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Only The Heart Themes

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Freedom
Hi, everyone. Today I am talking about at this year’s Youth Speaks for Australia conference. The challenges that refugee families are facing are very topical now and this seminar explores the novel Only the Heart by Brian Caswell and David Chiem. The authors have created this novel to draw attention to the experiences of refugee families and their incredible quest for freedom. I will talk about the refugee camp; Mai’s commit suicide and Linh in relation to the theme setting, plot and character.

Told by multiple narrators, this novel describes the journey of a family escaping from their hometown on boats and experiencing a lot of difficulties before they arrive in Australia. For example, the encounter with the Thai pirates costs a family …show more content…

“She is weightless. She is free. She is smiling as she opens herself to the waters and breathes in eternity” Mai is one of the bravest characters in this story. She sacrifices herself to save her own daughter and she is not able to be free physically as the rest of the family is. But she attains the eternal freedom through commit suicide and it ends her painful experiences as a sex slave to the Thai pirate.
Linh, the “shy flower” was a close friend of Toan and the younger daughter of Mai, she inherited her mother’s personality of being strong. She did not cry when her mother was taken away. Although she felt sick travelling, she made it all the way to Australia with constant vomiting on a boat, a plane or a train.Linh’s strong personality helps her get freedom in spite of all the suffer.

Only the heart describes the extraordinary efforts of Vietnamese immigrants in search of a better life and freedom. They are confronted by many extreme situations. Mai, who kills herself after being a sex slave to get her freedom. The rest of the family stays on a refugee camp waiting and fighting for the chance to be taken to a free land by other countries. Freedom is the dream that keeps the family, work hard to

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