Thai pirates were trying
to kill us just for the pleasure of doing it, which seems like an incomprehensible
thing for one human being to do to another.
But refugees were not human beings; when they left their home, no list
was made of who they were, when they left, or where they were headed. No nation mourned their departure, and no
country awaited their arrival. There was
death at sea but no death toll; there was heartbreak but no history. Refugees were unwanted, unclaimed, and
unnamed—invisible people. They were just
some country’s former problem, and the moment the problem was gone, they were
forgotten—out of sight, out of mind.
(pg. 184)
It’s not fair
might be the most common thought that ever crosses a refugee’s mind. The political climate in his country forces
him to leave the land of his birth; that’s not fair. He doesn’t get to choose the city he will
move to or sometimes even the nation; that’s not fair. He can’t get a decent job, regardless of his
talents, because he doesn’t have a diploma from a school he could never attend;
that’s not fair. He can’t learn the
language any faster, he can’t change the color of his skin, and he can’t help
it if his nation was formerly at war with yours. None of it is fair, and in the refugee it
creates a longing for justice. (pg. 265)
I actually had one
advantage over most of the students at Harvard: I had been working long hours
all my life, and I had learned how to juggle multiple tasks at the same
time. When I was growing up, I never had
time to feel pressure—I was too busy doing the next thing. I had spent my entire childhood scrambling,
stumbling, recovering, improvising, and learning how to do things after I did
them. That wasn’t always easy, but it
turned out to be very good preparation not only for Harvard but for life as a
whole. I knew how to juggle multiple jobs, demanding classes, physical
exercise, and spiritual development. (pgs. 323, 324)
I am a refugee, and I
always will be. But in a way, all of us
are refugees. We all are born in a time
and place we didn’t choose, born without language, property, or money,
dependent entirely on the decisions of others for our very survival. We all are strangers in a strange land, left
to fend for ourselves in a world we barely comprehend, and as we find our way
in this world, we need to help others do the same. We all have been blessed—every one of us—and
we all are expected to give back. (pg. 345)
I used to wonder who Jesus
had in mind when He spoke of those who have been given much because I sure
didn’t think it was my family. We
arrived in America with nothing but the secondhand clothes on our backs. And who exactly has been entrusted with much?
Not us—everything my family owned was taken away from us before we left
Vietnam. The way I saw it, my family had
been entrusted with nothing and had been given nothing, and I just hoped those
rich and powerful people would read Jesus’ words and take them to heart.
But when I went
back to Vietnam and stood there in my parallel universe, looking at my
alternate life, I finally understood: He meant me. At that moment I was overwhelmed by the
realization of just how much I had been given and all that had been entrusted
to me. I was the one who made it out; I was the one plucked dying from the
South China Sea; I was the one granted asylum in a country where education was
available to everyone and prosperity was possible for anyone willing to work
hard enough. If not for those rare and
precious gifts, I might have spent my life wandering down some dirt road,
tapping the haunches of a water buffalo with a bamboo rod. (pg. 343)
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