The Refugee Experience In Inside Out & Back Again

The Refugee Experience “Today, more than 14 million men, women, and children have been forced to flee their homes, towns, and countries because they are afraid to stay”(Refugees: Who, Where, Why). These people are called refugees, and the main reason that causes them to leave is war. Ha, the main character from the novel Inside Out & Back Again, has to go through the same thing, fleeing South Vietnam during the Vietnam War with her family and trying to find a new home in America. Refugees, as well as Ha from Inside Out & Back Again, have to live through numerous traumatic experiences, including having to leave family and friends.
To begin with, refugees may have a lot of trauma, mainly from living in a warzone or losing loved ones. For example,

During Til Gurung's speech to students about his experiences and why he had to leave his country, he says, “We suffered in our country Bhutan because we did not speak the language or practice the religion or culture of the royal family. Many of us were tortured and imprisoned”(Til Gurung). In this excerpt, Til Gurung is talking about his community’s struggles in their country. Refugees commonly have to deal with things like discrimination and prosecution from their country of origin and the country of asylum that they have escaped to, which Ha also experiences. A country of asylum is a country that accepts refugees and allows them the right to be treated the same as legal residents as well as civil rights, medical care, and schooling (Refugees: Who, Where, Why). This leads back to Ha because in the poem Pancake Face, Ha gets bullied by her classmates because of her appearance and because she didn't dress up for Halloween. “By the end of school he yells an answer: She should be a pancake. She has a pancake face…Tears gush because I can’t make myself explain a pancake is very very flat,”(196-197). Ha isn’t used to being bullied especially because of her features, since in Vietnam the people look similar to her. She must handle being in a new place with a new language as well as being picked on, which makes it very hard for her to