A stunning debut memoir about love, loss, and the Vietnamese immigrant experience in the American South.

In 1997, Thao Ha’s first love took the rap for a drive-by shooting and was sentenced to sixty years in the infamous Beto Unit, the most violent maximum-security prison in Texas. His name was Vu, and like Thao, he was a Vietnamese refugee in Houston’s Little Saigon neighborhood. Though steeped in Viet Pride, neither of them remembered the country they’d been evacuated from as infants. What they did know were the Vietnamese street gangs that ran wild in Houston. By her early twenties Thao had been arrested for theft, had transported a fugitive across county lines, and had been shot as a bystander in a pool-hall fracas turned violent.

After Vu’s sentence and her near-death experience, Thao parted ways with both Vu and gang life. She got serious about school and majored in sociology under the mentorship of an inspiring professor. She earned a PhD and secured a tenured professorship at Mira Costa College in Oceanside, California.

But as William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The decades of her professional success brought marriages, divorces, failed relationships, and family trauma. But like an inextinguishable flame in the distance, the memory of Vu always beckoned to her. As she worked with a program that helped formerly incarcerated people gain access to education, she wrestled with whether to reconnect with him. After finding a box of old letters from Vu during a move, she took the plunge and wrote to him. The letters progressed to phone calls and prison visits, and Thao recognized that she was still in love with him.

But three years after they reconnected, their rekindled love story was cut tragically short.

Love Letters to the Dirty South is a memoir about what it means to love, long for, and lose someone incarcerated. Offering a counternarrative to the typical immigrant’s story, Thao Ha deftly uses her sociology background to explore refugee trauma and prison injustice, demonstrating the impact of unconditional love when navigating the dehumanizing system of mass incarceration. In this stunning debut, she shares her story of reckless youth, love reclaimed and tragically lost, and the power of words to transcend boundaries with unflinching honesty, insight, and conviction.