The Santa Clara County Office of Education in collaboration with the Orange County Department of Education is proud to introduce the Vietnamese American Experiences Model Curriculum (VAEMC)
Read below for transcript
Jessica Simpson:
Welcome, everyone, and happy Friday. So happy to see all of you here. My name is Jessica Simpson and I am the Director of School Climate Leadership and Instructional support here at the Santa Clara County Office of Education. Welcome you all to the Vietnamese American Experience Model Curriculum Conference. We now have an opportunity to listen to a poem and watch a poem by Alexandra Huynh, the National Youth Poet Laureate.
Alexandra Huynh:
Hi, my name is Alexandra Huynh. I go to Stanford University, and this is my poem titled It Does Not Matter Any Longer Where You Live from news reports on the fires in California and the floods in Vietnam. One, they waited for the answers they didn’t want to hear, but knew were reality. From my living room, I watch as tiny yellow men march into the worst darkness and pretend not to hear when they have names. Witness an unprecedented use of the word unprecedented.
The state of California has swallowed Connecticut like fever, leaving behind a scorched footprint, the shape of neglect. There are streetlights in the forest now. The forest is a city with wildfire for veins and a steady churn of smog. Vehicles spill onto highways to escape the color of death. But even the lucky ones wake up to smudged sun and sepia. Classic western, villainize nature, defend your honor, reduce the brown people to accessory.
This is the work of a century’s suppression of a creature that feeds on its own dead. When there is nothing left to breathe, you produce the opposite of oxygen. Don’t need a crystal ball. Return the trees to their cradles, burn the land clean of history. Seethe warning, blaze insurrection. Do not slow. Do not slow. Let them see the inferno they created.
Two. Local residents now live in a way that is prepared for natural disaster in the country my mother loves. In its naked heart. Coastlines unravel into starving hands, drawing anything with mass into wet embrace. Include the slippers whose tattered pockets kept our feet from catching wind. And the plastic collected to prove we exist. Include the caution tape, the bamboo, the dining tables, the books, the altars, the rice, the fields they grow in, the ao yai, the photos and the children who have now found mothers in this soft earth.
They say it sounds like a bomb when the mountain that is not actually a mountain explodes and it weeps burials for the willowed bodies who watch water rise to fool their conscience, who recite Buddha’s name until synonymous with mosquito hum, who hold real hands in the dark of electricity while millions of hummingbirds crash into sheet metal roof, and herds of baby elephants swarm at the ankles, which, of course, the meteorologists will call rainfall and the parents will call temporary, will call home.
Three. Their only desire was to be together in the home they loved left. The structures are empty now, either because the people fled or endeared baptism by flame, flood. An elderly couple is found in the charcoal of their farm. A boy recognized under comic shop sludge. The men on the news say, “Climate change is a hoax.” I talk back, hold the objects they inhabit, break them.
Jessica Simpson:
Wow, that was absolutely beautiful. Okay. Whew, that was a lot. Here we are. A keynote speaker for today is Dr. Viet Nguyen Dr. Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Sympathizer, a New York Times bestseller that has been translated into 27 languages. His acclaimed work spans fiction and nonfiction with honors including the Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships. In addition to his writing, Dr. Nguyen is a university professor at the University of Southern California. Fight on. Anybody? Just me. There we go. All right. And has made significant contributions to conversations about war, memory, and identity through his novels, short stories and essays. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Viet Nguyen.
Viet Nguyen:
I’m just going to keep Ollie up here for good luck. No, I’m just kidding. Okay, thanks a lot. I, in my life have actually never said fight on, so thank you for that. Hey, good morning, Santa Clara County and San Jose. Such a thrill to be here back in my hometown. This is where I grew up from 1978 to 1988. I went to school at St. Patrick’s Grammar School on Santa Clara Street in downtown San Jose. And then I continued my education at Bellarmine College Preparatory.
And then I went to UC Berkeley, the greatest university in Northern California. All due respect to our poet, but nevertheless, that is true. I went to UC Berkeley and I had a very good education from Patrick’s and from Bellarmine. But what I did not have in those schools is what you’re getting today, which was an education in diversity. And when I got to UC Berkeley, I was immediately radicalized. I became an Asian-American. And I discovered all facets of American history that I had never learned before and I became enraged. I became stunned at how little I knew about the complexities of our history and our culture, and our politics in California and in the United States.
So it’s really gratifying to see now that we have a Vietnamese American curriculum and we have an ethnic studies requirement in California because as an undergraduate I majored not only in English, but also in ethnic studies. And none of us took what we had for granted as radical as Berkeley was. It still wasn’t diverse enough for our taste. So many of us who were Asian American and people of color activists on the campus, we had to struggle for issues of diversity and for issues of representation.
