Viet kieu

After her father was falsely accused of being a communist, Thanh found herself embroiled in a dramatic court case and discovered there is a lot her family is not talking about. In interviews with friends, family and author Viet Thanh Nguyen, Thanh begins to confront how the Vietnam war is still affecting her identity, her family — and an entire generation of Vietnamese-Americans — today.

This the first episode of Second Wave, a new podcast from KUOW and PRX. 

Here is the transcript:

Thanh Tan: When you hear the word Vietnam, what do you think of?

Speaker 2: Vietnam, it’s honestly, probably the Vietnam War.

Speaker 3: Probably the Vietnam War.

Speaker 4: The war probably, yeah. The Vietnam War.

Speaker 5: When I think of Vietnam, the Vietnam War.

Speaker 6: A gigantic mistake.

Speaker 7: Was this supposed to be at the Vietnam War or the country of Vietnam?

Speaker 8: I’m just glad I didn’t have to go. I didn’t think we should be there anyways.

Speaker 9: Kind of like, burning things from napalm, and rainy and dark jungle, treacherous environment kind of, a deal.

Speaker 10: Bo ne. Bo ne is dank.

Speaker 11: Actually, the first thing that comes to mind is Forest Gump, when Forest is in Vietnam in the jungles and getting napalmed and just getting shot at.

Thanh Tan: Many people think of Vietnam as a war and not a place and how can you blame people given the way that Hollywood has portrayed it. Apocalypse Now.

Speaker 12: I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Thanh Tan: Full Metal Jacket.

Speaker 13: She gives you everything you want, long time. Everything you want.

Thanh Tan: Even the Big Lebowski.

Speaker 14: Smokey, this is not Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.

Thanh Tan: In these movies, we see war scenes. Asian girls with accents, trying to make a quick buck off of a GI and troubled US veterans. But there’s more to our story than that and it’s been getting to me lately.

Thanh Tan: I’m on Facebook all the time and I follow this page run by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and these pictures of young veterans who were killed during the war. They show up on my feed and whenever I see these photos, I have to stop and I have to look because it’s so important to humanize the people who died in this conflict. When you look at these photos, I see a mix. There’s white faces, black faces, but I don’t see anyone who looks like me, a Vietnamese American and lately, I’ve been asking why? Why is that? Didn’t we go to war with Vietnam to help and to save people like me? It’s time to tell our stories. I’m Thanh Tan and you’re listening to Second Wave, an American story that begins in Vietnam.

Thanh Tan: Support from Second Wave comes from Fischer Plumbing family of companies, committed to their communities for over 40 years by supporting youth sports programs, charities for the disadvantage and water conservation. Fischer Plumbing offers, plumbing, heating, air conditioning and rooter services. More at Fischerplumbing.com, that’s F-I-S-C-H-E-R plumbing.com.

Thanh Tan: I’m Vietnamese American, born and raised in Olympia, Washington and I’m a daughter of Vietnamese refugees from South Vietnam, but I’m also a long time journalist and for this podcast, I’m going to explore how the Vietnam War is still with us. I mean, the war ended in 1975, but for Vietnamese Americans it plays out still in our daily lives. For example, I’ve never met the vast majority of my family because they’re all in Vietnam and I still feel to this day, that in the Vietnamese American community, there’s this hidden pain that a lot of us just can’t name.

Thanh Tan: There’s this feeling that struggle is normal, that struggle and day-to-day survival. It’s just how we live our daily lives and I think that’s because everyone in our families lost something during the war or after the war.

James Hong: I was really ashamed and embarrassed about being Vietnamese.

Thanh Tan: That’s my friend, James Hong and he’s also Vietnamese. I talked to a couple of my Vietnamese friends about what it was like growing up in America and James felt he had to hide his identity in his predominantly white community.

James Hong: At the time, it felt like it meant I had to give up that part that was Vietnamese, that was a refugee, which is the stories and the history that my parents brought, but that for many reasons, they did not feel comfortable in passing on or sharing with me.

