Talking Location With … author Tom Benjamin: BOLOGNA and environs
White Ghost Girls
Location(s): Hong Kong
Genre(s): Fiction, Historical
Era(s): Late 1960s
The narrator, the reticent Kate, who is 12, and her teenage sister, the boisterous Frankie, are American girls living in Hong Kong in the summer of 1967. Their father, Michael, a photographer for Time magazine, spends most of each month in Vietnam. When he’s home, he develops his pictures and the girls sneak into his darkroom, which becomes a depository for all things related to the war: a Vietnamese-English dictionary, slivers of shrapnel from his leg, a stolen AK-47. Kate describes how he “tacks his photographs up on the walls of his darkroom, a former laundry room. A soldier shoots through the open door of a Huey. ‘Squirrel hunting,’ my father’s scribbled underneath. A tall, sad-faced marine lifts an old Vietnamese woman from the rubble of a burned-out house. The woman’s arms stick out stiffly, as if she’s scared of being touched. ‘Saving Tuyet Diem,’ my father’s written.” New York Times
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