And I like to say that I graduated from UC Berkeley with two arrests, three degrees and four misdemeanors, all committed in the name of diversity and greater representation at UC Berkeley. I became a professor and an educator. I’ve been teaching in universities since I was 22 years old. You do the math, but it’s been a very, very long time. So I take these questions that the curriculum raises and our task here as educators very, very seriously.
And for me, the reason I became a writer, an educator, a professor, and the person who speaks to you here today is inextricably intertwined with the experiences of myself as a refugee, my parents as refugees, and the entire Vietnamese refugee community that has been scattered all over the world, but concentrated here, especially in San Jose, which I believe now has the largest population of Vietnamese-Americans in the entire United States and arguably the best Vietnamese food outside of Vietnam.
So I want to tell you a story beginning with my parents. My parents were born in the 1930s in a poor rural village in central northern Vietnam. They endured 40 years of war, colonization, racism, and becoming refugees. Not once, but twice. In 1954, the country was divided into north and south and my parents had to make a choice, and they, along with 800,000 other Vietnamese Catholics migrated or fled from the north to the south.
My mother went along with her entire family. My father went with my mother and her family and he left behind his parents, his three brothers and his younger sister. He was the eldest. He would not see them again for 40 years. My parents moved to the south. They settled in Banh Me Thuot, Vietnam. They became successful despite the lack of education. And then 20 years later they became refugees once more.
My father was in Saigon on business. My mother was in Banh Me Thuot. Banh Me Thuot is best known for two things, one is coffee. So you probably have had coffee from Banh Me Thuot. And the other was being the first town captured in the final invasion from the north in March of 1975. And at the time, my mother was left alone in Banh Me Thuot with my oldest sister who was 16, my older brother who was seven years older than me and myself at four years of age. And like so many other Vietnamese people during this time, whatever side they were on, my mother had to make a life-and-death decision.
Unable to communicate with my father, she decided to flee and take my older brother and me with her and leave behind my 16-year-old sister to guard the family property. Can you imagine being 16 years old and left behind by yourself in the face of an invasion and told to guard the family property? My mother assumed we would come back. I think it was a reasonable assumption, but that was not how history turned out. We didn’t come back. My parents would not see my sister again for 20 years. And I, at four years of age, who knew I had a sister would forget that I had a sister.
We ended up after the typical refugee dramas that are absolutely normal for just about everybody in the Vietnamese refugee community, we ended up in the United States in one of four refugee camps set up to hold the 130,000 Vietnamese refugees who came to the United States. Ours was in Pennsylvania in Fort Indiantown Gap. Anybody here from Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania? Okay, one. There were 22,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania.
And in order to leave that refugee camp, you had to have an American sponsor. You there wasn’t an American individual family or church willing to sponsor all four of us. So one sponsor took my parents, one sponsor took my 10-year-old brother. One sponsor took four-year-old me. And this is where my memories begin howling and screaming as I’m taken away from my parents. I like to say that I’m grateful to the refugee experience because it’s given me the necessary emotional damage required to be a writer.
I was comparatively lucky. I spent three months with my sponsor family who were very blonde and very kind. My older brother who was 10 or 11 at the time didn’t get to come home for two years. And that, he has told me, is how we know mom and dad love you more. You shouldn’t feel too bad for him though [inaudible 00:13:19] after coming to this country with no English, seven years later graduated as valedictorian of San Jose High. And then went on to Harvard, which is what you’re supposed to do when you’re an Asian immigrant, and then to Stanford medical school. And now he’s the professor at UCSF.
Many of you know him also as one of the founders of the Progressive Vietnamese Network. So the story of my brother and myself and my parents in many ways embodies the American dream. My parents came here with almost nothing, and then they moved from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to San Jose, California, thank God, in 1978 and opened perhaps the second Vietnamese grocery store in San Jose, the Saigon Mui, which was found on Santa Clara Street between fourth and fifth.
You know exactly where this is. Because if you go there now, you will see across the street from where my parents’ store used to be, the new or relatively new San Jose city hall. In the late 1970s, no one wanted to open businesses in downtown San Jose except Vietnamese refugees. By the late ’70s and early ’80s, you could go to downtown San Jose, you could see the Saigon Mui, you could see Vietnamese Cafes, you could see Vietnamese beauty parlors, you can see Vietnamese video stores, you can see Vietnamese restaurants. We helped to transform downtown San Jose.
So what was really interesting for me at around 10 or 11 years age, to walk down the street from my parents’ store and see a sign in another store window that said, “Another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese.” I was too young at that age to really understand what the implications of that sign were. But obviously, it was not simply a sign, it was a story, an age-old story in the United States and in many other countries of the fear of the other and the newcomer.
