#FallofSaigon41years

[hyphenated-identities]

41 years after the Fall of Saigon...

When I was younger my dad used to tell me stories about the Vietnam War and what my family went through. It was a refugee narrative that was very familiar to me. In fact most of the people I knew in my community and hometown of San Jose shared the same narrative. If they were Vietnamese and lived in East or South Side San Jose, the likelihood of them being or having a family member that was a Vietnam War refugee was high. San Jose currently has one of the largest Vietnamese American community outside of Vietnam. That number only continues to grow. That period of time prompted one of the largest diaspora of Vietnamese immigrants in history. 

After 1975, the “Vietnam syndrome” was something that Americans tried hard to end. The failure that occurred in Vietnam was a reminder that many did not want to remember. Following the end of that war, US media sought to highlight the ending of the Persion Gulf War in 1991 as a victory and the lifting of the US trade embargo against Vietnam in 1994 as an important milestone to open up Vietnam to the West. These narratives sought to erase America’s failures in Vietnam as the media also continued depict that those left created much better lives in the US as was depicted in the 25th anniversary coverage by major news outlets. Vietnamese Americans/immigrants became the new model minority. This created a narrative of winning even when losing (Espiritu). 

I find that even in my own family, “forgetting, but not forgetting” at the same time has become a reoccurring theme because of the trauma that they went through. I remember when I would ask my dad or uncles about it, they would get irritated, question why I wanted to know that stuff, and then relent, but only telling me fragmented parts of their oral history. The trauma of the war has left to a lot of fragmented parts of mine and many other family histories that are too painful to remember or have tried to be forgotten so hard that it becomes hard to recollect. 

**Some information from:

The "We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose" Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the "Fall of Saigon"  by Yen Le Espiritu