Love Letters to the Dirty South

A stunning debut memoir about love, loss, and the Vietnamese immigrant experience in the American South.

In 1997, Thao Hà's first love took the rap for a drive-by shooting and was sentenced to sixty years in the infamous Beto Unit, the most violent maximum-security prison in Texas. His name was Vu, and like Thao, he was a Vietnamese refugee in Houston's Little Saigon neighborhood. Though steeped in Viet Pride, neither of them remembered the country they'd been evacuated from as infants. What they did know were the Vietnamese street gangs that ran wild in Houston. By her early twenties Thao had been arrested for theft, had transported a fugitive across county lines, and had been shot as a bystander in a pool-hall fracas turned violent.

After Vu's sentence and her near-death experience, Thao parted ways with both Vu and gang life. She got serious about school and majored in sociology under the mentorship of an inspiring professor. She earned a PhD and secured a tenured professorship at Mira Costa College in Oceanside, California.

But as William Faulkner famously said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The decades of her professional success brought marriages, divorces, failed relationships, and family trauma. But like an inextinguishable flame in the distance, the memory of Vu always beckoned to her. As she worked with a program that helped formerly incarcerated people gain access to education, she wrestled with whether to reconnect with him. After finding a box of old letters from Vu during a move, she took the plunge and wrote to him. The letters progressed to phone calls and prison visits, and Thao recognized that she was still in love with him.

But three years after they reconnected, their rekindled love story was cut tragically short.

Love Letters to the Dirty South is a memoir about what it means to love, long for, and lose someone incarcerated. Offering a counternarrative to the typical immigrant's story, Thao Hà deftly uses her sociology background to explore refugee trauma and prison injustice, demonstrating the impact of unconditional love when navigating the dehumanizing system of mass incarceration. In this stunning debut, she shares her story of reckless youth, love reclaimed and tragically lost, and the power of words to transcend boundaries with unflinching honesty, insight, and conviction.

Author: Thao Hà
Publisher: High Road Books
Published: 10/06/2026
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.70w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780826370174


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 08/01/2026 pg. 84
Foreword 08/27/2026

About the Author
Thao Hà is a professor at MiraCosta College. She earned a doctorate in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin and has published in the areas of race, immigration, and Vietnamese American experiences in the South. She was an advisor and associate producer of Seadrift, a 2019 documentary about racial violence and KKK intimidation in the 1970s against Vietnamese Americans in a small Texas fishing town. She serves as board president of the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association, executive director of Collective Freedom, and board chair of the Doan Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Oceanside, California.