Wings in the Storm

The first part of the book, tilted A Childhood of Hardship, is about the author’s fateful birth that she kept considering as a prediction of her hard life. She was born unexpectedly on a road of her mother’s enduring her long miles through sunshine and harsh weather to make a living. She likened it with “her entrance into the world after the Vietnamese legendary mother Au Co’s delivery legend,” and attached her personal name to some bitter destiny, though Cam, in Nguyen Thanh Song Cam, actually means ‘sweet’. Since then, her mother and she, the baby named Cam, continued to follow their painful and hard fate. First, her mother’s happy marriage was cut short by her father’s sudden death when she was five years old and her new sister was born. Life to all three of them became more and more unbearable, as a result of the war and the ensuing national chaos, with dramatic losses of life day after day, forcing them eventually to move to the city of Hue where she stayed throughout her youth. From her mother’s profound love and tears, Cam sensed for the first time “her indescribable deep sadness, together with the feeling of total loneliness and loss that burned like a tiny fire in her heart” until the ‘liberation’ in 1975, that brought with it both worries and excitement. (From the foreword by Dr. Ho