(Published in 2018)
“What drove me? Hope! Hope for the displaced, for the abandoned, for the lonely and for those who believe in heaven.” (Dau-Thi-Cúc, who called herself Loan) In Loan – From the Life of a Phoenix, Isabelle Müller tells the true emancipation story of her mother Loan, a headstrong and rebellious Vietnamese woman who fled a forced marriage at the age of almost twelve to find her way to herself and to a free, self-determined life on a long and often dangerous odyssey through Vietnam, France and Algeria. The historical background to their search for identity is formed by the cultural and political upheavals caused by the colonization of the French, the Japanese invasion at the end of the Second World War, the division of Vietnam in the 1950s and the French war against Algeria in the 1960s. Loan – From the Life of a Phoenix gives the reader an insight into a fairytale-like but also partly archaic, brutal culture in China’s neighboring country. It tells of dignity, tolerance and acceptance, of an exotic culture of an almost forgotten time, and thus closes an important literary gap in the history of Vietnam.