It was a story that would be repeated over and over again. It’s a story that’s still being told today, not about Vietnamese refugees or immigrants, but about Haitians and Venezuelans. It’s a story that would be told again and again, and this. It’s our obligation, those of us who have experienced that story that stand up not just for ourselves as Vietnamese people or whoever we happen to be, but for the new others in American society. I hope that’s one of the lessons that the Vietnamese American curriculum teaches us.
It is interesting for me to look at downtown San Jose and to realize that most of those Vietnamese businesses are now gone. Because what happened is the Vietnamese American businesses were very successful, and then Silicon Valley took off, and all this tax revenue came in. And downtown San Jose or the city felt that it should be a prettier downtown San Jose. That’s why they built a new city hall there, and that’s why the city forced a lot of these Vietnamese American businesses to sell their property. So if you go to the site of the Saigon Mui today, you do not see the Saigon Mui. What do you see on the site of my parents’ store? Starbucks. Now that is the American dream. And Starbucks is at the bottom of a building that is apparently now the tallest and most expensive apartment building in downtown San Jose.
But you’ll see no trace of the Saigon Mai or any of these other Vietnamese businesses in the 1970s and 1980s. And I wrote one autobiographical short story in my entire life, and it was about the Saigon Mui, and that’s found in my collection, The Refugees. And when The Refugees was translated into Vietnamese and published in Vietnam, do you know the one short story that was censored and removed from that book? The story about the Saigon Mui. So I understand how many Vietnamese refugees feel about their stories and their erasure. They’ve been erased oftentimes in American memory and American history and American storytelling, and they’ve been erased from Vietnam as well.
So here we see the importance of a Vietnamese American curriculum, it’s for the United States as a whole. It’s for Californians, it’s for the residents of this county. But I do feel that for a lot of Vietnamese refugees of the older generation, it’s also for their own children and their own grandchildren who will not know the stories of their parents, their grandparents, and their ancestors.
But at 10 or 11 years of age, I did not understand any of this. Instead, I absorbed the racism in that sign in ways that I’d not fully comprehend or was able to articulate. So a few years later, I would go to Bellarmine, a very great high school where I received a very great education, but there was only a handful of us of Asian descent at the time. We knew we were different, we just didn’t know how to put it into words. So every day we of Asian descent would gather in a corner of the campus and we would call ourselves the Asian Invasion. That was the only language we had for ourselves, a racist language. And the irony of it all, the joke that none of us understood at the time was that Asians have never invaded the United States. If anything, it’s the United States that has invaded Asia.
And that’s the effect of racism, it’s gaslighting the victims of racism. It’s making the victims of racism absorb the stories directed against them and to absolve the racists of their own history. Again, I didn’t know any of this at the time. I was a young Vietnamese refugee boy watching my parents work 12 to 14 hour days in the Saigon Mui almost every day of the year. My parents were shot in that store. The greatest incident of police death in San Jose occurred outside the Saigon Mui when two police officers were shot there.
And you know what? My parents never told me about it. They wanted to protect me. I found out 30 years later from a classmate who became the president of Bellarmine who said, “Did you know that these police officers were murdered outside your parents’ store?” I had no idea. That’s what our parents and our grandparents have often done for us, is to protect us from the travails and the difficulties that they themselves have gone through.
I knew something difficult was happening, watching what was going on with my parents. I couldn’t do anything about their struggles. They would work all those days. Then they would come home after dinner. I would help them with the accounting. So the work wasn’t even done. So as a little boy, I was handling the cash, the checks, the food stamps, the aid to families with dependent children, coupons, the women, infant children’s coupons. I would tally all of that. And so had a sense of how difficult life was for Vietnamese refugees, that they were on welfare, that they were dependents of the state so many of them. And so why they turned out to be Republicans, who knows? That’s human nature.
But I survived that experience by turning to the San Jose Public Library. My parents didn’t buy any books, we had no books in our house. So I went to the San Jose Public Library, I read everything I could. Became a lover of literature and of stories. I wanted to become a writer. My first inkling of that was in the third grade at Lowell Elementary, the school I went to before St. Patrick. Our third grade teacher said, “Why don’t you write and draw your own stories?” So I wrote and drew my own book, Lester the Cat.
Lester was an urban cat stricken with ennui, bored with city life, he fled to the countryside. There in a hay-strewn barn, he found love with a country cat. Well, the San Jose Public Library unexpectedly gave Lester the Cat a book award. And I’m forever grateful to the San Jose public library for encouraging me and setting me on the path to more than 30 years of misery in trying to become a writer. Now, Lester the Cat had nothing to do on the surface with the Vietnamese refugee experience. At that age, I probably did not understand that lonely Lester who wanted to flee from urban strife to a pastoral countryside, probably most likely was me.
