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In 2012, Anh Duong sent a lengthy email to his daughter about student protests.
It sprang from a conversation Ashley Dạ Lê Duong had with her father when she was an undergraduate at McGill University in Montreal and had taken to the streets to protest tuition hikes. Anh warned his daughter that student protests could turn dangerous.
Ashley dismissed his concerns, suggesting her father was not well-versed in what the students were protesting. It was a different world than what he was used to, watching the conflict from afar in Calgary.
He sent the email shortly afterwards. He knew all about student protests, he wrote, before offering a rare glimpse into his early days in Vietnam during the war and his time spent in Iran as a student during the Iranian Revolution. The latter was news to Ashley. During her childhood, he spoke very little about his childhood years in war-torn Vietnam and she couldn’t remember him ever speaking about Iran. She didn’t know he had lived there and was shocked when he revealed had been in Iran on a scholarship from the Shah when the Islamic revolution began in the 1970s.
In 2019, Ashley visited Dạ Lê, her father’s village and her namesake. She didn’t tell her parents, who met in Calgary but were both Vietnamese refugees, that she was going to their homeland. They were still nervous about Vietnam, so she told them she was vacationing in Malaysia. She had travelled around the world to find out about her father’s past and family. While she was there, he sent another email. It was an early draft of a memoir, written as a series of letters to his daughter. Growing up in Calgary, whenever she or her older brother asked their father about the war or growing up in Vietnam, he would brush them off.
“I had surreptitiously travelled to the other side of the world to learn about my family, and here my father was trying to hand me these stories, all typed out in English from his home in Calgary,” she writes in the foreword of her father’s memoir, Dear Da-Le: A Father’s Memoir of the Vietnam War and The Iranian Revolution.
“I remember being surprised about a lot of things, especially the part about the Iranian Revolution,” says Ashley, in an interview from Montreal alongside her father. “He hadn’t mentioned that to me growing up. It developed quite a lot since then. In the beginning, he was just trying to put down an account of what happened without trying to form it into a book.”
In the letter that opens the book, Anh expresses regret to his daughter about many things, including “building a wall around our past.” He reveals that both he and their mother suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which could lead to erratic mood swings and behaviour.
“For a long time, I never talked about my past,” Anh tells Postmedia. “I tried to avoid seeing any movies related to the war and read any books about the war. So I tried to hide my past. When I started to talk to Ashley about the war, it came back. It hit very hard.”
He found writing about it was easier than talking about it. So began the journey that would eventually lead to his memoir being picked up by Douglas & McIntyre. Anh arrived in Canada from Iran in 1980 and spent decades working as an engineer in both Calgary and Houston. It wasn’t until after he retired that he thought about writing. In 2017, he participated in the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s Emerging Writers Intensive.
So Anh began recounting his early life through writing, dredging up suppressed memories. The book begins in 1953, the last year Vietnam was under French colonization. His mother tells Anh that his first taste of war came only three days after he was born when they both had to flee a burning house after Dạ Lê was raided by the French.
From there, Anh chronicles his early years in Dạ Lê. By 1965, U.S. Marines had landed in South Vietnam and the Viet Cong appeared in the area, leading Dạ Lê to become “a village at war.” By 1967, the United States had built Camp Eagle in the village. In 1968, the North Vietnamese and communist Viet Cong forces launched the Tet Offensive, a co-ordinated attack that had the U.S. and South Vietnamese suffer heavy losses. The village came under the control of the Viet Cong and Anh worked as a VC labourer before surviving an armed ambush and escaping to Hue. In 1975, he arrived in Iran on a scholarship from the Shah. While in Iran, he witnessed the 1978 Iranian Hostage Crisis at the American embassy in Tehran and interviewed for a refugee visa to Canada.
A few years after her father’s residency in Banff, Ashley followed suit. By that point, Ashley had become a filmmaker specializing in documentaries. Her 2017 debut, A Time to Swim, is about Mutang Urud, a former “voice of resistance” for the Indigenous people of Sarawak in Malaysia who was exiled in Montreal in 1992. The film chronicles his return to Malaysia and won the Special Jury Prize for Best Feature Documentary at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival 2017.
After Ashley’s residency in Banff, the initial idea was for her to contribute to her father’s book by writing responses to the letters.
“But we found out my writing voice was so different from his that I decided it would be better if I made a film, which is what I’m familiar with,” she says. “So now, besides the foreword, it’s just my dad.”
In February, Ashley and Anh will return to Dạ Lê to film the documentary, which will be made up of dramatizations of Anh’s memories and interviews with his relatives. The documentary will not be an adaptation of the book, but a separate entity. Titled Ba’s Book, she hopes to release it in 2026.
“It’s a bit of my filmic way of responding,” Ashley says. “I will film scenes from my dad’s memoir in Vietnam with actors and a full set and everything. But really, it’s to bring my dad, in conversation with his relatives, so he can be watching us as we create these recreations of his memory as a way of sharing different sides of his story and healing from potential familial rifts.”
Anh says he hopes the memoir shows the damage war can do, not only to those who experience it firsthand but to future generations.
The two are currently on a book tour that will bring them back to Calgary on Oct. 9 at Shelf Life Books. Their first stop was at the Kingston WritersFest a few days before this interview.
“Since then, we have gotten a lot of responses, especially from second-generation (Canadians),” she says. “We had a lot of Vietnamese diaspora come and contact me or my dad about how it’s almost like a dream to have their parents talk to them about this because a lot of people from my dad’s generation, for one reason or another, don’t want to share the stories. Maybe they want to protect their kids from bad memories or they don’t want to relive them. So we keep getting responses about how much it means to them to hear from this voice.”
Anh and Ashley Duong will be a Shelf Life on Oct. 9 at 7 p.m.