Writing From Diasporic Space: A Poetic Narrative of a Refugee Daughter

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.