“Well, they’re not really plums,” my husband, Lượng, said about the fruit that grew on the trees in the back of his house in the Mekong Delta. When he got to America, another Vietnamese immigrant had called them “plums,” and Lượng didn’t know any other English name. An Internet search on their Vietnamese name, “mận“, brought up…
Author Michelle Robin La talks with host Fred Klein about her first book Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands. The book is a memoir based on her husband’s life growing up in war-torn Vietnam. Literary Gumbo: Michelle Robin La from Literary Gumbo on Vimeo.
(This excerpt from Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands is a first-place winner in the Southern California Genealogical Society’s 2014 GENEii Family History Writing Awards and appears in the 2015 Summer edition of The Searcher) After dinner, Má decides who’s coming to the countryside in the morning. I try to go whenever I can. I’d rather swim and fish all day…
Ever since my husband first started telling me the stories of his childhood in Vietnam, he talked about cheap trees. When his family flees to Ship Island (Cồn Tàu) after the Tết Offensive: “Má points to an island in front of us that’s surrounded by cheap trees. The trees look like they’re growing out of the…
The Santa Barbara News-Press Books section featured Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands in “Finally free: New book details Santa Barbara man’s childhood in Vietnam during and after the war” on 17 April 2015. Alternately hopeful and sometimes heartbreaking, Michelle Robin La’s comprehensive 487-page debut is based on her husband’s childhood in his native country during and after the Vietnam War.…
While sad at times and occasionally horrific, overall the story is one of resilience and inspiration and adds to a growing counter-narrative of Vietnamese-Americans as courageous survivors, not victims. –Sharon Simonson, SV1World.com reviewing Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands. Read the full article here.
Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands: A Boy from the Mekong Delta is the true story of a boy growing up in the midst of the Vietnam War and his struggle for freedom after the Communist takeover. Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands is available at Amazon in print and Kindle versions, as an iBook, on Google Play, and…
My daughter has a job babysitting chickens for our neighbors when they’re on vacation. A side benefit is fresh eggs. Last time most of the chickens were molting, so she said they were crabby. They didn’t want her to pick them up. Only the one chicken that wasn’t molting was laying eggs. She gets paid quite…