Thanh Tan: Vietnamese families, often times, we don’t talk about these things. We don’t talk about the past and as a result of that, I think a lot of children of Vietnamese refugees, we don’t have a full picture of our parents and what their lives were like before they came here to the United States. A lot of us, we got this watered down version of the same story that goes a little something like this.

Thanh Tan: Basically, we, my family and other South Vietnamese refugees, we were the good guys and the North Vietnamese, the communist, they were the bad guys who ruined so many lives. So my parents fled South Vietnam a couple years after the communist took over and the Americans were gracious enough to allow us in. So we should be grateful and we should work hard and our parents, they’ll work menial jobs without complaining. We, the children refugees, we would succeed and we would make our parents proud. We would achieve the American dream and we’d move past the trauma and forget all of that bad stuff and I believed this for the longest time.

Thanh Tan: I never really questioned it and that was until I was subpoenaed. I was a character witness, subpoenaed and that’s not they crazy part. It’s a long story, but basically, my dad was accused of being a Viet Cong agent. Now, those are the communist who were infiltrating South Vietnam during the war. They were called Viet Cong and that’s a dirty word within the Vietnamese community. That is the ultimate way to really offend someone, is to call them a member of the Viet Cong.

Thanh Tan: So when this happened to my dad, he filed a defamation suit to prove that he was not actually a Viet Cong agent living in Olympia, Washington and I had to come back to help testify, to prove that he was not a communist. This was crazy and at the time I thought, “My God, this sounds like something out of the McCarthy era.” And this was actually in 2009. I just couldn’t believe it. This fact that my dad was being targeted by members of his own Vietnamese community. It felt like the ultimate betrayal. I just did not get it. But going through this trial for three weeks, it made me realize that there is a lot that our community just has not confronted or dealt with and maybe this whole good guys, bad guys explanation of the war in Vietnam and are place in America, maybe it’s not as simple as what we had been told. We’ll be right back.

Thanh Tan: You’re listening to Second Wave. I’m Thanh Tan. Questioning what I’ve been told about who I am and where I fit in as an American and as someone of Vietnamese descent, it’s a lot to process and I don’t have all the answers. I decided to turn to someone who could help give me a more nuanced view of our story to put it into perspective, Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Thanh Tan: So Viet is an author, a scholar and basically a rockstar in the Vietnamese community. I first learned about him when his first book came out. They Sympathizer, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. It’s a novel that features and unnamed main character who never quite fits in completely with his surroundings. He’s half French, half Vietnamese and Americanized. He also sympathizes with the communist cause in Vietnam. Basically, the novel and it’s protagonist challenge the black and white narrative that many of us Vietnamese Americans grew up with and how, in a lot of ways, we ignored how complicated our identities are.

Thanh Tan: In American society, we’re refugees and children of refugees, people of color. But to our friends and family in Vietnam, we’re also quasi outsiders. People who’ve become Americanized, emersed in western society and pop culture. They call us Viet [inaudible 00:07:47] and many of us, we can’t even speak Vietnamese. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel was a brave thing for a Vietnamese American to write and it’s been controversial for many people in our community because there’s a lot of, trauma and sensitivity around what happened to our families in Vietnam and at tendency to simply those storied because it’s really hard to talk about.

Thanh Tan: But now Viet is famous for writing about these things. So famous, he appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers, where he spoke from personal experience about grappling with identity and generational differences.

Seth Meyers: You moved out to California and is true that you lied to your parents about what it was that you wanted to be when you grew up?

Viet Nguyen: Well, I was an English major when I went to college and you know how it is, trying to convince people that you can make a living as an english major is really, really hard. Much less telling that to your immigrant parents.

Seth Meyers: So it is harder to tell your immigrant parents?

Viet Nguyen: I believe it is harder to tell … When your parents are working 12 to 14 hours a day and you say, “You know what? I’m going to study the romantic poets in college.”

