praise for the saigon sisters
choice OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE
“The literature on the war in Vietnam includes hundreds of first-person sources by men on all sides in the conflict, but fewer than a dozen books about women are in print. Thus this collection of oral history interviews . . . is an important contribution. Norland focuses on a particular coterie of female peers educated at Lycée Marie Curie, the elite girls school in Saigon that served the daughters of Vietnamese who worked for the French. These privileged women were sisters in the cause of resistance who all engaged in resistance activities during the late 1940s and 1950s, some continuing throughout the entire wartime period. The individual stories are illuminating. While some of Norland’s subjects functioned under cover in society, others went into the field to assist the guerrillas in a number of ways. While many of these highly educated students of the arts provided morale-building by presenting plays, musical performances, and poetry readings for the troops, others performed manual labor. All paid heavy costs in their own lives. Norland’s interviews, conducted over a 30-year period (1988 to 2018), reveal reflection and introspection, poignancy and sadness, particularly regarding events transpiring after the ‘liberation’ of 1975 through their retirement years.”
John Terzano,
Cofounder of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its International Campaign to Ban Landmines), Professor at the University of Dayton School of Law, and Cofounder of The Justice Project
“The Sisters’ stories tell of a remarkable journey from lives of privilege to lives of hardship, sacrifice, pain and loss, all in the struggle for freedom and independence.
While many Americans are familiar with the Vietnam Memorial Wall in DC and the thousands upon thousands of our stories of loss, sacrifice and heroism, few know the stories on the other side of the wall—the stories of the Vietnamese.
This book, chronicling and bringing to light the lives of these extraordinary women, is both necessary and integral to truly understand America's war in Vietnam.”
dr. christina e. firpo,
Professor of Southeast Asian History at Cal Poly
“The Saigon Sisters is a rare glimpse into the experience of young women during the Vietnamese Revolution, the Vietnam War, and communist Vietnam. Beautifully written, this book is a valuable contribution to women's history, as well as twentieth century Vietnamese history.”
Ken Burns,
Award-Winning Filmmaker
“Patricia Norland’s Saigon Sisters helps the reader understand why French recolonization, the hybrid radical Catholicism of Ngo Dinh Diem, and the American project of creating a new nation in South Vietnam were not going to work out as planned.
In a crisp literary style, Ms. Norland tells the story of nine Vietnamese women, all classmates at Lycée Marie Curie (Elite High School), who join the Communist revolution.
What holds them together throughout their lives is a shared understanding of Vietnamese society. The sisters intuitively know that something like Nguyen Du’s epic poem, The Tale of Kieu, represents the soul of Vietnam and cannot be easily appropriated by Marxist Leninism, France, Catholicism, or American Cold-War maneuvers.
The Communists are clumsy in victory and their romanticism vanishes. None of the sisters is particularly privileged after 1975, despite deep revolutionary credentials. All had personal tragedies and hard times. What is profound about their story is that they don’t feel betrayed by the revolution. In a sense—what holds the sisters together—holds the nation together.
Norland knows her material well. She has followed the lives of her subjects for over thirty years. The biographical sketches are introduced with very precise and accurate historical analysis. The nationalist puzzle is further understood by Norland’s remarkable portraits of supporting characters from all parts of Vietnamese elite politics. The most compelling is the quiet strength of the music professor Tran Van Khe and the wisdom of Belgian Catholic Priest Father Jacques, who was a mentor to both Ngo Dinh Diem and one of the sisters.
This book is destined to be a classic.”
christopher goscha,
Historian and Author of Vietnam: A New History, Cundill History Prize Finalist
“The friendship between the author and Nguyen Thi Oanh was such that Oanh introduced Norland to a ‘band of sisters’ with whom she had gone to high school in Saigon in the late 1940s before they joined the resistance war against the French in 1950. The ‘Saigon Sisters,’ as Norland calls them, form the basis of this remarkable book about the trials and tribulations of these women through two decades of war.
What makes this book so important is that it takes us through the wars through the Sister’s eyes, or at least how they recalled it in conversations with the author between 1988 and 2017 as Vietnam opened to the non-communist world. We get a better idea of the choices that continued to confront each sister as the first Indochina War ended with an armistice at Geneva in 1954 and the (provisional) division of the country into two halves. Some sisters went north, some remained in the resistance in the south, re-christened the National Liberation Front in 1960.
Each sister has a story to tell and each of them is well worth reading. There is a human touch to these souvenirs that will leave no reader indifferent.”
Murray Hiebert,
Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic & International Studies and Author of Under Beijing’s Shadow: Southeast Asia’s China Challenge.
“Norland's remarkable book pulls back the veil on a little understood facet of the Vietnam war: young women from an elite French school driven to join the resistance first against France and then the United States. Through sensitive interviews she teases out the motives of city girls from well-heeled families heading to the jungles where they endured bombing raids, malaria, deprivation and the ache of leaving their children and parents behind.”
Barry Healy,
Reviewing The Saigon Sisters for the grassroots publication Green Left (full review available here).
“To put it mildly, these stories are gripping.
