The Refugees

The Refugees is rooted in the experiences of victims of the Vietnam War, stemming from the refugee crisis that it spawned. The Vietnam War was a decades-long conflict, beginning around 1954 and ending in 1975 with the fall of Saigon. Vietnam was colonized by the French in the 1800s; along with parts of modern Laos and Cambodia, it formed the colonial territory known as French Indochina. France occupied Vietnam for more than six decades, and Japan invaded Vietnam before and during World War II under the guise of aiding their war effort against China. Japan left much of the country’s administration to the diminished French colonial government. Resistance against both Japanese and French occupation grew during this time under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh resistance, aided by the United States, which had not yet entered World War II but opposed Japanese expansion. Evidence of French colonialism is still present in modern Vietnamese culture, from food to linguistics; modern, written Vietnamese is a Romanized version of the language as opposed to Chữ Nôm, the precolonial script based on Chinese characters. Older characters in The Exiles, particularly Professor Khanh in “I’d Love You to Want Me,” sometimes refer to Vietnamese cities by their French colonial names.