The Paper Boat: A Refugee Story

Written and illustrated by Thao Lam

Owlkids Books

978-1-77147-363-7

40 pp.

Ages 6-10

September 2020

 

Told exclusively in the glorious collage art of Thao Lam, The Paper Boat follows the flight of a little girl and her mother away from Vietnam, a journey paralleled by an army of ants who strive for their own survival.

From The Paper Boat by Thao Lam

As the front endpapers illustrate, The Paper Boat begins amidst a history of the war in Vietnam. The conflict between South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese escalates until April 30, 1975 when Saigon falls and the South Vietnamese surrender. While a family tries to curtail an invasion of ants with sugar water, and a little girl uses her chopsticks to rescue them and send them on their way, the Vietcong tanks roll past their window. Soon the family is packing up and saying their goodbyes, with mother tearing her daughter away from her father and grandparents who have their own journeys.

From The Paper Boat by Thao Lam

As mother and daughter escape through long grass, hiding from soldiers, they follow a parade of ants in the moonlight to the water's edge. But while they wait for Vietcong patrols to leave, the mother distracts the child by fashioning a paper boat from the wrapping around their food. When their escape boat arrives, the paper boat is left behind but discovered by ants who will begin their own escape by boat.

From The Paper Boat by Thao Lam

The ants endure a multitude of hardships–undoubtedly mirroring what the child and her family bear on their own boat–from limited food and water, to calamitous weather and the capsizing of the boat before making landfall. Even as they help each other, some are lost, before they come together at a new table in a new place.

From the clues in Thao Lam's story, as well as her "Author's Note," it becomes evident that The Paper Boat is based on the author-illustrator's own family history of escape from Vietnam. This tale of migration is laced with trauma and danger and, by telling it through the parallel story about the ants, Thao Lam tells us so much without the reader witnessing the horrors of their fleeing. They, like the ants, come to make a new home, with the child together with both parents and even a new little one–though a photograph with incense on a side table suggests a grandmother who did not survive–in a city teeming with families undoubtedly with some of their own stories of migration.

By creating her story without text, Thao Lam invites the reader to delve into the story and make connections between the two families, one ant and one human, finding the similarities and differences in their plights and the relationships between and within. By using her collage art with images on cut paper layered to create depth and texture, Thao Lam brings us to a table, onto a boat, and into a city. Moreover, by using a limited palette, mostly sombre colours like dark blues and black with splashes of pink and golden for hopeful elements like the sun, the boats and food, Thao Lam makes us see where hope lies. Reassuringly, their new home is filled with the colour of promise.

From The Paper Boat by Thao Lam

Too Young to Escape: Book launch (Brantford, ON)

Join

author of children's picture books, middle-grade and YA novels and non-fiction

Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

and 

Van Ho

her co-author and subject of this 

new middle-grade non-fiction book

for the launch of

Too Young to Escape: A Vietnamese Girl Waits to be Reunited with Her Family

Written by Van Ho with Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Pajama Press
978-1-77278-066-6
152 pp.
Ages 8-12
November 2018

on 

Saturday, December 1, 2018

2:30 - 4:00 p.m.

at

Brantford Public Library

173 Colborne Street

Brantford, ON

 

Read my review posted October 3, 2018 

here on CanLit for LittleCanadians

Too Young to Escape: A Vietnamese Girl Waits to be Reunited with her Family

Written by Van Ho with Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Pajama Press

978-1-77278-066-6

152 pp.

Ages 8-12

November 2018

When Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch co-wrote Adrift at Sea: A Vietnamese Boy's Story of Survival with Tuan Ho, she began a family's story of escape from Vietnam in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and taking of power by the communists. In that picture book, illustrated by Brian Deines, a mother and her two daughters, Loan and Lan, and six-year-old son Tuan escape Vietnam by boat, hopeful of joining father and the eldest daughter Linh in Canada. But there was another story. Because four-year-old Van is left behind.  Too Young to Escape is her story.

In May of 1981, four-year-old Van awakens at 5 a.m. in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to find her mother, older sisters Loan and Lan, and her six-year-old brother Tuan gone. Though it is unusual for Tuan to go with the women to do their early morning work, Van is distracted by her own chores. As guests of their aunt and uncle, Dì and Bác, since her own family lost everything when the communists took over, Van's pre-school work includes cleaning the house and spinning yarn for a weaver to later make the rice sacks Dì and Bác sold. But when her siblings don't show up to school, Van learns from her grandmother, Bà Ngoại, that her mother and siblings are gone. Van is devastated, wondering why she wasn't good enough to go with them, but Bà Ngoại reassures her that they've gone on a dangerous journey and Van's respiratory issues–she has difficulty breathing and often has to clear phlegm from her lungs–would have made it even more hazardous for her and the family.

Sometimes there are no perfect solutions. (pg. 31)

So begins a difficult chapter in little Van's life, slaving away at her aunt and uncle's home, tormented by a policeman's son at school, and feeling the loss of her family, particularly her mother who, she'd thought, should have been there to protect her. Still her Bà Ngoại, though seemingly insensitive to Van's struggles, tries to help Van understand.

Be thankful for what you do have, little one, instead of fretting about what you don't have. (pg. 64)

And Van learns to become "an expert at hiding my sadness" (pg. 67). Finally, they get a heartfelt letter and package from Saskatoon where her parents and four siblings have reunited. Along with some gifts, including clothes that growing Van desperately needs, Van learns that that her parents have submitted applications to bring Van and Bà Ngoại to join them.

It takes over four years before Van and her grandmother are reunited with her family in Canada, a family that "was like a storybook family" (pg. 87), and, though her life in Vietnam is difficult, it is a life with which she is familiar and leaving it is difficult.

Van Ho, who lived this story, tells it through Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch's pen of extraordinary writing which reflects both Van's youthful point of view and her trauma. Her story is a disquieting but it's also uplifting, focusing on Van's resilience.  Told from her perspective, from Van explaining away her family's absence before she learns the reason to her obligation to completing chores many of our culture might deem inappropriate for one so young to finding a friend in a girl less fortunate than herself, Van's story of being left behind is heartbreaking.

Enhancing Van Ho's story with photographs and interviews with her father, Nam Ho, and mother, Phuoc Ho, Too Young to Escape gives a snapshot of a different time and place, one of upheaval and loss, perseverance and endurance, that ends with a reunion and a good life in Canada. It is a story of survival, even if Van Ho was Too Young to Escape.