Vietnamese refugees’ state of exile

Vietnamese refugees’ state of exile describes more than the loss of a homeland: it is a life reorganized by sponsors, distant resettlement, precarious work, cultural memory, and the uncertain prospect of return. In the unnamed narrator’s account, exile disperses people across unfamiliar places while keeping them oriented toward Saigon. The result is a divided existence in which making a home does not necessarily mean accepting that the past is over.

Dispersal and the Work of Resettlement

After leaving the camp, the unnamed narrator’s prospects in California depend on the people willing to sponsor him. Avery Wright Hammer, his former professor, secures him a clerical position in the Department of Oriental Studies and gathers money from former teachers. That support pays for a bus ticket to Los Angeles, several motel nights, an apartment deposit near Chinatown, and a used 1964 Ford. The narrator then searches neighborhood churches for a sponsor for Bon, eventually finding one through a storefront congregation. The reunion in September places the two men together again, but in what the narrative calls genteel poverty: sponsorship provides a foothold, not security.

The system’s reach extends well beyond their household. In a letter to his aunt, the narrator recounts how refugees sought sponsors among former employers, military advisers, lovers, churches, and even casual acquaintances. Families might leave together, alone, or split into separate placements. Some remained in warm western regions that recalled home; many others were sent to states whose names and pronunciations felt strange in their mouths. Refugees exchanged phone numbers and addresses before departing, anticipating a community-built network that could pass along information about jobs, taxes, welfare, racism, and places where more Vietnamese people lived.

The narrator imagines what resettlement might have looked like if refugees had been allowed to stay together: a self-sufficient colony containing workers, professionals, religious communities, political differences, and every social class. Such a community could have elected a representative and spoken for itself. Instead, bureaucratic dispersal prevented that concentration. People nevertheless gathered in basements, churches, backyards, and beaches, carrying groceries rather than buying costly concessions. These small reunions made a scattered population briefly visible to itself, even as the dispersed geography limited its collective power.

Making a Home, Living with Loss

For the narrator and Bon, resettlement takes the form of a dismal one-bedroom apartment and a narrow routine. Bon, grieving and listless, leaves mainly for a part-time night job cleaning the church. His wages are paid in cash, leaving him eligible for welfare. The narrator sets this arrangement against Bon’s wartime abilities: a man capable of parachuting, marching long distances under a heavy load, and shooting accurately has no apparent place in the civilian labor market. Welfare, in Bon’s view, is a more sensible reward for his service than a medal. On benefit days he buys beer and frozen meals; the two men drink together with joyless discipline. The routine gives their days a shape while also registering how little the new life can offer Bon beyond endurance.

A separate breakfast in Monterey Park brings the same dislocation into focus through the crapulent major. Once an analyst of Chinese-language communications in Saigon and the narrator’s guide to food in Cholon, he now works as a gas station attendant and also relies on cash wages to qualify for welfare. His wife sews in a sweatshop, her eyesight diminished by the work, and the couple has infant twins whose names, chosen in a panic at the hospital, are Spinach and Broccoli. The major jokes about these names and about using his fatness to make an employer pity him enough to hire him. The humor does not erase the pressure behind it: his family is poorer than before, and the skills and rank that defined him at home do not translate into security in exile.

Food makes cultural memory tangible, but it cannot restore what has been lost. Refugees depend on Chinese markets for ingredients and find that their attempts to reproduce familiar dishes acquire an unwanted Chinese inflection. Fish sauce, remembered for its distinctive quality and associated with Phu Quoc Island, becomes a measure of the distance between recollection and present experience. The narrator describes food as close enough to evoke the past, yet wrong enough to confirm that the past cannot be recovered intact. Exiles keep their criticisms of their hosts to themselves, gathering instead over dried squid and secondhand stories. Their closeness sustains shared memory, while the stories also carry knowledge of exploitation, trafficking, suicide, and violence among people scattered across the country.

Saigon Time and the Politics of Return

At the General and Madame’s Los Angeles restaurant, a clock carved from hardwood into the shape of Vietnam gives exile its most concentrated image. The clock hangs beside the flag of the defeated Republic of Vietnam and a beer advertisement. Its dial places Saigon at the center; its hands turn over the country’s map. Madame insists that it keeps Saigon time, fourteen hours out of step with the local time. The narrator realizes that the clock does not merely preserve an image of home. It marks a different chronology, in which the refugees inhabit both the place where they are and the place they have left, and in which the question of when they can return persists without an answer.

The restaurant itself embodies the compromises of that present. Madame’s cooking offers the narrator the last decent Vietnamese food he has eaten, and the business gives the Movement a source of revenue. Yet the General finds the small, unrepaired premises degrading; its former use as a chop suey house remains visible in grease-marked walls and battered fittings. Its waiters are veterans in ill-fitting clothes. The General, once a commander, is now behind a cash register, and the restaurant brings Vietnamese food to customers in a setting shaped by their suspicion of unfamiliar cuisine. The enterprise is at once a means of survival and a reminder that the General’s former position has not followed him across the ocean.

Return also acquires a military form. The General gathers roughly two hundred men on remote terrain east of Los Angeles for drills and calisthenics, organizing his nascent force into headquarters, rifle platoons, and a heavy-weapons platoon that does not yet possess heavy weapons. He describes the training as a way to restore discipline, harden bodies, and prepare the men to imagine themselves as an army again. To a hostile observer, the gathering might look like a foreign invasion; in the narrator’s account, the men’s preparation to invade their communist homeland is also a bid to become legible as Americans. The contradiction is stark: exile leaves these veterans dispossessed, yet their hoped-for return depends on rehearsing the military identity through which they once understood themselves.

From Exile to a New Departure

The final movement from resettlement toward escape comes after the narrator and his companions return to Saigon. They spend two months working on a manuscript while waiting to leave. Confession papers are part of ordinary life under the local cadres, and the group invents minor failings to fill them, careful not to disclose anything serious. Their written exercise in self-criticism contrasts with the manuscript they are preparing: one text is submitted under political compulsion; the other is meant to resist the stories imposed on them.

On the eve of departure, the travelers have paid their fares with the commissar’s gold, concealed in a false bottom of the narrator’s rucksack. A cipher takes the gold’s place as their heaviest burden after the manuscript, which is wrapped in waterproof plastic. The navigator’s plan begins with families leaving separate houses as if on short trips, then taking a bus to a village three hours south. A ferryman will answer a coded exchange before carrying them by skiff to the navigator’s clan and a fishing trawler built for 150 people. Most will hide in a hold with space for only about a third that number; heat, stench, and the lack of ventilation make the danger concrete before the voyage begins.

The travelers expect to join tens of thousands of people fleeing by sea, yet resist the label assigned to them. The narrator regards the name boat people as condescending because it makes a varied population sound like a primitive, lost tribe. The group includes children and adults, people of different complexions and accents, Chinese people persecuted for being Chinese, and people marked by reeducation. Their refusal of the label does not make them secure or free of uncertainty; it asserts that flight does not cancel their histories or their capacity to define themselves.

The manuscript and the voyage thus meet at the question of representation. After the narrator’s experience on the film set, he has already considered how being represented by others can amount to a kind of death. Now he and his companions carry their account alongside the cipher, treating words as both testimony and a claim to speak for themselves. Their exile remains unresolved: the sea offers neither a guaranteed destination nor a restored homeland. But the closing promise to live turns survival into an active, collective commitment. The refugees leave not because the problem of return has been settled, but because they insist on continuing to imagine a future beyond the power that displaced them.