Refugees In Inside Out And Back Again

All around the world, there are countless refugees. Refugees are people who have to flee their country for reasons such as ongoing conflict, violence, and war. Inside Out & Back Again, is a novel about a girl named Ha and her perspective while living through the Vietnam War as a refugee. In the title Inside Out & Back Again, 'inside out’ and ‘back again’ relate to the experiences shared by all refugees. When a person becomes a refugee they feel ‘inside out’ because their whole life has been flipped around, and at a point, they don’t know where they belong. They come ‘back again’ to that feeling of having tragedy in their life. Refugees can connect to Ha’s experience which deals with new challenges, facing yourself, overcoming emotions, and

This is what Ha and her family had to go through, which is relatively similar to other refugees. The article, Escape from Vietnam: A Refugee’s Story of the American Dream states, “All of us on that boat, and hundreds of thousands of others, fled for the same reason: to escape the oppression of the communist regime.” They had to flee Vietnam due to the communist taking over, Ha and her family also had to do the same thing. In the novel, Inside Out & Back Again the poem Inside Out on page 20 states, “The war is coming closer to home.” also the poem, Current News on page 40 states, “But when we keep talking about how close the Communists have gotten to Saigon…” Both of these quotes tell us that the war is coming closer to Ha’s home and that the Communists are taking over, leading them to evacuate Vietnam. The poem One Mat Each in the novel, on page 102 states, “Bodies cram every centimeter below deck, then every centimeter on deck. Everyone knows the ship could sink, unable to hold the piles of bodies that keep crawling on like raging ants from a disrupted nest.” Which is very similar to the other refugee experience. Their lives have been turned ‘inside out’ because it doesn’t happen to them on a normal day, everything is happening so fast. War is something that changes a person's life, it changes theirs