Vietnamese refugees in Britain: Language, translation, and the politics of protection in camp life and beyond

Through the lens of assemblage thinking and “territorialisation,” this article examines the operationalisation of language support by the voluntary sector in the Thorney Island and Sopley camps, which temporarily accommodated Vietnamese refugee arrivals in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on archival sources, the role and agency of interpreters are foregrounded in an analysis of the relationships between the materiality of the camps, camp practices, and their impact on refugee experience. A post-camp initiative to train refugees as parasocial workers (a role that included interpreting) reveals a more person-centred approach, in contrast to what we have termed a solutionist approach to interpreting observed in the camps.

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.

Forced Migration, Oceanic Humanitarianism, and the Paradox of Danger and Saviour of a Vietnamese Refugee Boat Journey

The ocean is a central site of escape, danger, and rescue for refugees. It is also a place where oceanic humanitarianism is enacted. In histories of refugee migration, the combination of the ocean, weather, and climate in determining the fate of refugees has not been adequately examined. This article provides a critical analysis of a Vietnamese refugee boat journey in 1982, to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the ocean as both a site of danger and saviour. Conventional historical methodologies alone cannot capture the complex role of the ocean and the weather in determining boat refugee journeys and rescues. Interdisciplinary research between historians and ocean engineers provides new evidence and understanding of how the ocean and weather influences the outcomes of refugees seeking asylum by boat. Numerical model predictions of sea state and ship motion – which enables the vessel's journey in past environmental conditions to be understood – integrated within historical analysis contributes to a fuller and more complex understanding of the nexus between environmental conditions and forced migration journeys. Ocean engineering produces a scientific narrative that historians can use, alongside oral histories and other sources, to theorize the ocean as an active agent.

�Nothing ever dies�: memory and marginal children�s voices in Rwandan and Vietnamese narratives

Memory is a highly contested notion insofar as it is claimed by the collective (Halbwachs, Young) and deployed within a variety of political and socio-cultural contexts. For Viet Thanh Nguyen, the �true war story� can be told by those who lived through it, thereby wresting power from �men and soldiers� and dominant structures (Nothing Ever Dies, Harvard UP, 2017: 243). Examining the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, this article examines narratives which reclaim memory as a personal and as a collective plea to understand the structural discrepancy at play from the child, who is victim of war. It examines the memoir of a Tutsi refugee child, Moi, le dernier Tutsi (C. Habonimana, Plon R�cit, 2019) and an autobiographical narrative by a Vietnamese refugee in Canada, Ru (K. Th�y, Liana L�vi, 2010), to gauge the extent to which such narratives create their own memorial spaces and in so doing reclaim their marginal memories and centre them, while grappling with the imperative to forget. Ultimately it tests Nguyen�s theory that memory can be just and that in this ethical recoding of memory, the humanity and inhumanity of both sides is underlined.