Bridge from Saigon
A Viet-American Memoir of Family and Mind
"War refugees like my parents don’t want to talk about what they’ve left behind."
As a young Vietnamese refugee, Hoangmai Pham suddenly lost her sense of safety and belonging when her family fled Saigon at the end of the war. But her later success in navigating life in America as a physician and health policy leader at the top of her profession paradoxically triggered a psychological unraveling during middle age.
Bridge from Saigon depicts Hoangmai’s struggle in confronting her hidden multiple personalities to heal, luring the reader into parallel slipstreams of discovery—one of family secrets and epic history before and during the Vietnam War, the other of traumas masked behind a child's vivid imagination. Hoangmai’s final triumph crystallizes the immense price that immigrants pay for a chance at a better life, and their resilience in achieving every sense of integration.
Stories of ghostly ancestors, a fraught return to Vietnam as an adult, and her kaleidoscopic inner characters unfurl in a voice that is at once dreamlike and brutally honest in a memoir that incisively depicts an immigrant story like no other.
What People Are Saying
"Hoangmai Pham's Bridge from Saigon: A Viet-American Memoir of Family and Mind weaves her harrowing escape from war-torn Vietnam with the intimate unraveling of hidden traumas, revealing the profound psychological toll of immigration through a physician's unflinching gaze. In this razor-sharp narrative, Pham bridges generational secrets and personal fragmentation, offering a vital testament to immigrant resilience."
"You will be riveted, enchanted and enlarged by the magical complexity of this wondrous book. Hoangmai Pham entered the Labyrinth of her ancestry, mind and soul, found powerful guides, and emerged with a gift of pure gold in Bridge from Saigon."
"Bridge from Saigon is a riveting immigrant tale like no other, infused with a kaleidoscope of history, passion, creativity, and phantasmagorical terror. Mai Pham is a keen observer of her own displacement, coming of age, and empowerment, all while wresting with ancestors, ghosts, the American experience, and the psychotherapeutic process."
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About the Author
Photo by Kosim Shukarov
Hoangmai (Mai) Pham
Hoangmai (Mai) Pham is a Vietnamese American refugee, physician, artist, mother, and debut memoirist. Bridge from Saigon, her first memoir, was shortlisted for Black Spring Press’ International Beverly Prize for Literature.
At six, Mai fled with her family from Saigon on a cargo plane at the end of the war to the United States. She went on to earn degrees from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She pursued answers to mysteries about her family and her own psychological journey with interviews, voyages back to Vietnam, and a scientific healer’s eye on her traumas.
Mai was the first Chief Innovation Officer for Medicare and Medicaid. When not making changes in American healthcare, she hosts a baking club and relishes in her “Zoomagogue” Jewish community.