North American news chronicled stories on "boat people" until attention spans wore out, though the Vietnamese horror continued.
Bloated bodies not consumed by the wilderness ended up floating into Chinese, Thailand, Cambodian, Malaysian, and Philippine beaches.
Coastline is the true story of a young woman's passage to America which embodies a rich and tragic history of Viet Nam. Her struggle may be the most exceptional and amazing story of survival by all standards. Each one of the hundreds of thousands who landed on different shores between 1975 and 1984 have a story, but bitter reality is that a third of the refugees disappeared. Over half a million people perished in the exodus. Some Vietnamese believe the numbers were much greater and the tally of the perished will never be fully known.
Coastline tells a different story of Viet Nam viewed through a life that represents what hundreds of thousands living among us know. If they will talk to you, you will hear a story none of us born in recent America could imagine. Most made their journey out at a great risk. Many of them failed to make landfall in another country; instead, their bodies floated up somewhere on a Coastline. At the age of five until twelve, for Loan the only life she knew truly began in a jungle somewhere in the mid-Pacific on a foreign Coastline.