Fall of Saigon: Children of Vietnam’s war refugees reconcile a painful past

Hanoi/Ho Chi Minh Metropolis, Vietnam – Though a youngster of war refugees, Victoria Ngo obtained to study extra about her Vietnamese id solely throughout her faculty years in the US within the Nineteen Nineties.

The eldest daughter in a refugee household with a Vietnamese father of Chinese language descent, Ngo grew up in a Chinese language-speaking neighborhood within the US and for a whereas thought of herself primarily as simply Chinese language.

As an inquisitive schoolgirl, Ngo had seen the variations, although, between her expertise as Vietnamese and people of the Chinese language folks she grew up with.

Curiosity about her id elevated through the years, partly as a result of questions she requested about Vietnam went unanswered by her dad and mom and different family.

“I lived with individuals who solely spoke Chinese language. My siblings and I went to Chinese language faculty on the weekends,” she advised Al Jazeera.

“I additionally converse Vietnamese, and my identify is a Vietnamese identify. My expertise could be very a lot a Vietnamese expertise within the sense that I got here as a refugee and got here in the course of the wave of the Vietnamese refugee,” she mentioned.

However Vietnam was simply not spoken about. And definitely not the war that ended 50 years in the past when South Vietnam’s then-capital, Saigon, fell to North Vietnamese forces and their leaders in Hanoi.

Making an attempt to fill within the lacking items of her household’s past, Ngo recounted how she signed as much as attend a convention concerning the war in Vietnam at her faculty, “pondering that my father can be proud of me”.

His response was stark and sudden.

“He mentioned, ‘In case you go to that convention, you aren’t my daughter!’” Ngo recounted.

“And I used to be like, ‘Wow, I assumed I used to be simply studying about our historical past,’ to which he responds: ‘That’s not our historical past.’”

Ngo’s expertise just isn’t unusual amongst Vietnamese households who fled their nation as refugees after Saigon fell on April 30, 1975.

The autumn of Saigon ended the war and marked the reunification of North and South with Hanoi as the brand new capital of post-war Vietnam.

However many of those that labored beneath the US-aligned authorities of the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam because it was then recognized – its civil servants, troopers, businesspeople – selected exile over unification and dwelling in a communist Vietnam.

Too many lives had been misplaced. An excessive amount of blood had been spilled – North and South – that many, like Ngo’s father, may by no means forgive nor reside with their wartime foes in peacetime.

For others, exile as refugees can be a alternative taken to stick with family who feared persecution – or so that they believed – in the event that they stayed in Vietnam after the war.

‘There may be this void in our historical past that doesn’t get talked about’

The US-backed wars within the three nations of Indochina left large losses of their wake. Laos and Cambodia suffered an estimated 1.45 million deaths beneath US bombings.

In Vietnam, there have been an estimated 1.1 million navy deaths on the communist North’s aspect alone and greater than 254,000 on the aspect of the South Vietnamese republic. Compounded with civilian deaths, the estimated dying toll from the war in Vietnam stands conservatively at 3.1 million folks.

For the victorious communist forces, they had been left with a nation in wreck. The northern half of the nation was subjected to heavy US bombings. The railroads had been inoperable. Most of the main roads had been bombed into cratered tracks. Its economic system was shattered. The northern inhabitants had additionally witnessed a long time of battle after the onset of French colonial rule within the late nineteenth century.

Southern Vietnam’s city infrastructure was much less broken by the war. The countryside was in ruins as rural areas had turn into the entrance traces within the guerrilla warfare that marked most of the combating within the South.

Croplands and forests had been poisoned by the US use of defoliant, higher often called Agent Orange, the extremely poisonous chemical compound that was sprayed from the air to disclaim communist fighters on the bottom the duvet of timber and different concealing foliage.

Thousands and thousands of Vietnamese folks had been affected by the use of Agent Orange, together with at the very least 150,000 kids who can be born with extreme bodily, psychological and developmental defects, and others are nonetheless being affected to today as a result of the soil stays poisoned.

Unexploded bombs – within the many a whole lot of hundreds of tonnes – nonetheless “contaminate” as much as 20 p.c of Vietnam’s territory because of the tens of millions of tonnes of ordnance used within the war, based on the Vietnam Nationwide Mine Motion Heart.

Whereas their April 30, 1975, victory marked an finish to the war for the North Vietnamese, for the defeated US-backed authorities and folks of the South, the war’s finish was for a lot of the beginning of prolonged separation from household in “reeducation camps” or everlasting exile to Western nations, such because the US, Australia, Germany and Canada.

