ho chi minh city (vietnam)

Told in alternating voices, while studying abroad in Saigon, Vivi falls for Lan, a street food vendor and food blogger, who is suffering from writer's block since her father's passing.

In S?i G?n, Lan is always trying to be the perfect daughter, dependable and willing to care for her widowed mother and their b?nh m? stall. Her secret passion, however, is A B?nh M? for Two, the food blog she started with her father, but has stopped updating since his passing. Meanwhile, Vietnamese American Vivi Huynh, has never been to Vi?t Nam. Her parents rarely even talk about the homeland that clearly haunts them. So Vivi secretly goes to Vietnam for a study abroad program her freshman year of college. She?s determined to figure out why her parents left, and to try everything she?s seen on her favorite food blog, A B?nh M? for Two. When Vivi and Lan meet in S?i G?n, they strike a deal. Lan will show Vivi around the city, helping her piece together her mother?s story through crumbling photographs and old memories. Vivi will help Lan start writing again so she can enter a food blogging contest. And slowly, as they explore the city and their pasts, Vivi and Lan fall in love.

Chronicles the experiences of an orphaned Amerasian boy from his birth and early childhood in Saigon through his departure from Vietnam in the 1975 Operation Babylift and his subsequent life as the adopted son of an American family in Ohio.

In the chaotic final days of the Vietnam War in April 1975, as Americans fled and their Vietnamese allies and employees prepared for the worst, John Riordan, the assistant manager of Citibank's Saigon branch, succeeded in rescuing one hundred and five Vietnamese. They were his thirty-three Vietnamese staff members and their families. Unable to secure exit papers for the employees, Citibank ordered Riordan to leave the country alone. Safe in Hong Kong, Riordan could not imagine leaving behind his employees and defied instructions from his superiors not to return to Saigon. But once he did make it back on the last commercial flight, his actions were daring and ingenious. Decades later, Riordan has located the Vietnamese and reconnected with them, sharing accounts of those frantic days and the derring-do it took to get them out to safety.

Discusses the events leading to the United States involvement in the war in Vietnam, key figures in the conflict, the actual course of the fighting, and the final American withdrawal in 1975.

Chronicles the experiences of an orphaned Amerasian boy from his birth and early childhood in Saigon through his departure from Vietnam in the 1975 Operation Babylift and his subsequent life as the adopted son of an American family in Ohio.