Hương

Hương is the granddaughter of Diệu Lan and the daughter of Ngọc and Hoáng. She was just eight when her family members enlisted in the war. However, her main storyline begins with her as a twelve-year-old in the midst of the Vietnam War/Resistance War Against America. Hương deeply loves and misses her family members and regularly wrote to them while they were moving with their troops. As a young girl, Hương loved books, especially fiction stories and fairytales. During the war, she uses books as a means to escape her current situation and imagine a world without the war. Similarly, the stories that Diệu Lan tells Hương kept her and “her hopes alive” during the war (17).

As a child and later as an adolescent, Hương tries to make meaning out of war from her juvenile perspective. For...