Australia seems divided over boat people. There are those who condemn them as immoral, threatening and un-Australian. Accordingly we have to 'Stop' and perhaps even 'Bomb the Boats!' (as was emblazoned on the T-shirts of two anti-boat people protesters).
Others view boat people as the ultimate underdogs, tortured souls who have been made more worthy by their suffering. The bumper stickers and placards of these advocates proclaim, 'Refugees Welcome!'
Both accounts deserve careful scrutiny. Boat people are, after all, people. There are good and not so good ones; none of them are angels or devils. However because they are human, they are also marked by experience. I like to refer to this legacy of persecution, hardship and displacement as 'refugeeness'.
While the notion of refugeeness is broadly applicable, I first observed it close to home. My parents' earliest memories are of being terrorised by French and Viet Minh forces during the First Indochinese War. They endured poverty and disease. Both were torn away from their homes and loved ones by war.
But these experiences were not all negative. From their dislocation Mum and Dad fashioned radical perspectives on the world. They came to believe that the West offered ideas and technologies that could be fruitfully adopted in and for Vietnam.
My father would harbour a modern sense of can-do-ism and irreverence for tradition throughout his life. It was his vision of a new and better world along with the conviction that his sons had no future in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, that drove us on to that horribly overcrowded boat in 1979.
Mum and Dad's refugeeness — their capacity to make something practical out of practically nothing — also proved valuable after we escaped. During our ordeal in a Malaysian refugee camp they assembled lamps out of loose threads and cans, sieved rice flour using mosquito nets, and maintained our hut with a knife and spoon (both of which are still in the cutlery draw).
Yet my parents' victories were by no means absolute. The stress of secretly organising our escape, of knowing that one wrong move or twist of fate could lead to our demise, also had a lasting impact. To this day they have an instinctive distrust of the state that transcends