The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family Paperback – April 20, 2000

This is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary woman. Of all the Vietnam narratives I've read, this is the first to give us a detailed picture of life in a Vietnamese mandarin family, a milieu which most of us who were there never knew existed. Moreover, this is a history of Vietnam seen from all sides because Mrs. Elliott's family members were involved in all the events that shaped the modern history of her native land from the French occupation to today's united Vietnam under communist rule. She spares no details and some of them must've been very painful for her to write about, especially the foibles of certain prominent family members whom she describes objectively and without emotion, and with all their warts. That kind of honesty is refreshing in a book like this and frankly makes her subjects' vulnerably human in spite of their extraordinary accomplishments. No mistake about it, the Duong family produced some extraordinary individuals but in Mrs. Elliott's narrative they put their robes on the same way everyone else does.Mrs. Elliott is also the author of the magisterial RAND IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. She was a RAND employee in the 1960s working as an interrogator and translator in the Vietcong Motivation and Morale Study commissioned by the Department of Defense. This effort produced hundreds of in-depth interviews with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese POWs and defectors which today are a priceless archive of the ordinary communist fighter's life in the jungle. When Lee Lanning and I wrote INSIDE THE VC AND THE NVA we relied heavily on these interviews some of which were conducted by Mrs. Elliott herself. We used other RAND reports, particularly "Documents of an Elite Viet Cong Delta Unit: The Demolition Platoon of the 514th Battalion," authored by Mrs. Elliott and her husband, David.If only we'd paid closer attention to what the Elliotts and their colleagues were finding out about our communist enemy in Vietnam we might've gained valuable insights. And, as she very perceptively points out in this book, if we'd only done a similar study on our South Vietnamese ally we might've taken a different course in Vietnam than the one that led to disaster and the vast diaspora Mrs. Elliott describes in this book.Mrs. Elliott was only a child when the first Indochina War ended. She grew up in a privileged environment, went to the best schools, was educated at Georgetown at the American taxpayer's expense, married an American intellectual, and was safe here in the States when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese juggernaut. She never knew the ordinary people of Vietnam, the soldiers, the bar girls, the prostitutes, the street vendors, the street urchins, the rural villagers, not like the average GI and if he was an infantryman, he knew the Vietnamese countryside better than this author ever could, better, in fact, than many of his communist enemies fresh off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Of her siblings none were killed in the war.But when the Duongs fled their country in 1975, those who didn't stay behind to experience concentration camps or victory in the ranks of the VC and the NVA, they came with nothing except a will to survive and provide for their children. A hundred-year membership in the mandarinate was worthless to these new immigrants. We should never forget it's people like them who've made this country what it is.Yes, Mrs. Elliott reveals in this book that she shared the anti-war views of the American intelligentsia which at the time outraged me and if I'd have met her back then I don't think I'd have liked her -- I'd have considered her a communist stooge. But she was right that the way we & our South Vietnamese ally were pursuring that war would end in failure and while she had close relatives who were devoted communists, she's not one herself, she's Vietnamese and that is a BIG difference.My son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren have all been back to Vietnam. It's not the same country it was in 1975. Mrs. Elliott doesn't beat you over the head with this fact, but it's clear and one might wonder who really won that war. My barber, a Vietnamese immigrant, wasn't even born when I first went there & he was but a baby when I left. That, Mrs. Elliott tells us in this book, is how we come to terms with the past, by living through and beyond it. Her family did it and so can the rest of us.

