1. What do you think is important to Huong T. Nguyen based on this story?
2. Provide a piece of evidence, cite, and explain how it supports his perspective that you mentioned in question 1. Remember quoting and citing looks like this: “Add your quote here. Then move the period from the end of the last sentence in your quote to after the citation like this” (Nguyen #).
3. Choose 1 emoji that she used and explain why that represented part of her life.
4. How are images helpful when sharing a memoir with others?
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FRESH OFF THE BOAT
A Young Refugee's Journey Through Emoji By Huong T. Nguyen, Vietnam
last journey. I was five years old and apparently worth two thin bars of gold.
illustration by Lila Volkas
When I left my country at age five, I did not have words to understand my refugee experience. I chose emojis to tell my story as they more accurately represent my understanding of the experience at that time.
The waves carried my two aunts, my cousin, and me to Malaysia. My mother brought me to the docks and handed me to her oldest sister. We were packed onto an overcrowded, dilapidated fishing boat and set sail for international waters. Some boats floated to their destinations; others sank. To me, the
black water was awesome and scary at the same
time. I still feel the same way about the
I was five
waves today, nearly years old and forty years later.
apparently The skull and worth two thin
crossbones repre sent pirates. People
bars of gold.
escaping Vietnam by boat were known to
bring their valuable possessions with them.
This attracted pirates from Vietnam and surrounding countries. Sometimes pirates would rob these refugees of their jewelry, other times their dignity, and others their lives.
I was a baby chick, just two years old, when Saigon fell in 1975. My father was in the Southern Vietnamese army and served as a transla tor for the American forces during the American War (as Vietnamese referred to it). The victors forced my father into a "reeducation" camp. When released, he promptly bought a fishing boat, loaded my two older sisters and others onto it, and set sail for international waters, hoping to escape Communist oppression. A French vessel picked up his boat, and he and my sisters were eventually settled in the United States. My mother, my younger brother, and I tried to escape together two times, only to be captured and sent back to Vietnam. Lack of money forced my mother to send me alone with my two aunts and my cousin on my
When pirates from Thailand boarded our boat, my aunt placed her diamond ring in my mouth. I sat with this ring in my mouth, try ing to make myself invisible, as the pirates broke my other aunt's jade
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100
bracelets and stole them. Luckily, those pirates stole only jewelry on our boat. My aunt's quick thinking allowed us to sell the ring at a refu gee camp to buy a month's worth of food.
The tent reminds me of the two refugee camps that took us in. From the second one in Malaysia we sent word to my dad who, along with the Catholic church in Green Bay, Wisconsin, sponsored our trip to the United States.
The airplane (actually, several) carried us from Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong to Chicago, and then to Green Bay. We arrived in the dead of winter. When I saw my father again, he wrapped me in a large faux leopard-skin coat. At the airport, many people came to welcome us to our new country.
Huong T. Nguyen is an attorney living in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and two sons.
