“When does war truly end?” – Ocean Vuong
The Universality of the Refugee Story: War, prejudice, displacement and generational trauma
Vietnamese Refugees in Connecticut
Overview
When? : Vietnamese Refugees started coming to Connecticut after the Vietnam War in 1975.
How?: Church groups, civic organizations and individual families sponsored refugees.
Where?: Two thirds of the refugees settled in New Haven, Hartford and Bridgeport.
The Stats
1980 U.S. Census: 1,438 Vietnamese in CT
1990 U.S. Census: 4,085 Vietnamese in CT
2000 U.S. Census: 7,530 Vietnamese in CT
*The truth of the Archive: Census data is only a piece of the actual story. The actual populations of Vietnamese in Connecticut are thought to have been much higher. The Archive is not the end all be all.
Vuong’s Family Migration Story
“Before going to school every morning, my mother would say, ‘Be careful — you’re already Vietnamese.’ And I always had this sense I was this perpetual trespasser — a guest” — Vuong
Timeline
During the war (roughly 1960s and early 70s)
Vuong’s family worked as as rice farmers before and during the war
His grandmother married a U.S. GI and they had three daughters together, including Ocean’s mother
His grandmother put her daughters in an orphanage and the family was not reunited until they daughters were adults
1975
The Fall of Saigon marks the end of the Vietnam War
1988
Ocean Vuong is born in Ho Chi Minh City
1989
Ocean and family are evacuated from Vietnam to the Philippines because it was illegal for his mother to work as a mix raced person.
They spend 8 months at a refugee camp in the Philippines before the Salvation Army helps them migrate to the U.S.
1990
Ocean and family arrive in Hartford, CT, continuing to move around from apartment to apartment
Vuong’s Literary Inspiration
“Perhaps Patricia Polacco never dreamed that a Vietnamese boy in Hartford would read her book and see himself, and yet it happened. It reminds us that storytelling can make this happen, where we can recognize one another.” – Vuong
Universal Themes Found in Refugee Literature:
Sacrifice, family, loss, migration, prejudice, generational trauma, displacement
What do all these works have in common?: They show the impact that war and prejudice have on the lives of the people who experience them firsthand, and the generations that follow. Literature does not exists in a vacuum, authors get inspiration from their own experiences and from other works.
Vuong’s Monarch Butterfly Metaphor
“Vietnamese refugees, for example, use metaphor as a coping mechanism; metaphor provides a way to talk about trauma without stating the experience outright.” -Vuong
Vuong employs the metaphor of monarch butterfly migration to represent the refugee journey and legacy:
Quote:
Analysis:
“Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread, a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country” (Vuong, 8).
Vuong illustrates the refugee journey through the objective description of monarch butterfly migration. He emphasizes how migration is caused by an outside force: for monarchs it’s the change of the season, for refugees it’s war. The refugee journey is one full of separation and fragmentation: people get left behind and plans are deserted. The stability of home is replaced with constant movement.
“The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past” (Vuong, 8)
The refugee journey doesn’t end with the first generation to flee; it is an intergenerational exploration. Sacrifice is a universal aspect of the story; refugees flee and risk their own lives in order to save their children.
“If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast” (Vuong, 10).
Vuong fights against the adverse effects of generational trauma. He highlights how trauma gets passed down genetically, yet dreams of more. He hopes that it’s not just anguish that is passed on, but an urge to survive and thrive. It’s not exactly that there are positive things that come from war, rather, refugees and their descendants have an incredible capacity to rewrite their own experience and story.
Citations:
VUONG, OCEAN. ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS. VINTAGE, 2020.
https://photos.com/featured/monarch-butterflies-in-various-flying-liliboas.html
https://www.wnpr.org/post/vietnamese-poet-raised-hartford-connects-refugee-experience-syrians
Ocean Vuong: The 10 Books I Needed to Write My Novel
http://clipart-library.com/cartoon-monarch-butterfly.html
