Vietnamese Diaspora Reflects on 50 Years Since Vietnam War
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim. Fifty years ago today, the Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon, and it led to the displacement of millions of people, and it reshaped communities far beyond Vietnam's borders.

In a new issue of the literary magazine McSweeney's called The Make-Believers, three writers from the diaspora reflect on their family's history. And they join us to share what this anniversary means to them. And we want to hear what it means to you. That's next on Forum after this news. This is Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim.

I think for many Americans with no direct connection to the Vietnam War, their understanding, which is similar to mine, probably comes from history classes, maybe movies. But for Vietnamese families, it might live in the kitchen, it might live in bedtime stories, or maybe it was never told at all. Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, we're talking with three writers from the Vietnamese diaspora.

The Reflections are part of a new issue of McSweeney's, which is a literary magazine. And we want to hear from you. What does the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, the fall, the end of the war, mean to you? Give us a call now at 866-733-6786. Again, that's 866-733-6786.

Today we are joined by Isabelle Thuy-Pelot. She's executive director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State. Welcome, Isabelle. Thi Bui is a writer and an artist. And Doan Bui is a writer and journalist for the French magazine Les Nouvelles Ouvres and a 2025 resident with Villa Albertine.

Isabelle, I'd love to start with you. What does this 50th anniversary evoke or what does it mean to you? Thank you for asking and having us here today. Well, it means, you know, it's been 50 years later and, you know, like this week, you know, we've been asked a lot of questions about what it means to us and just...

to be asked, you know, 50 years later, does this mean that we are more visible? We are more heard? I mean, it might not, you know, maybe next week you won't ask us, but it's just,

And we have so many events in the communities because we know this is a platform that we have this week, this month, that we really am very proud of all those organizations have been able to do to give a voice to the elders, to the next generations.

because we all do this with very little resources, and we seize the opportunities. And for us, it's a place of healing to come together and reflect. And for some of us, it's to let go, and some of us cannot let go because, you know, especially for the First Nations, everybody, people have lost everything, their property, their land, and sometimes their mental health as well.

Joanne, I'd love to hear from you. What happened to your family? What is sort of the story, your diasporic story? So first, thank you for having me there. It's very special for me because I'm French-Vietnamese.

And as I'm a byproduct of this war, like Isabelle and like all of us, because being a product of the war, it means that I am French, but I could have been American or I could have been Australian or even Russian because the Vietnamese diaspora is also in Eastern Europe. And being a product of this Vietnamese diaspora, it's living with the idea that you are

Your existence is like the product of hazard because it's a product of exile and migration. And it's a migration which was forced on our parents. So they didn't really have a choice. My parents wanted to stay in Vietnam, but there was a war and so my family lost everything. And my family is very scattered. So I have families that stayed in Vietnam. In South Vietnam, they were sent to re-education camp.

I have families in the North Vietnam who were communists. So I have an uncle who on this very day, on April 30th, he was on the tank who invaded Saigon, I would say, because when I grew up, I always heard about the fall of Saigon. It was like a mythological event, you know. And as a journalist, I remember that the first time I met journalists who were there for the fall of Saigon,

You know, it was like meeting someone who was there during La Guerre de Troyes, Homer, you know, that kind of stuff. Because it was so mythical. And I knew that my very existence was defined by this moment, you know, April 30th. Because on this very day, for example, one of my aunts, she was fleeing. She was, you know, on the embassy, on the helicopters trying to escape.

Other ones, they would stay in Saigon and afraid, but also hopeful. They were on the southern side, but they didn't know about the re-education camp. Other people would escape as boat people. So my whole family has...

been defined by this very fraught history, this complicated and divided history. And the thing is, as a, you know, I've been growing up in France, reading books, and I've

I've never, you know, found the story of my people in those books. I grew up in a small town and I was always the only non-white in my classroom. And my first relationship with this history was through films like Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket.

And it was kind of a, it was a very strange experience for me to see these films because I saw those Vietnamese people on the screen. And then actually they wouldn't speak because they would get shot very quickly. For example, in Apocalypse Now, you know, there is this scene with the helicopter and everybody gets burned and bombed.

