Abstract
The poetic narrative recounts a story of a Vietnamese refugee daughter I met in New Zealand. Her experience of family separation and dispersion when her parents decided to flee the country after the Vietnam war ended in 1975 evoked a sense of trauma, a collective trauma of thousands of Vietnamese who suffered from losses: “their country,” their home, their families, and their place, to the oceans they crossed. Many of them never had the future they thought they would when they stepped on the overcrowded, half-sunk boat into the dark and could not manage to see the light.
We never actually said goodbye My parents left on a night When the sea was calm, unlike our stormy souls And my three siblings were taken along, too On the boat, they departed Waves pushed them away, far from me I was the only one staying behind I was the only on the shore that night And the boat turned into a small dot When the sun started rising above On the horizon, they were far Just me, a ten-year-old, was left Every day I stood on the shore Winds blew, my eyes dried Then tears welled up, streamed down my face As I longed for news of their fates Out there, in the water Floating, they prayed with stars that storms would not come and sweep all our hopes If their lives were lost in the sea Who was I, the only one left? We’d lost all we could’ve lost And crossing the oceans was the only choice They escaped, leaving me behind To be the only one possibly alive Death had always crossed our paths But would death make us really part? . . . And one day the good news came Like sunbeams stormed in my place They arrived in a faraway land, “Safe!” And started to build a new life . . . For six years we could not meet Nor could we hug, or kiss, or touch Only oceans could hear us talk Only winds could hear me cry . . . And the day came when my father flew back He left on a boat, returned on a flight When his figure was on the doorstep My tree of life started to regrow He took me to the faraway land My family was a whole, again And I resumed my life as a daughter A first-born, the eldest sister Six years apart, I came here in a blank state Couldn’t speak the language they used But I couldn’t go to school I had to work so my siblings could I am the only one not going to college The only who can’t speak The language people here speak Three decades, a long time has passed And I’m still here, no longer there.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
