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[ A Generation Later | Viet Kieu | Lead Editorial ]

It is one of the most tragic wars in America’s history. Last Sunday, 25 years after the end of the Vietnam war, Americans of different ethnicities, lifestyles and views converged in heart and soul to remember fallen heroes, fallen hopes and a fallen country.

Veterans, anti-war activists, widows, survivors, emigrés, and a new generation of U.S.-born Vietnamese Americans collectively remembered the war that killed 58,000 American GIs and 1 million Vietnamese, divided a people, and drove more than 2 million to flee a country that was once theirs.

People young and old, of all backgrounds and ethnicities coped the best way they knew how. They gathered together. Some sang hippie folk tunes with their guitars, others sang the Vietnamese anthem.

Last Sunday, in San Jose, Calif., what is now the hub for Vietnamese Americans in Northern California, people recalled their escape from communism and all that was lost in their search for freedom, by holding a commemoration of the fall of Saigon.

At times, the memorial was loud and festive as freedom fighters marched the streets of San Jose. Cars honked. People cheered. Before the crowd, a huge altar greeted attendees. A big bright blue banner blared: “Freedom, Democracy, Human Rights For Vietnam”.

The buzz of activity soon fell to a dead silence. And then sounds of Buddhist chanting echoed through the quiet crowds. Sticks of incense were lit filling the air with a spicy perfume, as the chants continued to ring out.

An elderly woman sitting on a patch of grass nearby witnessed the ceremonial act. She wiped tears away from her murky eyes. Asked what made her weep, she whispered, “we lost our country. Why shouldn’t we cry?” The woman shook her head falling silent.

This was the day Vietnamese Americans ditched mundane activities—chores, shopping or just relaxing at home—and instead spent the day in the company of those who fought in the war, remembering those who lost their lives and comforting each other for having lost a country as well.

Today, the Vietnamese émigré community in San Jose and the Bay Area numbers over 100,000. Their stories all have common threads weaving them together: A war divided a country and a people; citizens were forced to flee as political asylees; many came by boats; some lost wealth and possessions, while others lost family and loved ones. Still, behind the common history lies individual stories, each one uniquely experienced with its own mark of human tragedy, remembered and still told a quarter of a century later.

That diversity within the community is evident today, and chronicled by recent Vietnamese American history.

The first wave of Vietnamese immigration brought over 150,000 refugees who escaped during the final days of the war. Most were lifted by aircraft which hovered mid-air. Even now, famous footage of such scenes continues to be replayed on television, forever capturing the fright and rush that marked the memories of escapees.

The late1970s and early 1980s marked the era of ‘boat people,’ when refugees left Vietnam in droves by small fishing boats. Most sought haven at camps in Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong. Depending on where their sponsors lived, they were later scattered across the world—America, Australia or Europe.

Those who made it to My—or America—settled throughout the United States.

Orange County, in Southern California, boasts the largest Vietnamese exile community to date, with a Vietnamese American population of over 200,000 and the first ever ‘Little Saigon.’

San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is the next largest Vietnamese enclave, where Vietnamese Americans—from self-made high-tech CEOs to computer parts assembly workers—converge.

Then there’s Texas, where football player—Vietnamese American Dat Nguyen, a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys, grew up and became a sports star. Further east in Louisiana, the first Vietnamese Catholic church was founded. And other Vietnamese communities have sprouted in Washington D.C., Richmond, Va., Atlantic City, N.J., and Boston, Mass.

In 1983, another wave of Vietnamese arrived when the U.S. government allowed ‘Amerasians’ to immigrate, bringing thousands of Hapa children of American GIs to the United States.

Then in the early 1990s, older war veterans and political prisoners were released from reeducation camps and were allowed, along with their families, to come to the United States. Though emotionally and sometimes physically scarred by the war, some have not given up the fight, leading oft-times controversial protests and rallies within a larger anti-Communist movement.

Last spring, when one man—Truong Van Tran—put up a poster of Ho Chi Minh in his video store in Little Saigon in Westminster, Calif., droves of Vietnamese Americans from all over the country journeyed to protest. And earlier this year, an art exhibit in Oakland, Calif., featuring illustrations of the Communist leader, drew an equally impassioned crowd.

These protests, no doubt, have spurred heated debates. The young, the old, the liberals and conservatives are publicly battling it out and remain divided over the issues of free speech and communism.

If only one definitive thing can be said, it is that the Vietnamese community is still grappling with its past.

“We have moved on. But we cannot forget our past,” said Tung, who only wanted to be identified by his first name. Tung fled Vietnam in 1979, when he was 17 years old. He left with his cousin and little else. Now, at 38, he lives in San Jose, with his wife and son.

His two elder parents and sisters were left behind. He had always dreamt of bringing them to this country but both parents passed away before the paperwork could be completed. First his mother, three years ago, and a year later his father. The bureaucracy took too long, he said.

“My family is still back in Vietnam. I cannot forget about them, about why I left,” he said. “I still have a lot of memories.”

In many ways, it is the past that has glued the community together over the decades, despite its many differences.

“It’s part of our history; it makes us who we are today, as a community and as an individual,” said 24-year-old Katey Nguyen.

