A survivor now living in Canada, a writer recounts, on a level of men and women, the collective tragedy. His novel becomes a literary act as much as a gesture of memory, at a time when Vietnam is embarking on a process of reconciliation.
The publication in June 2025 of the novel Thuyền by Nguyen Duc Tùng, published by Éditions des Femmes (Vietnam), marks a literary and memorial turning point in the Vietnamese publishing landscape. With 2,000 copies sold in just six days, the work immediately established itself as an editorial phenomenon unanimously praised by critics.
Beyond this success, Thuyền striking with the force of his words. It gives voice to a long-repressed memory – that of boat peoplethese hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who fled their country after 1975. Carried by the personal experience of the author, himself a survivor and now living in Canada, this novel becomes a literary act as much as a gesture of memory, a crossing between past and present, between individual pain and collective history.
Pivotal moment
The exceptional welcome of Thuyền reveals a deep yearning for truth and recognition within Vietnamese society. For decades, the story of the boat people remained a taboo subject, shrouded in silence. Several reasons can explain this: the political complexity of the post-war period, the desire for national unity eclipsing past divisions and, undoubtedly, a form of shame or pain in the face of this mass exodus.
Thuyền appears at a pivotal moment. Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War and the unification of the country, the country is engaged in a long process of reconciliation and bringing together its compatriots scattered across the world. In this context, the publication of Thuyền is a bold move by Nguyen Duc Tùng and Éditions des Femmes – a hand extended to those who have suffered and been forgotten for a long time.
Those who died of hunger and thirst. (…) Those who were hit in the temple with oars, stabbed repeatedly in the stomach with cutters, those who were shot in the chest. Those who died instantly. Those who died after long days of agony. Those who remained disabled for life. Those whose bodies were washed up on the beaches, floating, their hair and mouths full of sand. I saw the human suffering, the despair of my people, I heard the cries. (pg. 294)
The main character, a young man, accompanied by his fiancée Liên Hương and around 150 other people, embarks on a desperate quest for freedom. The ordeals endured at sea are depicted with heartbreaking precision: famine, storms, damage and, above all, the haunting of Thai pirates. These attacks, described without concession, reveal the incredible brutality of the aggressors – thefts, rapes, acts of unspeakable cruelty: shooting the first protester, throwing people overboard, gang-raping women and girls. The death of Liên Hương, throwing himself into the sea to escape the rape and preserve his dignity, becomes a tipping point in the novel, a symbol of the horror experienced and the depth of the trauma.
The essentials of Thuyền lies in its unique way of approaching the memory of the boat people. Nguyen Duc Tùng, himself a former boat people exiled in Canada, infuses his story with authenticity and remarkable psychological depth. It is not a simple factual reconstruction, but a sensory and emotional immersion in the experience of boat refugees, where diffuse pain, heavy silences and the complexity of moral dilemmas in the face of extremes are expressed.
Its narrative construction is fragmentary. Rather than a chronological progression, the novel adopts the jolting rhythm of traumatic memory – intertwined memories, bursts of thought, interior monologues, philosophical reflections. Each of the chapters is like an independent essay and, yet, all are articulated into a “ mental maze » where repression, obsession and the fear of uprooting are inscribed.
A request for memory
The success of Thuyền is all the more remarkable as it is the first work to address the vicissitudes of the boat people in such a frontal and integral manner. In the literature of exile, if previous novels have touched on this painful subject, none have confronted it with such magnitude.
Let us cite, without exhaustiveness, among the authors of the diaspora, Viet Thanh Nguyen with The Sympathizer (Pulitzer Prize) which, although not exclusively about boat people, explores post-war trauma and the identity of Vietnamese refugees. Likewise, Kim Thúy in Ru offers poignant fragments of the boat people experience through the prism of memory and exile. On the side of Western authors, Philippe Claudel, with Mr. Linh’s Little Daughterdepicts the uprooting and solitude of an old refugee man, while Cécile Pin, in Wandering Souls (Wandering Souls), follows the heartbreaking journey of a family fleeing Vietnam.
Commercial success, critical unanimity and popular enthusiasm are the symptoms of an unsatisfied demand for memory, of a deep need to fill a gaping hole in post-Vietnam War history (1980s-1990s). This phenomenon underlines the importance of finally giving a full and complete voice to this tragic page of Vietnamese history, which has remained in the shadows for too long. It also reveals the emergence of a new generation of readers, more open, more curious, eager to understand all facets of their history, including the most painful.
The strength of the novel lies in its ability to transform an experience that is both intimate and collective into a literary work. By offering a space for reflection to direct witnesses of these events, the story also opens a path for subsequent generations, allowing them to reconnect with a family and national heritage that has long been hidden. Thuyền thus stands out as an essential book for intergenerational transmission. As Paul Ricoeur pointed out, the story is the “ guardian of memory », the vector by which a community, as well as an individual, represents its past and transmits it.
When literature outpaces history
The power of Thuyền lies undoubtedly in his ability to fuse history and literature, transcending the bare facts to explore the human and emotional dimensions of the Vietnamese exodus by sea.
During the first years, despite the indescribable pain, I still did not know the extent of the price to pay for this great departure. (…) The tragedy of choice lies in this eternal uncertainty: I will never know if my decision was the right one or the wrong one, nor towards what destiny it would lead me (p. 321).
By delving into the psyche of characters faced with a choice to break with their past, a resonance can be established with the emblematic work of Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In both novels, the protagonists – the “ I » by Tùng and Tomas at Kundera – find themselves faced with the same impulse to tear themselves away from their previous existence to embrace another life. For Tomas, it is the confrontation with the existential dilemma and the relativity of choices in an oppressive political context. ; for Tùng’s protagonist, it is the desperate decision to flee oppression and seek freedom.
If the situations differ in their origins – one existential and philosophical, the other anchored in a struggle for physical survival – they converge in the exploration of the complexity of the human being faced with determining choices. Like Kundera who anchors his reflections in the experiences of his characters, Nguyen Duc Tùng explores the dizziness of freedom, the shattering of identity and the despair of those who have no possible certainty. Writing then becomes the place where the unspeakable takes shape.
This gap between the intimate narrative and the historical narrative was highlighted during a recent round table in Hanoi devoted to the book. Faced with the moderator’s question, “ doesn’t your story come after our literature? ? “, the historian Dương Trung Quốc replied : “ Alas, the backwardness of history is precisely the fertile ground where literature can flourish freely and create. » This response highlights the crucial role that Thuyền : in the absence of an official discourse on the exodus, it is literature which takes over. It creates a space of testimony and dignity, fills the silences. And reinscribes individual trajectories in the national narrative.