Ocean Vuong
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Ocean Vuong is an American poet, essayist, novelist and photographer. His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Fellowship the same year. He is t
Vuong in 2019
Reading at the Library of Congress, 2015
Operation Babylift
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Operation Babylift was a mass evacuation of children from South Vietnam to the United States and other Western countries at end of the Vietnam War, in April 1975. Over 3,300 infants and children were
Ocean Vuong
…forces; his grandmother then placed his mother and her sisters in separate orphanages. As daughters of a US serviceman, they would have qualified for Operation Babylift, a program that evacuated children to the United States for adoption. Vuong's mother gave birth to him at 18, already working in a hair salon in Saigon…
A Babylift flight arrives at San Francisco, 5 April 1975
A pair of well-worn baby shoes worn by an orphan evacuated from Vietnam during Operation Babylift