Allowing Complexity in Refugee Narratives with Thanhha Lai
Thanhha Lai is an author of children’s literature. Her debut book Inside Out and Back Again is a verse novel, a collection of poems about a girl who was born and raised in Saigon and has to flee with her family to America because of the Vietnam War. Thanhha’s positive energy shines through something as tragic as the refugee experience and something as traumatic as family separation. The optimism is evident in her work. In this upbeat episode, Eugene and Thanhha talk about her young adult novel, “Butterfly Yellow,” and how we should allow complexity in telling the stories of refugees.
The title of your book, Inside Out and Back Again, alludes to being a refugee.
Once you’ve endured this harsh experience, everything pertains. It will take you the rest of your life to process it. It’s been my story for 45 years, but there are certain aspects that will be with me forever. So once I became a refugee, I remained a refugee is in the present tense.
There was a scene where Ha, the girl, was on a boat. You describe the waves on the outside, and her turbulence inside. That’s one of those moments where it clicked.
I put it in this poetry format because if you’re thinking in Vietnamese, that is what the narrator’s thinking: She’s 10 years old, she just left Vietnam and she doesn’t know English yet. You think in poems because language is naturally a miracle; it has a cadence to it. My next two books are not in strict prose because unless I’m inside the mind of a Vietnamese thinking in Vietnamese, I don’t need to use prose poems.
You have a new book called Butterfly Yellow that came out in September 2019. Could you give us a quick synopsis?
That is my favorite book. I poured my heart into it. It’s considered YA (young adult) so it’s for an older crowd. It’s a story I’ve been thinking about since I was a journalist 30 years ago: How do you bring about a story of someone who has endured so much horror that you can’t actually interview her as a journalist?
I don’t think it’s fair to splash someone’s face on the front page and put her real name to it because it’s a very personal story. So I knew I wasn’t going to approach it as a journalist. It took me forever to bring it into fiction. This is a story about an 18-year-old girl who lived in Vietnam post-war for six years with the communists. She escaped on one of those rickety fishing boats that we hear so much about. So she’s a boat person. And of course, she encounters Thai pirates and endures all kinds of horrors on her way across.
Then I decided to set the main action of the story in Texas when she landed in Dallas. She’s on a bus on her way to Amarillo; without speaking English, all she really has is her spunk. She’s going out there to reclaim her little brother, who she accidentally parted from. She thinks it’s her fault that they got separated at the end of the war. He was part of Operation Baby Lift, where they were lifting orphans out of Vietnam, even though he’s not an orphan. I hear that plenty of people pretend to be so they could get lifted out.
I based it on that to take a look at healing. How do you heal from horror? My true focus was how do you tell that story without depressing every single reader on every single page.
So it became a funny story about her. In order to do that, I had to play up the Texas angle and I had to bring in a wannabe cowboy. He’s this white boy wandering through Texas and he gets roped into helping this refugee out. She doesn’t really like him and he doesn’t really like her at first, but somehow they formed this trans-cultural friendship. That’s the heart of the story in addition to her relationship with her brother.
In the beginning, he rejects her because he left at five and grew up without any reinforcement of anything that was Vietnamese. She is there as a representative of his past. I managed to make that funny too because a refugee story in itself is already dire enough.
I thought, Is there a happy refugee story rolling around? There’s not one. I wanted to give it another angle, come at it from the back door so that I’m able to process it in a way that is interesting to me, because I don’t see a point in crying for 300 pages.
This is a podcast about sad stories and sometimes it’s not supposed to be fun. How do you balance that without going too much into the story itself?
First, you go ahead and assume that it’s sad. There’s no other way to do it once you know that it’s sad. This is the way I approach any novel: Once I already know the tone, what else are you giving me? I look for surprises in a novel.
Once I know it’s going to be beautifully sad, what else can you do with it? For me, you have to bring in some kind of humor. Now, are you making fun of the person who went through hell? Of course not. But you can approach it in a way where you can still bring out the horrendous aspect of the novel without living with that moment on every word, on every paragraph, on every page. That makes sense to me as a writer.
