California is the novel’s most sustained landscape of Vietnamese exile, where refugee resettlement becomes both an everyday struggle for work and shelter and a stage for political reconstruction. Los Angeles, Monterey Park, Huntington Beach, and the scrubland east of the city offer different versions of refuge: a cramped apartment, immigrant businesses and gathering places, a congressional office in a strip mall, and a training ground for an army that hopes to return to Vietnam.

Setting and Resettlement

After leaving the camp, the unnamed narrator receives practical help from Avery Wright Hammer, his former professor. Hammer sponsors him, arranges a clerical position in the Department of Oriental Studies, and gathers money from former teachers. That assistance pays for the narrator’s bus journey 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 willing to employ him nominally. By September, the two friends are reunited in a modest apartment, where the remaining money goes toward necessities such as a radio and television.

The General and Madame also settle in Los Angeles, with sponsorship arranged through the family of a former American adviser. Their bungalow is less grand than their former home, and the General, unemployed and stripped of his military position, remains in a deep depression. California thus receives people who arrive with different resources and prospects, but none simply resumes a former life. The narrator finds work and housing through a chain of personal sponsorship; the General retains the title and loyalty of former officers but not the authority or livelihood that once gave the title force.

The narrator’s account of the first year after Saigon’s fall places California within a larger system of dispersal. Refugees rely on sponsors, including former employers, military contacts, lovers, churches, and acquaintances. Some arrive as families; others are separated or sent alone to unfamiliar states. Although the exiles exchange addresses and phone numbers, their imagined community is scattered across the country. California is one of the places where Vietnamese people find one another again, but it is not a settlement they have been allowed to choose collectively.

Work, Poverty, and Everyday Life

The narrator and Bon’s apartment makes the contrast between material security and felt impoverishment tangible. It has a refrigerator, running water, a flush toilet, and constant electricity, comforts unavailable to some people of the middle class back home. Yet it is a dismal one-bedroom with an odor the narrator associates with belly lint, and Bon spends his days listless with grief on a red velour sofa. His night work as a church janitor pays cash; this arrangement allows him to qualify for welfare as well. The narrator presents the assistance as a meager return for a veteran who had fought in a war shaped by American decisions, while the skills that once made Bon a soldier have little value to civilian employers.

A routine of government benefits, cheap beer, frozen meals, television, and sleep takes shape in the apartment. On welfare-payment days, Bon spends his cash on beer and uses food stamps for meals. The friends drink together with joyless discipline until they pass out. The routine is not simply private misfortune: it shows the distance between military competence and the limited work available to a refugee, and between basic material provision and the emotional injuries that resettlement does not repair.

Monterey Park offers another sharply particular account of that adjustment. The unnamed narrator meets the crapulent major at a crowded noodle shop, where rice porridge and fried crullers provide a familiar meal among Chinese and other Asian customers. The former Special Branch analyst now works as a gas station attendant, taking cash so he can qualify for welfare; his wife sews in a sweatshop and has strained her eyesight. Their twins, born in the camp, receive the American names Spinach and Broccoli because the major panics when a nurse asks him to choose names. His comic explanation carries an anxious hope: the children will need strength to grow up in a country he regards as harsh toward the weak and the poor.

Community and Cultural Memory

California offers places where exile can briefly feel like belonging. At the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, Bon and the unnamed narrator attend Fantasia, a gathering in which Vietnamese men and women dress for an evening of wine and song. Many have found full-time jobs with overtime and can afford the outing. A singer performs a song associated with Saigon, turning the lounge into a temporary refuge for people who carry the lost city with them. The hotel itself has faded from its glamorous past, but the gathering creates a social world that its worn furnishings cannot supply on their own.

The larger refugee community is rebuilt in fragments. People gather in basements, churches, backyards, and beaches, bringing food and drink from grocery stores rather than relying on costly concessions. Their meals attempt to recover familiar tastes through the ingredients available to them, but the narrator says that food from Chinese markets can be close enough to recall the past and wrong enough to underline its absence. His longing for fish sauce becomes a measure of what displacement changes: memory survives through shared tastes and stories, yet those substitutes also reveal that the former life cannot be reproduced intact.

The possibility of remaining together haunts this account. The narrator imagines that the refugees could have formed a self-sufficient colony with workers, professionals, religious communities, artists, and people across the full range of social and political life. Instead, bureaucratic dispersal prevents that collective settlement. Small Californian gatherings answer the separation without undoing it: people find one another, but the community they assemble is local, partial, and dependent on the conditions of their new surroundings.

Political Networks and the Return Project

California is also the base for the General’s political and military ambitions. With the narrator’s help, he develops the Benevolent Fraternity of Former Soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The organization has a public charitable function, assisting veterans who have lost their army, country, and former identity; it also serves as a channel for donations that support the General’s Movement. Its funding is expected to come chiefly from sympathetic individuals and charitable foundations rather than from refugees who are themselves poor.

The General and the narrator present the Fraternity’s proposal to the Congressman at his modest district office in Huntington Beach. Located in a strip mall surrounded by parking, the office displays campaign signs and photographs of the Congressman with Republican political and entertainment figures, including Richard Hedd. The narrator’s description sets the organization’s political hopes against the ordinary commercial architecture of its host society. The strip mall, with its shops and parking lots, represents a landscape organized around business and private mobility; it also becomes a place where the General seeks public support for a cause rooted in the lost Republic of Vietnam.

The military project moves from fundraising to physical preparation in remote, sun-exposed hills east of Los Angeles, near an Indian reservation. About two hundred men travel there for drills and calisthenics. The General’s plan is to rebuild their discipline and sense of themselves as soldiers, with the eventual aim of invading their now-communist homeland. A napkin diagram outlines a headquarters platoon, three rifle platoons, and a heavy-weapons platoon, although the weapons have not yet been obtained. The narrator recognizes the contradiction in this enterprise: the men prepare to fight for Vietnamese independence while, in their host country, armed commitment to freedom is also presented as quintessentially American.

Exile’s Clock and Narrative Significance

A clock in the General’s home gives California an image of exile measured not only by distance but by time. Carved from hardwood in the shape of Vietnam, its hands pivot in the south and its dial surrounds Saigon. Hung beside the former republic’s flag and a beer advertisement, it makes the lost country present in a Los Angeles room while registering the refugees’ inability to return. The narrator observes that the journey home has a finite distance but an uncertain, potentially endless duration; the question that governs displaced life is when return might become possible.

The novel also places renewed violence inside this Californian landscape. After returning from the Philippines, the unnamed narrator drives through the smog-laden air of Southern California and reaches his car before vomiting, unable to master the bodily aftermath of Sonny’s assassination. Elsewhere, a visit to the crapulent major’s widow in Monterey Park turns the narrator’s money into an attempted gesture of forgiveness for what he has done. These moments prevent California from serving as a simple safe haven: it is at once a place to build a civilian life, maintain political loyalties, and confront the consequences of actions carried across the ocean.

Taken together, the Californian settings show refuge as a condition rather than a resolution. Work, welfare, sponsorship, food, music, and community make survival possible, while dispersal, racialized suspicion, political longing, and unresolved guilt shape what that survival costs. California offers the exiles a place to live and organize, but the imagined return to Vietnam continues to set the clock.