After sorrow

the long version

After Sorrow spans an American woman's twenty-five years of experience in Viet Nam. It is the story of the ordinary Vietnamese whom Americans fought against but never had the chance to know. Lady Borton has come to know these people intimately from her work there, first in a Quaker Service rehabilitation center for civilian amputees in South Viet Nam (1969-71), and up to the present. After Sorrow centers on the last eight years, during which Lady made repeated visits to three villages, one a former Viet Cong base in the Mekong Delta of southern Viet Nam, another a rice-farming commune in the Red River Delta of northern Viet Nam, and the third, Ha Noi, which Vietnamese call their "largest village.". In this deeply moving memoir, Lady's women friends recall their own roles in the struggles that climaxed in the American War. These are war stories of a kind we have not heard before: women's stories of courage, guile, patience, and fate; of climbing mountains and hiding in rivers and capturing prisoners, of carrying rifles beneath vats of fish sauce in canoes, of mourning husbands, of thousands missing. In Lady Borton's previous book, Sensing the Enemy, she wrote about the Boat People who left Viet Nam. After Sorrow is the strong and uplifting story of the people who stayed.