And I think now when I think about the kinds of stories that we have in this Vietnamese American curriculum and all of these young Vietnamese Americans who want to become storytellers and writers, makers of their own narrative and of their own stories, they shouldn’t be obligated. Like I feel I’m obligated to tell the story of refugees and of war and of history. They should be telling stories like Lester the Cat. And in fact, there’s a whole new generation like Alexandria who’s writing about climate disaster. There are others who are writing about zombies, lesbian vampires, rewritings of the Great Gatsby. And this is exactly what it should be. The Vietnamese American curriculum should tie us to our history and also free us for our history at the same time.
But I grew up in a generation in which we were not free from history. We were reminded of history all the time. I grew up in the seventies and eighties watching almost every single movie Hollywood made about the Vietnam war, which is an exercise I recommend to nobody, especially if you’re Vietnamese or Asian. It was through that experience that I understood that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in history. The war ended in 1975, but it was clearly not over for the Vietnamese refugees. I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee community, steeped in melancholia, rage, anger, sadness, bitterness and loss over the war. I grew up in the United States that was still fighting the war over again in memory every time I went to the movie theater.
I remember my first encounter with the American fantasies about the Vietnam war. I was 11 or 12. We had a VCR. I brought home a videotape from the Vietnamese video store, put it in the VCR, it was Apocalypse Now. 11 or 12 years of age, I was an American. I loved American war movies. I was an American War movie fanatic, I cheered for American soldiers. So I was cheering for the American soldiers in Apocalypse Now up until the moment they massacred Vietnamese civilians. And at that point, I was split two. Was I the American doing the killing or was I the Vietnamese being killed? That was too confusing for me to understand.
So I put that feeling away. I didn’t think about it again until I went to what I affectionately call the University of Communists at Berkeley. Took a film class. I was asked by the professor to recount an episode in a movie that had shaped me in some way. First scene that came to mind was the massacre scene from Apocalypse Now. And as I told that story, I found myself shaking with rage and anger. And at that moment, I understood fully for the first time the power of stories. Up until then, I had been naive, I had been romantic, I’d been sentimental. I believed in the power of stories to save me, that little boy in the San Jose Public Library.
But if stories have the power to save us, they also have the power to destroy us as well. That’s what those movies of the Vietnam war did to me and to so many other Vietnamese refugees and Vietnamese Americans and Asian Americans as well. And it made me realize what I didn’t understand that my entire life in the United States, I’d been growing up under conditions of narrative scarcity. That’s when almost none of the stories are about you.
And so when a story about you comes along, you get very excited or very nervous, “At last, a story about us”. And so when Crazy Rich Asians came out, all the Asians freaked out. We were like, “Oh my God, A story about us. Too bad is not a very good story.” But that’s an unfair burden to put on Crazy Rich Asians or any movie. Crazy Rich Asians just wants to be a rom-com. Why are we putting the weight of 2 billion people on a rom-com? But that’s narrative scarcity. It’s an unfair burden of expectation and representation. The opposite of narrative scarcity is narrative plenitude. That’s when almost all of the stories are about you. And so when a story about you comes around and you don’t like it, you can just say it’s just a story because it is. You have 999 other stories about you that you can turn to.
And so if you have ever said it’s just a story, you live in narrative plenitude, you have narrative privilege that you take for granted. You are a part of a majority in some way, and those who live in narrative scarcity can never take for granted the meaning of stories. Stories are a luxury and a necessity all at the same time. And that’s why the Vietnamese American curriculum exists because we want a plenitude of stories. We don’t just want one story to bear the weight of the community and the history. And I know this very intimately because when my first novel The Sympathizer came out, it was well-reviewed and the first review that came out said, “Viet is a voice for the voiceless.” And I was like, no. Have you ever met Vietnamese people? Been to a Vietnamese house, a Vietnamese restaurant? Were really, really loud.
As the writer, Arundhati Roy has said, there’s really no such thing as the voiceless. They are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard. And that has been the place of every single minority in the United States, whether these are racial minorities, gender minorities, class minorities, sexual minorities, they have been deliberately silenced and preferably unheard.
So I would like for you never to call anybody a voice for the voiceless because you may think it’s a compliment, but it is not. Because what you are really saying is, “We only want to hear one voice from your community. We don’t want to deal with everybody, we just want one representative. We don’t want to hear the chorus or the cacophony of voices from that community. And I say chorus or cacophony because when we speak about a diversity of a people or a community, sometimes they will be in harmony and sometimes they will be in dissonance. And we who grew up in the Vietnamese refugee and Vietnamese American community know very well that we oftentimes disagree with each other very vigorously.
And that is not to be suppressed. And I know that very intimately as well. I was on book tour in the fall, this young Vietnamese-American woman comes up to me, she’s in her early 20s. She’s a fan, she likes my work. But she says in her parents’ household, “You are the second most hated person. The most hated person, Joe Biden.” It’s probably Kamala Harris now.
