This project examines the histories of post-1975 Vietnam’s heterogeneous and multiethnic diasporas through the nation’s various “vanishing points”: the interethnic violence, political censorship, disappearances, and deathworlds that comprise the narrative margins of postwar histories from Vietnamese, American, and Asian American perspectives. Focusing on the two decades starting with the fall of the Central Highlands in 1975, the manuscript explores the dangerous environments and social conditions that propelled people to cross borders and seas in search of an elusive freedom, and the ways in which nation-states, History, and even other refugees could betray them at each turn. 
 
Turning to oral histories, Vietnamese-language texts and sources, and institutional and community archives both within and outside the United States, the project charts the localized consequences of war, empire, political oppression, and authoritarianism to emphasize histories without arrival. Challenging state-centric narratives that frequently position refugees within temporal (refugee to resettlement) or spatial (homeland to asylum) trajectories, which privilege survivorship and linear mobility, the book turns instead to vanishing points in the historical record—the Indigenous and non-elite people abandoned during the Fall of Saigon, those caught or left behind in the homeland between 1975 and 1992, and the dead and the disappeared on Southeast Asian coasts.
 
Through various case studies that follow refugees both through and beyond the fray of Vietnam-US migration patterns, the chapters attend to surplus and non-hagiographic histories that liquefy the borders of nation-states and hegemonic diasporas, elevating a radical critique of systems that perpetuate global refugee conditions by preempting livability and non-statist personhood. "Nonarrival," as both theory and method, is accountable to the dead, the disappeared, and the uncounted who have fallen victim to ethnic cleansing, racist bordering regimes, economic deprivations, political suppression, and extralegal violence. In registering these nonarrivals, the book seeks to denaturalize the relationship between refugees and resettlement, turning instead to the contingencies of migration as they are shaped by borders, states, and everyday people.