I bought this book by mistake, believing it to be a novel on a day I felt like getting something easy to read. Realizing it was non-fiction I figured I would put it down after a few pages but that proved to be impossible: Duong Van Mai Elliott has written an absolute page turner. Admittedly her book requires some pre-existing interest in Vietnam, a country ravaged by thirty years of war against the French and then the USA in what became the defining event of the postwar baby boomers generation, who reached adulthood at the height of the American phase of the war.Vietnamese born, married to an American scholar with whom she fell in love in Saigon as a shy teen ager studying in a French lycée still run by nuns, she tells the story of her family starting with her mandarin great-grandfather serving the emperor as one of the members of the cast of respected scholars who ran the country at the time. Confucianism and a reluctance to confront the modern world soon led to the collapse of the imperial state, invaded and turned into a French colony in the South and two puppet states in the North and Center (Tonkin and Annam). The humiliation of the colonial times bred the steely determination to throw out the foreigners after the Second World War and French weakness combined with the stupidity of the American policy of containing the advance of communism did the rest.She takes us through turmoil after tragedy seen from the eyes of her family. Perhaps she idealizes the qualities of her grandfather and father somewhat – both described as honest, incorruptible officials, secretly loving their country and longing for independence whilst serving the colonial masters and then the Americans – but the very involvement of her family in the history of her country – including a sister and several relatives who became dedicated cadres in North Vietnam – is of course part of what makes this book so fascinating.What she describes throughout a century or so is an amazing people, a society that finds in its traditions and in particular in its devotion to family values, the strength to struggle through unspeakable horrors, devastation, famine, let alone tyranny after 1975, reeducation camps and finally exile as boat people fled the communist paradise by the thousands. Her main point seems to be that the Vietnamese can endure almost anything and survive until they pick up the pieces and achieve a better life. Writing this book must have been quite a catharsis for her and at times the oddly detached way in which she describes the tragedies of the war or the depravity of communist reeducation camps for instance, seems to reflect a reluctance to display inner feelings that we understand from her is typically part of the Vietnamese tradition.Her work is instructive, deeply moving at times, superbly written and to be recommended to anyone with an interest in the fascinating country that I once heard in 1969 being referred to in an army briefing as “that stinking backyard of world history”. Nothing could be further from the truth as she so convincingly shows.

I am Vietnamese and I moved to the US when I was 9 back in 1995. Having been born after the war and resettled at a young age, I have been trying to learn more about Vietnam and its history, particularly the events that took place during the war. This book is a fascinating accounting of one family's history through the war with the French, the rise of the Viet Minh in the north, the fall of Saigon, and their resettlement in the US, Canada, France, and Australia. It was a very moving and poignant personal account and Mai is a good writer. Mai is not a historian and she doesn't claim to be one. This is just her family's accounting of events, but it does give a lot of insight into people on both sides of the war, and why the South might have lost. One of the best book purchases I have made!

I first heard Mai Elliott on Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History Podcast, reporting on her work for the Rand Corporation interviewing Viet Minh and Viet Cong prisoners of the US. Her telling of her family's story beginning with her mandarin great grandfather and his brother and continuing until the evacuation of Ho Chi Minh City provides rich insights into life in Viet Nam during the French and American occupations. Her writing is reportorial and free of political bias, finding fault with the mindless cruelty of the early Viet Minh cadres, the French government, and the American military. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who genuinely wants a better understanding of this important time in Viet Nam.

I am travelling to Vietnam and Cambodia shortly and had read First They Killed My Father about the war in Cambodia. I looked through all the books available about the Vietnam war but most of them were penned by Americans and I wanted to read about the war through Vietnamese eyes. After much deliberation, I bought The Sacred Willow. When I first looked at the size of the print, I thought it would take me ages to read but I have been unable to put the book down. It tells of the history of Mai's family from her Great-grandfather down to her own generation. It gives a real insight as to how Vietnam became the country it did today and how horrendous life must have been at times for the Vietnamese under French rule and then how the Communists of the North tried to take over, bringing the Americans in to defend the South. I know feel so much more prepared for my trip to Vietnam and seeing how life from the Mid 1800's up to the late 1980's has affected life there and how the country is now starting to develop encouraging tourism etc.

Having been researching Vietnam war this helped to understand its progress, complexities and how it affected Vietnamese. Excellent book

By telling the story of one family through from the French times to resettlement in USA after the war, the author reminds us that the Vietnamese are people like us, with feelings like ours and a rich cultural heritage, who suffered abominably under one occupying power after another and under several cruel governments. A gripping read.

Good subject, Dull writing. Sorry to say that this was tough going due to the bland, dull writing. The subject is interesting enough to just get through it, but this book is reportage, not literature. It needed a lot of editing. The other reviews were incredibly kind but I don't see any of the attributes given it.

Fairly lengthy but fascinating history of Vietnam covering 100 years and 4 generations of a middle class family. About to visit Vietnam and wanted to find out more about the country other than the American war. Also interesting to understand the country's history from the perpective of the Vietnamese. Well worth the read.