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A Note on Language Vietnamese is a monosyllabic, tonal language, in which the difference between ba, bà, and bả, for example, produces a difference in meaning from “three” to “grandmother” to “poison or bait.” Until recently, American presses were unable to accommodate the diacritical markings indicating tones or other orthographical differences from the Western alphabet. In this volume, Vietnamese names and words have been reproduced within the literary selections with the same spellings as they had when originally published. Thus, the hand-lettered children’s book The Little Weaver of Thái Yên Village has diacritical marks, but the excerpts from Nguyễn Cao Kỳ’s memoir of the same year does not. In the footnotes and introductions, I have restored diacritical markings as often as possible and used Vietnamese spellings for place names, unless the names have become dominantly familiar in their Western forms (Vietnam, Hanoi, Saigon). Vietnamese nomenclature also differs from Western convention. In Vietnam, the surname (or family name) appears first, often followed by “Van” for males, “Thị” for females, and then the first (or given) name. However, since there are very few Vietnamese surnames (over half the population has the surname Nguyen), it is conventional to refer to people by an honorific title and their first name. Thus “Ngô Đình Diệm,” whose surname is “Ngô” and given name is “Diệm,” is referred to as “President Diệm.” The notable exception to this rule is Hồ Chí Minh, who is referred to by his surname, often with the honorific “Bác”: “Uncle Hồ.” In this volume, I have followed the practice of each author. Where authors have published under their Vietnamese names, such as Nguyễn Thị Thu-Lâm or lê thi diem thúy, I refer to them in the critical apparatus following Vietnamese convention as “Thu-Lâm” or “thúy.” When they have published following Western nomenclature conventions, such as Le Ly Hayslip or Barbara Tran, I refer to them in introductions and elsewhere following Western critical convention as “Hayslip” or “Tran.” ...

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