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Undaunted A Memoir is a harrowing story of unimaginable loss, horrible abuse, and unspeakable tragedy. For a young orphaned Vietnamese girl, living in a war torn country, growing up is the hardest journey. She flees an army of demons, ghostly soldiers, false friends, conniving and dangerous relatives, callous bureaucrats, and a complex, endless war that ensnared a whole nation. She struggles to endure a life of impossible circumstances and situations, until help comes and changes her life.
Life makes orphans of us all. Some of us get a head start. I should begin this story when I was born, but I don’t know exactly when that was and those who could tell me are long gone, as is the world we once shared. It probably doesn’t matter. Ours is an old story begun afresh each day in war zones around the world. Orphans are one big family that seldom gets to meet. We know only those who hold our hands and we have only two of those. This book is about the two kinds of ‘sisters’ who held mine.
The first are the little girls, strong women, weak women, kind or cruel women, and old ladies who, being real or spiritual sisters, guided me from ignorance and despair to some kind of peace and understanding in my life. The second are the angels who watch over us from eons before our birth to what, sooner or later, will become the end of time.
Van B. Choat was born Nguyen Thi Hien in the village of Rach Gia, southwest of Saigon. Orphaned at age four in a bloody Viet Cong massacre in 1964, Van begins a heart-breaking odyssey that takes her from the loving care of her stoic grandmother to foster homes where relatives both nurture and abuse her. Surviving the Tet Offensive, teenager Van later escapes to the U.S. with her adoptive family on the eve of Saigon’s fall in 1975. She faces poverty, brutality, and discrimination in an alien land-compounded by the untimely death of her young husband and high-school sweetheart, a U.S. soldier who gives her two sons and a new mission in life.
