Resilience In Anh's Book 'The Happiest Refugee'

Resilience: (noun) The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.

Resilience is having the motive to go through hard times and ‘bounce back’ from them and learnt how to deal with certain situations. To be resilient you must have a positive point of view on life. Anh’s book ‘The happiest refugee’ He was born into a 1970’s Vietnam, He and his family were forced to leave their country due to seeking safety and freedom from war. Anh uses resilience through his comedic, selfless actions. Resilience has allowed Anh to improve the quality of his life, and the lives of those around him.

Throughout the book, Anh continually describes the way in which he was taught to cope with difficulties in life by using humour to enlighten tough situations. To maintain being resilient is very hard especially for Anh due to the fact he grew up around racism. When Anh got a gig in a small town he was in a room filled with Vietnam war veterans. The

Anh describes in the book how “…when you’d been shot at by pirates and faced starvation on a leaky boat, these little things really do seem trivial.” (Do, 2010, pg 67). When Anh ran for school captain in Year 6 and lost, his family still celebrated, and his mother told him that it didn’t matter because he was still important.

The freedom to try difficult yet rewarding things combined with knowledge that it did not matter if they failed or succeeded allowed the boys to deal with setbacks and motivated them to try again. Anh’s parents had such positive reaction to failure. After running for school captain, Anh proved his resilience by celebrating his effort and the student who won, rather than getting sad or angry because he lost. He simply had a go. However, this gave them the opportunity to get perspective on what really does and doesn’t