Against the Current of the Moment, We Arrived

At eleven years old, I knew how to hold my own bag. I knew how to stay close to my parents. I knew how to listen without understanding, how not to cry when adults spoke over my head in a language that moved too fast. My family of nine had crossed the South China Sea on a wooden fishing boat and entered a country still bleeding from a war it was desperate to forget. We arrived with the clothes on our backs and papers that mattered more than anything we owned. Papers that said we were permitted to stay. Before we spoke English, before we understood how silence traveled in American rooms, we understood that those documents were not symbols. They were shelter. The small Minnesota town we were sent to had never seen people like us. That was intentional. The U.S. government scattered Vietnamese families across the country so no single place would feel overwhelmed, so the presence of refugees would be absorbed quietly. I understand the policy now. But at the time, it meant only this: we were alone. Our new neighbors were not cruel, exactly. But even as a child, I felt the unease: the way the […]