Going Home, Coming Home/Ve Nha, Tham Que Huong [Vietnamese]

I am a Vietnamese American, born in Saigon but raised in the States. I still speak Vietnamese at home, and would like to teach the language to our daughter. My husband is Caucasian, so we are trying to teach our daughter both English and Vietnamese. This book is a good start to that teaching however; we were taught very formal and polite Vietnamese growing up. Some of the terms used in this book, I found, were a bit rough around the edges. For example, referring to a little girl as "Toi" as opposed to "Em", I didn't care for too much. Other than the minor semantics, I found this book to be enjoyable and reflective of our visit to Vietnam.

Going Home, Coming Home is a bilingual English/Vietnamese storybook by Truong Tran about a family visiting Vietnam. The mother and father had to leave their home during the Vietnam War, but their young daughter has no memories of Vietnam and struggles to understand what it means to have a home one has never before visited. Ann Phong's warm and colorful illustrations embellish this thoughtful tale of making new friends, learning new ways of doing things, and embracing the true meaning of "home" in more than one location.