As someone who has been deeply involved in covering all news Vietnamese American and Asian related, I have received my share of bewildered looks when people learn that I come from an African American studies background. “Why,” a few brave souls have asked, “didn’t you just do Asian American studies?” My usual response has been, “Because I got sick of reading about gay Asian men and dragon ladies."

Now, I make no claims of being politically correct, so if the yellow-flag-waving patriot in you is unsure of whether or not to be offended, I hope you will give this humble Vietnamese American girl the benefit of the doubt and continue reading.

Most recently, a dapper young man pulled his shiny sports car up to the curb in front of my home and placed a book in my hands. The paperback, Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War by Trin Yarborough, looked to be, at face value, just another new piece of academic literature. Little did I know I would be in store for a real treat.

Yarborough’s book, which is indeed quite academic, is something that I suspect will be considered an invaluable treasure to sociological and humanitarian studies for a long time to come. What’s more, her engagement with her material is apparent and genuine, weaving us through the type of grand narrative that only a disciplined literary journalist can create. She is a master negotiator between statistical information and human experience, and reading her work made me realize that I have so much more to learn ... about writing and about my community in general.

First and foremost, the lady has her priorities in order, letting us know that unless we are able to acquaint ourselves with the Amerasians mentioned, all other data is useless and, quite frankly, as boring as reading newsprint can be sometimes.

We are formally introduced to several Amerasians (four African American and one Caucasian) in the book’s first chapter, “Meeting the Amerasians.” We meet Alan “Tiger” Hoa, an arguably deluded hoodlum who has been in and out of the prison system since he first arrived in the States; Sara Phuong, an orphan who followed a Buddhist nun to the United States and blossomed to be a tragic and strikingly beautiful woman; Son Chau, who lives with his superstitious, storytelling mother and is haunted by her fabrications about who his American father was; Louis Nguyen, who was ignored by all women until he became a singing sensation in Little Saigon and subsequently the beneficiary of single roses and pecks on the cheek; and Nan Bui, a bisexual African American Amerasian who is still trying to overcome the common story of racial and domestic abuse at the hands of her Caucasian Amerasian partner.

While the story focuses mainly on these individuals, many more are brought into the picture, their stories used to contribute a feeling of timeliness and urgency to the text because they are all Amerasians still struggling with the political process in Vietnam or the States.

With all these complex people to sort through, Yarborough does a tremendous job of staying coherent and relevant. This is largely due to the structure of the book, which is straightforward and extremely well-organized by topic and individual.

If you want to know about the rendezvous and personal violations that lead to the conception of these Amerasians, kindly flip over to Chapter 2, titled “Romances, Rapes, and Casual Encounters, 1960-75.” If you want to know what they thought of the first American beer belly that they saw, skip a bit further to Chapter 7, titled “Culture Shock in Their Fathers’ Land, 1988-95.” And if you have more of a taste for the macabre, then Chapter 8, titled “Shattered Dreams,” may be what you are looking for.

Not only do you clearly understand what Yarborough is trying to explain to you, you also get her detailed secondhand account of each individual’s contextualization of that topic—all with markers of division. But I guarantee you—for as easy as Yarborough has made navigation—you will want to go back and read her book in its fascinating entirety.

You will feel exhilaration, not exhaustion. And you will feel the battling of a million other emotions as she retells the story of her role in the suicide of an Amerasian man whom she turned down for help as she did footwork for the book in Vietnam.

One thing that had me personally invested in the book was its geographical concentration. Yarborough, a Los Angeles-based journalist, focused most of the American part of her book on Orange County (Little Saigon specifically). It was so interesting to read about these contemporary Amerasians and their present lives—all occurring in the very same digs as my seemingly humdrum life.

The book is very current, and this helped me to re-think the timelessness with which I have always—unknowingly —associated direct physical and political products of the Vietnam War (my parents included). All iconic events can seem frozen in time, and even someone who works in news can often forget that she is living in the same space and time as history. A figurative slap in the face becomes necessary lest one forgets how remarkable even the most unassuming person can really be.

And while I am unsure of whether or not I have actually rubbed elbows with Chau or Phong as I’ve sorted through piles of white grapefruit at the local market, I am all too familiar with the assumptions made about them and other Amerasians who are spotted as curious, if not amusing, oddities. They’re ugly. They can be cute if they are half Caucasian. They can be exceptional if they are cute and half African American. Or they can be wild, prone to meanness which is an apparent byproduct of the Africanized blood flowing through their veins.

(I once wrote an article about an Amerasian for a Vietnamese American newspaper. Any reference I made about the mistreatment of African American Amerasians by Vietnamese Americans was notably cut out, indicating to me that we seemed to be transparently ashamed and well aware of our own prejudices.)

Surviving Twice unapologetically lays these assumptions out, and tells us about the repercussions for such discrimination without pointing a hurtful finger at any one party. No nation, it seems, has ever been really ready for the occurrence of race mixture as a byproduct of war—grossly naive, given the emotional, political and economical necessity of such sexual relationships at these times. Yarborough uses the theme of reciprocal need to tie together the Amerasians and their Vietnamese and American counterparts. Like it or not, these Amerasians were conceived through emotional and sexual needs of American soldiers and Vietnamese women, and though many of these Amerasians were seen as worthless for a time being, they eventually came in high demand when postwar Vietnamese realized that they could be used to get entire families into the United States.

Much advantage was taken of Amerasians during this time, though Yarborough does tell of one case where an Amerasian man used a Vietnamese mother and daughter for rape as a way of blackmailing them because they were posing as his immediate family members in order to get to America.

And then, of course, are the cultural needs of Amerasians and their families. Yarborough insightfully notes the terribly important need for a sense of place in the Vietnamese-adopted Confucius system. What one does has implications for all family members, including those dead and unborn. Also, there is the weight of shame that is attached to being rejected or unheard. Most Amerasians, the book explains, would be happier to work and give money to their previously absent fathers than to accept a hand-out, as many Americans suspected. Unfortunately, the American government and many American fathers still living are uninterested in reconciliation, if the damages of a war can ever really be reconciled.

For the most part, the Amerasians in Yarborough’s book seem to suffer from many of the complexes that Vietnamese American do: extremely frugal living disrupted by bouts of addictive gambling, pressure to care for elderly parents who may or may not have “been there” during more impressionable years, shame, depression, and self-mutilation (a coping mechanism not uncommon in some Asian subcultures and includes cutting oneself, suicide, drug abuse and denial of nutrition).

But Amerasians are different, crowned as “survivors” by a race of survivors, though many did not actually survive. They are among us, and those who aren’t are still trapped in Vietnam, victims of countless political and economical injustices.

They are no longer cute, wide-eyed orphans, but grown people who are still trying to call out to us, trying to make sure that we don’t forget. Surviving Twice gives them, and us, a second chance.