Eleven-year-old Bao Dang remembers watching in horror four years earlier as Communist soldiers dragged his parents from their home.
Now an orphan, he begins a journey to escape the oppressive government of South Vietnam.
The owner of a small boat, paid in gold, smuggles Bao and his cousin, Binh Pham , down the Saigon River at night to the South China Sea, where he and over one hundred other boat people pack into a trawler designed to hold fewer than thirty.
For six days, they f.