Thanh Tan: When I saw him on Seth Meyers, I was amazed about how put together he was and how funny her was and then I found out that he was coming to Seattle.

Speaker 18: Ladies and gentleman, Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Thanh Tan: So I went to see him talk at the Seattle Public Library. It was packed. That’s right, an English major packed an entire auditorium. Lots of people were turned away and the enthusiasm for him once you got inside, it was pretty intense.

Viet Nguyen: I’m a refugee, an American, and a human being, which is important to proclaim as there are many who think these identities cannot be reconciled. In March 1975, as Saigon was about to fall or on the brink of liberation, depending on your point-of-view, my humanity was temporarily put into question as I became a refugee. My family live in Buôn Ma Thuột, famous for its coffee-

Thanh Tan: As Viet spoke, he talked about his family and I was struck by his explanation of what’s like to be a Vietnamese American. That it’s complicated. That it’s not black and white and it reminded me of my family and my story. I also found it kind of refreshing to hear about the Vietnamese experience who is a Vietnamese American.

Thanh Tan: So I’m really excited to talk to you. I don’t know how much I- … While he was in Seattle, I got the chance to talk to him. Basically, we are apart- … And I had so many questions. Why do you feel that it’s so important in your writing to explore different perspectives and more than one narrative?

Viet Nguyen: I look at my life as an American and as a Vietnamese and I see that in these countries, when there’s only one narrative, disaster follows, for the people whose narratives are not included. So in the United States, I believe actively that we have to acknowledge that we are a diverse country, a multicultural country with contradictory histories and contradictory stories. Acknowledging that doesn’t make us weaker, it should make us stronger.

Viet Nguyen: In Vietnam, if you’re a Vietnamese American or South Vietnamese, you realized that a country of one narrative has erased southern Vietnamese and refugee experiences. So why would we turn around as exiles or refugees or Vietnamese Americans and decide that it’s our turn to impose one narrative. The fact that we’ve been excluded should make us really worried about excluding and erasing others.

Thanh Tan: So I want to make something clear. I don’t think that my parents intentionally misled us into believing a story that may not be complete or may not be true, but I do believe that for every Vietnamese American, for a lot of Vietnamese Americans, there’s an emotional truth and that emotional truth, it just doesn’t always square with the facts or with what we see in the history book and often times I find that we fall into this trap of treating ourselves as victims, as permanent victims. Why do we do that? Why do Vietnamese refugees do that?

Viet Nguyen: Because it affirms them. It denies the possibility that they were responsible for anything and it fits into the narrative of rescue and gratitude that Americans have imposed upon them. Now, this is a position of mostly weakness, but a little bit of strength because it allows Vietnamese Americans a voice in American politics that is anti-communist, but it’s really a position of weakness because it avoids the question of moral complexity, moral responsibility and it robs the Vietnamese American population of the capacity to think of themselves as agents and actors of their own history and as people who can move outside of this Cold War history that was actually imposed on them by outside forces. Not just Americans, but the Chinese and the Soviets, as well. So constantly returning to the rhetoric of victimization just encourages Vietnamese people to think of themselves as victims trapped in the past.

Thanh Tan: I think it’s true that for most of my life, I did view us as being victims and I didn’t have a problem with that and I think that was a lot easier to go through life feeling like someone did something bad to us and now we’re okay. In some ways, it gave us the determination to move on and do big things with our lives, but I want to look to the future too.

Thanh Tan: So how do you want your Vietnamese American son? You have a little boy. How old is he?

Viet Nguyen: Three and a half.

Thanh Tan: What do you want your son to remember about the Vietnam War?

Viet Nguyen: I want him to remember that this was a historical event that still resonates today and probably will still resonate when he’s older, that we’re living in a history that is not finished. That the Vietnam War is part of a much longer history of war that Americans have fought, but also of the Cold War, of global conflict and he, as a citizen of this country and as someone of Vietnamese ancestry and is hopefully a global citizen, is going to be implicated and in meshed in this very long and complicated history.

