Analysis: The Happiest Refugee By Anh Do

To me, displacement means to be absent from comfort, relationships, belongings, beliefs, home and freedom. Often this displacement occurs when a person is forced to leave their home and subsequently lose their connections with where they belong, or their place. War, persecution, natural disasters or neglect are some of the reasons that someone might become displaced.

In The Happiest Refugee, the author, Anh Do, expresses his experiences with displacement after his family flees Vietnam in search of refuge in Australia.

Anh Do uses a lot of impersonal language to recall the dehumanising nature of the boat his family escaped Vietnam on. He continuously refers to the passengers as “thirsty human beings,” “thirty-nine pairs of eyes,” and “thirty-nine