“We Should Never Meet”

“We Should Never Meet”

 The novel “We Should Never Meet,” which was written by Aimee Phan, explores the lives changing in Vietnam before the operation of Babylift that removed nearly two thousand children without parents, right before the falling of the Saigon. The stories in the novel are interlinked, showing the scars left due to the war are evident throughout the book. War split characters apart, children became orphans, and there was no purpose of safety for these children to live on. In this study, the main focus is on Mis Lien, a character in the novel “We Should Never Meet” is faced with challenges, the shame of the reality behind her pregnancy knowing that the child is an outcast, and she leaves the child in an orphanage. It is painful to leave a beloved person your blood to unknown forces and life. Desperation and life pressures cause her to leave her unnamed child with strangers, in the orphanage and shows how Lien is contributing to the challenges that orphans face in their lives.

Young women face many ups and downs in their life. Lien was forcefully impregnated during the war in her country as she was working to provide for her family and pull them out of poverty. Older children are forced to separate from their low-income families, going away to search for money and resources to support the people left behind at home. While she is working, she gets pregnant and has no choice but leave the child with strangers. Here, she is facing the same issue of leaving her family-member to pursue the other problems at hand, providing for her family at home. She is feeling shameful, but the situation has no other better option for her. The Vietnamese war left many girls and women with unwanted children because of being raped by American soldiers. They were left to look out and care for these kids in a poverty-stricken land. The kids have no identity to claim, are they Americans or Vietnamese? They do not know what race they belong to, who to say is their parents, and anything to show where they belong or originate from. War is a primary cause of poverty, deaths, and alienation of people from their culture-identity. Miss Lien does not imagine how life will be for her child, and circumstances force her to leave it. Being identified with American origin is an unwanted thing in Vietnamese culture. Therefore, Lien’s child is regarded as an abomination. The Americans had come to provide assistance in the Vietnam war, but they destroyed everything, worsened the situation, and left severe scars in the lives of Vietnamese survivors. They had tried to intervene in a war that was almost losing, with severe effects already taking the better of the left survivors.

The novel “We Should Never Meet” shows that Miss Lien failed to establish a good relationship with her child, as seen from her act of abandoning it at the steps of the orphanage. The kid struggles with a miserable life in the orphanage and grows up to never know who its’ parents are. The writer Phan shows how war results in neglecting ones’ beloved members in search of basic needs or as a result of not being able to provide for them. War affects a whole country, the deaths, loss of parents who should look and provide for their children, and challenges faced throughout their entire lives. In the orphanage, the kids suffered a lot, from squatting for extended times, discipline, the orders that the adults asked them to follow, and more heartbreaking the deaths that occurred. There is no connection with their real families, parents, and relatives to take care of their needs when the children were evacuated from the orphanage and taken to America, and they had to adopt a new culture and forget their place of origin, Vietnam.

As the children moved from one foster home to another in the US, they experienced challenges, especially with their identity. As they become Americanized with western culture, forgetting their original traditions of Vietnam. Lien doesn’t have any notable relationship or connection with her abandoned child. In conclusion, the report explores the effects of war in many countries in the modern world. Children and women become the most affected in these wars, losing identity, battling with sickness, malnutrition, and mistreatment from foster-families. There is a need to manage these effects of war. Setting up facilities with essential needs to meet and support orphans, refugees, and war-survivors. Governments need to stop wars in their countries, fund the facilities supporting the affected people, and to create a conducive environment free from wars.