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Vivid recollections span a childhood interrupted by war in Beyond the Rice Paddies by Linda West, whose birth name is Tran Thi Bach Yen Oanh. This moving autobiography portrays the author’s childhood spent in what she considered a peaceful village in South Vietnam during the escalating war with the North in the mid-to late 1960s. Each chapter shares a poignant vignette of her daily life or a memory of her family that is often juxtaposed against the backdrop of an unforgiving war.

Raised by her doting paternal grandmother while her mother worked as a bargirl in Saigon, the author did not have the easiest path in the small pastoral village of Bien Hoa. Separated from her older brother and having lost a younger sister to a childhood illness, she becomes a deeply thoughtful and self-reflective child.

This heartfelt collection shares the story of this little girl, who often was lonesome and at times ostracized by playmates because of her mother’s occupation but makes her way with the usual charm of precocious innocence. As the war between North and South Vietnam intensifies, the market and fields where she once roamed free became a dangerous playground in which the Viet Cong, South Vietnamese soldiers and American GIs often battle.  Sometimes the skirmishes erupt right outside her home, forcing the little girl and her grandmother to seek safety in a dugout under the girl’s bed. 

Belying all that is pure, the complexities of war are reflected through the wide eyes of a child who witnessed war waged in her own backyard.

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