Van

Hello! My name is Van (pronounced "Vaughn"), and I am a girl! I’m very excited to have found Stage 32 as I was searching for Hollywood pitch info. I recently completed the first draft of an autobiography, and am looking for a publisher and possible screenwriter.

In a nutshell, it’s the story of my life as an orphan during and after the Vietnam War, surviving not only the battle that killed my parents and the infamous Tet Offensive, but a gangland massacre in the Philippines a few years later. It’s the story of the women, both kind and cruel—many of them relatives—who helped or hurt me along the way, my adoption as a teenager by an American step-father with unwholesome desires, and my escape from Vietnam on the eve of Saigon’s fall in 1975. The last chapters recount my subsequent life in America, including marriage to my American high-school sweetheart and his tragic death in the “bureaucratic hell” of VA hospitals, leaving me a widow with two young sons. However, the book is really about resilient people making and remaking their lives despite horrific adversity; and how nations, like people, can recover from wounds many consider past healing.

I’m looking forward to learning all that I can from the accomplished professionals here on Stage 32, and hearing any and all comments or advice that may be offered.