Viet Nguyen: But also, I want him to remember it as a history that shaped his grandparents and his parents and brought them here to this country and enabled his existence, so that even if he grows up as an American there will always be this part of him in Vietnam, as well.

Thanh Tan: So we’re starting this … just beginning our journey and exploring memories and … Well, let me just preface this by saying, I’m a little anxious and I’m scared. I’m scared of lifting the veil of what I might see because I’m already questioning a lot of the things that I grew up believing. What advice would you give to us as we start our journey of really trying to unveil people’s memories and curate and do something with those stories? What would you tell us?

Viet Nguyen: I’ve lived with discomfort most of my life. As a refugee, I felt like I was never at home and to a certain extent, I still don’t. I’m certainly, very comfortable, but it’s been important for me to remember what it feels like not to be at home. That when I was a kid, I felt like an American spy in my Vietnamese parent’s home and when I was outside in the American world, I felt like a Vietnamese spy. I never wanted to give that up because that ability to see any issue from both sides has been really important to me as a scholar and as a writer. It’s important to most human beings and most human beings lack that capacity.

Viet Nguyen: What I would say to you or to anyone else who feels scared is to say, that’s not a bad thing. It’s obviously the case that we would much rather be happy and comfortable most of the time, but being scared tells us that we’re confronting something that maybe we haven’t wanted to confront. We don’t want to confront something that makes us it could potentially unravel everything that we take for granted.

Viet Nguyen: If you want to be an artist, that’s what you have to do and I think that’s true for journalists, for writers, for politicians, for anybody who’s doing anything important, everybody reaches that moment of fear. That’s your test, whether you back away from it or whether you try to deal with it.

Thanh Tan: So dealing with it, as Viet just said, is going to be the mission of this podcast. I have to say that it feels really comforting to have someone like him say these things and to tell me that it’s okay to have doubts, it’s okay to start asking question because I have this fear of bringing up really painful memories. Not just for myself, but for my family and for others in the Vietnamese community.

Thanh Tan: To move forward, it starts with seeking the full unvarnished truth. The truth that we’re not just the people who made [inaudible 00:16:22] famous. We’re not just a model minority. We’re actually really complex human beings and we have a lot to say and now is the time to say it because our elders, the keepers of our storied, they’re dying.

Thanh Tan: It took a younger generation of Jews to get their parents and their grandparents to talk about the Holocaust and it took a younger generation of Japanese Americans to get their parents to acknowledge the indignity of the interim camps during World War two and I feel the exact same way about our Vietnamese American experience. It’s on us, the younger generation of Vietnamese Americans to tell these stories. About the pain of our parents losing their country, South Vietnam and what it means to have sided with the Americans in the only war this country has ever lost. Many of us are now in the privileged position of being able to look back and reflect in a way that our parents simply can’t.

Thanh Tan: So thanks for listening to Second Wave, an American story that begins in Vietnam. What’s a story you’ve always believed about yourself and your community, but are just now starting to question? Let me know by emailing me at secondwave@kuow.org. Second Wave is a production of KUOW and PRX, Caroline Chamberlain and Whitney Henry Lester are our producers. Jim Gates is our editor. Music in this episode is courtesy of Sublime Frequencies. At the top of the show, you heard the voice of Zoa Lynn singing the song [inaudible 00:18:08] and at the end, music courtesy of [inaudible 00:18:10]. Special thanks to Sonia Harris for production assistance.

Thanh Tan: Support from Second Wave comes from Fischer Plumbing family of companies, committed to their communities for over 40 years by supporting youth sports programs, charities for the disadvantage and water conservation. Fischer Plumbing offers, plumbing, heating, air conditioning and rooter services. More at Fischerplumbing.com, that’s F-I-S-C-H-E-R plumbing.com.