Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she explains how Ho Chi Minh's nighttime visits are Dao's attempt to bring harmony to his family before he dies.

"A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain" is the title story from Robert Olen Butler's 1992 collection, which includes fourteen stories and one novella, all told from the points of view of Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana. The different narrators created by Butler are also similar in that they are undergoing the process of reconciling their past lives with their present lives. As such, the influence of the tumultuous events that have shook Vietnam in the past several decades make its importance on the Vietnamese psyche clear.

The narrator of the story, Dao, is almost 100 years old, and he feels that he is...