 In fact, every casualty in war is someone's grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, brother, sister, child, lover. In the decade of the first Indochina War, while my parents were still children learning their place in the world, an estimated 94,000 French soldiers, many of whom were from other French colonies, died trying to reclaim France's colony. Three to four times as many Vietnamese died, fighting them or running away from them. In the war, we call here the Vietnam War, and which in Vietnam is referred to as the American war to distinguish it from the rest of the wars of the 20th century that happened there. Over 58,000 Americans were killed, and over 3 million Vietnamese were killed. How many and which can you name? But we are here to talk amongst the living. So let me give you a story tonight about lives lived between the bombs and bullets as a way to reset the balance out of desire to keep the living alive. So this is called a graphic memoir. I tell people I do nonfiction comics, which it's filled as a very sad graphic memoir. But anybody who's lived one of these sad lives knows that it's just a life, which means that it was made up of real people, and real people laugh and cry and go to the bathroom and have sex and children. So tonight's reading is hopefully going to give you a little bit of all of that. Maybe no bathroom scenes tonight. But I'm going to try to entertain you a little bit. So this is my family. We came in 1978 in the second wave of refugees from Vietnam. The first wave left right at the end of the war around April 30th, 1975, at the fall of Saigon. We came as the second wave that left on boats and were refugees in nearby places until the US accepted us. We were sponsored by my aunt's family who came first, which I think would make us what Trump calls chain migration. Those are my sisters, Lan and Bic on the left. Very important to remember the pronunciation of Bic. That's my mother, eight months pregnant, and my father will call them Ma and Bo, and that's three-year-old me. I'm going to ask for a few volunteers tonight who would like to do more than just sit here. I don't want to do all the voices, and I think it's a lot funner when someone helps me. So I'm taking you across time and space now to a South Vietnam that no longer exists. To give you some context, the year is 1955. The French have lost the first Indochina War. The international powers that be have divided, temporarily, the former colony of Indochina, which is really Vietnam, into two countries at the 17th parallel, creating a problem for people who live on either side of that line. Many, many people from the South moved to the North to follow Ho Chi Minh. Many, many people left the North in fear of the rise of communism. And my father, 14 years old, was one of the people who left the North in the ships that were sent by the US to bring people to the South. I imagine the awe and excitement that I felt for New York City when I moved there after college must be something like what my father felt when he arrived in Saigon in 1955. Bono's grandfather were two bachelors exploring the big city, money in their pockets, freedom on their minds. They strolled down Grand Avenues, ate at restaurants, and visited friends and relatives. When his grandfather wanted some time away from him, some money, go see a movie, Bo's grandmother arrived in Saigon separately on the last of the great ships from the North. Grandma, let's make a new home together. No, I don't need you. Bo's grandmother rented a flat with two other women. This way, auntie. But fate would soon drive her back to her unfaithful husband. The South had a new prime minister named Ngo-Ding Zem, who had yet to establish full control of the region. Saigon had its own mafia called the Bingsuin, who controlled the casinos, the brothels, and the drug trade. Zem's forces fought the Bingsuin in the streets of Saigon. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. One night, the fighting came right to the doorstep of Bo's grandmother. Ah, my opium jars. Stay down. Pow, pow, pow. With her securities gone and scared of more violence, Bo's grandmother agreed to go back to her cheating husband. Huh, grandma? And Bo had a family again. They pulled their money together and bought a little house for the equivalent of $5,000. $5,000 seems pretty cheap for a house in the capital. It was really just the space between two other houses. Wait, I've got paper. Can you draw it for me? Someone had topped it with a roof made of palm leaves. Inside, they lined it with cardboard to give it the semblance of a house. But to me, at age 14, it was a home, an address. This is the house I lived in only a lot later. Yes, but by that time, they had added another story to it. It was still small and dirty. Do you remember it? No, I was too little. My first home. I went to see the old house with my family in 2001, the time that Bo refused to go. Travis and I were newlyweds. I had an impulsive short haircut. The street had changed beyond recognition. Miraculously, an old neighbor still lived across the alley, recognized my mother, and came out to talk to us. Aren't you Nam's wife? That's your house. There, that's your house. Oh, I thought it was that one. That was Mr. Khan's house. Mr. and Mrs. Khan lived in that one. No, that's Mrs. Diao. He's right, Ma. That's right, Bik. This is our house. We each had our own reaction to this homecoming. Lan already scouting ahead. Ma and Bik, the most excited, me and them documenting in love remembering. We didn't know the people there, and we didn't go inside. Even standing right in front of our old home, I had to rely completely on my family's stories to picture how it was when we lived there. I think this is the same shop where occasionally we would get a cigarette or two for dad. This is where we learned to ride our bikes without hitting any of the vendors. This is the old coffee house where we would go out every day with our little glass and bring back some coffee for dad with the condensed milk laced with opium. Smelled really good. Lan and Bik remember the alley where a friend lived? A lamp post that Lan walked into while reading? And the sidewalk where Bik beat up a boy for harassing Lan? There was a brick in her back. Click? Lacking memories of my own. I do research. Lots of research. Hello, Ty. Tea. I bought you a video I found. Vietnam War with Walter Cronkite. The narration is only OK. But what I thought was neat. But what I thought was neat was seeing footage of our old neighborhood. Really? Thank you, Bo. If you like it, I'll get you more. George Sievers in the battle in one of Saigon's slums. This neighborhood is called Bang Kru or the Chess Board because of the maze of alleys and passageways. Its residents are mostly poor working people and its slums are a refuge for Saigon's hoodlum and criminal elements. A Southeast Asian version of the Lower East Side or the Algerian Casbah. I know this is caricature, but lacking memories of my own. I've come to depend on other people's stories. Lower East Side? I'll draw it like that. I still have the chess board my father made when I was a kid in the wooden set of pieces we played with. Revisiting this game of war and strategy, I think about how none of the Vietnamese people in that video have a name or a voice. My grandparents, my parents, my sisters, and me, we weren't any of the pieces on the chess board. We were more like ants, scrambling out of the way of giants, getting just far enough away from danger to resume the business of living. Thank you so much to the readers. So I love hearing my parents and my loved ones embodied by strangers. It's the best feeling. And this is really the work of the book, is to reach out to different audiences and embody stories as a way of doing the work that is 40 years late of understanding that the other is a human. It's really quite simple, right? Like we humans take a really long time to learn these lessons, and then we forget them over and over again. So I don't know if a book alone does it, but I think it can't hurt. So we're here to dialogue and we're here to complicate an old story and hopefully take away something that's useful and applicable to the challenges that have presented themselves today. Thank you.