So there are all kinds of divisions in the Vietnamese community that a Vietnamese American curriculum should not ignore. We’re not all just singing songs in harmony. We come from a history and a people who have fought wars with each other, who have fought conflicts with each other in our diaspora, that also should be acknowledged. I don’t blame this young woman’s parents for hating me. After all, when I wrote the Sympathizer, that first novel, I set out to offend everybody.
And judging from the reviews I’ve received from Vietnamese people, Vietnamese Americans and Americans in general, I have succeeded. It was important for me to write a novel that tried to offend everybody because the place of so-called minorities in the United States is oftentimes to placate the majority, to placate other minorities, to placate our own people. But that’s not the function of storytelling or it shouldn’t be, and that’s not the function of education. If we’re placating, we’re failing.
So why did I want to try to offend in the Sympathizer? Well, I had grown up, as I had said, watching this war fought again in American memory and realizing that even though this was called the Vietnam War in the United States, it was not actually about Vietnam, it was about Americans. It was called the Vietnam War. And yet the Vietnamese people were erased from this narrative in the United States and in the global consciousness as well.
So I wanted to write a novel about the Vietnam war from a Vietnamese point of view. And that was so difficult because I was being told by people in the publishing industry that we’ve had enough Vietnam war novels. No one wants to read more Vietnam war novels. What they really meant was we’ve had enough Vietnam war novels written by white men, and we don’t know what to do with the Vietnamese American who wants to tell the story and of the Vietnam war. The poet Bao Phi talks about this in a slightly different way. He was also a Vietnamese refugee.
He wanted to write not about the Vietnam war, but about the displacement of Vietnamese refugees who had fled from Vietnam and then come to the United States, and then settled in New Orleans Louisiana where they were displaced yet again by Hurricane Katrina. That’s what he wanted to write about. But he was told, “No, you’re Vietnamese. You only get one trauma, the trauma of the Vietnam war.” So we only get the one trauma and then we can’t talk about other traumas, but we can’t talk about our one trauma except on the terms set by the majority in the United States.
That’s the double bind of minorities, so-called minorities in the United States. And we Vietnamese are not unique. Every single, so-called minority in the United States has been given one trauma. That’s what you’re allowed to talk about, and you’re only allowed to talk about it on the terms set by the dominant majority.
So for me to write the truth was already to offend everybody who was attached to the one trauma that had been defined by dominant society. I sat out very deliberately in writing the Sympathizer and refuse the typical positions expected of so-called minority storytellers. And those positions are of apology and translation. To be heard in this country as a so-called minority, it’s easier to be heard if first you apologize for your existence, “I’m sorry that we’re here. Sorry. I’m sorry that my people, our food stinks. I’m sorry that we take up space. I’m sorry that we’re too loud. But let me explain to you, my dominant audience. Let me translate for you the history, the culture, the language, the customs of my strange people.” If you do those things, you are much more likely to be heard because the terms are set by the dominant majority.
Let me give you an explanation or an example of this. Let’s say you’re reading a novel and the character in the novel says, “I ate a bowl of pho, comma, a delicious beef noodle soup, comma. Now that’s true, but if you read that, you would know that that story is not being told to Vietnamese people because no Vietnamese person would require a translation of what pho is. And then let’s say you came across an early draft of the Great Gatsby, the great American novel, and in it F. Scott Fitzgerald had Jay Gatsby say, “I prepared for Daisy a sandwich, comma, two slices of bread between which there is something delicious.” You laugh because he would never say that because he would assume you know what a sandwich is.
So, Vietnamese people, when you tell your own stories, do not translate. Be defiant storytellers. That’s what a Vietnamese American curriculum or any ethnic studies curriculum should teach. Be defiant storytellers. Make your readers, your listeners, your audiences come to you not the other way around. I think often about the ending of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, because Toni Morrison has been so correct and important and influential in asserting that she wrote about black people and especially black women from the perspectives of black people and black women.
She has said that black people have been delegated, relegated to the margins of American history, but the task of black storytellers was not therefore to speak to the center, but to move the center to the margins. That is the task of defiant storytelling. And at the end of Beloved, she wrote about this story of enslavement and of haunting, and of trauma, and of horror that this is not a story to pass on. I think she meant two things by this.
This is not a story to pass on to the next generation. This is not a trauma and a crime and a horror that should be repeated. But it also means this is not a story to ignore. And that’s a dilemma that all of us who are so-called minorities, find ourselves in. We are minorities, not just by demographics, but by the categorization of the very conflicted and horrifying history of the United States.
