Ship of Fate: Memoir of a Vietnamese Repatriate (Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies, 21) - Hardcover

Trần, Trụ Đ�nh

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9780824867171: Ship of Fate: Memoir of a Vietnamese Repatriate (Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies, 21)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0824867173 ISBN 13: 9780824867171

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press, 2017

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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.

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From the Author:

Trần Đ�nh Trụ (Author)
Trần Đ�nh Trụ is a former naval commander in the South Vietnamese Navy. He has lived in Texas since 1991.

Bac Hoai Tran (Translator)
Bac Hoai Tran, formerly lecturer of Vietnamese at UC Berkeley, is the Vietnamese language coordinator of the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Jana K. Lipman (Translator)
Jana K. Lipman is associate professor of history at Tulane University.

About the Author:

Trần Đ�nh Trụ is a former naval commander in the South Vietnamese Navy. He has lived in Texas since 1991.

Bac Hoai Tran, formerly lecturer of Vietnamese at UC Berkeley, is the Vietnamese language coordinator of the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Jana K. Lipman is associate professor of history at Tulane University.

David K. Yoo is vice provost, Institute of American Cultures, and professor of Asian American studies and history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.