Another person might want to emphasize the horror and say, I will not lift you from this so you feel everything she felt. My focus was on her healing process, not on the hurt itself. It depends on how you approach it, what you want to do, and your own mental life as you’re writing. Because you are sitting alone for a very long time, I wanted to make sure I was in a space that was interesting to me.
For those who are unfamiliar with you, does it take distance to see it in a happier way? Were there brighter periods depending on how you frame it?
In order to understand my humor, you would have to know my background. I was born into sadness. Immediately, when I was one year old, my father became missing in action. We had two choices within the family. My mother set the tone: We could either sit around and hug each other every day and cry, or we can accept the fact that we know absolutely nothing more about him. You still have to build your future. You still have to do something with your life; you cannot just sit here and cry.
So we chose the latter. We didn’t cling to each other and cry all day long, nor did we dismiss what’s missing; we know that. We did everything to lift ourselves out of it. I’m the youngest of nine children. There were eight others above me who set an example of how to do it. They all went to college, they all did their thing, they all found their way.
By the time I came along, it was something I also did. I come from a family where we laugh all day long. To me, it’s very natural to laugh in the face of tragedy. That’s just what you do. To me, it’s false to constantly be sad because I’ve never known it. I was born into sadness. If you were from the outside looking in, you would assume that we sat around and held hands and cried at every dinner. I heard laughter inside of that sadness. I know that it is true that within sadness, you can bloom laughter. Without that background, I’m not sure if I would approach a refugee story and put a funny angle on it.
You left Vietnam when you were 10 as a refugee. Is there a particular memory that sticks out to you during your time in Vietnam that stands out to you?
I visit a lot of schools. When I walk in, the kids want me to be a sad refugee because that’s what they see on TV. They always hear that refugees are sad. Just because you’re from a country at war does not mean you’re fighting in it. Mostly what I remember about Vietnam are snacks I ate all day long. I remember the food and the fruit until this day. My family were like fruit hunters; we will travel the globe for fruit. I remember laughing. I remember the play on words that my brothers would have for Vietnamese to English. It was a joyful childhood, as odd as that sounds. I would not be able to say that if I hadn’t lived it.
What is the reception when they realize that you’re not sad as they expected?
I tell them that emotions are varied. You can’t predict an emotion any more than you can predict a person. You have to meet them and find out what they really like because you can assume all you want before the meeting, but once they meet me, and I talk about myself, they go “Oh, I see why she wouldn’t be sad because it’s almost impossible to be sad all the time.” Just like it impossible to be happy all the time. Life goes in waves like a narrative.
I have sad moments and I have happy moments just like everybody else. To assign a human being an entire life of one emotion is such a narrow way of looking at another person. I would caution against it because it’s not going to happen. Just like any child, a baby even has happy moments and sad moments. Why wouldn’t anybody else not have that same thing? If we allowed people emotional complexity, they just become much more interesting.
What do you think is the prevailing way that people see refugees? What do you think that it should be?
I thought I was writing historical fiction. And then as soon as Inside Out and Back Again came out, boom, all this news was happening with refugees. In order to fundraise for refugee causes, you need to present them as hopeless, sad people running from a war, running from atrocities so that people would give money. It’s a narrow narrative for a specific purpose. Somebody has an agenda there. You’re not so much there to advance complex humanity as you are there to fundraise. That’s one side of the refugeehood.
Then the real refugees show up. Sometimes they match the version you’ve seen on TV and sometimes they don’t. Chances are they’re much more complex than what you’ve read because of who wrote the story. The journalist probably went through a translator, or maybe two translators, in order to get the story and then typed it up under deadline and pressure. By the time it gets to you, probably 1% of it is authentic.
That’s the nature of newsgathering. Whatever you’re reading is just the periphery, the shadow of the true story. I caution kids all the time. They’re being taught so much about refugees from all these books and videos that when they see an actual refugee, the tendency is to start spilling out all the facts that you know.
I can guarantee that this Syrian child refugee is standing there rolling their eyes going, I don’t know where you get this stuff. Perhaps she doesn’t have the English to say it, as I did not have the English to explain to my silly fourth-grade Alabamian classmates that no, there were no tigers running in the jungle in Vietnam. And no, bombs were not going off on top of my head. And no, I was not on that last helicopter to leave Vietnam. And no, I was not the naked girl running down the road in the Pulitzer Prize–winning shot.
