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评论 (3)
出版社周刊评论
This is the poignant, well-told story of Sawyer, who, at the age of 20, fled her native Vietnam just as the North Vietnamese stood poised to capture Saigon. Anh Sawyer tells of her harrowing escape, along with throngs of other panicked Vietnamese, through the American Embassy and onto a boat overcrowded with other refugees. But her account begins with the colorful history of her family, starting with her grandfather's conversion to Christianity, and the history of Vietnam, including previous occupations by various countries. Sawyer's Vietnam is in constant turmoil; inhabitants are in fear for their lives and the lives of family and friends. Her Christian faith keeps her strong throughout the ordeal, but she finds that Americans can also be terrifying, for instance when an American holds a gun to her father's head inside the American Embassy in Saigon. The author and her entire family are adopted by a Christian family in Illinois, and she is sent to college, where she lives like a normal young American. But after her marriage to a fellow student, Philip Sawyer, she finds life in America disappointing, until her faith in God restores her strength. Joining a missionary group, Sawyer returns to Vietnam-something she had vowed never to do-after an absence of nearly two and a half decades, and finds the return intimidating at first, with a frightening encounter with a customs official. But after reuniting with the people of her homeland, she is soon comforted by finding her former church. This is a moving story, and thanks partly to the skill of Proctor (coauthor of Willard Scott's The Joy of Living), readers will stay with it to the end.. (Feb. 18) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
A Vietnamese refugee movingly recalls her life during wartime, her escape, and her sometimes bumpy adjustment to life in the US. Nineteen when she and her family managed to get on one of the last helicopters taking off from the US Embassy roof in Saigon in 1975, Sawyer first explains how the family came to be Christian in a narrative crafted by veteran coauthor Proctor (Sally, 1990, etc.). Anh's grandfather had been a bureaucrat employed by the French colonial government in Hanoi. Unhappy with his work and his wife, he became addicted to opium; saved by an American missionary, he converted to Christianity and dedicated his life to God. Her father, the son of a prominent landlord, became a communist and was imprisoned by the French; after the communists took over in North Vietnam, he got into trouble with the Party, and the family had to flee to Saigon. As communists advanced from the north, an elder brother who lived in America tried but failed to get them exit visas, and they joined the mob of panicked Vietnamese on the embassy grounds. In the US, religious organizations found the family homes, work, and a college for Anh in the Midwest. There she fell in love with fellow student Philip Sawyer, an aspiring fashion designer who seemed refreshingly different from everyone else. They married and moved to New York, but while Anh thrived working for an airline, Philip was unable to succeed in his chosen field and became depressed. Her religious faith wavered until they moved to Kansas, where Philip's depression was cured by a speaker at a prayer meeting. In the late 1990s, Anh began working with Vietnamese relief groups, and she recalls a visit to Vietnam in 1998 that allowed her to come to comforting closure with her past. Vivid testimony to faith and the human spirit amidst chaos and daunting change.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Sawyer's harrowing memoirs chronicle her Vietnamese childhood and narrow escape from Saigon in 1975. Struggling to survive during the long years of civil war, the Vu's lived a precarious existence caught amid and between the French, the Americans, and the Communists. As Saigon fell around them, Sawyer and her family miraculously managed to escape via one of the last helicopters to leave the American embassy. Reaching back into her past, she vividly recalls her family's richly textured history in Vietnam and their difficult transition to American life. Throughout her ordeals, Anh, a devout Christian, was sustained by both her family and her unwavering faith in God. Returning to Vietnam on a humanitarian mission 25 years later, she was able to reconcile the past with the present in a suitably poignant fashion. A stirring testament to the tenacity of the human spirit. --Margaret Flanagan.