and committed more and more troops; by 1968 the nation found itself in Vietnam with a force of 543,000 soldiers fighting a still undeclared war. Who fought in the Vietnam War? What class of American society did they represent? Could I be categorized as the norm? The Vietnam generation born during the years 1940 to 1954 was brought up believing in the greatness of this country. Their fathers had sacrificed during World War II and with their allies had defeated two major powers in several theatres of war. Many of these same veterans were called again to fight during the Korean War, a bloody conflict fought to a draw after three years. Ours was the generation that was raised to believe that the United States had a worldwide mission. We couldn’t revert to isolationism, as our predecessors had done during the period between the t

Hailed by critics and writers as powerful, important fiction, Monkey Bridge charts the unmapped territory of the Vietnamese American experience in the aftermath of war. Like navigating a monkey bridge—a bridge, built of spindly bamboo, used by peasants for centuries—the narrative traverses perilously between worlds past and present, East and West, in telling two interlocking stories: one, the Vietnamese version of the classic immigrant experience in America, told by a young girl; and the second, a dark tale of betrayal, political intrigue, family secrets, and revenge—her mother's tale. The haunting and beautiful terrain of Monkey Bridge is the "luminous motion," as it is called in Vietnamese myth and legend, between generations, encompassing Vietnamese lore, history, and dreams of the past as well as of the future. "With incredible lightness, balance and elegance," writes Isabel Allende, "Lan Cao crosses over an abyss of pain, loss, separation and exile, connecting on one level the opposite realities of Vietnam and North America, and on a deeper level the realities of the material world and the world of the spirits." • Quality Paperback Book Club Selection and New Voices Award nominee • A Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award Book Prize nominee