“Two decades after we lost her, I was still trying to reconstruct who she was, but no one – not Ba, my siblings, or my mother’s sisters – wanted to talk.”

That’s when Susan Lieu, about to become a mother herself, steps up her search and finds more than she expected. She shares it in her memoir The Manicurist’s Daughter.

Susan's search takes her back to Vietnam, to a little village called Mỹ Xuyên where Má marries Ba. It's 1975, Saigon has fallen, and the communists have taken over. By 1979, with two toddler boys, they begin planning their escape.

After many failed attempts, they survive a treacherous four-day journey by boat to Malaysia, leading to two years in a refugee camp. With luck, they gain entry into America, settling in California where Susan is born.

Life seems to be on track for that American Dream. Hard work, a thriving nail salon business, just enough stability and lots of opportunity. Then one day Má's life is cut short from a botched tummy tuck. “When Má died, when my sun fell out of the sky, she was thirty-eight years old. I was eleven. After that, my family was never the same.“

As Susan grows into an adult now looking for closure, she finds everyone connected to Má's passing all dealing with grief privately in their own way. Painstakingly, persistently, sometimes stubbornly, she eventually finds her answers, and along the way the family Má would have wanted for them all.

“Have you heard?” is our way of sharing another point of view on commonly held beliefs. Through this we hope to encourage curiosity, dialogue, and tolerance of diverse ideas.