Children of Refugees

My mom was pregnant with me when she escaped Vietnam by boat in 1980. For seven days, they ventured out into the open sea, attacked by pirates, and eventually made it to a refugee camp in Ga Lang, Indonesia.

As I’m reading the events happening in Afghanistan, I’m struck by what the lasting impact of this will be, particularly for the children of the refugees.

My parents went through unspeakable atrocities to make it here in the US. Yet those stories are told often in books like Voices of the Vietnamese Boat People or podcasts like Vietnamese Boat People. We’re living in it now, reading the stories of the Afghan people.

For children like me, we live through it without truly understanding it. How can you. We walk and talk like any other children, yet we carry generational traumas inside us. It wasn’t until last year, when I finally understood the horrible sounds inside my head. Although I’ve never witness death, or been around war, I felt it, my entire life.

Events in history are not isolated in a point in time. It creates a ripple in space and time, and it embeds itself in our bodies.

For now, I’ll grieve with those on the other side of the world. Soon, I’ll share my story, one that I only recently discovered.