RAIN ON THE RED FLAG - BOOK REVIEW BY REEDSY DISCOVERY
Loved it! 😍
A compelling and absorbing memoir about one man's desperate journey to freedom after the fall of Saigon. No library should be without it.
SYNOPSIS
Tchaikovsky. A White Butterfly. The Memory of Love. For seventeen-year-old city boy Frank Thanh Nguyen, the official end of the war in Vietnam marked the end of his freedom and the beginning of a harrowing adventure.
Rain on the Red Flag details Thanh's remarkable journey, which begins on the day the Communists planted their flag in homes along his street in Saigon. Thanh's only chance of survival was to escape. During several escape attempts Thanh discovered parts of his country and its people that weren't known to him before. Later, Thanh was captured by the undercover police. For four years, he was held in jails and labor camps, chained, and starved. Only his love for freedom, music, the memory of his girl, his family, and friendship with the other prisoners keeps him sane.
When Thanh was finally set free and returned to Saigon, he helped to build a boat. He finds himself captaining the boat to navigate himself and seventy-five other refugees through tumultuous seas to seek freedom again.
Rain on the Red Flag is the gripping and harrowing account of author Frank Thanh Nguyen’s years in a Vietnamese labor camp, his subsequent release, and his perilous journey toward freedom aboard a flimsy boat crammed with fellow refugees. It is also a tender love story about how his love for music and one special girl sustains him throughout years of hardship and adversity.
Everyone is desperate to escape Saigon following the Communist take-over at the close of the Vietnam War. Told in retrospect some thirteen years after fleeing his homeland, Nguyen’s story is compelling, intense, and deeply evocative.
“It was a senseless time… We did what we could” is how the Prologue winds down. It’s also an apt summary of the author’s experiences, post-fall of Saigon, his hometown.
Readers are thus plunged into the subsequent chaos, fear, and desperation of April 1975 as the Communists are closing in. The smoke. The U.S. Sea Stallions. The shelling. The collapse and surrender of the South Vietnamese Army after the loss of American military aid.
“We had lost,” writes the author. “Everything we had been taught to believe in had been lost.” It is an observation as heart-rending as it is prescient as hordes of North Vietnamese military pour into Saigon.
The author’s father, a high-ranking officer in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, is arrested. “Our only responsibilities were to escape and survive,” writes Nguyen. But everyone is trying to escape. Scores perish at sea in the process.
Caught while trying to escape through the jungle, Nguyen winds up in jail. He is then transferred to a Communist labor camp. Here, Nguyen seeks solace and sanity in music and memories of a young love. (We later learn that his beloved Thuy didn’t make it. Attempting to flee the country by sea, Thuy drowns when her rickety boat capsizes. Bring tissue.)
The book’s title has a specific meaning that is revealed in later pages. It’s a line from a poem recited by a fellow prisoner. You’ll have to read the book yourself to get that.
After years in prison camp K-3, Nguyen has pretty much given up hope of ever leaving the camp. You can almost taste the bitter tang of defeat and despair. But when he’s finally released, he writes, “I thought I would cry, but I didn’t. I realized it was because all those years, there were no tears left in me.”
Making his way back to Saigon, Nguyen finds that his family has changed and “Saigon had sickened.” He details how people move with “a desperate nervousness,” as if they were putting on masks “to adjust to the new regime.” He tries to settle in but can’t. “Too much had happened to change me,” he writes. “Home was not home... Saigon was no longer real. I didn’t belong.”
Escape is his only hope. And it’s a forlorn one, fraught with peril and danger. Against all odds, Nguyen finally makes it to Malaysia. Free land. Hope. “And what would I do, now that my new life had begun?” Nguyen asks. “I thought I would cry, but I didn’t.”
Rain on the Red Flag is an immensely moving and absorbing memoir of one man’s journey to freedom and the high price both he and his family paid to get there. Highly engaging and thoroughly readable, it is superbly well-written and expertly paced. You can almost smell the smoke. Feel the wind and the rain. Hear the blare of Communist propaganda. Taste the salt air on the open sea.
Don’t miss this one. It is incisive and poignant while neatly side-stepping mawkish or maudlin. Indeed, Rain on the Red Flag is likely to join other classics such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, or Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.
Rain on the Red Flag is a memoir no library should be without. I’d grab a copy now ‘fize you.
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