Born: 1942,
Washington, DC
Nationality: American
Personal
Born September 8, 1942, in Washington, DC; daughter of John Carter (a public
servant in the U.S. Department of Commerce) and Mary (a writer; maiden name,
Newlin) Borton.
Education
Attended University of Hawaii, 1962; Mount Holyoke College, A.B., 1964;
attended University of Pennsylvania, 1964-65, Temple University, 1967, Ohio
University, 1972, 1975, and 1979, and Goddard College, 1979.
Interests
Reading, especially texts in Vietnamese.
Career
Westtown School, Westtown, PA, teacher of mathematics, 1964-67; Friends
School, Philadelphia, PA, teacher of history, 1967-68; Overseas Refugee
Program of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Philadelphia, PA,
assistant director, 1968-69; Quaker Service (physical rehabilitation center),
Quang Ngai, Vietnam, assistant director, 1969-71; freelance writer and
photographer, 1972--; Careline, Inc., Athens, OH, executive director, 1975-77;
Pulau Bidong Refugee Camp, West Malaysia, health administrator for the Red
Cross, 1980. Beacon School for Children with Mental Retardation and
Developmental Disabilities, Athens, OH, bus driver, 1972--; works in home
restoration, 1972--; B. Dalton Bookstore, Athens, OH, clerk, 1985-88; Quaker
Service--Vietnam, Hanoi, Vietnam, interim director, 1990-91, field director,
1993--. Independent radio producer, 1987--; columnist for Akron Beacon
Journal, Akron, OH, 1989--; commentator for Sunday Weekend Edition,
National Public Radio, 1990--; affiliated with Faculty Writers' Workshop at
the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, University of
Massachusetts, Boston, summers, 1993 and 1994.
Memberships
PEN, Authors Guild, Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators,
Association of Asian Scholars, National Association of Columnists.
Sidelights
"The book ... had dogged me for years," wrote Lady Borton (her real
name, not a title) in the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly. "The
book" is her own Sensing the Enemy: An American Woman among the Boat
People of Vietnam, the culmination of a decade-long odyssey that began in
1969, when Borton witnessed the ravages of the Vietnam conflict while working
at an American Friends (Quaker) rehabilitation hospital in Quang Ngai.
Throughout the 1970s, Borton tried to record her experiences with the
Vietnamese people, first in journal form, then as a novel. She abandoned the
effort in the face of what she called "my inability to recreate on paper
the Vietnamese who had touched me."
Then in 1980 she accepted a position as a Red Cross health administrator at
the Pulau Bidong Refugee Camp in West Malaysia. For six months she lived and
worked with approximately thirteen thousand Vietnamese "boat
people"--refugees who had fled Vietnam in ramshackle boats--on a barren
volcanic island that, she says, was no bigger than her farm in southeastern
Ohio. Her experience there finally broke the logjam: "Life on Bidong
clawed at me with such intensity," she remembered in the Mount Holyoke
Alumnae Quarterly, "that I could process it only by writing."
The journal she kept at Bidong eventually became Sensing the Enemy.
Critics have noted that what distinguishes Borton's book from many other
first-person accounts of Vietnam written by Westerners is, first, that the
author looks at the tragedy of Vietnam from the perspective of the Vietnamese.
"For years," Borton wrote in the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly,
"I had been haunted by the perception that few Americans knew [the]
Vietnamese except as victims, underlings, pimps and prostitutes." Second,
Borton examines no political views or ideologies-- she takes no interest in
why the refugees she came to know had left Vietnam, nor does she explore the
causes or the morality of the war there. Her goal simply is to record life in
the camp, with its seemingly endless problems: disease, rats, monsoons,
robberies, prostitution, erratic deliveries of United Nations rations, and the
scores, if not hundreds, of unannounced refugees who arrived each day. In the New
York Times Book Review, Henry Kamm found that "in artless words that
stem from compassion, Miss Borton illuminates the refugee experience.... She
illustrates the simple nobility of goals and the exceptional resources of
spirit and determination that the refugees bring with them as their principal
capital."
Borton continued her study of the Vietnamese people with After Sorrow:
An American among the Vietnamese. "This book," the author told CA,
"introduces the reader to the people who stayed in the country after the
war. To my knowledge, I'm the only foreigner who has lived among the different
sides in the war--I was in both South and North Vietnam during the war, and
among boat people and former Vietcong (guerrilla members of the Vietnamese
communist movement) southerners since. I continue to be haunted and, yes,
driven to illuminate the pain that unites us all.
"For years I was the only foreigner whom the Vietnamese allowed to
live in a village with a family. This was quite extraordinary, given that
Vietnamese officials knew I'd written a book (Sensing the Enemy) that
the boat people find empathetic. But perhaps that speaks to the power of
stories to heal. I worked on After Sorrow for more than ten years. It
took more than three years to secure permission; I've been staying in the
villages for a subsequent seven.
"My visits began during the period of collectivization, before the
opening known here as doi moi, or 'renovation.' I was also among the
first dozen Americans living in Hanoi. Although I did not set out to do this, After
Sorrow also records from the inside, as they happened, the incredible
changes that have transformed Vietnam. If I could have a wish for this book,
it would be that readers feel the warmth and friendship toward Vietnamese that
they, scarred from the war, have shown me."
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copyright by Gale Research.
