For much of my life, I was deprived of most of my family. My mother wasn't telling me who my father was or what she -- tall, beautiful, French and Vietnamese -- was doing in Saigon, French Indochina, where I was born, when it was run by the French. In 1948-53, my three parents fell in love there -- a terrorism cradle with five hand grenades thrown a day and assassinations quite common. I literally come from warring factions. After living in Japan and Thailand, I was brought to America as a small child, speaking Chinese because that’s what my amah (nanny) spoke to me. I learned English in Washington, D.C. and area public schools and was then taught by nuns in Baltimore, New York and Dublin. It would take me decades to learn who I was, who I am. I feel the absence of my grandparents, an aunt who died before I could find her and the rest of the loved ones kept from me for all of my youth. After years of living in fear and poverty, Fordham and an Ivy League university became my alma maters. I love the USA and the UK, but I consider Manhattan to be more of a hometown to me than anywhere else. I often feel like a child of the world – stateless. The years of being a living mystery remain a part of me. The question of who I am, who we all are, is always there...THE UNQUIET DAUGHTER is my tale of love, betrayal and resilience...
Of my memoir, THE UNQUIET DAUGHTER, and English author Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN, Pulitzer finalist, Greene expert and Indiana State Professor Michael Shelden says:
"Passionate and unflinchingly honest, this is a fascinating memoir that explores the tangled connections between Graham Greene’s fictional version of wartime Indochina, and the real people there whose actions have haunted the author for most of her life. She is the child of an affair so much like the one described in the love triangle of Greene’s novel that she is perfectly right to make her startling claim, “I am a sequel he never wrote.”----Michael Shelden, author of GRAHAM GREENE: THE ENEMY WITHIN
To read an excerpt -- the prologue and the first two chapters -- available for a limited time, please go to the http://www.danielleflood.com