Just as A Boat to Nowhere is a fictional transformation of collective Boat People experiences, so A Long Way from Home fictionalizes the plight of many Southeast Asians who thought that, after months on the sea and often years in refugee camps, they had finally found homes and a familiar, congenial way of life in America. Many Vietnamese, after all, had been fishermen before they fled; it was logical that they sought warm, seaside communities in Florida, Mississippi, and California, where they could form small Vietnamese enclaves and ply their accustomed trade. The complaint in Travor that Vietnamese fishermen were over-catching, underselling, and generally destroying the town's economic balance became an actual national outcry that, unfortunately, was not always resolved as amicably as in the fictional town because racial hatred was invariably fanned when jobs were seen to be threatened.

Since 1950, when the Truman administration had...