"Bui-doi: The Dust of Life" is the third play of a Vietnam War trilogy which includes "American Pies, Happy Lives, Blue Skies and Other Lies" and "The Wall." Thirty years after getting out of the Vietnam War, more or less in one piece, mystery writer Taylor Munroe is confronted by a young Amerasian who claims to be his son. Dissident Hong Kong publisher Wei Chan, with his mother in tow, flees Hong Kong when China seizes control of the British Crown Colony in 1998. Bound for San Francisco, Wei's intention is to arrange a marriage between his mother and his absentee father. Taylor knows nothing of Wei's existence although he remembers a blissful time he spent in the arms of a Chinese bargirl just prior to the TET offensive exploding across Vietnam in 1968. Wei is an example of what the Vietnamese refer to as bui-doi: the dust of life. These are the children sired by soldiers in a foreign country and left behind after the war. Wei's unexpected intrusion into Taylor's troubled existence forces both father and son to reconcile an unconnected past with an uncertain future.
About the Author: David W. Christner was born in Sweetwater, Tennessee and raised in rural Oklahoma. He attended high school in Mountain View, a small farming community situated between the Washita River and the Wichita Mountains in the southwestern part of the state. As a Commissioned Officer in the U.S. Navy, Christner served three years at sea fighting the Vietnam War and two years ashore in Norfolk, VA. After completing his graduate education at the University of Oklahoma, Christner settled in southern Rhode Island and for more than two decades worked as a technical writer, editor and multimedia training developer for a variety of defense contractors and hi-tech multinational corporations during the day and wrote plays and novels at night. His stage plays The Wall, Bui-Doi: The Dust of Life, The Walk, Red Hot Mamas, The Babe, The Bard and the Baron, The Bitch of Baily's Beach, Ezra and Evil, What About Mimi?, and This Blood's For You have been finalists or winners in national/international playwriting competitions. Speculations on the cosmos, sex, war, religion, injustice, environmental exploitation, aging, women's issues, the homeless, the colonial slave trade and capital punishment have formed the thematic content of the plays and novels he has written so far. His plays have been produced in the U.S. Australia, Japan, Belgium, India, Italy and Canada. An Italian translation of Red Hot Mamas by Leonardo Franchini opened in Trento, Italy in 2016. Victor Weber's Russian translation premiers in Tula, Russia in May. Christner is theater critic for the Newport Mercury in Newport, RI. Bui-Doi: The Dust of Life, is one of his 19 full-length plays.