Leaving Vietnam

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Although enormous numbers of Vietnamese fled Vietnam in the spring of
1975, when Saigon fell to the Vietcong, and in the subsequent early
years of Communist rule, there are few literary accounts of this
traumatic era. This dramatic personal memoir is one of them.

Minh Thanh Nguyen grew up during the civil war, in the slums of Saigon
and in a fishing village with his grandmother, a woman who found the
Communists “pleasant, simple people” like herself. At the age of 20,
he was drafted, and became obsessed with the possibility of escaping. He
eventually fled, in 1980, with a few friends in a tiny fishing boat,
risking death by starvation, dehydration, drowning, or capture in the
hope of living in a free country.

Nguyen’s long, detailed account of his life gives the reader a feel
for conditions in a country where life is hard for most of its people.
In addition, his narrative captures the confusion felt before 1975 by a
people whose political sympathies were pulled two ways, and vividly
re-creates the fear and excitement of a journey toward freedom and hope
in Canada.