In the program notes to his new drama, "Trial by Water," the playwright Qui Nguyen recounts a sto... Poignant Echoes In a Leaky

Submitted by admin on Mon, 2006-03-27 09:00. ::

In the program notes to his new drama, "Trial by Water," the playwright Qui Nguyen recounts a story from his boyhood. In 1988, he arrived at the Little Rock airport with his family to pick up his 10-year-old cousin, a refugee from Vietnam, and found himself in a crush of clamoring photographers.

The cousin, Hung Tran, was but one of the thousands of so-called "boat people" who fled Vietnam rickety fishing boats, but this boy had made the crossing under particularly gruesome conditions. Of the 110 desperate, starving passengers stranded aboard the broken-down Bolinao in the South China Sea, only 52, including Hung, survived. A few months later, Hung would tell his cousin he thought his soul was dead.

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