The long arduous journey to get home is a common story. Homer’s epic poem of Odysseus struggling against the gods and various dangers is arguably the best of such stories. It is still being told and appreciated nearly three millennia after the blind bard sang of Odysseus.
In The Beautiful Country, Binh makes his own odyssey from Vietnam to America . Odysseus’ journey was his attempt to get back to his home and his loving wife. For Binh it is a much different trip – he is hoping to find a home he has never had.
Binh is “bui doi,” (literally “less than dust,” a term used for children fathered by American soldiers during the Vietnam War). He has grown to adulthood in a land where he is considered nothing. People think nothing of insulting him to his face. While his family eats dinner in the house, he waits outside for someone to hand him a bowl of food.
In time he can no longer stay with the family and heads to Saigon to find his mother. Even in the big city, he is easily recognizable as bui doi, and rejected by people because he has “the face of the enemy.” Yet when he finds his mother, he finds a bit of what it means to have a home. But it is short-lived. Soon he must flee and try to make his way to the US (taking a small brother with him) through the dangerous route of the boat people. The only thing he has to go on is a wedding certificate his mother gave him with an address in Houston .
The journey is very much a struggle. Just as Odysseus moved from one ordeal to another, so too does Binh. Storms, refugee camps, fights, immigrant smugglers, semi-slavery, love, betrayal and death all become part of Binh’s experience. The destination is just as problematic as the journey. His father, although he and Binh’s mother were married and in love, suddenly one day just wasn’t there. We don’t know if he was killed or just returned home without his family. If Binh can find him, will his father accept him any more readily after all these years than the rest of the people Binh has known? Will America understand him as his father’s son (and thus American) or only as his mother’s son (Vietnamese)?
Robert Frost wrote:
'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.'
For Binh, all his life there has been no place where “they have to take you in.” In Binh’s case, it is not because of anything he has done, but just because of how he was born. His great odyssey is not just from one land to another – it is a searching for a place to belong.
Perhaps the stories that have been told of the journeys home, from The Odyssey to The Beautiful Country, stir us because there is a sense in which that struggle to find a home – a place where they take you in – is a universal story.
Many people feel alienated – without a place. Perhaps because of their skin, their background, their sexual orientation, their looks, a physical handicap or any of a number of other reasons, people have often been excluded or at best set off to the side (as Binh was with his family). Yet they yearn for home. They need home. Home is a place of safety, of love, of nurture – of belonging.
The eventual outcome of Binh’s odyssey is poignant and touching. This is a journey that for all its tribulations, he had to make to discover himself and to know where home was.
We also journey in our lives to find our true home. I hope you have a safe, but fulfilling trip.
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