My family’s journey is very much a part of American history, part and parcel with the Vietnam War, a singular event that caused a dispersion of ripples.
Greek migrant boat wreck may be Mediterranean’s ‘worst ever tragedy’ with hundreds still missing I knew only the most cursory details about their tending to my crying, seasick brother while other passengers bitterly threatened to throw him out of a boat crammed with refugees. My parents rarely spoke of the difficult journey that led them to settle in the United States. Unlike other illustrative depictions of passages to the US that cast their seafarers as heroic, Vietnamese boat people are forever portrayed as victims and sidebars to the main narrative. This is where my family history was stuck for a long time - prostrate at sea and afforded only a few sentences in the hardcover book with hundreds of pages of history that didn’t feel like mine to claim. Under the subheading of “The Vietnam War,” I learned about the boat people’s plight through that paltry text and a singular emblematic photo of faces, young and old, staring up at their assumed rescuers from a wooden boat. In high school a few years later, my Chinese Vietnamese parents’ entire forced migration story was compressed into two paragraphs of my history textbook. Lynda Lin Grigsby Courtesy Lynda Lin Grigsby
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