Why Vietnam? That’s the question that people most often ask me. I realize Vietnam is an odd subject for a Jewish girl from Memphis who, before 1990, had no direct connection to that small country in Southeast Asia. While most other writers keep to one genre and shift subjects from project to project, I’ve continually shifted my genres and keep returning to Vietnam. 

As a storyteller, I’m enthralled by the stories that come to me from Vietnam, and I write in the genre that best conveys the particular story that I want to tell. After living in Hanoi in the early 1990s, I wrote a memoir, The House on Dream Street, in order to convey my own experiences and the stories I’d heard from the people I came to know there. Two Cakes Fit for a King, the collection of folktales I wrote with my Hanoi-born friends Nguyen Nguyet Cam and Bui Hoai Mai, came out of our desire to introduce to an English-speaking audience the stories they had loved as children. I wrote my novel If You Lived Here, in part to capture the feeling I’d had, while living in Vietnam, that we treat the stories of our lives like sacred objects, holding them close and, often, keeping them secret. Telling a story, or failing to tell it, can make a relationship blossom, or cause it to wither completely. 

My next project focuses on the story of Operation Babylift, the U.S.-led evacuation of Vietnamese children at the end of the war and their subsequent placement with adoptive families overseas. Why this story? I once saw a photograph taken during Operation Babylift. Shot inside an airplane, the photograph frames a single row of seats. A cardboard box lies on each seat, and each box holds a tiny baby in it. When I saw that picture, I knew I had to tell that story. 

I doubt I’ll write about Vietnam for the rest of my life. I have other stories to tell. I plan to write a book about Memphis in the ’60s and ’70s, tentatively titled The Church of What’s Happenin’ Now, Baby, and I’m also working on a Chick Lit novel set in Wilmington, North Carolina. That one’s called Number One International Runaway Bestseller.