Out of the Dragon's Mouth is a middle grade coming of age novel about Mai, a young Vietnamese girl, who must leave her home and family to flee the communist regime in South Viet Nam for a better life in the United States. Surviving a perilous journey across the South China Sea in an overcrowded fishing boat, she and her uncle land on an island off Malaysia and spend the next year in a refugee camp. Eventually Mai arrives in the United States, but not before she has grown from a naive child into a young woman who has experienced the pain of first love and learned to survive in very difficult circumstances.
This is my first novel that was nine years in the making. I based it on the true life experiences of a teacher friend of mine who was a Vietnamese boat person who fled Viet Nam after the fall of Saigon in 1975. The book is currently with an agent who is trying to get it published.
I first became interested in the plight of refugees when my husband and I sponsored a Chinese Cambodian refugee family in 1979. This family had survived the killing fields of Cambodia and had fled to Thailand where they languished in a refugee camp with thousands of others. When Thailand decided they had too many refugees, they bused many of them back to the mined border area between Thailand and Cambodia and left the people to die. The Red Cross came in with journalists to the forests where people were literally eating the bark off trees to survive and told the world about them. Our refugee family, along with others in their situation, were rescued, taken to Bangkok, and put at the top of the list for emigration to the U.S. That is how we met the Lims 34 years ago. Resettling them and becoming their friend, was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. To see them now married, with children of their own is a joy.
This is my first novel that was nine years in the making. I based it on the true life experiences of a teacher friend of mine who was a Vietnamese boat person who fled Viet Nam after the fall of Saigon in 1975. The book is currently with an agent who is trying to get it published.
I first became interested in the plight of refugees when my husband and I sponsored a Chinese Cambodian refugee family in 1979. This family had survived the killing fields of Cambodia and had fled to Thailand where they languished in a refugee camp with thousands of others. When Thailand decided they had too many refugees, they bused many of them back to the mined border area between Thailand and Cambodia and left the people to die. The Red Cross came in with journalists to the forests where people were literally eating the bark off trees to survive and told the world about them. Our refugee family, along with others in their situation, were rescued, taken to Bangkok, and put at the top of the list for emigration to the U.S. That is how we met the Lims 34 years ago. Resettling them and becoming their friend, was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. To see them now married, with children of their own is a joy.
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