Thuy -- who escaped Saigon as a 10-year-old in the aftermath of the Vietnam War -- predicted that the world's attention would soon drift from crises such as Afghanistan, leaving those who fled the Taliban voiceless and battling to prove themselves in their new lives.

The novelist -- who was among Vietnam's thousands of "boat people" and spent months in a refugee camp in Malaysia in the 1970s -- has spent her writing career gathering threads of stories of Vietnamese forced to flee, trying to illuminate the lives of communities she says are overlooked.

"When you are on the outside perhaps you cannot see why we should rescue these people," she told AFP, saying she saw parallels between the desperate families that thronged Kabul's airport following the withdrawal of US troops and those that escaped the country of her birth more than 40 years earlier.

"But if they have survived the sea, if they have walked hundreds of kilometres or if they have climbed walls and they still survive, then it's because they have become superhumans.

"So when you plant them anywhere they will grow back, maybe stronger than the average," said Thuy, who has just released a new book, Em, in English translation.

Losing your past and future

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