Are we supposed to ignore that history? But if we ignore that history, are we going to be condemned to repeat it? That contradiction defines who we are as so-called minorities in the United States and the Vietnamese Americans are not exempt from that, we are faced with a contradiction and a paradox. I’ll give you an example. Much of the Vietnamese American community is constituted by refugees.
I’m a refugee. I was a refugee. I used both tenses the past and the present because legally, politically, technically sartorially, I am no longer a refugee. But in some corner of my mind, I still feel like a refugee. I’ve never forgotten the refugee experience. The trauma of that experience has imprinted itself on me in a very deep way in ways that I never fully understood until I became a writer and struggled with that emotional and psychic damage for many decades.
I think that’s true for a lot of refugees, that they have never left behind the refugee experience, whether they can articulate it or not. And oftentimes because they could not articulate what it meant to be a refugee, their children and their grandchildren suffered from that. So much of the damage of the war and the refugee experience wasn’t simply what happened on the battlefield or in Vietnam, not even on the boat or the trip over here, but in the decades and decades of silence and abuse that happened in Vietnamese refugee families because people could not process their refugee experience.
And that’s why we needed Vietnamese American curriculum, to tell these stories. And to acknowledge that the sufferings of war and the refugee experience were not a matter of the past, but are in fact a matter of the present, and that their legacy has been transmitted generationally. That is true also for American veterans of the Vietnam War. I have encountered so many veterans, so many children of veterans, so many grandchildren of veterans who have never fully processed what happened, who never spoke about what happened, and who left an absence, a hole in their families that resonated emotionally and traumatically for decades and decades that binds together refugees and veterans of war.
Think about the fact that when we speak about refugees back then in the 1970s and today, the term that we often use is a refugee crisis. Refugee crisis. Refugees are a problem in this imagination, but I grew up with refugees. We were not a problem. We were not a crisis. What if the problem in the crisis is in the people in the countries that produce the refugees in the first place? Would Vietnamese refugees have existed without French colonization and American War?
Would the refugees that are coming to the United States today exist without our military industrial complex, our foreign policy, our drug habits, our over consumption, our excessive capitalism, our xenophobia, our ignorance of the world? Perhaps we are the problem and the crisis, not them. That’s also something that should be considered in a Vietnamese American curriculum, and it should make us question the difference between identity and solidarity.
I call myself a Vietnamese American and a refugee, and its great. It’s an identity. I know where to get the best pho. But if that’s the entire point of the Vietnamese American curriculum to tell Vietnamese Americans that they’re great, they’re awesome, their stories are important, they should be validated, that’s crucial. But if in the end, the point of the curriculum is to reinforce identity, then it’s a failure. I’ll give you an example. 2017, the Trump administration decides to reinforce the borders, escalate the xenophobia, separate children from families at the border, lose children in cages and in our detention system for years and years, possibly up until the present. That is a crime and a stain on the American consciousness forever.
The LA Times interviewed Vietnamese Americans about this. An 80-year-old Vietnamese American said, “Trump is correct. These brown people, these Muslims, these people from south of the border, we should keep them out. We Vietnamese people were the good refugees. These people are the bad refugees.” My reaction was, “Oh no, Steve Tran, you didn’t just say that.” Because I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee community in the 1970s and 1980s, and let me tell you something, there were a lot of bad Vietnamese refugees. We did a lot of bad things. Our list of crimes is long and very creative.
I’m not going to get into all of it. Those of us who lived through that time know what we did. And now all that has been forgotten by Americans, but especially by Vietnamese people because we only want to remember the positive part of the Vietnamese American community, we only want that validated. The Vietnamese American curriculum needs to acknowledge, however, the full humanity and complexity of Vietnamese Americans. Not just our successes, our accomplishments, but our failures, our conflicts, our crimes as well. Because that is actually what makes us human, the full complexity, not just the ideal vision.
Even using the language of good and bad refugees is deeply problematic. Refugees who commit crimes don’t do it simply because they’re refugees, they do those things because they’re human. Refugees who do good things don’t do those things because they’re refugees. They do them because they are human. Even those people we call good refugees. People like my brother and myself, the doctors, the lawyers, the engineers, the nurses, the pharmacists, all those people all doing noble things, how good are they if they don’t do good things for other people?
The bad refugees, so-called bad refugees, the ones who committed the crimes, the ones who did things like home invasions, which the Vietnamese refugee community was terrified of in the 1970s and the 1980s. So Vietnamese refugees were more scared of other Vietnamese refugees than they were of Americans. Those refugees did bad things. Absolutely. You don’t want a Vietnamese guy putting a gun in your face. We were terrified of that. But where did that Vietnamese refugee learn how to do that? Learned it from his father’s, learned it from his uncle, learned it from these traumatized Arvin veterans who didn’t know how to process their trauma.
