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1855 Viet Thanh Nguyencuisine, the guests were suitably impressed by the Cham statuary, by the Chinese scrolls hanging on the walls, and by Phuong herself, her slim and petite body sheathed in a golden, form-fitting ao dai. Sometimes guests would ask to photograph her, requests that initially flattered her and now irritated her. Still, she could not decline, as her manager had made clear, and so she would force herself to smile and tilt her head, a trellis of hair as black and silky as her trousers falling over her shoulder. Striking this or another pose, Phuong could pretend that she was not a hostess doing a foreigner%u2019s bidding but rather a model, a starlet, or her sibling namesake. What she actually looked like she never knew, for while everyone promised to send her the pictures, no one ever had.%u2022 %u2022 %u2022When she arrived, Vivien carried with her a schedule of the sights she wanted to see, complete with estimated travel times via train, bus, car, hydrofoil, or plane. President Clinton had come the year before, his much-celebrated visit reassuring her mother that Vivien%u2019s return would be a safe one, especially when armed with a US passport and dollar bills. So equipped, Vivien had insisted on paying for the family during all their outings, her father putting up only token resistance. While Phuong was impressed by Vivien%u2019s approach, as if vacationing were a job at which she sought promotion, she was not surprised. In the occasional dispatches sent by Vivien%u2019s mother, a picture had emerged of an independent young woman, the unmarried pediatrician who had backpacked solo through western Europe and vacationed in Hawaii, the Bahamas, Rio. Mr. Ly, who made a humble living as a tour guide, reviewed the itinerary and said, %u201cI couldn%u2019t have done better myself.%u201dHe was a man of rare praise, except when it came to his first trio of children. After the war, he%u2019d been banished to a New Economic Zone for five years, and his mistress had gone to his wife, demanding money. Until then his wife had been ignorant of the mistress%u2019s existence, and she responded to the discovery by fleeing the country with her children on a perilous boat trip. Mr. Ly learned of their flight in the middle of his sentence and sank into depression, until his return to Saigon. Life must move on, his mistress said, so he had divorced Vivien%u2019s mother, made his mistress the second Mrs. Ly, and sired three more children. He often compared Phuong to her absent namesake, which had cultivated in Phuong both a sense of yearning for this sister and also some undeniable jealousy. A weevil of Pictures from History/Bridgeman ImagesThis is the cover of a 1962 pocket guide that was distributed to U.S. forces serving in Vietnam. The woman with the bicycle is wearing the traditional ao dai, the same kind of outfit Phuong wears when she works as a hostess at an upscale restaurant.How does this cover depict that outfit? To what extent does this portrayal align with the way it is characterized in %u201cFatherland%u201d?Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.