Love Letters to the Dirty South book cover
A debut memoir

Love Letters to the Dirty South

A memoir about first love, Vietnamese refugee girlhood, incarceration, grief, and the long road back to a love that survived across decades and prison walls.

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Book Summary

Evacuated from Saigon as an infant in April 1975, Thao Ha came of age in Houston’s Vietnamese community, shaped by refugee memory, family, girlhood, violence, and survival. When Vu, the love of her early life, was sentenced to sixty years in prison, their lives were separated by time, walls, and punishment.

Nearly twenty years later, they reconnected through letters. What followed was a love story written across impossible distances — intimate, devastating, and alive with the question of what it means to love someone inside a system designed to disappear them.

Book Themes

Vietnamese refugee memory
Love across prison walls
Vietnamese in South
Mass incarceration
Coming of age and survival
Letters, grief, and longing

Testimonials

“An urgent, lyrical coming-of-age love story.” — Carolyn Huynh
“A miracle of a memoir about love in the time of mass incarceration.” — Daniel A. Gross
“Raw and poetic.” — Eric Nguyen

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Available from Simon & Schuster and major booksellers.