Standing Up After Saigon: The Triumphant Story of Hope, Determination, and Reinvention

In this inspiring true story of familial love and triumph through adversity, Thuhang Tran and Sharon Orlopp document decades in the lives of Thuhang and her father, Chinh, both in America and in a war-torn Vietnam. Thuhang Tran was born in 1970 in Saigon, near the end of the Vietnam War. When she was still just a baby, she contracted polio that left her legs partially paralyzed, and though her family sacrificed much to care for her and find her the treatment she would need to walk again, their efforts were halted by the fall of Saigon. Thuhang and her siblings' father Chinh was an air traffic controller in the South Vietnam Air Force at the time, and was lost in the evacuations from Saigon and presumed dead. This memoir, heavily interspersed with the politics and history of Vietnam, follows Thuhang and her father Chinh through their respective struggles and fights; Thuhang's inability to walk or gain proper treatment for her polio, and the impact that their missing father had on the family for fifteen years after he was taken from them; Chinh's immigration to the United States and his desperate struggle to be reunited with his family, who remained in Vietnam, now struggling to survive under a new, oppressive regime. Through all this, however, Thuhang has remained hopeful and resilient, and she lives today to tell her incredible story and inspire those around her to be as strong as she is.