When you have little information, what you do is take someone who’s in front of you and start plugging that person into the tiny bit of information that you have. That’s just human nature. I would say take a breath, stand near that person, just smile and say, “Hey, you want to sit with me at lunch?” So that person doesn’t end up eating alone in the bathroom somewhere.
Then just be quiet. That person will eventually say something. It might take months, it might take years — just let the person reveal herself to you when she’s ready. It’s going to take some time, especially if you have language barriers. Eventually, you’ll trade information. Every time you get a new refugee somewhere people are excited with the facts that they have learned.
Does this feed into why you became a journalist? What happened for you to switch from journalism to fiction?
When we were refugees in Montgomery, Alabama, a reporter came around and took our family picture and wrote a story about us. It was overly PR stuff like Oh, they are so happy to be in America. And please, everybody help them. It’s the typical story that you would write about a refugee if you’re an outsider. They were quoting people saying all kinds of things that we did not say because the person just made it up. It was in the Montgomery, Alabama paper.
I knew I would grow up to be a journalist. Then I would somehow get past my immediate need to tell a story from my version and actually get to something that is more authentic.
My mom is a poet and but she doesn’t publish. She’s the house poet. She’s been telling gorgeous verse lines to me all my life. She ruined journalism for me because one day, I decided that it was much more important to tell how the leaves are falling off the tree, instead of talking about the body besides the tree, which is what I was supposed to be doing. My editor said, “Perhaps we can cut back on the leaves description, and tell me about the body.” So then I have to leave journalism because I have this natural tendency to make things up. It makes a bad partnership with journalism.
Why did your family end up going to Alabama?
After the war, the United States set up refugee camps. One that was very popular was Camp Pendleton, California. That was where the movers and the shakers of Vietnam went. And there was one in Virginia near DC. I think the folks who wanted to be near politics or thought it was important to be next to the capital went there because in Vietnam, everything got done close to Saigon, at least for the south side. so you want to be near the city.
One was in Arkansas. We ended up in Florida. Because we were such a huge family, nobody would sponsor us. Because you can’t leave the camp unless some American sponsors you, we ended up in Alabama because one brave person who owned a car dealership was looking for a refugee to work in his car dealership. My brother was a mechanical engineer. My mother looked at him and he took all of us because that’s my mother. She’s magical.
Of course, the sponsor had his own agenda. Everybody has an agenda. He was very active in his Southern Baptist Church. So he brought us all in and baptized us all. It made him look very good to the congregation. So again, he wanted to help refugees, but he also wanted to show his people that he could save the souls of 10 people.
What does sponsorship entail?
First, they help you find housing. And he helped register for schools, made sure we went to church, got us heavy down clothing. He did a furniture drive; he said something at church and people started donating. So we were very grateful. I’m certainly not saying that he didn’t do a great job in settling us. But “why did he do it?” is the question.
In the South, a lot of people were sponsored through churches or through people who are affiliated with a church. There weren’t a lot of sponsorships, as far as I know, in the North because they were more anti-war. There were fewer churchgoers so they wouldn’t have been affiliated with a church. So it’s a double edge.
On one hand, the people who are helping you turn you into Christians when you were Buddhists. But the people who would never do that to you wouldn’t sponsor you in the first place because they were anti-war, and you represent something that they don’t want to have anything to do with.
I’m sure that you’ve been asked about this line 100 times: “I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama.” As you said, wartime in Saigon for you was not right on the combat field.
Vietnam was about being inside a language that I felt completely comfortable in. It was about family. It was about knowing that you belong simply because everyone looks like you. You walk out in the street and there was a legacy there. I went to an elementary school that all my brothers and sisters went to, so by the time I got there, the principal knew our family very well. There was this huge legacy that was already built up. I never felt like I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing.
It wasn’t until Alabama that I was shocked to find out that people do not think that I’m smart. Suddenly, you come to this new place, and you can’t express yourself, kids are yelling at you in the playground. You have a feeling it’s not flattering, but you can’t quite understand what it is they’re saying. Then you get in class and it’s English. It’s a language you haven’t learned. The only place you feel truly smart is math because numbers are international.