And the woman that would be speaking, the only woman that you can see in those films, in the Hollywood films, they are prostitutes. And I was very disturbed because they were supposed to speak Vietnamese, but it seems that at that time...

the filmmakers didn't think it was important that they can speak Vietnamese. So they would hire actresses that couldn't speak Vietnamese. So they would speak gibberish, you know. So I would like speak a weird language that no, it was not Chinese. It was not Thai. It was nothing, you know. And I was like, oh, okay. So it's strange when we appear in a film

We are like, you know, small animals, goggling, speaking gibberish. Or, you know, it's like in the Grand Grim book when he says that Fung, so this very famous book, and there is a very important character, which name is Fung. And he says that she's just Twitter like a bird. So I grew up thinking that we were not allowed to have this voice.

And T, how did your family, what is your story from the fall of Saigon? What happened to your family? Where did you end up? And yeah, give us a little bit of that history. Good morning. Thanks for having me on. And it's so great to hear my friends' voices on the show, too. I am 50 years old, just like the diaspora.

I was born a few months before April 30th, though, and so I was the reason why my family couldn't leave with the first wave of refugees on April 29th through 30th. So my parents stayed behind and they were teachers and sort of idealists and they were taking a chance with maybe staying behind and with the hopes of helping rebuild the country after so much war.

But because they were educators, they also saw a lot of censorship and restriction and changes that they didn't like and agree with. And so they started to try to escape.

And of course, by then it was completely illegal to do so. You would get caught and be thrown in jail if you tried to leave the country. But eventually we did on a boat in 1978, snuck out on a little river boat through the Mekong Delta and Gantau and South Africa.

We're out at sea for a few days. My dad ended up piloting the boat and found some land after four days, I think. And we ended up in a refugee camp near Terengganu, Malaysia, where we were for a while until my mother's sister, who was already in the US, sponsored us to come over to Illinois. Or no, sorry, Indiana. Wow.

Isabel, what about you? What was your story, your family's story at the end of the war? Oh, yes. It's very different. At the end of the war, because my mother, she's Vietnamese, and she has nine siblings, and she left in 1963. So it's a different story, right? The Vietnamese, you know, people in the diaspora have a different journey of immigration. So my mother is part of the immigrants.

who came before '75. But when I first came to this country, I lived with my Vietnamese aunt, one of my aunts, who was a refugee who came in on April 30th, 1975, because she works with Americans. And she left because she was afraid of being killed, really.

And, you know, I was close to all my uncles and aunt, I mean, my uncle and aunt and cousin there. And one person I was very close to is a cousin who had just, who had left by boat and risked his life and had stayed in refugee camps and his family.

His duty was to, well, first survive and then sponsor all of his family members. But because he stayed in refugee camps, he had some issues adjusting. He was not too stable. And he came with another uncle, the husband of my aunt, one of my aunts. And for him, I remember vividly,

that it took 10 years for him to sponsor his wife, and his wife was pregnant when he left by boat. And I remember picking up that boy and his wife, my aunt, at the airport, and he threw up in the car, but he was so distant. He had spent 10 years looking at little pictures of black and white photographs of this beautiful wife, and the woman who came out was very different, and the little boy was very strange.

I have a lot of stories and other uncles staying in prison. I mean, they were put in prison with their five children and tried to escape by boat and they had to try many times until my mother actually sponsored them in France and my grandparents sponsored them in France and they were not happy they came here. I mean, I have eight, nine uncles and aunts, so I have a lot of stories, but

You know, beside my mother, everybody is a refugee. And when I first came to this country, I did not know those stories. And I only knew the story that I saw in history books or the little I knew from my mother. And I was shocked to hear those counter-narratives. Because it took me a while, actually, for them to sink in, to really, wait, how come they're so different than what I thought I knew? And in a way, that's why I do the work that I do.

We're talking about the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, which is today, and the impact of what happened to the people who were in Vietnam and the diaspora that followed. We are joined by Isabel Thuy-Polo. She's executive director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. Thi Bui, who's a writer and artist, and Duan Bui, writer and journalist. We'll be right back after this break. Stay with us.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim. And we're talking about the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. We would love to hear from you. What does this 50th anniversary mean to you? Maybe what does it represent for you or your family?

