Flashbacks illuminate her steadily accumulating losses in Vietnam but also paint her as a young girl with a love of National Geographic magazines and dreams of the American West. Outwardly all sharp angles and fierce determination, inwardly filled with love, longing, and grief, she is a heroine who elicits sympathy but resists pity. This is a new angle on refugee stories, where the focus is more often simply the wrenching departure or the establishment of a new life Hằng has survived that departure and a savage pirate attack that left her mother dead and herself covered with scars, and her main goal now is the reconnection to the one piece remaining of her old existence. Hằng is devastated but unflagging, and she and LeeRoy are taken on as labor at the ranch, where she works her way through a summer of getting closer to her brother and negotiating her past and her present.

She finds a helper/patsy/driver in LeeRoy, a young guy determined to be a cowboy despite his academic upbringing, and together they end up at a ranch in Amarillo, where Hằng’s now eleven-year-old brother lives but doesn’t remember her and wants nothing to do with her. Hằng never would have crossed the sea on a rotting fishing boat if he weren’t waiting for her.” So thinks eighteen-year-old Hằng, who arrives at her uncle’s house in Texas in 1981 after fleeing Vietnam and within a day heads out to find that younger brother, Linh, who’d been babylifted out of Vietnam years earlier. Grandmother gone, Father gone, mother gone. “Her brother is the only person left from her youth.

Butterfly Yellow by Thanhhà Lại