Mai Pham - Bridge from Saigon

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As a young Vietnamese refugee, Hoangmai Pham suddenly lost her sense of safety and belonging when her family fled Saigon at the end of the war. Later her success in navigating life in America as a physician and health policy leader at the top of her profession paradoxically triggered a psychological unraveling during middle age. This unusual memoir depicts her struggle in confronting her hidden multiple personalities to heal, luring the reader into parallel slipstreams of discovery—one of family secrets and epic history before and during the Vietnam War, the other of traumas masked behind a child’s vivid imagination.

Stories of ghostly ancestors, a fraught return to Vietnam as an adult, and her kaleidoscopic inner characters unfurl in a voice that is at once dreamlike and brutally incisive. Her final triumph crystallizes the immense price that immigrants pay for a chance at a better life, and their resilience in achieving every sense of integration.

Hoangmai (Mai) Pham is a Vietnamese American refugee, physician, artist, mother, and debut memoirist. Bridge from Saigon, her first memoir, was shortlisted for Black Spring Press’ International Beverly Prize for Literature.

At six, Mai fled with her family from Saigon on a cargo plane at the end of the war to the United States, and went on to earn degrees from Harvard and Hopkins, and other markers of a model minority. She has pursued answers to mysteries about her family and her own psychological journey with interviews, voyages back to Vietnam, and a scientific healer’s eye on her traumas.

Mai was the first Chief Innovation Officer for Medicare and Medicaid. When not making change in American healthcare, she hosts a baking club and relishes in her “Zoomagogue” Jewish community.

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