The scholarship of Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese History, is deeply affected by her past.

The daughter of Vietnamese revolutionaries, Tai was educated in the West at the height of the Vietnam War. As a result of her bi-cultural upbringing, she believes she has a special perspective on the complexities of being Vietnamese.

After spending her early childhood in France before returning in 1957 to her birthplace in Saigon, Tai says she went through "culture shock." She left Saigon for America when she was 18, and has lived here ever since.

"I had to think about what it means to be Vietnamese," says Tai, who teaches "Foreign Cultures 60: Individual, Community, and Nation in Vietnam," among other Vietnamese history courses. "It was not a spontaneous process."

Tai's childhood was tinged by the imprisonment of her father, a critic of U.S.-supported President Ngo Dinh Diem's South Vietnamese regime.

"When I was growing up, my father spent most of his time in jail," recalls Tai. "But...I was told time and again that he was a hero."

Tai says people would refuse to accept her mother's money for services when they realized who she was, insisting that she keep the money to feed her eight children.

Although Tai says she received a "good education" in Saigon's French schools, the realities of the brewing civil war did intrude, if indirectly.

She recalls students at her high school joining city-wide protests of Catholic Diem's prohibition of Buddhists' religious flags in 1963. Her school was closed for a month after Diem ordered the army to open fire on the protesters.

Tai's family sheltered refugees from the countryside and took precautions when they went outside.

"I had a friend who went to the cinema and was the victim of a terrorist attack. She lost a leg," Tai says.

After Diem's assassination later in 1963, Tai's father was released from jail to resume his writing and political activities. He became a representative in parliament. Yet her family's life was still constrained.

"Everything [my father] wrote was censored," Tai says. "When I left [for university] my parents didn't have a telephone. But even if they had, it would have been tapped anyway."

As an undergraduate, Tai studied political science at Brandeis University, where she was the sole Vietnamese student during the anti-war protests of the late 1960s.

While Tai says she was treated well by her peers, she perceived a distinct barrier between herself and the American students.