RED BLOOD, YELLOW SKIN
SYNOPSIS
AND AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY
Red Blood, Yellow Skin is the story of a young girl’s survival in war-torn Vietnam during the First Indochina War between France and Vietnam, the civil war between North and South Vietnam, and the later American involvement in the Vietnam War. Linda Baer was born Nguyen Thi Loan, in the village of Tao Xa, Thai Binh Province, North Vietnam in 1947. When she was four years old, the Viet Minh attacked her village and killed her father, leaving Loan and her mother to fend for themselves. Seeking escape from impoverishment, her mother married a rich and dominating widower who was cruel to his free-spirited and mischievous stepdaughter. Loan found solace in the company of animals and insects, and escaped into the branches of trees.
In 1954, her family chose to relocate to South Vietnam, rather than live under the yoke of communist North Vietnam. When Loan was thirteen, she ran away to Saigon to flee the cruelty of her stepfather and worked at menial jobs to help her family. At seventeen, she was introduced to bars, nightclubs, and Saigon Tea. At eighteen, she dated and lived with a young American airman. Two months after their baby was born, the airman returned to America, and Loan never heard from him again. She raised their son by herself.
However, time healed her heart, and she eventually found true love in a young American Air Force officer, whom she married and accompanied to America in 1971. In 1972, she gave birth to a daughter in Tennessee, and in 1973, a son in Oklahoma. She became an American citizen in 1973, and their family returned to Vietnam, where her husband worked for the U.S. Government, until the fall of Vietnam in April, 1975. In 1976, she and the three children followed her husband to Tehran, Iran, where he again worked for the U.S. Government for three years. After brief stays in Ohio, Florida, and California, the family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where they settled, and she is a successful businesswoman.
Red Blood, Yellow Skin is a story of romance, culture, traditions, and family. It describes the pain, struggle, despair, and violence as Loan lived it. The story is hers, but it is also an account of those who were uprooted, displaced, brutalized, and left homeless. It is about this struggle to survive and her extraordinary triumph over adversity that Baer writes.
Linda has written the sequel to Red Blood Yellow Skin, titled RBYS-The Endless Journey, which follows her travels and intense experiences during the final two years of the war in Vietnam, her encounter with the Middle East in Tehran, and the family’s final settlement in Charleston, South Carolina. It deals with the many adjustments she had to make in both America and Iran, particularly as they related to the varying customs, cultures, and languages she encountered during her extensive relocations. She also deals honestly with the anguish she and the family experienced, due to her husband’s bout with PTSD, alcohol and drug addictions, and how, with her help and understanding, he has achieved extended and continuous recovery.
The Endless Journey is scheduled to be released in October, 2017 by River Grove Books, and there are other works in progress.