"I'll be there in five minutes," Thi says.
If you spend any time around college students, you expect this kind of phone call--and you know it really means 15 minutes, maybe 20. But sure enough, five minutes later, I spot Thi hustling up the sidewalk from UCLA's main library, a stuffed messenger bag swinging at her side. She is wearing dark, low-cut jeans, retro sneakers and a trim, arty T-shirt with big aviators hanging from the collar. "Hey," she says, a little out of breath. She is pretty and record-store cool, with heavy black hair that falls across her eyes.
Thi is a senior now, which means she spends a lot of time hustling across campus. She has to decide on a subject for her documentary film class, finish a deep stack of books, find time for clubs and volunteer work, make some headway on her thesis (examining the concept album as a narrative form) and figure out what to do with her life once she graduates. Maybe a PhD in English? Or in education? An involuntary wince says it all: Can't we talk about something else? Just thinking about the question stresses her out, typical for a UCLA senior on a warm fall afternoon.
But Thi is not a typical college senior. Only a few students on campus see the kind of uncertainty she does when they look ahead to graduation. These students--Thi, Martha and about two dozen other confidants in an unlikely campus club--share a secret. It is the kind of secret that has roiled Congress this session, that has led hundreds of thousands of protesters to march on downtown Los Angeles and across the country, and that pokes at a fundamental question: What does it mean to be American?
Thi's secret is older than she is, and for most of her life, she barely understood it. It took her nearly 20 years to figure out what was set in motion the night her father took off his glasses so he could pass as a poor farmer, and shuffled, squinting, to the bank of the Saigon River in Vietnam. There he met a fisherman, who helped him into a damp, dark space hidden beneath the floor of his tiny boat. As he lay on his back, squeezed between two other men, the fisherman set out for a bigger boat, bound for international waters. Thi's father still has no idea where that boat was meant to take him. Getting out was good enough. And out was as far as the ship got. After a week of violent winds and nauseating swells stranded them at sea, a huge German navy vessel appeared, and its crew helped Thi's father and the other refugees aboard.
