Laurette Heger, former wife of the late Ernie Hoberecht, a longtime OPC member, wrote the book Saigon Is Burning.
She writes of places familiar to anyone who has lived in Vietnam in
winning prose style.
Laurette Heger, a former wife of the late Ernie Hoberecht, a longtime OPC member, wrote a book two years ago that OPC member Pat Killen recently introduced me to. Its title, Saigon Is Burning [Mustang, Oklahoma: Tate Publishing, 2006].
Surprise! I had no idea that Laurette, who grew up speaking only French and Vietnamese, could write such winning English, let alone become an author. I knew her only as a lovely, beautiful young woman from Saigon who years ago met and immediately captivated Hoberecht. Her book is just as attractive as the woman who won Ernie.
Saigon Is Burning is an account of Laurette’s experiences and thoughts during Japan’s occupation of French Indochina during World War II when she was a child. Born in Vietnam in 1937, Laurette describes herself as “one quarter Vietnamese, a quarter French and half Suisse” with Chinese ancestry in her Vietnamese blood and German and French in her Swiss half. Her father was a watchmaker with his own shop in Saigon, and her mother was a school teacher.
In her book, Laurette mentions Japanese soldiers; American bombings in the Saigon area; the sects Hoa Hao and Cao Dai that included Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo among its saints; Binh Xuyen gangsters; the communist Vietminh; the March 9, 1945 coup in which the Japanese occupiers kicked out the Vichy French officials in Indochina, killing and imprisoning some of them; the burning of Vietnamese huts by the French when the French colonialists returned; and Vietnam’s two wars.
But Laurette, who turns 72 in August, writes mostly about her family and friends, sensitive portraits of people whom she remembers decades after she knew them when she was a child.
She writes of places familiar to anyone who has lived in Vietnam: rue Catinat, the Continental and Majestic Hotels, La Pagode, Le Circle Sportif, Cholon and Cap St. Jacques, and she describes life and class structure in colonial France. “Read each chapter as if it were its own story,” Nathalie Hoberecht, one of her five children, suggested. “They are random stories she remembered.” Laurette’s stories brought back many memories of the Saigon this reviewer knew when he lived there, 1956 to 1958, and taught him things about Vietnam that he never knew.