Earlier than the autumn of Saigon, Ngo’s father was a highschool principal in South Vietnam. After April 30, 1975, he was positioned in reeducation camps twice earlier than he made a determined resolution to take his household out of the nation on a rickety, overcrowded boat in 1978.

The household would spend half a yr in a refugee camp within the Philippines earlier than being accepted by the US as refugees.

By the point of their arrival within the US within the early Eighties, Ngo’s prolonged household had misplaced all the things. Her instant household, two aunts and uncles, and a grandmother and her family shared a two-storey, 30sq-metre (323sq-ft) subsidised housing unit in Los Angeles.

Her father couldn’t train within the US and ended up changing into a deep ocean fisherman in addition to doing odd jobs to place meals on the desk.

The Vietnam they fled turned a dangerous reminiscence to be forgotten, Ngo mentioned.

“There may be this void in our historical past that doesn’t get talked about. You don’t find out about what’s occurred within the past,” she advised Al Jazeera.

A profound sense of loss is a narrative shared by many Vietnamese refugee households – deep ache from the past that’s felt throughout generations.

Inside some households, any point out of the war dangers evoking sturdy feelings and triggering past griefs. The sensitivity is such that silence concerning the past is usually most popular.

‘Deep ache from her past’

Cat Nguyen, a younger American Vietnamese poet, skilled related evasiveness when it got here to household experiences of the war.

Now based mostly in Ho Chi Minh Metropolis – the identify given to Saigon after the war in honour of the founding father of the Vietnamese Communist Occasion – Cat Nguyen mentioned little was shared about their household’s past earlier than coming to the US.

“My household, particularly my grandma, harboured deep ache from her past,” Cat Nguyen advised Al Jazeera.

Cat Nguyen’s household additionally has a difficult political historical past.

Whereas a maternal grandfather was an energetic revolutionary who supported anticolonial efforts in opposition to the French in pre-independence Vietnam, a paternal grandfather served within the authorities of South Vietnam and a maternal grandmother was the principal of an American-English faculty in Saigon.

However in 1975, Cat Nguyen’s household on either side, and its political divide, left Vietnam.

Cat Nguyen’s father was simply 10 years outdated and mom was 13 after they left Vietnam. They had been “uprooted from their homeland within the blink of a watch” for a new life within the US, Cat Nguyen mentioned.

“The primary few years within the US had been stuffed with unhappiness for them: difficulties adjusting to a unusual land, a language they weren’t fluent in, a individuals who didn’t perceive the world they [the Vietnamese refugees] had been coming from,” Cat Nguyen mentioned.

The trauma of fleeing Vietnam was additionally compounded by official accounts that solid the refugees and Vietnamese diaspora as abandoning their nation in its hour of much-needed nationwide reconstruction.

This yr’s fiftieth anniversary of the autumn of Saigon might be celebrated by the Communist Occasion of Vietnam as a day of unification and likewise “liberation of the south”.

That message speaks to the aspirations of tens of millions of Vietnamese within the north and south who made nice sacrifices in the course of the war, however the social gathering’s official historical past is inevitably restricted.

To today, the experiences of many in southern Vietnam and their views on the war – what motivated them to withstand North Vietnam’s political management, together with Ho Chi Minh – stay absent from the celebratory narratives.

On this fateful historic showdown, southerners who fled abroad as refugees are solid within the position of puppets or traitors, lured and manipulated by the enemy’s luxuries and propaganda into abandoning their very own folks.

Seeing their experiences erased and delegitimised after the war added to the ache of displacement for Vietnam’s diaspora communities. It additionally explains the anger nonetheless harboured in the direction of Vietnam’s management by an older technology of refugees, comparable to Ngo’s father.

That is a multigenerational resentment that also rears its head when refugee dad and mom imagine their kids are being uncovered to constructive narratives about bustling, economically thriving Vietnam 5 a long time after the war – which they model as “the North’s propaganda”.

‘You crossed an ocean for me to cross one other’

It isn’t solely modern Vietnam’s official model of historical past that’s problematic.

Cat Nguyen realised there have been additionally gaps when turning to American highschool textbooks to study concerning the war in Vietnam.

In these schoolbooks, Washington’s decades-long navy involvement in Vietnam, which left tens of millions of folks useless and tens of millions scattered the world over as refugees, solely “a small paragraph” was dedicated to “how the US fought in opposition to communism in Vietnam”, Cat Nguyen mentioned.

