Summary

The last story of the collection tells of a young refugee, Mai, fleeing Vietnam after the war. Mai had to leave her young brother, her mother, and her father, a South Vietnamese soldier who returned blinded from Communist reeducation camp and was hospitalized. Mai’s mother sent her away to escape the country’s suffering, and Mai traveled by bus and canoe before being taken on board a larger boat headed out to sea. The narrator describes the squalid conditions on the boat, where Mai counted two hundred people “squashed into a space meant for fifteen” (247). A few days into the journey, a storm nearly capsized the boat. Mai heard the sound of hundreds of people praying and singing in “their native tongue” (233) and wondered if it was “the voices of their ancestors” (234) before realizing that it was the wind. The storm severed...