For most of French colonial rule, Vietnamese children were provided with second-class education. But after WWII the lycées were opened to the children of Vietnamese functionaries.
Paradoxically, as Norland writes in the foreword, ‘the colonial classroom probably provided the best space for these privileged Vietnamese teenagers, boys and girls alike, to discover politics and develop a political activism that would push many of them into action’ . . . . As one of the women says, having studied the English, American and French revolutions in the Lycée Marie Curie: ‘We concluded we had to have our own revolution.’ . . .
[F]or young women to defy their families, leave home and join the Viet Minh (later the Viet Cong) in the jungles or to work clandestinely for the resistance was as astonishing as it was courageous. . . . The privations they experienced for the cause were extraordinary. They demonstrated courage under bombs, dealing with deadly snakes and malaria in the jungle or under police surveillance in the city.
One woman, needing to maintain her underground cover in Saigon, had to leave her new born daughter with her sister. She would occasionally organise a rendezvous so she could see her child, but the meetings had to be staged in such a manner that trailing cops would never recognise the connection between mother and child. The daughter would be left in a pram outside a shop while the aunt went inside. The mother would stroll along the street, stop and seemingly spontaneously, coo over the baby.
Another mother, working in the North, had to leave her children with peasants in the countryside to escape Operation Rolling Thunder, the 1965-68 US bombing campaign. ‘On Sundays, I bicycled thirty or forty kilometres to see the children,’ she remembers. ‘I left at four in the morning, in the dark to avoid the bombing. Reaching their village around nine, I bathed them and cooked, and we ate together.’ She would get back to Hanoi about seven or eight at night. ‘All mothers did this; that’s what Sundays were for.’ . . .
Taken together, [The Mountains Sing and The Saigon Sisters] offer inspiring stories about the strength of Vietnamese women and their powerful contribution to the struggle.”
Shirley ruhe,
Reviewing The Saigon Sisters for the local community newspaper The Arlington Connection (full review available here).
“Patricia (Kit) Norland sat listening to a Vietnamese social worker in 1988 in Saigon as Oanh explained in beautiful English what it was like to suffer postwar trauma with poverty, unemployment, domestic abuse and street children. Norland was at that time working for a small non-profit organization dedicated to improving relations between their two countries in a time when there were no formal diplomatic relations.
Norland returned to Vietnam a year later to interview Oanh and eight other women who had all attended the prestigious Lycée Marie Curie in Saigon and had left their lives of privilege to fight French occupation, each in her own way. Their stories are included in the recently-released book, Saigon Sisters.
Norland explained the ‘Sisters’ lived in a cocoon of French society where the children were given French names, wore French skirts and had to salute the French flag. They didn’t even know what the Vietnamese flag looked like. As the women encountered the history of other countries during their studies at the Lycée, they realized they didn’t know the history of their own country and needed their own revolution. They wanted a more egalitarian society.
Some took off their silk garments, donned black pajamas, grabbed their knapsacks packed with sandwiches by their mothers and headed across the street to the bus stop to join the revolution in the jungle. . . .
Norland was fascinated by how these women who had attended the Lycée, the gold standard of education, and had the whole world at their feet could choose the revolution. These were girls who were expected to have few ideas, to care for the home. Reading and writing was enough. They were taught to smile, not to laugh; and to walk, not to drive. They wanted to live more; they wanted to be free. . . .
Norland says part of the background surrounding what happened lies in the history of Vietnam fighting off invaders. In addition, the Sisters were a generation at the crossroads on the hinge of feudalism.
Norland adds that you can’t underestimate the role of culture itself where music and literature are extremely powerful and inspired people to leave the classroom and rise up against colonialism.
Listening to the ballads of Tuyen’s brother Luu Huu Phuoc, ‘Who would not have tears in their eyes?’ . . . .
[The Saigon Sisters] is a book about politics and learning the lessons of the past as they apply to your own country’s struggles, and it is a story about how nine women broke through the barriers of tradition to fight for a new life.”
Phuong phan,
Reviewing The Saigon Sisters for the Asian Review of Books (full review available here).
“Norland first came to Vietnam in 1988 as a member of the US diplomatic corps aiming to build up diplomatic relations between the former enemies. She became friends with the women who would ultimately serve as her case studies, gaining their trust and recording their stories one by one over the years. The book’s strength derives from her evident ability to listen and to make space for her case studies to speak. She recedes into the background: there is no mention of her own experiences in and with Vietnam, or her impressions of the women she depicted. She gives them a platform to talk directly to the reader, and lets the reader take her place as a careful listener, thereby revealing the women’s double and even multiple lives, full of contradiction and inner conflicts caused by the complexity and long duration of the war years. From the perspective of these women, this was not just a hot war between two nations during the Cold War but also a civil war which tore apart friendships forged as classmates, stealing their youth, breaking families up through separation and death and ultimately defining both their lives and fates. The author also collected and included letters between these women and their friends, husbands and children, providing yet more insights into their characters and lives as women and mothers. . . .