What do you hope the world has learned from the war? You can email your comments, your questions to forum at kqed.org, or you can find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, threads, Discord threads. We're at KQED Forum. Or you can just give us a call. I'd love to hear live voices. 866-733-6786. Again, that's 866-733-6786. We are joined by Isabel Thuy-Pillow. She is a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University.

And Thi Bui is a writer and artist, and Duan Bui, who's also a writer and journalist. Thi, I'd love to hear from you. How did you learn about your family's story? How did that story get passed on to you? You were obviously quite small when it all happened. Right. So I didn't have my own memories. I have my older sister's memories and my parents' memories. And luckily, they're all talkers. I know from a lot of people, they're

that their parents, their families just don't talk about what came before coming to the US even though there are a lot of stories. My parents would drop that kind of information on me sometimes at inopportune moments when I was trying to get ready to go to school or eat breakfast or something. It was always quite heavy. So

At some point, I think I was in college or graduate school and I started to formally collect their stories, sit down with them and formally interview them and use oral history techniques and try to like gather as much as I could to create a coherent narrative. At the same time, I was basically just pretty mad at all of the bad Vietnam War movies that I had grown up with that Doan has talked about.

And I realized... For you to interrupt there, just what was bad about them? What was missing from those narratives? Oh, well, the fact that the Vietnamese people were completely flattened into stereotypes and the main characters in a story about Vietnam were Americans and American soldiers. So I just needed us to have...

first of all, like some really basic things like names and voices and then, you know, a little bit further along some nuance and dimensions. So I had to create my own and I started with nonfiction because I had access to my parents' stories and they were willing to

share them in a way that made them quite vulnerable, but the trust that they gave to me allowed me to tell a very common story in a very specific way. And it turns out when you put that kind of thing out there, it becomes sort of a cracker barrel for other people to gather around and say, "Oh, that happened to us too, but it was a little bit different, and here's how."

Beautiful. What about for you, Duan? How did you learn about your family's story? Actually, for me, it's very different because this history was mainly silence and mainly because I grew up in this totally white environment. So I think I was kind of trying to erase my Vietnamese identity.

And actually what happened, in 2005, 20 years ago, my father got a stroke and he became aphasic, so he could not speak. So the silence is really something. He did not talk about his past before, but he couldn't really talk for real. And at that time I was already a journalist and I realized I had been writing so much about exile, migration,

And I hadn't asked any questions to my father. And I realized I didn't know anything about the story of his family. And this aphasia, I realized it was also my aphasia, you know, concerning this whole history. So for those past 20 years, I've been trying to find this narrative and interviewing people and learning.

And that's how I discovered, you know, all it was like, you know, finding like my memory was all torn apart, like shredded, you know, and I had to pick up all those shreds to find something somehow consistent. I don't know if it was really coherence, but it was really like, yeah, this is just collecting the shreds. I'm curious that shredding and putting yourself maybe back together is.

Did it feel like that? Did you feel like you changed through that process? Totally. I'm a totally different person by weaving together all those fragments of history and talking about aphasia. So my father is aphasic.

And now I'm... So I forgot my mother tongue. When I arrived in school, I could only speak Vietnamese, but then afterwards, it's kind of French-arised Vietnamese. And somehow I realized that I was also, like my father, aphasic because I had forgotten this part, my mother tongue. And I've been... I'm on a journey right now to get back and to learn back Vietnamese again.

And it's amazing, you know. It's amazing to learn your mother tongue, to learn back your mother tongue. And I understand why I write. I understand...

a lot of things about me. So this journey, you know, putting the shreds of my history, it's also putting the words of my mother tongue and the whole part is like a big spider web. And in this spider web, there is tea, there is Isabel, all the people from Jasper, Viennese Artistic Network, all those books.

And it feels really great, you know, to belong to this community because growing up, I think I wanted to fit, but I didn't belong. And now I have the sense of belonging thanks to all my counterparts. I want to talk about the project with Isabel, but let's just catch this call. Let's go to the phones. Sean in San Jose, you're on the air.

Hi. Large Vietnamese population in the large city I live in, San Jose, very much contribute to health and safety through the political process, which really makes San Jose safer and cleaner. It's great. I was hoping that...

