Charlie - Softcover

Joanna Catherine Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 093077373X ISBN 13: 9780930773731

Publisher: Black Heron Press, 2007

Charlie and the Children is a novel about an American soldier who goes to war, fathers a son, and abandons him. He is taken captive by the Viet Cong and held in a cave in a tunnel underground. Sick, starving, and alone, he gradually loses his grip on reality and becomes convinced that one of his captors is his lost son. In clear, lyrical prose, Joanna C. Scott has written a book that is at the same time mythic and believable. Although a number of fine Vietnam war novels have been published, Charlie and the Children is unique in its concern and its surpassing quality.

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From the Author:

While living in Philippines in the 1980s, I met a young Amerasian, Vu Hai, at a refugee camp in the mountains of Bataan. Vu Hai's father, an American GI, had married his mother while on tour in Vietnam and had two children with her. He returned to the U.S. promising to send for them, but he never did. Instead, he married someone else. After the fall of Saigon, Vu Hai and his mother became boat people and eventually came to the Philippines. His sister did not make it. She was shot by the Communist Home Guard while trying to get on a boat. The Joint Voluntary Agency helped Vu Hai locate his father, who lived in Florida, but his father refused to sponsor him or help in any way. When I heard this, I asked Vu Hai to let me contact his father. I wanted to tell him what a smart, brave, handsome son he had, to persuade him to change his mind. But Vu Hai said no, he would get to the States without his father's help. And that was that. But Vu Hai's father haunted me. I wanted to know his story, what had befallen him in Vietnam, why he would reject his son. I dreamed of him at night and could not put him from my mind. One day, back home in the US, I was working at my computer. It was one of those gray winter days in Virginia, bleak outside and dark inside. The only light came from my screen. I heard a man crying. I jumped up and searched the house, but there was no one, and I realized I was having an auditory hallucination. I sat back down, set my fingers on the keyboard, and a man's voice came out of the air. It was Charlie's voice. He wrote this novel for me.

About the Author:

Joanna Catherine Scott is the author of the novels "The Road from Chapel Hill;" "Cassandra, Lost;" and "The Lucky Gourd Shop;" as well as "Charlie;" the nonfiction "Indochina's Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam;" and the poetry collections "Breakfast at the Shangri-la" and "Fainting at the Uffizi." A graduate of the University of Adelaide and Duke University, she was born in England, raised in Australia, and now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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