San Diego matters as the transitional setting between the refugees’ confinement at Camp Pendleton and their dispersed lives in the United States. In summer 1975, the narrator and Bon arrive there from Guam, where many refugees had been housed in tents, and spend a period in barracks before sponsorship and work arrangements carry them onward. The camp offers better material conditions than Guam, but remains a temporary refuge shaped by dependence, grief, and uncertainty.

Camp Pendleton and Refugee Life

The move to Camp Pendleton is made by airliner, a sharp contrast with the earlier camp: the narrator sits in a real seat beside a real window. The refugees now have barracks rather than the tents hastily erected by the U.S. Marine Corps on Guam. The improved amenities suggest an initial share in the upward mobility promised by the American Dream, though the barracks are also a boot camp for learning Americana. Camp life remains communal and exposed: thousands of refugees share showers without stalls and live alongside strangers.

For the narrator and Bon, San Diego follows the deaths of Linh and Duc. Their grief continues in the camp: Bon tosses in the bunk above the narrator, troubled by memories of Man and the deaths of Linh and Duc, and the narrator has to drag him to the mess hall so he will eat. The General is also living through the humiliations and constraints of refugee life; the narrator spends time with him, while finding little in the camp to ease his rage. San Diego is therefore not a settled home but a pause in which bereavement and political displacement remain present in the daily routine.

Correspondence and Intelligence

During the summer at Camp Pendleton, the narrator writes his first letters to Man’s aunt in Paris, though the apparent addressee is a cover: the messages are intended for Man. The two men have agreed on conventional subjects such as weather, health, and French politics as signals. When those cues appear, an invisible message is to be read between the lines; when they do not, the letter contains no hidden communication. The first year in the United States, however, offers little need for secrecy, because the exiled soldiers are in no condition to organize a counterstrike. The letters begin a channel of contact and reporting, but their limited operational urgency also registers how politically weakened the refugees are at this point.

Sponsorship and Departure

San Diego is where the narrator seeks a way out of the camp. He writes to Avery Wright Hammer, his former professor, asking for help. Avery Wright Hammer becomes his sponsor and arranges a clerical position in the Department of Oriental Studies. By the middle of summer, this support has made departure possible. At summer’s end, the narrator’s account of the move records how the sponsor’s collection pays for a bus ticket to Los Angeles, several nights in a motel, a deposit on an apartment near Chinatown, and a used 1964 Ford.

Bon’s departure requires a separate sponsor. After reaching Los Angeles, the narrator canvasses neighborhood churches and secures one through the Everlasting Church of Prophets; Bon and the narrator are reunited in their apartment by September, just in time for the academic year. The contrast between the two routes out of Camp Pendleton shows how resettlement depends on personal sponsorship and charitable networks, rather than on a common path or a return to the refugees’ former standing. San Diego’s narrative role lies in this hinge: it is where temporary camp life gives way to an uneven, sponsor-dependent beginning in Los Angeles.