So we could reference the large Vietnamese population in New Orleans and describe the area they moved into, New Orleans East. There were a lot of elders who lost everything that they had three times. First, it warned their home country and then having to leave everything behind to emigrate to the U.S. And then in the federal flood that we call Katrina.

Thanks. Yeah, Thi, do you want to take that? You're in New Orleans. Hi, yeah, I'm calling in from Loyola University. And yes, I'm new to New Orleans. I've only been here a couple of years, but I have been spending some time learning from the Vietnamese community here. And you're right, they have endured multiple losses and the threat is always there. And the thing about having come here as refugees is

And then, you know, also being amongst many, many victims of Hurricane Katrina, they found themselves in a weird position of being only allowed to have one crisis. Like you already had the boat people thing. So, you know, we don't really take your claims of need or...

or crisis right now, that's the story that I've heard a lot. And it is heartbreaking, of course. Just to clarify there, you mean like who wasn't listening to their story? Officials or? Officials. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the story of New Orleans in general is like people suffer, then they have to make claims and then they have to

have people who are holding the funds believe their claims. So the narrative of having to tell your story and plead your case is, yeah, it's one that people here have had to go through multiple times. But they've become more resilient every single time and they have found support through other people going through the same things. And so they're still here.

Well, let's talk about what brought the three of you together. Isabel, kind of give us a rundown of this, the writer residency in this that happened in late 2023 in southern France.

Yes, yes. Yes, I mean, just to say what Thi was saying and the previous scholar said, you know, something about the diversity of diasporic Vietnamese, you know, I mean, yes, defined by war, but we, well, first of all, you know, these people have been here for more than 50 years, I mean, 50 years at least, and can be defined by other things, by other interests, and there's also people who came, like, before the war, you know,

like in France. So the residency in France is a project, a program of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network that I lead, co-founded with Viet Thanh Nguyen, who wrote The Sympathizer and won the prize for it.

And thanks to, you know, to his fame in a way, his things with us, with his grassroots organizations to uplift other writers. And one thing that we found, and also the way that we're trying to make our voice more visible from the margin to the center, I like to say, but, you know, just more visible in general.

And it's just to make sure that just not like one or two Vietnamese can be heard, right? Vietnamese American writers can be heard, you know, but other writers, you know, we do public events, we do publications, we have a blog, we have a podcast. But we also found that writers find they, you know, in general, writing isolations don't really have the support from family to write. Sometimes actually I ask not to write.

I mean, I was asked, I'm still asked not to write, you know, especially if you want to write about domestic violence or, you know, being shunned for your sexuality or things, you know, like air the dirty laundries, right, of the community, which every community has.

And to find the strength to speak one truth and do this work. And then sometimes, you know, people cannot get published because there's also racism in the publishing industry. So we started those. We applied to the Luce Foundation who gave us a grant. And we organized three residencies, one in France, one in the U.S., and one in Vietnam. So that's one of them. Yeah.

Yeah, this one. And Duane, you touched on this a little bit, but what was it like to be, spend those two weeks with folks who are exploring their history in a similar way? Totally life-changing. So I know that this work can be, you know, use it a lot, but really for me, it was life-changing because it was the first time, you know, I had the chance to

to experience this sense of belonging, to meet other writers who are Vietnamese. And it's so funny because at the beginning, you know, I didn't know what to expect from it because, you know, okay, there were Vietnamese, but American Vietnamese, maybe we would have, you know, nothing to share. And the very first night, I felt like, you know, I was meeting like brothers and sisters and we would like, you know, we would...

joke together and use our broken Vietnamese and make jokes. And it was really, really amazing because in France, for example, I'm a journalist and I read books. But in my newspapers, there are very few non-white people. And in the publishing industry, it's the same. Actually, I think I don't even know one publisher who is non-white.

