As The Heart Bones Break

by Chin Audrey

A searing story about a Vietnamese man’s struggle to balance the many faces of belong and loyalty in a Vietnamese family torn asunder by war and unresolved peace.

In Thong Tran’s Vietnam, everyone is at war and no one is who they seem – not his adopted father, a French civil servant, not his Blood Father, the Viet Cong rooster master, not his pro-American journalist tutor. Like them, the boy from the Mekong Delta cannot escape the war.

And like them, he too must create shades of himself to survive.

But even a conflicted heart needs a home. Thong yearns for a true father and a cause to give himself to. He chooses independence, liberty and happiness – his tutor and the Viet Cong.Tragically, there’s no independence, liberty or happiness at war’s end. Re-invented as an American aerospace engineer, husband and father – the Viet Cong informer must spend another half a lifetime crossing the Pacific as a defense industry dealmaker before he can set down the bones rankling in his heart

Audrey Chin works with numbers as a financial steward by day and with words at night. Her mission is to tell the ASEAN story to an international audience from the point-of-view of a multi-cultural Peranakan woman in Singapore. Her debut novel, Learning to Fly, was a fictional romance of a couple drawn together by their love of trees. She has since co-authored Singapore Women Re-Presented, which tells Singapore’s social history in the perspective of Singaporean Women.