“What’s your name?”
“Viet”
“Viet?”
“Yes!”
“It’s a boy’s name!”
“No. My mom said it’s not. It a country’s name”

*

I gave the young boat-rower some riels, and asked her to take me home. Actually, it is one of the boat-houses, within the Chong Kneas Vietnamese Floating Community at the north end of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Great Lake.

I met Viet’s parents. They told me they were having her late, and Viet is the only child. During pregnancy, the lady made up her mind to have the name for their long-waiting child as “Viet”, hopefully once grown up, their kid would remember the country where the family has root from. Currently, they are Cambodian citizens, eating the Vietnamese foods, speaking dual languages, and always claiming that they are Vietnamese, even though they don’t have a legal document to prove, and Vietnamese Embassy or Consulate have done nothing for them. These human beings still exist as the term in dictionary exists: the displaced citizens.