Sweet Dried Apples: A Vietnamese Wartime Childhood

Sweet Dried Apples presents a sister and brother’s experience and limited understanding of war coming to their country, Vietnam. They’re awakened one morning by their mother’s words that Ba, their father, has gone to fight. Soon after this, their paternal grandfather Ong Noi, a respected herbalist, arrives at their home, a yoke balanced across his shoulders: clothes in one basket, precious medicines in the other. With their father gone, the old man has come to care for his grandchildren and their mother, a school teacher.

From Ong Noi, the sister and brother learn how to gather medicinal herbs, and as a treat, they’re allowed to accompany him to market. He arranges for a new school room to built for the children’s mother to show more teach in. There’s some air space underneath the building, which will prove to be useful in the future.

Initially, the war seems far away, but as the months pass, there’s an increasing amount of roaring in the sky. Loud booms regularly make people scramble off the roads and into the forest. Soon Ong Noi announces that he must make a journey. Given that he ties his bottles of medicine in pouches to his side, one infers he is travelling to treat injured civilians and soldiers.

During the many weeks he’s gone, Ong Noi’s grandchildren pick and dry guava and place the pieces in the hiding space under the school. In the days before the war intensified, their grandfather had used dried apples to sweeten his bitter herbal remedies, but apples are so expensive . . . maybe guava can be used instead, they think. (In light of what is happening, the reader wonders, would markets even be running?)

When Ong Noi returns, he’s in terrible condition: thin and feverish. His concern, however, is for the children. They must hide in the air space underneath the school, as the war is now so close. That night the sky is bright with fire and everything is ablaze. In the morning: devastation.

Over the next days, their grandfather’s last acts are to tend to the injured. How wonderful that the children gathered so many herbs and an alternative fruit with which to sweeten their grandfather’s medicines. Sadly, there is nothing left for Ong Noi himself; he falls asleep forever. Before the family leaves on a long trek east to a refugee boat, their last act is to make “an eternity blanket” for him from a mound of flower-strewn dirt.

This beautifully illustrated story from a credible child’s perspective ends with the girl narrator’s vow to return one day to “burn paper money so its smoke will rise up to him and he can buy comforts. I will bring him sweet dried apples instead of flowers.” show less