Those Vietnamese refugees who cheated welfare, and there were a lot of them, where did they learn how to do that? Was it possibly from living in an economy in Vietnam that was over inflationary, that had been distorted and transformed by American aid and by American corruption? Maybe that’s where they learned their corruption from. A Vietnamese-American curriculum needs to turn our attention, not only to the stories of Vietnamese people, but to the histories and the contexts that help to shape them and make them do what they did.
Think about the fact that when it comes to refugees, we’re tempted to resort to a rhetoric of us and them. And again, that rhetoric is impossible for me because I’m one of us and I’m one of them at the same time. I am not a refugee and I am a refugee at the same time. And so that is the lesson that I have drawn from my experience, that identity is important, but it is not enough. Solidarity is what matters. The ability to take our identities and to draw the lesson that we are connected to history and to other people who on the surface may not seem like us, but who are actually quite like us because they’re human, but also because we share histories that we may not fully understand.
I’ll give you another example. Fort Indiantown Gap. I have to admit that for 40 years, I never thought twice about the name Fort Indiantown Gap. Why do you think it was called Fort Indiantown Gap? By 1700 in Harrisburg, the indigenous peoples, the Susquehannock and the Conestoga, had mostly been wiped out by white settlers. In 1700 handful who were remaining were massacred by a white vigilante gang called the Paxton Boys who were never prosecuted for their crimes. My parents, when they left Fort Indiantown Gap and bought their first house in Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, bought their house in Lower Paxton Township.
What does it mean to be a refugee, to come to this country, to own land, to become citizens, to live the American dream, knowing or unknowing that your home, your dream is built on indigenous land? It’s possible to be both a victim of racism and a refugee and to participate in racism and structural oppression and settler colonialism. That’s a paradox and a contradiction that our education should awaken us to. The difficult lesson, Americans don’t like it. Americans have never called settler colonialism by its name. Instead, they call settler colonialism the American dream.
So what’s the function of our education? I speak as an educator. I teach a class at the University of Southern California called the American War in Vietnam. I’ve done it for about 15 years now. I have 150 students. It fulfills a general education requirement. Almost none of my students are humanities majors. Most of them are pre-law, business, the sciences, technical fields, all wonderful things. A lot of them are Southeast Asian refugees or the children or grandchildren of Southeast Asian refugees.
A lot of them are military. For years and years, I was encountering students who were literally coming from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, and sitting in my class in their military uniforms. And for years and years I’ve been training students who would leave my classroom to go to war. I had one student who said, “I’m graduating, then I’m going to go and I’m going to learn how to fly F-18s off an aircraft carrier.”
I think of that class as an exercise in democracy. This is what we’re supposed to do as educators, we reach out to everybody on important subjects like the Vietnamese American curriculum, like the Vietnam War, like the history of warfare in the United States. We deal with difficult subjects and we have to speak to everybody, not just the people who look like us and agree with us. So in this class for the Southeast Asian students, I think there is a lot of positive work that’s being done very similar to the work to what’s being done in the Vietnamese American curriculum.
These Southeast Asian students are getting affirmation about their history and their experiences and their genealogies. They’re getting the opportunity to reflect upon themselves, their families, and their place in American society. They get to make a connection with their families. One of the exercises of the class, interview survivors of the war, put up their videos on our website anotherwarmemorial.com. It’s a transformative experience for a lot of these Southeast Asians to finally talk to their parents and their grandparents who have never talked to them before about what they had been through.
But the class is also designed to unsettle them as well. As educators, our obligation is to give our students safe spaces and to provoke and to protect them. But I think our obligation is also to unsettle them and to provoke them as well. And that’s a difficult task, but we have to do both. The Vietnamese American curriculum, I hope, also does both. Not enough just to make a few people feel better about themselves. We have to make them ask questions that can be very uncomfortable.
Ironically, when I started teaching this class, I told my students, “This is not a military history class.” Because when you say military history, you think things like generals and battles, and tanks and all of that. I said, “This is a class about war and the real nature of war as a totalizing experience. This is a class about the Vietnam war as a function of the military industrial complex of the United States. This is a class about war and how wars don’t only kill soldiers, but kill civilians as well. More civilians died in the Vietnam war than soldiers. More civilians have died in the wars of the 20th century than soldiers.”
Classes on war have to take that into account. Classes on war have to stress that civilian stories are war stories too. And the irony of it all is now this class fulfills ROTC’s military history requirement. And I’m glad. I’m glad about that. Because I’m glad that people who are not Vietnamese or not Southeast Asians take this class. And I’m glad that hopefully people who are not Vietnamese Americans will take the Vietnamese American curriculum because we who have been so-called minorities, have always been required to take the education and the classes and the literature of the people who are not like us, and we are expected to understand their stories. And the function of education and the storytelling is to get people to tell and listen to our stories.
