The Evergreen Country: A Memoir of Vietnam.

Joseph Jones is a reference librarian in the Koerner Library at the
University of British Columbia.

After four chapters of preliminaries, the personal narrative begins: “I was born in Hanoi in the spring of 1940.” Up to that point, family background blends with geopolitical history and local neighbourhood sociology. That welcome turn to a more personal tone only goes so far. The entire book maintains a distanced voice that seems grounded in a reserve natural to the author’s Asian cultures.

The story of Vuong-Riddick’s youth in Vietnam ends with chapter 18, which offers a bare outline of her 1962–1969 transition through France to Canada and then her sponsoring the immigration of seven relatives over the next six years. The last quarter of the book consists of her travel diary of 1995 and 2004 trips to Vietnam.

The core story’s strongest thread follows the fluctuations of family fortunes. Her father moved from Hanoi to Saigon when Vietnam was divided in 1954. As tutor to the children of South Vietnamese generals, the author became the economic mainstay of her family. Eventually her father prospered with a bakery that sold bread to the American forces. Strong connections with the French Catholic system facilitated the education of her siblings and her own emigrations to France and Quebec.

A second prominent thread is Vuong-Riddick’s place in a society where marked changes in women’s roles occurred in one generation. At one point she connects her own independence with that achieved by Vietnam in the 1950s. (Other factors also emerge: birth order, liberal family attitude, and individual personality.)

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the complexity of the author’s initial identities. As a fourth-generation Chinese girl in Vietnam, she first knew herself as Wang Seng. Her personal appearance is said to indicate Japanese ancestry. By accident of geography, her upbringing was Vietnamese. Her primary education and culture were French.

Vuong-Riddick left Vietnam in 1962. She has more to say about the 1970s exodus of “boat people” from Vietnam than about the intervening decade of American military action. This accords with an unselfconscious perspective that ultimately stands on the two legs of Chinese and French colonialism.