I wrote this article which ran in the San Jose Mercury, and on NAM website: New Year, Old Unresolved Passion: Vietnam and its Diaspora and Prof. Long Le responded. It’s a well thought out argument. I wanted to write a longer version in which I could explain what I meant by engagement but in journalism you’re not allowed to go pass certain number of words, so I will have to reply to Long in another article in the near future…

in the meanwhile, read on…

Both of my and Long’s pieces were published in the Nguoi Viet newspaper in Orange County, where the original Little Saigon is.

Andrew—-

Andrew Lâm is, of course, a gifted writer. Perhaps, he’s able to ‘’speak to each of us’’ because he is ‘’unresolved.’’ That is, he is of and, at the same time, beyond, the Vietnamese diasporic community.

In his own words, he has written, ‘’I was born a Vietnamese. ... I am reborn an American. …I am of one soul. …Two hearts.’’

In part, such ‘’unresolved-ness’’ has made his essays reflective, compelling and even fascinating. So much so that he is able to connect and evoke emotions from both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese alike.

In his recent article, ‘’New year, old unresolved passion: Vietnam and its diaspora,’’ Andrew has done just that by noting: ‘’The Vietnamese living abroad is no longer exiled from his homeland, but he risks being sidelined if he doesn’t adapt to the new realities of 21st-century Vietnam.’’ Simply, the Vietnamese will be sidelined if he fails to go beyond ‘’flying the flags of South Vietnam in shopping malls, erecting war memorials for fallen soldiers, organizing anti-communist protests and, lately, renaming business districts,’’ which ‘’have no apparent effect on Vietnam itself.’’

But, to be fair though, if the Vietnamese diasporic community is merely just denouncing and protesting instead of engaging a Vietnam in transition, I believe Andrew is also merely journalizing by commentating on the relations between the Vietnamese diaspora and the homeland without complementing it with journalistic reports through interviews and other research sources.

Interestingly, in an earlier article on the 30 years after the Vietnam War, Andrew claims that Vietnamese refugees are able to do what F. Scott Fitzgerald stated as the test of a first-rate intelligence: ‘’the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’’

As a matter of fact, evidence suggests that caution should be used in assuming the anti-communist identity breeds intolerance of attitude toward other dislikes. That is, Vietnamese refugees, on the one hand, are indeed intolerant of communism, but they are committed to political rights and civil rights as other immigrants on the other.

My own empirical research in Houston’s Vietnamese community also reveals that the older generations, with time, are more likely to agree that there is too little done to protect the environment and to make improvements for the poor, to volunteer for a non-Asian charity, to supportgays in the military, and to approve relatives marrying non-Asian. In fact, when I compare Vietnamese immigrants to other Asian immigrants of the same age and time in the U.S, Vietnamese immigrants have a better score on these acculturation indicators.

In fact, the characteristic of the Vietnamese diaspora is that of being physically, psychologically, culturally and intellectually displaced from one’s native land and culture by communist rule after the fall of Sài Gòn in 1975. Moreover, their experiences of war and its aftermath are sometimes further marginalized in the U.S. For example, in my research on how the Vietnam War is taught at the collegiate level, I found the vast majority of courses focus on the ‘’American Experience in Vietnam.’’ When the Vietnamese experience is covered, the focus is on nationalistic narratives of the communists and of the ‘’Việt Cộng’’ in order to explain how the communist north, as a bearer of country’s national resistance against foreign invasions, defeated the most technological advanced country in the world.

This is in essence intellectual displacement in which the views of the former Republic of Vietnam are often buried and disqualified in the teaching of the war. Andrew’s father, along with others of the same generation, has written unbiased work that does not hesitate to self critique, condemn the South’s problems or its Western allies, and provide unique insights on why the South lost and why the North won. But these works more often than not never see the light of day in the classroom. And it is not just American professors who perpetuate this intellectual displacement, but also many of the younger Vietnamese American professors who teach courses on the Vietnamese American experience but who choose not cover the war or when they do, they don’t include the views of the former Republic of Vietnam.

As a result, like Andrew who began to write in order to deal with his displacement, his father’s generation created the ‘’Little Saigons’’ to put back the ‘’place’’ into displacement. The ‘’Little Saigons’’ are not just economic or cultural necessities. They are also intellectual necessities to maintain the collective memory of their experiences and never more passionately than when the collective identity is believed to be attacked.

Nevertheless, the Vietnamese diaspora’s claims and negotiations of its rights to place and space do have its hardliners and extreme reactions. To be sure, the fervent anti-communist sentiment has resulted in several murder cases of Vietnamese American journalists that remain unsolved; restricted personal freedoms of which may attribute to why a number of the young and the more independent-minded have left or are alienated from the community; and have steered demonstrations of making claims to focus primarily on homeland concerns.

Yet, at the same time, it is often overlooked that the anti-communist identity is also a process of ‘’meaning making’’ in which members of the community can access, use, and alter the ‘’meaning making’’ activities. This would explain why currently, within the community, activities now include provisional return and repatriated return, without any backlash so long as these activities do not ‘’betray’’ the anti-communist identity. Cases, such as Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, that apologize or become ‘’spoke persons’’ for the regime’s đời mới reformers can ignite fervent protests. In my opinion, I believe such actions that are not independent or not willing to critique the shortcomings of the current regime cannot be considered a form of effective engagement.

Worthy of note is that, within the community, there are already discussions about new ways to engage Vietnam. At a conference in 2000, Lâm Lê Trinh argued that what’s at stake is the ‘’rebirth’’ of Vietnam in which the younger generations of overseas Vietnamese are the responsible for the reconstruction of Vietnam.

There are also discussions about the role of the Vietnamese diasporic media. Ngô Thế Vinh has argued that because there is no freedom of the press in Vietnam, the diasporic media should tailor and disseminate ‘’timeliness and a measure of content in news items’’ related to ‘’the future of the people, not of a temporary political regime.’’ So that when ‘’information is complete, generally speaking the Vietnamese will no longer maintain a passive stand which American people refer to as the ‘wait-and-see’ attitude.’’

The above I believe is more reflective of the realities, as well as the negative and positive externalities, of the unresolved anti-communist passion.

In conclusion, if it is fair that Andrew Lâm asks the community to resolve its ‘’old unresolved passion,’’ then I think is also fair to ask him to use his talents to provide ‘’reports’’ about these discussions that may reconstruct, and may bridge the divides, in order to usher in a ‘’rebirth’’ of Vietnam.

Dr. Long S Lê is the director of international initiatives for the Global Studies Program and also a lecturer of Vietnamese studies at the University of Houston. He has a blog on the global Vietnamese diaspora at www.vietdiaspora.wordpress.com.