Her childhood memory is of riding "on a South Vietnamese Navy ship that went AWOL," that then lost one of its engines and was towed directly to Guam by a U.S. Lai doesn't recall being part of the escort by the USS Kirk. flag flew over those ships, they were allowed in. Once the South Vietnamese flag was lowered, and the U.S. The solution was to transfer the ships from South Vietnamese ownership to American control. When the convoy arrived in the Philippines, President Ferdinand Marcos refused to let the ships in, fearful of offending the belligerent North Vietnamese. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. "That's the give-away."Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Inside Out & Back Again Author Thanhha Lai "If she had watched the flag being lowered, that only happened on that mission with the Kirk," says Herman, who is writing a book about the Kirk. That's the detail that makes Navy historian Jan Herman believe Lai's family most likely was part of the Kirk escort.
As they wrestle her down, a man stabs his heart with a toothbrush." "One woman tries to throw herself overboard, screaming that without a country she cannot live. "South Vietnam no longer exists," she writes. In her book, Lai describes a moment when the ship's commander calls people above deck to witness the lowering of the red and yellow flag of South Vietnam. Many of her other details also echo stories in the NPR series: Bombs and helicopters in the sky above, long days at sea as food runs low and the creeping understanding that they are now citizens of a country that no longer exists.
Lai writes about "piles of bodies that keep crawling on like raging ants from a disrupted nest." She describes the panicked scramble aboard ships, so crammed with refugees that there is fear they will stall or sink. Inspired by the author's own childhood experience of fleeing Vietnam as a refugee and immigrating to Alabama, this tween novel told in verse is sure to capture young readers' hearts and open their eyes.Lai's novel uses precise "prose poems" to convey the wonders - and sights, sounds and smells - of that chaotic and dangerous journey. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next. In America, Hà discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape. Hà and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. and the beauty of her very own papaya tree.īut now the Vietnam War has reached her home. No one would believe me but at times I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama.įor all the ten years of her life, Hà has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by. 2011 National Book Award Winner: Young People's Literature
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