Boat People [Paperback]

Mary Gardner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1996

Tough, optimistic, yet still scarred by memories of escape and loss--by their traumatic passage by boat out of Vietnam to freedom--the characters in this deeply felt novel seek an ever elusive balance between their old world and their new home on the Texas coast. Boat People was the winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for the Novel in 1993.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Vietnamese immigrants struggle with the burdens of faraway loved ones, unfamiliar customs and the scars of their flight from home in this evocative novel set in Galveston, Tex. Hai Truong is possessed by a spirit, a "ghost husband" who will not let her sleep or eat. While she is hospitalized, her daughter, Linh Nguyen, takes on adult responsibilities for her father, a fisherman, and her two younger siblings, even as she works to excel in school. Meanwhile, Linh's older girlfriend, Trang Luu, living with an aunt and uncle who blame her for their son's death, and troubled by the mystery of her unknown, American father, manages to succeed academically and be recruited by a private Catholic school; she also develops a crush on Lang Nguyen, an intern at the local hospital who, despite his accomplishments, remains bewildered by the American way of life. Gardner (Milkweed; Keeping Warm), who compares the struggle of Vietnamese immigrants to that of African Americans, fills her story with atmospheric details of Vietnamese culture and tradition, at the same time illuminating the uneasy ethnic mix of Galveston's lower-class community. Some readers may tire of the brief staccato sentences meant to convey her characters' disjointed lives and their lack of familiarity with the English language, but Gardner succeeds in communicating the bewilderment and anguish that at times overwhelm people torn from their cultural heritage and forced to struggle in a hostile environment.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Gardner (Milkweed, Papier-Mache, 1993) pens a sympathetic portrait of the Vietnamese refugee community in Galveston, Texas, introducing a variety of characters: Dr. Lang Nguyen, a medical resident from an upper-class family; Hai Truong, who is haunted by "the ghost husband in her head"; Hai's daughter Linh, who must cope with her mother's hospitalizations; and Trang, who is searching for the American father she never knew. Gardner vividly demonstrates the myriad difficulties faced by newcomers to America, movingly describing the sociology-language difficulties, culture clashes, and racism, both implicit and explicit-of a multiracial society. As a novel, however, this work is less successful because too many characters and too many plot lines overwhelm the casual reader. Winner of a 1993 Associated Writing Programs award, Boat People is a good purchase for libraries interested in expanding their fiction holdings in this area. -Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 277 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (December 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820318817
• ISBN-13: 978-0820318813
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,148,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Offensive, January 19, 2012

By 

TruthSeqr - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boat People (Paperback)

I purchased this book to learn more about the Vietnamese "boat people" because I have friends who endured unspeakable hardships on their journey from Vietnam to the United States and I wanted to understand why they left, how they survived, how they felt about their experiences, and how they were treated once they came to America from their point of view.

I was hoping to find realistic, possibly first-hand narratives of people who had actually made the journey. Although Gardner's book enlightened me to some aspects of the Vietnamese-American experience, I thought it was a very ethnocentric account from the white American perspective and very different from first-hand accounts I've read on the internet.

I found several things offensive about her book. First of all, I felt that she spoke patronizingly about the Vietnamese people in her story as if even the adults were childlike and "less than" the Caucasians. She insinuates that incest and wife-battering were common among the immigrants - I sincerely hope that isn't true. Secondly, I found Gardner's extensive use of the n-word offensive and disrespectful to African-Americans. I found it very disturbing that Gardner, a teacher and social worker, could so easily use pejorative language, as if it were the most natural way to talk about other human beings.

I'm very surprised that the book won the Associated Writing Programs award. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the "boat people" experience from the first-hand perspective.

1.0 out of 5 stars The cover says it all, October 10, 2001

By 

Sankhya (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boat People (Paperback)

Yes, you can judge some books by their covers, and this is one of them. The title on the cover, depicted in lower case with Vietnamese diacritics over the letters, exhibits a shocking insensitivity to Vietnamese language and culture. The novel is no better. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with Vietnamese people--particularly those who came to the United States--will not recognize the characters. Apparently, the author did not take advantage of her work as a refugee coordinator to get to know these people in any depth. Their depiction is so shallow as to be insulting.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable, March 24, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Boat People: A Novel (Hardcover)

In recent years, I have developed an interest in Asian culture, particularly in the customs and mysteries of the Vietnamese people. Considering this, it was not surprising to me that I should enjoy Boat People as much as I did. The author, Mary Gardner, injects her story with compassion and respect for a group of people set adrift in a peregrine and bewildering land. Mrs. Gardner's five years as a social worker for a group of Vietnamese immigrants in Galveston are obvious here, from her knowledge of these people and their tribulations.

The story involves Hai Truong, a malnourished, hospitalized Vietnamese refugee, and her family, who take up residence in Galveston, Texas. Events in the lives of this family are interspersed among chapters detailing the experiences of Dr. Lang Nguyen, another refugee who is mystified by some aspects of American culture, and of Azelita Simpson, an African American volunteer at a local hospital who also works at an elementary school, where she observes the many problems involving the Vietnamese students and their difficulty in acclimating to America. She soon finds herself immersed in the lives of several Vietnamese youths, who make her a gift of some shrimp caught on their father's boat. While Azelita struggles to understand her new charges, Lang finds his attentions diverted by Shirley, a friendly, if culturally ignorant nurse.

This was a marvelously crafted, engrossing book. It deserved the awards and accolades that it received. It would be a shame if this were to be taken out of print.