Description: A stunning debut memoir about love, loss, and the Vietnamese immigrant experience in the American South.
As an infant, Thao Ha was evacuated on one of the last flights out of Saigon during the fall of the city in April 1975. Like the other lucky few--and the thousands who came after--she and her family found sanctuary in America. Raised in the growing Vietnamese community in Houston, she did all the things American kids of the '80s and '90s did--but she also ran with a Vietnamese street gang. By her early twenties she'd picked fights with other girls who threatened her sister, transported a fugitive across county lines, and been shot as a bystander in a pool-hall fracas turned violent. But the greatest shock came when her boyfriend, Vu, the love of her early life, took the rap for a drive-by shooting and went to prison for sixty years. Enough was enough. Thao got serious about school and majored in sociology under the mentorship of an inspiring professor. She went on to earn a PhD and a tenured professorship at Mira Costa College in Oceanside, California.But as William Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
The decades of her professional success brought marriages, divorces, failed relationships, and family trauma. But one person stayed with her through it all. Like a still-small flame far out on the landscape, the figure of Vu was somehow always with her. Sentenced to sixty years, Vu was locked up in the infamous Beto Unit, the most violent maximum-security prison in Texas. Nicknamed "the gladiator unit," it is a place where inmates must be prepared to fight for status and for their very survival. Nearly twenty years into his sentence, Thao and Vu reconnected. Three years after that, he was dead. Love Letters to the Dirty South is a memoir about what it means to love, long for, and lose someone incarcerated. A testament to lifelong love, it is also an unflinching depiction of prison culture, a loving portrait of family life in the Vietnamese diaspora community, and a counternarrative to the typical immigrant's story. As a Vietnamese refugee and sociologist, Thao Ha deftly explores refugee trauma, mass incarceration, and prison injustice, and she shows how unconditional love attempts to navigate, resist, and thwart a dehumanizing system. In this stunning debut, she tells her story of reckless youth, love reclaimed and tragically lost, and the power of words to transcend boundaries with unflinching honesty, insight, and conviction.
Brief description: Thao Hà is a professor at MiraCosta College. She earned a doctorate in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin and has published in the areas of race, immigration, and Vietnamese American experiences in the South. She was an advisor and associate producer of Seadrift, a 2019 documentary about racial violence and KKK intimidation in the 1970s against Vietnamese Americans in a small Texas fishing town. She serves as board president of the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association, executive director of Collective Freedom, and board chair of the Doan Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Oceanside, California.
Review Quotes: "Thao Ha has written a miracle of a memoir about love in the time of mass incarceration. She writes with artistry and wisdom about growing up as a refugee, finding a community in Houston's Little Saigon, and struggling to overcome gang violence. Most of all, she crafts a tender portrait of the remarkable man she found, lost, and found again: Hoang Vu Tran. Ha loses Vu, as his loved ones call him, when he is sentenced to sixty years in prison for aggravated assault, and when she in turn survives a gunshot wound in a pool hall. But, twenty years later, they reconnect in an unforgettable series of letters. Both Ha and Vu are exceptional writers, and their correspondence captures a love story for the ages. Ha's memoir is as dramatic as any Hollywood film, and as devastating as anything I've read lately. To borrow one of Ha's own memorable phrases, her book is 'a luminous tragedy.' It is also a triumph."--Daniel A. Gross, story editor "The New Yorker"