Edited and Produced by Lynn Borton
American journalist and writer Lady Borton volunteered with the American Friends Service Committee to do relief work during the war in Viêt Nam and has spent many years since living and working there. In honor of International Women’s Day we sat down to share some of the stories she’s collected of women, war and Viêt Nam.
Lady’s 1984 book Sensing the Enemy: An American Woman Among the Boat People of Vietnam chronicles that exodus and her role as health administrator on Pulau Bidong, the largest refugee camp in Malaysia for Vietnamese Boat People. In 1996 she published After Sorrow: An American Among the Vietnamese. Sensing the Enemy is about people who left Vietnam, After Sorrow shares the stories of those who stayed. She has written extensively about women in Viêt Nam, including compilation of The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present, the only bilingual anthology of Vietnamese women’s poetry, ancient to modern times. She’s translated innumerable histories and memoirs – and, at 83, she’s not done. There’s another book on the way.
Music by Bayou Birds, via Blue Dot Sessions.
Painting of Lady Borton by Ritchard Rodriquez, used with permission from Lady Borton.
Lady has no social media
@choosetobecurious on IG, FB, BlueSky & Threads
website: choosetobecurious.com
and, of course, https://kpfa.org/program/choose-to-be-curious/
IWD/KPFA 2026