What We All Long For

Tuyen and the others return from the celebrations. While Carla and Oku head into Carla’s apartment to smoke up, Tuyen retreats into her own studio to develop her photographs, as the image of her brother and the mystery man nags her. As she sets up, she thinks about a pair of her parents’ photographs, one of the family happy, prior to leaving Vietnam, the other taken just before leaving the camp in Hong Kong, all of them tense and grim. Quy had been hidden under his mother’s dress in the first photograph, and in the second, he was missing. Cam had been reluctant to leave the camp, hoping to hold out just a little longer, but eventually they had to leave.

As she continues to develop the photographs, she wonders about their decision to leave. She had never sensed political opposition from her parents living in Canada, and her parents had not been political people from what she could tell back in Vietnam, either, even if they were part of a potentially vulnerable middle class. They were “ordinary people living an ordinary life who were suddenly caught, the way war catches anyone, without bearings; the way war dismantles all sensibility except fear” (225).