Marcelino Truong

This historical fiction started strong as an artist, Tran Van Minh, the son of a petit bourgeois family in Hanoi, finds himself pressed into service with Ho Chi Minh's army to fight the French colonialists in the year leading up to the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. There's tension as he has to fear being killed by the enemy as well as his own comrades if his privileged background is revealed.

Unfortunately, the narrative just runs out of steam halfway through as the paranoia goes on a little too long and Minh spends a lot of time just marching around before he settles into a boring role drawing propaganda.

I found it annoying that while the story is entirely in first-person narrative, we are given access to secondary characters thoughts . . . but only when they are thinking how handsome Minh is. It becomes drinking game ludicrous at a certain point, and I started to wonder if the author was self-inserting and stroking his own ego.

(Best of 2023 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto NPR's Books We Love 2023: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels list.)… (altro)

An upper-class Vietnamese family views the onset of the Vietnam War from a privileged perspective in this frustrating muddle of domestic drama and military history. I wish the author had devoted more time to his parents and been more open about their personal relationships with each other. As it is, his Vietnamese father is practically a cipher and his French mother, who he briefly mentions may have been bipolar, mostly comes off as a hateful shrew. I would have loved to learn how they came together and how they apparently sustained their marriage for decades after leaving Vietnam. Or alternatively, I wish the creator could have dug deeper into the lives before and after the war of the servants and lower class people who came into contact with the family. As it is, tales of him playing juvenile games with his brother in proximity to a war zone mix poorly with a pedestrian history of the political and military maneuvers going on at the time.… (altro)

A beautifully illustrated graphic memoir of a young French-Vietnamese boy living in Vietnam with his family during the 1960s.

Marcelino Truong’s father worked as a translator for Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem in the 1960s. The family moves from the US, where they had been living for the past three years, to Vietnam. I’m not sure how old the three kids are but they look between the ages of 6 to 12. Their mother is French and their father Vietnamese.

It’s fascinating seeing the Vietnam war through the eyes of this young boy, upper-class, who lives in a nice apartment with servants to help his mother do housework and drive them around

And more unusual for that time, whether in Vietnam or the US, a biracial family,

I may be from Southeast Asia (Singapore), but we never learnt anything much about the Vietnam War in school. I’ve since then read some books about it but I’ve learnt from this graphic memoir too, especially about Madame Nhu, the de facto First Lady at the time (the Prime Minister was a lifelong bachelor and she was his sister-in-law). She pushed for “morality laws” like banning divorce, abortions, dance halls, boxing matches.

Truong has a beautiful illustration style. The images look a little like woodcuts.

He occasionally includes drawings from his childhood, letters from his mother to his grandparents in France.

Originally posted at https://reallifereading.com/2018/05/06/asiannlitbingo-such-a-lovely-little-war-b...… (altro)