Though supposedly sympathetic to their former South Vietnamese “allies”, Cat Nguyen advised of a US-centric perspective that also topics Vietnamese refugees to an “Americanised gaze”.

“An Americanised gaze of refugees, that means that Individuals seen all Vietnamese as both harmful, threatening communists or as helpless, infantilised refugees,” Cat Nguyen mentioned.

Such narratives had helped to justify US intervention and navy occupation of Vietnam to “save” the Vietnamese from themselves and communism.

“Whereas it’s true that Vietnamese refugees suffered tremendously, this gaze strips human beings of their very own company and humanhood, displacing them into a framework that upholds the system of white supremacy,” mentioned Cat Nguyen, who has known as Vietnam dwelling for greater than two years.

Vietnamese American author Viet Thanh Nguyen famous in his ebook Nothing Ever Dies that Vietnamese refugees had been capable of finding within the US – in no matter restricted area that was out there to them – alternatives to inform their immigrant tales, to “insert themselves into the American dream”.

But it surely was exactly that “dream” that Cat Nguyen would finally develop disenchanted with together with its “capitalist propaganda”.

The “American dream” has erased “the historical past of the US’s genocide of Indigenous populations, enslavement of Black and racialised peoples, and violent colonial and imperial initiatives”, they mentioned.

It isn’t that Cat Nguyen by no means had tried to suit into US society. Somewhat, from a younger age, Cat Nguyen advised of consistently being made to really feel totally different in a society that “by no means sees them as American sufficient”.

“All through my life, I watched because the Vietnamese elements of me slowly eroded. It wasn’t till the passing of my grandmother – the one who taught me probably the most about the place I come from – that I started desperately looking for a bodily, psychological, emotional and religious return to my ancestral homeland and my humanity,” Cat Nguyen mentioned.

In search of to reconnect, Cat Nguyen has turn into concerned in artwork initiatives within the kind of poetry, efficiency and filmmaking that experiment with a vary of components in Vietnamese folklore and conventional musical devices to “unapologetically” recommit to “the combat in opposition to colonisation, imperialism and capitalism”.

Drawn to establish with Vietnamese revolutionary fighters from “the opposite aspect”, Cat Nguyen spoke of discovering a supply of private energy of their knowledge and dying for his or her trigger.

That conviction has not led to a dismissal of Cat Nguyen’s family’s struggling as refugees within the US, however the acknowledgement of the coexistence of intergenerational trauma that Vietnam’s official historical past fails to incorporate.

One of Cat Nguyen’s poems pays homage to their late grandmother: “You crossed / an ocean / for me / to cross / one other and you then crossed / a world / earlier than I / may observe.”

Ngo by no means did attend the college convention on the war in Vietnam that her father had threatened to disown her over all these years in the past.

That was out of respect for her father’s needs. Since then, she has step by step come to see occasions in Vietnam in the course of the war years and after from the North’s perspective – albeit with essential eyes.

“I positively see that when something is just too centralised and too authoritarian, you might have corruption. But when the management could be very sturdy and competent, issues can transfer very effectively,” mentioned Ngo, who relocated to Vietnam greater than 20 years in the past.

Like Cat Nguyen, Ngo understands the trauma her relations from the South suffered.

It impressed her to pursue a profession in psychology and public well being centered on underserved communities. She turned an affiliate professor of neighborhood well being and social sciences at Metropolis College of New York’s Graduate College of Public Well being and Well being Coverage.

“One of the the explanation why I work with marginalised populations and weak populations is as a result of I additionally perceive that have having grown up as a refugee and within the early years not having very a lot,” Ngo mentioned.

After greater than 20 years in Vietnam, Ngo has centered on equipping major care clinics with the capability to take care of poor individuals who endure from psychological well being issues however lack entry to care.

“I really feel like my expertise as a refugee has actually made me assume a lot concerning the human situation and what sorts of social assets and financial assets we have to put in place to assist folks in transition and who’re marginalised, to assist people who find themselves displaced in a method or one other,” she mentioned.

For each Ngo and Cat Nguyen, being half of the Vietnamese diaspora and its painful past has given them a nuanced perspective on Vietnam’s historical past that’s not readily discovered within the competing narratives of North and South.

Divided by the flag

Kevin D Pham mentioned there was a recurring story he was advised whereas rising up in a Vietnamese refugee household in San Jose, California.

“I used to be advised by my highschool lecturers and particularly my household that communists had been dangerous, primarily,” mentioned Pham, an assistant professor of political principle on the College of Amsterdam.