So it means that, as I said, I grew up in this town which was totally white. And afterwards in my professional life, you know, I kept on, you know, being in a totally white environment. So it was so enriching for me. It gave me a lot of energy and a lot of strength, you know, to meet other writers and artists like me that, you know, had...

you know, this heritage, this legacy of our tongue, mother tongue that we forgot and that we knew we speak so badly, but still, it's still part of us. This legacy of also trauma, but I don't want to talk about trauma. Actually, when during the residency, we talked a lot about joy and there was a lot of

And it was a lot of fun, finally. And I think in the Max Sweeney Literary Magazine, you can have the feeling. So it's, okay, there's some sad stuff. Of course, we are a product of war and grief. So, of course, there is. But actually, I always think that from grief, you can have a lot of light,

and incredible laughter. It's like in the song of Leonard Cohen, he says, there's a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in. And so we are people with so many cracks, so many. We are failed people, you know, and we are totally cracked. But from all those cracks, you know, we have a lot of light inside us. T, can you highlight a piece or two that really touched you that's in this new issue?

Yeah, I wanted to mention earlier that we are all learning Vietnamese as Duan learns Vietnamese through her glossary of broken Vietnamese, which is completely insane and hilarious. It is a great piece. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, you get to learn expressions like "bite bat", which is usually an insult. Like if you're getting called not proper or like, you know,

How would you say this? If you're getting called a woman who is "bae bae," that's not a nice word. It's basically like a nasty woman, but you can totally reclaim that for yourself and just have a lot more fun. So one of the artists of the issue, Sam Nga Bloom, told me that she showed her mother the cover of our book, of the cigar box where we're all smoking in a kitchen. And her mother said, "Vietnamese women don't smoke." And I said, "Well, bae bae, women do."

And so, you know, it's sort of funny, like turning these expressions that used to limit us on their heads completely frees us and allows us to have a lot of fun, not only with the culture and limitations put upon us, but like it lets us have fun with ourselves because we just don't take ourselves seriously. And we recognize that we are imperfect narrators.

probably unreliable narrators of our culture. But what can you do? For lack of examples and an environment in which we saw ourselves, we've had to make things up. And that's how we've gotten closer to the truth. Why is the issue called make-believers? Oh, yeah, because of our favorite, I think, expression that got tossed around a lot by that

which means to pretend or to be full of it. It was also an insult that many of us got apparently growing up when we were trying to be fancy writers and artists. Our parents would just look at us and shake their heads and say, you buy that.

And so we reclaimed it. I think Paul Tran was part of this beautiful turning of the phrase to take the insult, translate it and turn it into something that means what it is that writers and artists are good at doing. It's using our imaginations to create what is not there and what is needed. Ten Lee writes, I want to thank

T. Bui for her evocative, beautiful graphic memoir about her family's immigration journey from Vietnam to the U.S. The book is called The Best We Could Do. It's great to have a chance to hear her say more about her work. I also want to recommend two other graphic memoirs from the Vietnamese diaspora, G.B. Tran's Vietnam-America, A Family's Journey, and T. An Pham's Family Style, Memories of an American from Vietnam.

Let's sneak in a call before the break. Peter in San Francisco, you're on the air.

Yes, hi. Thank you for the program. I wanted to say that there were certainly impacts, strong ones, in our own country in America, and those included opposition, strong opposition, especially among young people who were still subject to a draft that eventually afterwards went away. But there were very strong protests against what was considered an unjust war that was particularly pursued in

very, very ugly and deadly ways. There were so many deaths and things like My Lai, the burning of villages, all those sorts of things. I also think one of the lessons might be that protests, especially among young people and colleges,

ultimately were pressures that helped to end the war, however you might think the outcome turned out. So I think, and many people's lives were distorted. Some left the country to avoid the draft. Some people went into careers that they might not have chosen otherwise to get an exemption and so on. So there was a lot of impact in America that I think one might draw lessons from as well.

Any comment there, Isabel, right before we go to the break in terms of the protests that happened here and how that... Yes, I mean, the Vietnam War and the protest movement had, you know, put this country in big crisis. I mean, you have, you know, the hippie movements, the women's, you know, movements. I mean, this is really challenging the authorities, right? It's big, huge. And then a lot of people, you know, went...

draft and died there or come back and not well but one thing we also have to remember that what is it like three to between three and four million Vietnamese died and that is not a

often acknowledge. And also when Vietnamese came here, this, you know, has to be a sense of, I mean, I heard T use the word pretending and another one is to be a sense of gratitude to be able to come here. But one thing that we also find in the literature, there's an ambivalence and sense of abandonment because the South Vietnamese fought on the side of Americans. And because the war ended, uh,

they had to lose everything that was not expected. So that perspective is not heard enough. And yeah, and that's why this perspective. Okay. We're talking about the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. We'll be right back after this break.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Meena Kim. And we are talking about the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and mostly its impacts on people across the Vietnamese diaspora. We are joined by Isabel Thuy-Pillau. She's executive director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network. Thi Bui is a writer and artist, and Duan Bui, a writer and journalist.

