Ship of Fate: Memoir of a Vietnamese Repatriate

Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies

by Trụ Đình Trần, Bac Hoai Tran (Translation), Jana K. Lipman (Translation)

Ship of Fate tells the emotionally gripping story of a Vietnamese military officer who evacuated from Saigon in 1975 but made the dramatic decision to return to Vietnam for his wife and children, rather than resettle in the United States without them. Written in Vietnamese in the years just after 1991, when he and his family finally immigrated to the United States, Trần Đ�nh Trụ's memoir provides a detailed and searing account of his individual trauma as a refugee in limbo, and then as a prisoner in the Vietnamese reeducation camps.

In April 1975, more than 120,000 Indochinese refugees sought and soon gained resettlement in the United States. While waiting in the Guam refugee camps, however, approximately 1,500 Vietnamese men and women insisted in no uncertain terms on being repatriated back to Vietnam. Trần was one of these repatriates. To resolve the escalating crisis, the U.S. government granted the Vietnamese a large ship, the Việt Nam Thương T�n. An experienced naval commander, Trần became the captain of the ship and sailed the repatriates back to Vietnam in October 1975. On return, he was imprisoned and underwent forced labor for more than twelve years.

Trần's account reveals a hidden history of refugee camps on Guam, internal divisions among Vietnamese refugees, political disputes between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.S. government, and the horror of the postwar "reeducation" camps. While there are countless books on the U.S. war in Vietnam, there are still relatively few in English that narrate the war from a Vietnamese perspective. This translation adds new and unexpected dimensions to the U.S. military's final withdrawal from Vietnam.

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

Published April 30, 2017

Reviews

[David]

A devastatingly powerful story about one man's escape from Vietnam in 1975 and the decision he made from a refugee camp in Guam to return to his wife and children in Communist Vietnam (along with over 1600 other Vietnamese repatriates) rather than go to America. His descriptions of life in the refugee camp, then of the voyage he led as a repurposed ship's captain back to Vietnam, followed by more than a decade in multiple re-education/prisoner camps are harrowing, educational, and moving. Tran Dinh Tru is a hero of our often-terrible times. His translators, too, did a wonderful job in helping to bring his story to an English-reading audience. This should be required reading by Americans.

[RYAN PHAM]

Laminated hardcover

My gosh. The difference between Guam’s refugee camps and Vietnam’s re education camps is unreal. I would have loved to have heard more about the author’s life in America

[Mills College Library]

305.90691 T7721 2017