Love Letters to the Dirty South

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 tenure