Pham’s paternal grandfather was imprisoned by communist Viet Minh forces within the Fifties, and his maternal grandfather was imprisoned in a reeducation camp after 1975 and died there from malnutrition.

From a younger age, Pham was taught to be proud of his Republic of Vietnam household heritage. Though he appreciates this angle, he didn’t uncritically settle for what he was taught. After graduating from college, he lived in Vietnam for eight months and, there, got here to study and sympathise with views from the “different aspect”.

However rising up within the US, he advised of listening to his uncle, who was a pilot, as he recounted the glory of his youthful days when he fought “the communists” in the course of the war.

Pham’s father, then again, was solely 16 years outdated when he was compelled to go away Vietnam and didn’t have a lot direct expertise of warfare. Nonetheless, his patriotism for the vanquished US-backed Southern authorities was nonetheless unwavering.

Pham recounts how, throughout his youth, older Vietnamese males would cease and salute as he and his father cruised down the streets of San Jose in his father’s shiny yellow Ford Mustang, which had three horizontal purple stripes painted on the bonnet to characterize the flag of South Vietnam.

In Vietnam to today, the South Vietnamese flag remains to be taboo.

Amongst staunch Vietnamese nationalists, the south’s “three-stripes”, or “ba que”, flag has turn into a well-liked slur, symbolising betrayal of the nation, defeat and humiliation. Any affiliation with the previous authorities’s flag, nevertheless distant, has additionally been used to denounce and alienate.

In early 2023, Hanni Pham, an Australian-Vietnamese singer with the Korean band New Denims, obtained caught up within the flag controversy and was subjected to a web-based marketing campaign, which began when on-line activists noticed a South Vietnamese flag in a video recording made when she visited her grandparents’ dwelling.

The one public place the place you’ll be able to nonetheless discover an precise three-stripe flag in Vietnam is in Hanoi on the newly constructed Vietnam Navy Historical past Museum, the place one is displayed as a historic artefact.

But makes an attempt to reconcile Vietnam’s fractious past date again a long time.

In 1993, beneath Vietnam’s then-prime minister, Vo Van Kiet, the Communist Occasion’s Politburo issued a decision that marked the primary official try at reconciliation by encouraging the nation to “respect variations, be a part of arms in dismantling prejudices, disgrace, hatred, and look ahead to the long run”.

Kiet was delicate to the plight of Vietnamese refugees, one thing that he witnessed inside his family. In a well-known interview in 2005 that drew each reward and criticism, he described April 30, 1975, as a “nice victory” however one which left “tens of millions joyful, tens of millions in sorrow”.

“It’s a scar that wants therapeutic relatively than left to bleed,” he mentioned.

In November, then-president and incumbent basic secretary of the Communist Occasion of Vietnam, To Lam, made a historic look at Columbia College within the US with Lien-Dangle Nguyen, the daughter of a refugee household who turned the primary director of Vietnamese research on the college and who has labored on constructing bridges between the diaspora and Vietnam.

Their assembly mirrored a broader spirit of unity and therapeutic rising amongst Vietnamese folks lengthy divided by the scars of war and political variations.

Kevin D Pham mentioned he seen how those that have sturdy views on the historic North-South divide in Vietnam generally use the phrase “puppets” as a slur, whether or not referring to supporters of the South Vietnamese authorities as “puppets” of the Individuals or the North’s supporters as “puppets” of the Soviet Union and China.

“There may be this tendency on either side of seeing the opposite aspect as puppets who can not assume for themselves,” Pham mentioned, including that it signifies a “lack of curiosity” concerning the different aspect’s perspective and has turn into “an impediment to true reconciliation”.

“What I encourage as an alternative is the flexibility to grasp a number of views,” he mentioned.

For Cat Nguyen, what’s fascinating is that the present nationwide flag of Vietnam – a yellow, five-pointed star on a purple background – which as soon as introduced painful recollections to relations nonetheless within the US, is now a supply of comradery all through Vietnam.

This was skilled firsthand when the Vietnamese nationwide soccer workforce gained the 2024 ASEAN championship in January. Cat Nguyen described flag-waving crowds storming onto streets throughout the nation in celebration of a sporting, not a political, occasion.

“I’m empathetic to the affected by either side regardless of which flags they establish with, both the three-stripe or the purple flag with yellow star,” Cat Nguyen mentioned.

“Everybody skilled a lot violence, and in the end I assign probably the most blame to US imperialism.”

Extra reporting by Duy-Minh Nguyen in Ho Chi Minh Metropolis