Nguyen, a 1.5 generation Vietnamese Australian, arrived in Australia as a child refugee with her family. Her father had been South Vietnam's last Ambassador to Japan before the fall of Saigon and also a negotiator at the Paris peace talks.
A graduate of the University of Melbourne and Oxford University, Nguyen was awarded the Professor Alan Rowland Chisholm Memorial Prize and the Dwight Final Examination Prize at Melbourne, and won a Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Award to do her doctorate at Oxford. She specialised in the field of Vietnamese Francophone Literature and in 2003 published Vietnamese Voices : Gender and Cultural Identity in the Vietnamese Francophone Novel. On returning to Australia, Nguyen taught French at the Universities of Adelaide and Newcastle before taking up an ARC Fellowship at Melbourne University which resulted in the publication of her Voyage of Hope.
Voyage of Hope : Vietnamese Australian Women's Narratives
Altona
:
Common Ground Publishing
,
2005
Z1230951
2005
multi chapter work
biography
Voyage of Hope explores the experiences and journeys of twelve Vietnamese women who arrived in Australia as part of the massive exodus of refugees from Vietnam following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. It reveals women's memories of life in Vietnam during the French colonial period and after, throughout the war and its aftermath, and what motivated them to leave their homeland and embark on an often dangerous journey to freedom - a voyage of hope that eventually led them to a new life in Australia.