Pivoting to Butterfly Yellow, the new book, you talk about language and how language is used between Vietnamese and English. Was it based on a true story?
I don’t know if it’s true or not. but I have certainly sat among people who have hinted at the many horrific things that have happened to them on the way across. They would never come out and say it again; this is not a story you’re going to put a name to.
I would never tell anyone what truly happened, not even my husband. I started reading journalism accounts of what actually happened. It’s a story that’s well-known: Thai pirates sexually assaulted women, and routinely, they stole the gold and killed the men. People try to bring them to court and it did absolutely nothing.
But it’s such an ugly chapter that once people arrived safely in their new land, they want to forget. It’s only nosy people like me that started digging it up. I did it through fiction. So Hang represents the thousands of women out there who went through hell to get over here. Am I saying that every Vietnamese woman went through this? Absolutely not. But a good number of them did. But they’re never going to get on this podcast and tell you. It’s not something they want to talk about.
Do you think it is essential for us to remember? Or do you think it’s better to leave it and just let it be?
It depends on the age group and how horrific the experience was. Let’s say you were sexually assaulted and you want to forget. But that is not to say that mentally, your brain will let you forget; you might be having nightmares, you might be having PTSD. You might be showing the kind of mental illness that people can’t name.
And because you can’t talk about it but something is going on, you’re not 100% whole. I can tell you that as refugees age, we start to see acute signs of not mental illness, but definitely sadness, and acknowledge horror, that they can all use therapy. I’m not sure if anyone will go; it’s a private decision. Now, that takes care of the first generation.
The 1.5 generation, which would be me who came here as children, didn’t suffer those horrific experiences but feel close to them. I keep thinking it could easily have been me if I weren’t 10. If I hadn’t left in ’75 and I left later, and I was on a little fishing boat, maybe it would have happened to me.
Now the ones who are truly curious about it, the second generation, were born here. They’ve only heard hints of something that happened. They want the memories: It’s not their memory, they want their parents’ memory, they want that aunt’s memory, but I’m not sure if they will get it. How do you get that out of the person when the person doesn’t want to tell them?
It’s not being told, it’s being quietly swallowed up in this kind of internal sadness that’s buried deep, deep inside, and I’m not sure when it will come out. I think the way the stories will happen is the second, maybe the third generation will do it through fiction, through pure imagination as to what happened. Maybe they too have heard hints of it at the dinner table or late at night when whispers happen, and then they’ll have to build a whole world around it.
So I think that’s how memories happen. The same way with Holocaust victims, the ones who actually went through the Holocaust with the tattoo on their wrist; they’re not the ones running around telling the stories. They’re not the ones holding out their wrist going, Look what happened to me. They very quietly live their lives. It’s the second and third generations digging up all these stories, writing about them and making films about them. So I’m predicting something like that.
How do you ground yourself in the past?
I think it has to do with empathy because the stories you’re hearing about could have happened to your mother or your grandmother; it’s that close. Naturally, the connection is so close that you feel not only their pain, but you feel anger for them. It is this anger that fuels you. You’re angry because maybe your grandmother and your mother never got to be angry; they simply pushed it away. I think that is a huge motivation: You did not get to be angry, I’m going to do it.
Injustice is a huge motivation. It is a chance to reclaim history, but it’s also a chance to reclaim justice. And it’s going to fuel the next generation. Also, now they have power. They may not have the native language, but they have the English language. Maybe they know someone who can write these stories, and they feel empowered to do it. So if the mother can’t tell the story, I think the daughters would do it for her.
How important do you think it is for second and third generations to learn the heritage language?
I speak Vietnamese to my daughter, she answers me in English. I have no problems with that because what I’m doing is I’m giving her at least an oral exposure to Vietnamese so that she has the foundation. If one day she chooses to go learn Vietnamese, she’s able to pick up the pronunciation. I don’t know if it is helpful to force it on children.
Some parents have rules like inside the house, you will speak absolutely nothing but Vietnamese. It works in the sense they grow up absolutely bilingual, not just being able to hear it, but they can speak it. So I think it depends on many different factors on the family atmosphere, on the dedication of the parents because it is hard to make sure the mother tongue gets inside the brain.
