The year the novel's events take place is not specifically stated. However, the New (after April 30, 1975) Communist Government is in power and has worked its reforming way down to the southern tip of the Mekong Delta region, to a small (nameless) village that has been effectively hidden—and thus shielded from most of the war—by a thick jungle forest.

The Boat People of this story are clearly not from the group historians call the "first wave" of American-connected refugees who left Vietnam in the last days of the war; nor are they from the "second wave" of Vietnamese migrating northward into China three years later. Rather, they seem to be part of a 1978-1979 "third wave" of disenchanted or fearful people who escaped in fragile boats that set desperate sail across the South China Sea for Thailand and Malaysia.

By this time, however, most Southeast...