We would love to hear from you. What does this anniversary mean? Or maybe what does it represent to you? What do you hope the world has learned from the war? Maybe are you part of the Vietnamese diaspora? And how did the war impact your family? Email your comments, your questions to forum at kqed.org. Find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, maybe Discord threads. We're at KQED Forum. Or you can just jump on the phone at 866-733-6786.

Again, that's 866-733-6786. Let's go right to the phones. Sandhya, you're in San Jose. You're on the air.

Yes, hi. I just wanted to give a shout out to Thuy. I went to Kearney High School. You knew my sister, Angie. And it was so refreshing going to school where we had a lot of Asian Americans, particularly from the Vietnamese community. We were the only Indian Americans. And it was just kind of nice knowing that, hey, there's other kids here that grew up

with the same Asian parents and values and that we weren't alone and that we could relate to each other. And it really shaped how I view my life, how I raised my child. And I feel like it's given me such a great perspective on being with different cultures and appreciating different cultures.

Beautiful. T, do you want to comment there at all? Oh my gosh. Hi. Thanks for finding me. And yes, it was such a gift to go to a high school where my experience was not that different from other people's experience. And you could be a refugee kid, you could be an Asian kid, and your food was not made fun of when you brought it for lunch, and everybody was kind of like you, and nobody cared.

Mike writes, my dad was the head of the church council of a Lutheran church in Eugene, Oregon in 1978, and he arranged to sponsor four Vietnamese refugees from a camp in Indonesia. We eventually adopted Duc, who was an orphan from Phan Thien, with only one living relative, an uncle or so we thought. Decades later, Duc traveled to Vietnam and found his grandmother. Too much to say, but the photo of a handsome and beaming Duc holding his beautiful and elegant grandmother tight is

can make me cry every time I look at it.

What a beautiful story. Duan, in your writing, you use the phrase Viet-Q, Q, if I'm saying that right. What does that word mean? And what are the connotations that are associated with it? So Viet-Q actually it's us. It's Vietnamese from the Vietnamese diaspora. So almost 4 million in the U.S., 500,000 in France. I don't know how many in the world. So to me, it's like we're the second country

like another island which is scattered all around the globe.

with Vietnamese roots and a very strong link with this history. But somehow we live in another place. And for a very long time in Vietnam, Viet Kieu, it was a synonym for traders because we were the people who fled the country and who didn't support the, you know, the communist, the communist government. So it was weird because our identity was to be like the losers of the war, you know, being from the South Vietnam. And

So that was kind of difficult at the very beginning when the country opened. And now there is actually they changed. You know, we say so. I always heard the fall of Saigon for what happened in April 13. And in San Jose, they commemorate Black April. But in Vietnam, I'm very cautious because I know you have to say liberation and not

full of Saigon and you shouldn't say Saigon you should say Ho Chi Minh City but right now because they know also that a lot of Vietcues come back to Vietnam to start businesses or even to do art so

So they don't talk anymore about liberation, Vietnamese people. They talk about reunification, which is more, I mean, it's better for everyone. And I think right now that's what's happening. It's we are in the movement of reunification. Surely that's exactly the work that Yvonne is doing, building bridges between France, the U.S. and Vietnam and other countries. Because

Of course, we are talking about the American War. But I want to, yeah, before this American War, you have one century of colonization, French colonization. And during the Indochina War, America gave money to support this Indochina War. So it's not only, you know, this war that started in 55 or 54. The history is much longer. So right now we are connecting the dots.

and reuniting all those narratives to maybe build another narrative.

