Summary
As spring arrives, Hà and her mother go downtown for President Thieu’s ceremony to comfort war wives. They sit through his bluster about winning the war and democracy because they will be given sugar, rice and vegetable oil. At the market they eat rice crepe filled with shrimp, cucumber and bean sprouts. They stand in line then sit on hot metal benches facing the president’s podium. He thanks the crowd and cries, facing the cameras. Her mother says they are tears of an ugly fish.
Hà’s mother furrows her brow as she measures the rice grains in the bin. There are not enough to last until payday at the end of the month. A siren sounds during class, in the middle of a lesson on President Ford, and school closes a month sooner than scheduled. On April 14, Hà counts five green papayas clinging to the trunk of her tree. Hà’s mother calls a family meeting and says that Ong Xuan sold gold to buy twelve airplane tickets; Ba Nam has a van ready to take 25 relatives to the coast. The family discusses if they should leave. Quang and Khôi would like to stay, while Vū says they must go. In the morning Khôi wakes Hà before dawn and shows Hà a hatched chick. He says they must not leave; he must protect his chick and she must protect her papayas. They hook pinky fingers to promise. On April 18, while watching Hà prepare dinner, Hà's mother says she should grow up somewhere where she doesn’t have to save half a bite of sweet potato. President Thieu resigns. Again his eyes are full of tears. Hà’s mother lifts one eyebrow in doubt.
Uncle Son comes to tell the family to be ready to leave any day. He says to keep quiet, only navy families can board the ships. Hà’s mother pats Hà’s head and says father watches over them, even if he’s not there. Hà watches her mother sew the first of five bags. Khôi tells her to make only three. Hà’s mother says father will be proud he obeyed his mother while his father was not there. Khôi slowly nods. The family packs pants, shorts, underwear, shirts, toiletries, rice, and one personal item. Hà chooses her doll. They leave behind gold-rimmed glasses father brought back from America, report cards, vines in bloom, a leather belt, glass jars Khôi used for fighting fish, and ten photographs. The rest of the photos Hà’s mother burns, knowing they cannot leave evidence of Hà’s father’s life that might hurt him. They decide to eat Hà’s biggest papaya, dipped in chili salt, rather than leave it for the Communists.
At the port on April 28, they find thousands of people have come to the port, after having found out about the navy ships ready to abandon the navy. The family sticks together as they make their way onto the ship. They claim a straw mat on which the five of them huddle together. The ship is crammed with bodies. After dark, the ship glides out to sea, emptied of half its passengers who went to the ship next door. Bombs pierce the sky, but with the lights off they won’t be a target. Everyone goes below deck as the ship takes a safe river route to the sea, avoiding the more obvious escape route of Vūng Tâu, where the Communists are dropping all the bombs they have left; Hà hopes TiTi got out.
A helicopter pilot jumps into the water, letting his helicopter plunge behind him. People panic but the commander assures them he is on their side. The pilot climbs aboard and says the Communists crashed tanks through the presidential palace gates and planted a flag with one huge star. He says Saigon has fallen.
At sea, the ship creeps along. There are no lights, cooking, or bathrooms, even though Hà needs to go. Uncle Son gets Hà into the commander’s bathroom, which is worth the embarrassment. Hà chews her food slowly to savor it. No other family offers the food Hà smells: sardines, durian, salted eggs. On day three they enter the sea heading toward Thailand. It’s safe enough to cook. There’s enough rice and water to last three weeks, but the commander expects rescue will come sooner as ships from all countries are out looking for them. They are rationed one clump of rice three times a day, portioned according to height. Quang begins English lessons after a week on the ship. When no one is around he says: “We must consider the shame of abandoning our own country and begging toward the unknown where we will all begin again at the lowest level on the social scale.” People stick their bottoms over the edge of the ship to go to the bathroom. Hà draws pictures of food. Khôi has a stink the family can’t ignore. The family discovers that he has a dead chick in his pocket. It was crushed during boarding.
After two weeks at sea, the commander lowers the flag of South Vietnam—yellow with three red stripes—and says South Vietnam no longer exists. People scream that they cannot live without a country. Their pain seems unreal to Hà. But she understands Khôi’s. She takes his hand and they go to the back of the ship, where they wrap his chick in a handkerchief with Hà’s doll and toss the white bundle into the sea. The ships stops in the middle of the night. They have lost one engine, meaning it will take longer to get to Thailand. Having taken the river route, they missed not only the bombs but the rescue ships. The commander halves their rations and says it is impossible to predict how much longer they will be floating. At night the women go up to the deck to sponge-bath and relieve themselves behind blanket curtains. Every night Hà’s mother points at the moon and says her father might be looking up at it too.
