As a young Viet­namese refugee, Hoang­mai Pham sud­den­ly lost her sense of safe­ty and belong­ing when her fam­i­ly fled Saigon at the end of the war. But her lat­er suc­cess in nav­i­gat­ing life in Amer­i­ca as a physi­cian and health pol­i­cy leader at the top of her pro­fes­sion para­dox­i­cal­ly trig­gered a psy­cho­log­i­cal unrav­el­ing dur­ing mid­dle age. Bridge from Saigon depicts Hoangmai’s strug­gle in con­fronting her hid­den mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties to heal, lur­ing the read­er into par­al­lel slip­streams of dis­cov­ery — one of fam­i­ly secrets and epic his­to­ry before and dur­ing the Viet­nam War, the oth­er of trau­mas masked behind a child’s vivid imag­i­na­tion. Hoangmai’s final tri­umph crys­tal­lizes the immense price that immi­grants pay for a chance at a bet­ter life, and their resilience in achiev­ing every sense of integration.