9 October 2017
There's a photograph on the jacket of Ocean Vuong's debut poetry collection of a small boy sitting on a wooden bench. Encircled by the arms of two women in summery cottons, he gazes steadily at the camera.
The elegance is deceptive: it was taken when the family were living in poverty in a refugee camp in the Philippines, en route for the US, after being expelled from Vietnam. Vuong, the only child in the three-generation exodus, was two years old. A fellow refugee was bartering photographs for food. "That picture cost my family three tins of rice, according to my mother," he says. "Each of us gave up our ration just to be seen."