They are woken by a honking horn. A gigantic ship with an American flag moves closer. Men in white uniforms smile and wave. Hà sees a man with a red beard; she didn’t know such hair was possible. People clap as the ships draw together and kiss. Boxes of food pass onto the deck. The American ship tows their ship with a thick steel cable. That night Hà pours fresh water all over her skin, bathing for the first time in ages. The soapy water tastes sweet. They land on an island called Guam. Living in tents, they eat canned food: canned fruit, and beef and potatoes that taste like salty vomit. They begin a routine, learning English in the day and watching cowboy movies and cartoons projected onto a sheet at night. Their food becomes more edible after cases of fish sauce arrive.
On July 1, Hà’s mother wants to sell the amethyst ring her father brought back from America. The children protest: they have never seen her without the purple rock. They stand in line to fill out papers deciding where to move: many choose France, where many Vietnamese moved after the country was divided into North and South. Uncle Son suggests Canada, but Hà’s mother says it is too cold. A man tells Hà’s mother there are more opportunities in America, and that her sons can get scholarships to study.
They are flown to another tent city in Florida. An American must come to the camp and sponsor them if they are to leave the camp. As they wait, they watch as other families leave to various U.S. states. Their mother learns that sponsors prefer applications that say they are Christians. She changes their forms, saying all beliefs are pretty much the same. A man from Alabama sponsors them, as he is looking for a young man to be a mechanic and Quang studied engineering. Their sponsor looks like an American, dressed as a cowboy with a red face and golden hair. Hà loves him and expects he owns a horse.
Analysis
Hà’s mother struggles to decide the best course of action when she is given the opportunity to emigrate. Though her oldest sons want to stay and face the Communists advances, the sight of her daughter living with such scarcity that she must save the nub of a sweet potato helps Hà’s mother decide the family will leave Saigon. She would prefer her daughter to grow up in a place where things are not so dire.
Immigration and the uncertainty of the journey necessitate that Hà and her family give up the majority of their possessions and bring only one non-essential personal item each. Fearing what the Communists will do with the evidence of Hà’s father, Hà’s mother burns all the photos and paper evidence of his life.
Hà’s family boards the navy ship—repurposed as a refugee vessel—on the day Saigon falls, symbolized by the planting on the presidential palace of the “flag with one huge star,” i.e. the North Vietnamese flag. The next year, 1976, Saigon will be renamed Ho Chi Minh City after North Vietnam’s first president.
The motif of food and the theme of adaptability arise as Hà documents life at sea. To avoid producing smoke or flames which could be seen by overhead bombers, on the first three days, as the ship makes its passage to the ocean, the commander doesn’t allow cooking. But even once people start cooking, Hà, as a great fan of food, has difficulty adjusting to the limited rations of rice.
While on board, the refugees start learning English. Hà’s brother Quang anticipates that, in addition to the language barriers the Vietnamese will face once resettled, the process of immigrating will mean not only shame for having abandoned their home country, but a need to adapt to starting from scratch at society’s lowest rung. Immigration also means that Khôi must say goodbye to the chick that stood in for his attachment to the homeland. Hà is generous enough to discard her personal item as well, tossing the doll and the chick to sea—a gesture whose weight she does not fully consider until the doll is irrevocably lost. As they make these personal gestures of detaching from the homeland, the commander lowers the South Vietnam flag; having been taken over by the North, the country Hà and her family once knew is gone.
Hà’s spirits lift with the arrival of an American rescue ship which tows the refugees to the island of Guam, a US territory in the Western Pacific. Hà has her first introduction to the ethnic and cultural differences of America, starting with her awe of the sailors’ red beards and hairy arms. On Guam, Hà has her first taste of dull American food, which is only acceptable when enlivened by the salty, popular southeast Asian condiment fish sauce. After being relocated to Florida, Hà and her family learn that they will have a better chance of leaving the camp and being selected by a refugee sponsor if they lie about being Christians. Hà’s mother jokes that the cultural difference between Christianity and their true Buddhism is immaterial; she understands the need for adaptability.
