Love Letters to the Dirty South

A stunning debut memoir about love, loss, and the Vietnamese immigrant experience in the American South. As an infant, Thao Ha was evacuated on one of the last flights out of Saigon during the fall of the city in April 1975. Like the other lucky few—and the thousands who came after—she and her family found sanctuary in America. Raised in the growing Vietnamese community in Houston, she did all the things American kids of the ’80s and ’90s did—but she also ran with a Vietnamese street gang. By her early twenties she’d picked fights with other girls who threatened her sister, transported a fugitive across county lines, and been shot as a bystander in a pool-hall fracas turned violent. But the greatest shock came when her boyfriend, Vu, the love of her early life, took the rap for a drive-by shooting and went to prison for sixty years. Enough was enough. Thao got serious about school and majored in sociology under the mentorship of an inspiring professor. She went on to earn a PhD and a tenured professorship at Mira Costa College in Oceanside, California. But as William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The decades of her professional success brought marriages, divorces, failed relationships, and family trauma. But one person stayed with her through it all. Like a still-small flame far out on the landscape, the figure of Vu was somehow always with her. Sentenced to sixty years, Vu was locked up in the infamous Beto Unit, the most violent maximum-security prison in Texas. Nicknamed “the gladiator unit,” it is a place where inmates must be prepared to fight for status and for their very survival. Nearly twenty years into his sentence, Thao and Vu reconnected. Three years after that, he was dead. Love Letters to the Dirty South is a memoir about what it means to love, long for, and lose someone incarcerated. A testament to lifelong love, it is also an unflinching depiction of prison culture, a loving portrait of family life in the Vietnamese diaspora community, and a counternarrative to the typical immigrant’s story. As a Vietnamese refugee and sociologist, Thao Ha deftly explores refugee trauma, mass incarceration, and prison injustice, and she shows how unconditional love attempts to navigate, resist, and thwart a dehumanizing system. In this stunning debut, she tells her story of reckless youth, love reclaimed and tragically lost, and the power of words to transcend boundaries with unflinching honesty, insight, and conviction.