Saigon Calling: London 1963-75

This is a perceptive, brutally honest memoir about the author’s own experiences growing up in England in the tumultuous Sixties. Marco and his family, including his French mother, his Vietnamese father, his brother, and his two sisters, left Vietnam at the start of the Vietnam War. In this, the second volume about Marco’s life, the family is in London, where his father is an ambassador. Marco grows from a war-obsessed child to a pop-culture obsessed teen, and his family struggles with their new culture and with each other. Always, always in the background is the Vietnam War, where Marco’s grandparents and friends constantly face violence and terror by both sides of the conflict. Marco feels torn, trying to puzzle out the truth between what he hears from the Western media and his British peers, and what he remembers from his own experiences and learns from his connections back in Vietnam. This book is startling, candid, and blunt. It is a beautifully executed juxtaposition of two histories, a large and small one, showing how intertwined they are. The graphic novel format, with its rich imagery and sharp, pointed conversation, is the perfect medium for showing Marco’s adolescence in such an agitated world.