I think I know what my Southeast Asian students get from my class, but I often wonder what do my military students get from my class, those who are trying to reflect upon what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and their role there as soldiers and as pilots and as sailors. I wonder about my students who have left my class to go to war. I don’t know what they’ve taken from my class, but I hope they think twice. I hope they think twice. Because we have been conditioned to think of the people outside of our borders as inhuman, they’re not American. Those who are not white are not considered human in our American imagination.
We have to consider them as less than human because we’re dropping bombs on them, we’re firing drone missiles at them, we’re supplying other countries with those weapons. They are not human to us. I want my graduates to think twice about the inhumanity of the people at which our military industrial complex is aimed, because we Vietnamese people, we’re the inhuman ones in the American imagination at a certain point. And I want my graduates to think about their own humanity and what kind of inhumanity is required to pull a trigger or simply to pay the taxes that supplies someone else with our bombs and our weapons.
In order for that to happen, in order for my graduates to think twice in order for the students of the Vietnamese American curriculum to think twice, in order for Americans to think twice, there has to be a change in the storytelling of America. There has to be a change in narrative, and it’s a very, very difficult thing. I’ll end with one example. How many of you have listened to, have seen or have read Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream? Raise your hands. Great.
How many of you have read or listened to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech Beyond Vietnam? Not many of you. And that’s a lesson for you. I Have a Dream is a great speech, but it speaks to the idealized image that Americans want to have for themselves. And most Americans have no idea that Martin Luther King Jr. exactly one year before he was assassinated, gave his speech Beyond Vietnam. It’s a 30-minute speech, you can find it online, Google. It’s very easy.
And in that speech, what he says is that the United States is guilty of a racist war. That the United States is guilty not only of racism, but militarism and capitalism. What he says is that this is a crime. What he says is that we have to listen to Vietnamese voices. What he also says is that if we have not learned our lessons from the Vietnam war, we will be marching again and again in future generations in protest of future wars. He was absolutely right.
When we speak about education, what we have to acknowledge and when we speak about Vietnamese and Vietnam and Vietnamese Americans, is that the United States has not learned its lesson from the Vietnam war. If we had learned our lesson from the Vietnam war, we would not be fighting forever wars. But instead, we took the exactly the wrong lessons from the Vietnam war. The Americans were defeated, and the lesson was, “We have to learn how to fight better wars.” That was the wrong lesson according to Martin Luther King. But we have forgotten all of that.
We have forgotten that. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “One of the cruel ironies of the war in Vietnam was that it took poor black men from the United States, brought them together with poor white men in Vietnam, and joined them together in a brutal solidarity against the Vietnamese, a solidarity that blacks and whites did not have in the United States.” I hope the Vietnamese American curriculum teaches that as well. Martin Luther King Jr. said he believed that the arc of the moral universe inevitably bends toward justice. We Americans like it to believe in that. We quote him on that very often.
But I also think there’s a parallel arc in American history that emanates from the very origins of our society. That other arc is one that finds its roots in genocide, in enslavement, in colonization, in occupation, and in perpetual war. That arc has brought us from the Indian Wars to the Philippine American war, to Korea, to Laos, to Cambodia, to Vietnam. And when I wrote my novel, the Sympathizer, it was not in my mind a Vietnam war novel, it was a novel about American history in which the Vietnam war was simply one episode in a long history of perpetual warfare. That is not the story that Americans want to hear about the Vietnam war.
That arc has brought us to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Israel, to Gaza, to Palestine. It’s not a surprise that a country like the United States, which has never confronted, never dealt with its origins in genocide, is supporting what I see as Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza against Palestinians. Our education is supposed to equip us to deal with difficulties with paradoxes, with contradictions. If the point of the Vietnamese-American curriculum is simply to say, “Vietnamese-Americans, you’re awesome,” it’s failed.
The point of the Vietnamese-American curriculum is to point out that we exist as Vietnamese-Americans in this country because of the paradoxes and contradictions of the United States, a country that has been founded on democracy, liberty, equality, inclusion, representation, all the beautiful things that I have benefited from. And it is a country that is also founded on brutality as well, the brutality of genocide, enslavement, colonization, and war. But it’s only in recognizing the horror from which the country has been born, that we can also find the hope in a Vietnamese-American curriculum. Thank you so much, San Jose, Santa Clara County.
Jessica Simpson:
Okay. That was amazing. Wow. Okay. Sorry. Oh, no. There we are. Thank you, Dr. Nguyen for your insightful and thought-provoking keynote. Your exploration of identity, memory and the immigrant experience has given us all much to reflect on, and we’re grateful for the depth and wisdom you’ve shared with us today. Your stories and perspectives inspire us to think more critically and empathetically about the world around us. Please join me in giving him one more round of applause.