Like you just said there, I think a lot of Americans forget just how long the Vietnam War was. I think we think of like the 60s. But as you just said there, it started, when did you say? 45, actually. And before you have 100 years of colonization. So we are the product of this. We are the byproduct of war, but also of colonization and being French. You know, I'm in the convergence of, you know, French, the colonizer.

the United States. And so it's, that's why our, our history and our memories are so fraught. Isabel, for those who, like you, like we talked about earlier, most war movies, books about Vietnam were about the war, but talk about what happened afterwards, just brief history lesson in terms of where people went and why they went to different parts of the world in the diaspora. Oh, yes. Um, let me get shot. Uh,

Yes. I mean, people left in panic in 1975, April 30, 1975. But those who, you know, America did not really prepare for refugees to leave. I mean, I think actually a lot of GI did a lot of the work, but...

but things like 130,000 people were able to leave. But, you know, it was not orchestrated. It was totally panic led by plane. And those who led by plane at first was maybe people who work with Americans who are more educated and so forth. And then in the 80s, you have people who led by boat, right? And a lot of people from ethnic Chinese were repressed, right, in Vietnam because also, you know, there's more than the Vietnam War, right? The war with

border with China and after that with Cambodia, right? So ethnic Chinese were oppressed and were really asked to leave, forced to leave. And other Vietnamese also left. So that's, and people were, you know, just maybe different education, so economic background, right? But they arrived to refugee camps. And then for refugee camps, they have to, you know, some people didn't know, didn't, you know, where to go.

And, you know, they, I mean, in the U.S., you know, church or, you know, people start to organize American GIs to, so can sponsor because the only way to leave the refugee camps, you need to have sponsors. So people came, you know, sometime in the U.S., but also another, the second largest, the largest group, the Vietnamese came to the U.S. and the second one is in France and then Australia and Canada. And,

But sometimes people, you know, sometimes because it's such a large clan or group, for example, Amy Phan's book, The Re-education of Cherry Phan, right? The family had to make quick decisions at the refugee camps. Some go to the U.S., some go to France and they scattered. And that really impacted

the family and one sense of identity and also can I just add that Eastern Europe also in Eastern Europe a lot of people in Eastern Europe and just a few months ago I was in Ukraine covering the war and I met this guy he's Vietnamese but he's Vietnamese Ukrainian you know I did the interview in Vietnamese and it was and he was fighting in Bahamut

And he was this soldier. And it was so symbolic, you know, to talk about the war because we talk about the anniversary. But there are wars everywhere right now. So it's like history repeats itself. And this guy, he was a byproduct of war. And he's now fighting a war, you know, and he's Vietnamese.

So, yeah, that's Eastern Europe. Yes, and Eastern Europe and the people from Eastern Europe, immigrants or some of them are immigrants from North Vietnam, right? So here we talk about, you know, refugee immigrants from South Vietnam, but also communists, North Vietnam, immigrated and mostly in Eastern Europe. A listener on Blue Sky writes, so many refugees and their kids from Vietnam were ethnic Chinese. I know five of them personally, but their story is never told as far as I can tell.

And another listener on Blue Sky writes, it seems that we always abandon countries and people we barge in on and help and leave them worse off than before. T, you have written a lot about the emotional toll of migration, of diasporas. Do you think there is a thread, a similar thread? Every story is obviously different, but is there a similar story of pain that runs through all of these people who are forced or maybe choose to leave, but in bad situations?

Oh, I mean, of course, you know, it doesn't take doesn't take much imagination to realize that there would be a lot of pain to have to leave everything that you know behind and have to rebuild in a completely foreign environment where there might be a lot of hostility to you. And then your own children grow up not understanding who you are. And maybe they don't even have the words anymore, the language anymore to communicate with you. So the displacement

becomes internal as well as external. That's so hard. But I do want to just put out there the notion that the world is big and so interconnected and so

I find that there is a crack, you know, the light that comes through the crack for me is finding the commonalities between our experiences and other refugee waves that have happened since then.

And also, if I could just make a point about the US's outsized impact in other countries. I mean, I would hope that we would stop maybe interfering in other people's elections. You know, 1955 was a year that probably Vietnam should have had a proper election and maybe then the war that happened in the next 20 years would have never needed to happen.