When children are starting out, especially in middle school, there’s this tendency to want to be like everybody else. So you’re not going to want to run around and speak in your native tongue, because you just want to speak English like everyone else, but the interest will start right around high school, and it will intensify by college.
My nieces and nephews are going back to their Vietnamese names because they were all born with an American name and a Vietnamese name. They’ll start calling themselves their Vietnamese middle name and they’ll have an interest in speaking Vietnamese.
There’s a huge movement among Vietnamese Americans, Australian Americans, all the kids that were born abroad, to go back to Vietnam to be entrepreneurs right now, because the country is just one big business opportunity. The closer you are to your parents, the closer you are emotionally to them, the more you identify with what they felt at each stage of their life, such as What were you doing at five? If you were in Vietnam, what were you doing? What were you eating? What were you saying? If you’re that curious, then the chances of you learning that language will be very high.
Again, it has to do with opportunity. If you grow up in California, there are Vietnamese language classes that are offered every Saturday. It would be very easy to pick it up with Vietnamese all around you and chances to practice it. But if you grow up in Wisconsin, as one of two Vietnamese families, I’m not sure if it’s possible for you to pick up the language aside from the little bit that you hear your parents say. And if your parents came at five, they’re not going to speak Vietnamese, so then you would have to go back to your grandparents, if they are around. Almost 50 years after the war, it is getting harder and harder to connect to what I call the primary source.
That very first group that actually experienced it all is starting to die off. My mother just hit 90. There’s a huge project in California to record all this history. That effort is there but I think eventually we’re going to see these experiences through imagination, through fiction and films. That’s where it’s going to live on.
If you were to pitch to somebody why they should learn their native or heritage language, how would you do that? Or would you say you don’t have to learn it?
I would say do it. And I would expand it and say learn any other language other than the one you’re fluent in. Every time you speak a new language, you become a new person, your personality changes to fit with that language. Like I’m very handy and emotional when I speak English. But when I speak Vietnamese, I tend to be calmer and suddenly much more reflective and poetic. Partly for my mother, but I change even the way I view the world, even my word choices, my body language, everything.
I almost feel like I should put on different clothes when I’m speaking Vietnamese because I feel it changing almost every pore in my body starts. That is the closest you’re going to come to having the ability to have multiple cells. One of the reasons why I love being a writer is that this is as far as I’ve come to be able to read other people’s minds. I make it up. I pretend like I know what goes on in another person’s mind. That is a superpower that is so amazing. I would take it over flying. If you can read somebody’s mind and be that person, if you can completely get inside all the secrets that they keep deep inside their soul that they can’t even admit to themselves — those are the best secrets.
In an interview for Butterfly Yellow, you mentioned that there’s a silver lining. Where does this optimism come from?
I would say that 99% of refugees are optimists. Why? Because that’s what it takes to rebuild a life. Otherwise, I think you would just be so sad. Or even if they’re sad, they put it away until they make it. This is what I’m starting to see: They got the big house, the vacation, the cards, all the kids went to Berkeley, all the kids went to Stanford, everything’s great. Then out of nowhere, that path sadness, slams them in the head and they’re like, what happened? Why am I not completely satisfied by now? They’re in their 60s and they’re just in shock. Why am I not as happy as I should be?
It’s because you’ve been suppressing what you went through for years. It makes perfect sense. In order to make it as a refugee, you put away all your heart, all your sadness. So once you make it, it all comes back, and you still have to deal with it. Now, people can choose to keep ignoring it, or they can choose to deal. But I think the first order of business, if you talk to any refugee, is to just hunker down and plow forward. And that’s what it takes. That’s called optimism.
Now, is it healthy? I don’t know, people live the way they live. What other choice do you have? It’s called surviving. Because let’s say you’re a refugee, you just arrived. You’ve decided now is the time to dig into your sadness and really try to work through all the trauma you’ve gone through. I’m not sure you’d be able to get out of bed, go get a job and start your life over because it’s so daunting.
So I can see why people would just push it away. And maybe you push it away long enough, it never comes back. But human beings have complex things come back all the time; you think you’ve gotten over it, and you haven’t.
Tune in to Episode #32, contact us at dividedfamiliespodcast@gmail.com and follow us at @DividedFamiliesPodcast.