The humidity clung to our faces on that hot summer afternoon. My cousin and I stared at the mountains in the distance, comparing the landscape to the one in a photo taken more than 40 years earlier. It was here, on a quiet beach in southern Thailand, that our parents had landed one morning after leaving Vietnam by boat. No evidence of their arrival remained on the beach, and the pagoda that my mother remembers seeing was no longer there. But the mountains have stayed.

My gaze turned to the sea. The gentle ripples in the water masked the roaring waves from decades earlier, which had propelled my family’s leaky boat to its final destination. The horizon looked empty and flat, but beyond where the eye could see was Vietnam. A few months earlier, I had visited where my family had left the country, unable to fathom how they survived five days on a riverboat that was just a tiny speck in the sea. But now, standing on the beach in Pak Tako with the sand seeping between my toes, I was on the other side. Had my family been unsuccessful crossing the Gulf of Thailand, where they were attacked by pirates who stole their engines, I would not be alive today.