But it did, and then refugees happened, and then we show up on these shores and people are like, "What? Where did you come from?"

this country and that country were never connected. But, you know, the US is a big country with a very uneven education system and a lot of people just don't know what our government is up to, what the oligarchs are up to, and they do things abroad that have an impact and then cause these waves of refugees. And so we sort of show up as these like unknown step or half brothers and sisters and cousins that Americans didn't know they had. And it's

frightening to them. But the more that we share stories, the more I think people here and in other host countries will realize that we're here because your country was there. Stories that can provide very needed healing. You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Mina Kim. We are talking about the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Let's go straight to the phones. Claudia in Davis, you're on the air.

Hi, my name is Claudia Critch. I was the co-director of the American Friends Service Committee program in Vietnam, based in Quang Ngai, from 1973 to 1975. And as other people have said, the sadness of people displaced was very evident. I was among about 12 of us who stayed

after the Americans left. We did not leave, and therefore we were able to witness what happened afterwards. And on this subject, there were people who arrived from the North after 20 years, looked for their family members,

Some of their family members had gotten on airplanes or helicopters and left the country. Sometimes a wife had left or a husband had left. And many people who left really had no connection to the United States government or the Southeast Asian government, but they panicked.

Because the propaganda that there would be a bloodbath was extremely effective, as, of course, we have the same situation right now. But it was a very, very scary and dangerous time. I might note that 2,000 French people stayed, along with about 12 of us Americans. I actually kept a diary during that time, and so...

And I turned it into a book for this anniversary, for the 50th anniversary. Congratulations, Claudia. Yeah, that's beautiful. Do you want to say the name of the book on air? Well, of course, I'd love to. It's called Those Who Stayed, a Vietnam diary published by University of Virginia Press. Thank you for letting me say that. Yeah, congratulations, Claudia. Let's stick with the phones. Ray in San Rafael, you're on the air.

Yes, good morning, Leslie. Thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to note as a former Marine officer and a combat veteran, this

50-year anniversary has some meaning in my life and the experience of 1968 has been with me my entire life. It's kind of marked the end of my youth and the beginning of my adulthood. And one of the major lessons that I learned, I learned several years after I was discharged, I was put in contact

Wow.

And I was put in contact with his mother, and she really wanted to talk to me. So I went back to the Boston area, and I met with her. And it really revealed the impact that war can have on not just the individuals involved, but the entire family. He was the oldest of

Wow.

was telling and she essentially adopted me to replace her son and i i felt that i was obliged to assume that role and we kept a long and loving relationship until she died in 19 2019 at age 97. we had many years of togetherness and

And it was such a comfort to her and her family. Beautiful. Ray, I love that story. We're coming up against the end of the hour, so forgive me for jumping in there. But thank you so much for calling. T, we have a comment here I'd love an answer to from Nong. He writes, what do you hope for the next generation of the Vietnamese diaspora? I wish them peace. I wish them joy. I wish them a...

sense of security in where they are so that they don't have to operate with a scarcity mindset, but can operate from a place of abundance and hopefulness and a sense that they have everything that they need to build something beautiful out of the ashes. Duan, the second half of the comment had another question. What does healing look like for the diaspora? Healing, I think it's...

It's to understand that our story is not specific. And as T said, to me, it's very important to connect the dots with the other wars and to understand that we are part of this collective history. It really helps me to heal when I meet people in the West Bank or in Ukraine. And I understand that this

Sorrow of War, you know, it's a very famous novel from Baonin, the Vietnamese writer. The Sorrow of War, it's exactly the same if you are Vietnamese, if you are Lebanese, if you are Ukrainian, you know, it's the same. And to understand that and to accept it, to acknowledge it and to hear those voices and to make my part by telling those stories, it helps me to heal.

Absolutely. We've been talking about the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. We've been joined by three writers who are contributors to a new issue in McSweeney's, which I highly recommend. This is a literary magazine. The title of this issue is The Make-Believers. And the three writers that have joined us today are Isabel Thuy-Pillow. She's executive director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. She's also a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State. T.

T. Bowie is a writer and artist. She joined us from New Orleans. And Duane Bowie is a writer and journalist for the French magazine Les Nouvelles. Someday I'll learn how to speak French. Thank you all so much for joining us. And thank you to our callers and listeners. Have a great day. Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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