Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars [NOOK Book]

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Overview

From Andrew X. Pham, the award-winning author of Catfish and Mandala, a son’s searing memoir of his Vietnamese father’s experiences over the course of three wars.

The Philadelphia Inquirer hailed Andrew Pham’s debut, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, for evoking “the full sadness of the human condition . . . marveling at spiritual resilience amid irreconcilable facts.” The New York Times Book Review called it, simply, “remarkable.” Now, in The Eaves of Heaven, Pham gives voice to his father’s unique experience in an unforgettable ...
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Overview

From Andrew X. Pham, the award-winning author of Catfish and Mandala, a son’s searing memoir of his Vietnamese father’s experiences over the course of three wars.

The Philadelphia Inquirer hailed Andrew Pham’s debut, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, for evoking “the full sadness of the human condition . . . marveling at spiritual resilience amid irreconcilable facts.” The New York Times Book Review called it, simply, “remarkable.” Now, in The Eaves of Heaven, Pham gives voice to his father’s unique experience in an unforgettable story of war and remembrance.

Once wealthy landowners, Thong Van Pham’s family was shattered by the tumultuous events of the twentieth century: the festering French occupation of Indochina, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the Vietnam War.

Told in dazzling chapters that alternate between events in the past and those closer to the present, The Eaves of Heaven brilliantly re-creates the trials of everyday life in Vietnam as endured by one man, from the fall of Hanoi and the collapse of French colonialism to the frenzied evacuation of Saigon. Pham offers a rare portal into a lost world as he chronicles Thong Van Pham’s heartbreaks, triumphs, and bizarre reversals of fortune, whether as a South Vietnamese soldier pinned down by enemy fire, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese under brutal interrogation, or a refugee desperately trying to escape Vietnam after the last American helicopter has abandoned Saigon. This is the story of a man caught in the maelstrom of twentieth-century politics, a gripping memoir told with the urgency of a wartime dispatch by a writer of surpassing talent.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Martha Sherrill
In 1802, a war hero named Hao Pham was awarded a vast tract of land in the fertile flatlands in the north of Vietnam. He'd won several battles that had led to the unification of his country. For this, he became the lord of a large manor with thousands of peasants and lived out his days in supreme comfort. A string of male descendants succeeded him, each becoming richer and more powerful than the last. Under French colonial rule, the Pham estates expanded further. The Eaves of Heaven describes the gradual undoing of this vast and elaborate dynasty, the cataclysmic disintegration of a country, and the series of dramatic misfortunes that befell the great-great-great-grandson of Hao. Poised to inherit everything, Thong Pham instead lost it all, as Andrew X. Pham, his son, recounts in this gorgeously written book. But this is not ultimately a story of loss and upheaval, nor is it simply a retelling of Vietnam's war-torn history from a Vietnamese point of view. Many other books have ably covered that ground. The Eaves of Heaven is something entirely new: an effort to recapture the moments of beauty and transcendence that emerged from these events.
—The Washington Post
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
Few books have combined the historical scope and the literary skill to give the foreign reader a sense of events from a Vietnamese perspective. Le Ly Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places gave us the war through the eyes of a South Vietnamese peasant girl turned sex worker, while Nguyen Qui Duc's Where the Ashes Are told us what it was like to watch his father, a high-ranking official in Hue, be taken captive by the Vietcong. Bao Ninh's autobiographical novel The Sorrow of War gave us the viewpoint of a disillusioned North Vietnamese grunt. And now we can add Andrew Pham's Eaves of Heaven to this list of indispensable books…It is often said that the Vietnamese conception of history is circular rather than linear: the same episodes recur over and over, with only the details altered. The Eaves of Heaven has a similar feel. Thong Van Pham is constantly fleeing and rebuilding in the midst of war, watching world after world vanish, from the feudal estate of his childhood to the Hanoi of the '50s to the Saigon of the '70s. He and his son have done us the extraordinary service of bringing a few pieces of those worlds back again.
—The New York Times

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780307409348
  • Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 6/3/2008
  • Sold by: Random House
  • Format: eBook
  • Sales rank: 260,754
  • File size: 392 KB
  • Items ship to U.S, APO/FPO and U.S. Protectorate addresses.

Meet the Author

ANDREW X. PHAM is the author of the memoir Catfish and Mandala (winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award) and the translator of Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram, published by Harmony in September 2007. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and lives in Hawaii.

AndrewXPham.com


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents


Author's Note     xiii
Prologue: Ancestors     1
Leaving Home     5
Father     14
Phan Thiet     19
Mother     28
Dalat Days     32
The Mid-Autumn Festival     41
Sea Grubs     49
Saigon Night     51
Cricket Fight     57
The Recruiter     64
Hoi and I     71
The Draft     80
The Orphan     91
Famine     97
The Famine Soup     99
The Flood     105
The Ambush     107
The Last Magistrate     120
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam     124
The Trap     129
The Algerian     144
The Resistance Fighter     154
The Tet Offensive     164
The Executioner     172
Old Friends     184
The Champagne Bottle     200
The Slave     210
A Lull of Silence     213
Crossing the French Line     220
The Fall of Saigon     226
The Widower     241
The Capture     251
The PeasantGirl     267
Reeducation     276
Farewell, Hanoi     284
The Release     294
Bibliography     299
Acknowledgments     301
Customer Reviews
Average Rating 4
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  • Posted August 13, 2009

    I Also Recommend:

    I love memoirs like these

    This book is something of a memoir written from the perspective of his father through the son's pen. This heart-rending story catalogues the trials, the horrors, and the injustices suffered by the average Vietnamese citizen at the hands of their political elite--on both sides Communists and Nationalists---and also provides insight into traditional family time---complete with "grasshopper" hunting and cricket fights among the children.

    Mr. Pham's description of "the Elder's" moral and physical courage in the face of friends joining one movement or another or physical danger is illustrative of a courageous and dedicated spirit.

    Read the book in two sittings---and was truly impressed with both the style and content. Reading "I Love Yous are for White People" by Lac Su next. It's the same Vietnamese American immigrant genre.

    6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted December 9, 2008

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    A reviewer

    From 1940 to1976, Viet Nam was in a constant state of war that impacted the people. Andrew X. Pham provides the biography of his father Thong Van Pham, who lived through the three plus decades of war starting with the Japanese invasion of the French occupied region during WW II through the fight for independent from the French and finally the war over the South against the United States. As a child Thong lived an upper crust life being born to a wealthy family. Over the years of war, famine and abuse, the family fortune vanished and consequently the life style. This is a fascinating biography that also serves as a deep look at the history of Viet Nam. The author rotates his father¿s life with recent events that brings a harrowing feel as the reader gains a sense of the outcome resulting from the years of turbulence. Well written, readers will marvel at Mr. Pham¿s capture of the impact of power struggles on everyday people.------- Harriet Klausner

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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