In recent years, the younger generation now coming of age, adds another dimension to an already complex community. While the older parents and grandparents remember the country of yesteryear, the younger ones are embracing the present, all the while trying to explore and understand the events that have shaped their parents’ lives and hence theirs.

Like so many other younger Vietnamese Americans, Nguyen has no recollection of the war. “We don’t carry the same kind of emotional baggage that came from the war,” said the third-year law student. “We don’t have the same kind of understanding of that time.”

Nguyen’s mother was three-months pregnant with her when she left the country. Nguyen was later born in Fairfax, Virginia.

But that never stopped her from trying to make sense of stories from her family’s past.

“My maternal grandfather served on the cabinet of the former president,” she recalled. “After the war, he was placed in a reeducation camp.”

Years later he was released from camp and reunited with his children.

“All he talked about were all the stories of his accomplishments, what he had done during his service.

“That’s all he has to hold on to. Coming over here, having nothing left, having your kids take care of you, it’s a lot of loss. I can’t imagine working [my] entire life for something, then end up with nothing.”

Understanding Vietnam’s recent history is “a moment of revelation, for the younger generation,” she added. “All of this makes up our history. We can’t push that aside—but as a community we need to look toward the future and forge ahead.”

Over the last two decades since the war ended, Vietnamese Americans have been depicted in the context of war, with their ‘escape stories,’ and romanticized tragedies. And until recently the word Vietnamese was synonymous with the terms ‘refugee’ or ‘boat people.’

Moreover, little credit has been given to the way in which Vietnamese Americans have carved their place in American history—Vietnamese American history—in the last 25 years.

Two years ago, Nguyen and her friend Thuy Thi Nguyen, toyed with the idea of a publication that would articulate that journey.

In the project’s initial stages, over 70 young Vietnamese Americans were recruited all over the nation—mostly graduate students, some of whom Katey Nguyen had never met. Ideas were generated and disseminated in cyberspace, and stories and discussions were teleconferenced. In the end, the project had culminated into a full-color, 178-page book profiling 25 Vietnamese American luminaries. And they aptly named it New Horizon.

Just last week, the two had finished putting the final touches on the design before sending it off to a printing press in Florida.

Among the profilees—the first Vietnamese American city councilmember, an NFL player, an astronaut, a MacArthur Genius fellow, journalists, filmmakers, community activists and professors—all pioneers who have done work that expands the definition of ‘Vietnamese American.’

Nguyen said the publication not only commemorates the 25^th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, but also celebrates the presence of Vietnamese in America over the past quarter century.

“If we can move away from the whole context of the Vietnam War and try to concentrate where the Vietnamese American community is today and how much we’ve accomplished, then the focus will be on the future, then we can forge ahead.”

Men in army fatigues with black berets stared ahead sternly, some in tears. Young women stood as poised as beauty queens with their faces made up and their hair perfectly coifed, donning colorful ao dai that fluttered in the wind.

By the afternoon, the crowd attending the San Jose ceremony had waned. Those who remained sat on the grass underneath trees, catching some shade, while others sat around picnic tables, eating their lunch, almost oblivious to the sounds of singing and the sermon-like speeches in Vietnamese declaring the need for a free Vietnam and civil rights for all.

Many children stood around, trying to understand the event that had shaped their parents’ life.

Elizabeth Vo is 17 years old. Dressed in a tube top, jeans and wearing sunglasses, she looked as though she was heading to the mall to hang out with friends. But she was there with her mother and three younger sisters. She pointed at a tiny ‘refugee boat’ on display at the ceremony, and said, “that’s how I came here.”

Vo was 2 years old when she arrived in the United States. With no memory of Vietnam, she, nevertheless, wanted to attend the day’s events to honor her grandfather, who passed away two years ago. He was a veteran of the South Vietnamese army. He was also the one who sponsored Vo, her sister and her mother to come to My.

Vo recognized how important it was for her to learn her family’s history. And for other young Vietnamese Americans, she said they need to “know the truth.”

“[Kids] need to be told the details. You don’t want to tell them lies,” she said.

Her mother, who now calls herself Betty, said she wanted her daughters to know what her “people” had endured to be in this country.

She said being at the commemoration brought back to her a sense of patriotism, renewing her commitment to educate her children about Vietnam’s turbulent history.

“Taking them here lets them know what happened 25 years ago. The younger ones were born here. They don’t know.”

She has five daughters. The eldest couldn’t attend last weekend’s event, but the other four went and absorbed as much as they could about their mother’s homeland, which they had forgotten already or, for the younger ones, never knew.

The littlest, 6-year-old Catherine, had been dressed in children’s army fatigues just for the day’s occasion. Standing no more than four feet tall, the girl, brimming with smiles, walked to a photo-collage board and stared at it.

A confusing array of images—the faces of war, of anti-Communist movements, of red white and blue and yellow and red stripes, of text both in Vietnamese and English, of a community—stared back at her.

Asked if she could read Vietnamese, she shook her head ‘no’. Asked if she could read English, she said, ‘yes.’ Asked if she knew what the images were about, she just covered her face and smiled and shook her head.

Then she said, “They’re Vietnamese Americans.”