Some of them have passed away in the last few years while a few remain. One noted that their generation faced a ‘crossroads offering three choices: rebel against foreign domination, collaborate, or leave their beloved country.’ Another said that ‘We worked toward the same goal. We all want to serve this country. It is the flame that still burns.’ There may have been two sides in the War, but—despite the widespread pain and suffering of women throughout the country—only one people: what matters is the common pain and suffering for, as Thanh noted, ‘we are, after all, human beings.’
The Saigon Sisters is a substantial collection of thoughts, memories, moments of pain and joy in individual lives. Although their lives took different paths, these women shared the same spirit, shaped by the unquestioned love for their country and people. Their remarkable stories shift our focus of the war, and contribute enormously to a “herstory” of the wars in Vietnam.”
ANH THU,
Reviewing The Saigon Sisters for Fulbright University Vietnam’s website (full review available here).
“[A] book of our times. While global challenges are creating a more and more disruptive and polarized world, [The Saigon Sisters] sends a vital message to the young generation about respect to others, giving back to the society, and selfless dedication.”
nathaniel l. moir,
Reviewing The Saigon Sisters for Pacific Affairs (full review available here).
“In Vietnamese studies and books analyzing the wars for Indochina in the twentieth century, the amplification of women’s roles, perspectives, and voices is a salutary trend. Patricia D. Norland, a public diplomacy officer and former member of the non-profit organization, the Indochina Project, positively contributes to this development. In this informative collection of oral histories, nine women provided Norland with their personal stories and comprehensive thoughts . . . . Through separate and illuminating chapters, each of the different sisters recounts her political evolution after January 1950 . . . .
The book is divided chronologically into two sections, with nine well-organized chapters each. Part 1 begins with the sisters’ descriptions of their personal and political lives at Lycée Marie Curie up until the time of the Geneva Accords in 1954. The second half of the book, which covers the sisters’ accounts from 1954 to 2017, demonstrates how revolution in Vietnam was political but also social and personal. New perspectives on familial obligations are woven into these women’s stories and they explain how they managed relationships in more modern ways as Confucianism receded and did not dominate their lives.
Separate chapters, which focus on the individual accounts of the women Norland interviewed, are augmented by vibrant recollections of others connected with the women. In one case, one of the sisters, Xuan, and her husband Lau, worked together to publish the Saigon Daily News, which had a circulation of near 20,000 in Vietnam and abroad. . . . Lau’s commentary contextualizes his wife’s contributions while also demonstrating how couples and families managed to promote resistance to the Republic of Vietnam through diverse means. Such accounts add significant colour to Norland’s overall collection. A highlight in the same account includes how Lau mentioned meeting American newsman Walter Cronkite, who asked Lau, ‘How can the Viet Cong vanquish the Americans who are a thousand times better equipped than the French had been against the Viet Minh?’ To which Lau replied, ‘the Vietcong were 1,001 times better organized than the Viet Minh had been against the French.’ Such smart and evidently accurate remarks and analysis are common throughout this relatively compact and edifying book.
The result one gains from reading this collection of oral histories is thus multi-dimensional and while focused on women, it rises above gender to evaluate the humanity these women promoted during a series of horrific wars between 1945 and 1975. This quality transcends gendered discussions in important ways, but the unique and remarkable stories these women share should encourage historians to include the book in graduate and advanced undergraduate forums.
The book is authored, in many respects and as Norland seems to suggest, by the ‘Saigon Sisters’ themselves. However, the motivation, organization, and remarkable skill Norland brings to bear in producing this outstanding collection of revelatory views on revolution in Indochina demonstrates how valuable oral history can be and how it adds remarkable dimensions to other historical accounts. Also notable is how Norland articulates Vietnamese female-authored historiography in her succinct preface . . . . Instructors seeking to show students the rich and growing amount of scholarship authored by women will benefit from how Norland frames this book in the field. It is quite easy, and motivating as well, to imagine a course on Vietnamese history after World War II that includes only work by women and with The Saigon Sisters as a pivotal work connecting them all.
As a way of closing, one of the ‘sisters,’ Thanh, centred her thoughts on the powerful commonality that grounded her friends’ affinities even though they took different paths: ‘We found that, wherever we ended up, we all worked toward the same goal. We all wanted to serve the country. That bond ties us together.’ As Norland’s powerful oral-history recounting of the lives of this ‘band of sisters’ demonstrates, friendship and independence required vigilance but endured despite decades of war.”
Talya Zax,
Reviewing The Saigon Sisters for The Atlantic in an essay on “Biographies of Groups Who Changed the World” (full essay available here).
“To read a good group biography is to come out with a different level of appreciation for the ways, trivial and tremendous, that humans influence one another. . . . Here are nine animating, searching, and interrogative titles with which to start. . . .
[The Saigon Sisters] tells the stories of nine [Vietnamese women] who, after spending their childhoods secretly dreaming of Vietnamese independence, found surprising ways into the resistance. [The book] also tells how, after the end of the Vietnam War, they came to reconnect. In the end, they found, the privileges they experienced as children helped teach them the importance of the fight they would come to join. Their small group became its own source of revolutionary ferment: The sense of patriotism felt by each fueled the others, and set them on their extraordinarily courageous paths.”