We were meant to be a gentle people
Subtitle: a memoir in text + image (+ song)
By: Dao Strom
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Paperdoll Works/PDW/MPMP
Published: 2015
Place of publication: [Portland, Oregon]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 188
ISBN-13: 9780990955511
Subjects: Childhood and youth; Authors; Family relationships; Biography; Vietnamese Americans
Other titles: We were meant to be a gentle people :
Description: "A memoir in text, image, and song. In this unique hybrid work, author/musician Dao Strom navigates the spaces between shores, mother and father, two cultures. The daughter of writers, she fled Vietnam with her mother at the end of the war. It was not until years later that she learned her father was still alive and had spent a decade in Communist "reeducation" camps as persecution for his work as a writer in the pre-1975 era of Saigon. This rift--caught between the forward-looking mother who severed ties with the past, and the only tenuous presence of a father who could not turn away from the past--is the initiating ethos behind this memoir, which renders itself also as an experiment in literary multimedia, combining text, image, and song to express the nuances and buried emotions of aftermath" --
Table of contents: title: East. Cataclysm ; Au co's tears (for the rain) ; Ode to mother(land) ; [Interlude] ; Lullaby* ; Origin tale ; <Break the silence>; title: West. On an open field ; Mother ; Bear/New Earth ; Sometimes I feel like a motherless child ; Hell's Gate ; Two Rivers; title: Two Rivers, an essay.