This is the Music of Vietnamese Refugees

It’s 1 AM. You can’t sleep at night because your dad is with ten other friends, drinking and singing with no regard for you or your neighbors! Vietnamese music again!? Like, seriously! How many times can repeat “Sài Gòn đẹp lắm! Sài Gòn ơi! Sài Gòn ơiiiii!”??

You come home from college, wafting through the pungent smell of nước mắm as your mom is cooking phở, the sweet odor of anise seeds filling the air. In the background are two familiar faces: a short, old man with rounded glasses speaking in a gentle, refined Northern accent. Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn, the grandpa you probably see more than your own ông nội. A tall, slender woman, with the look and dignified air of a diva. Nguyễn Cao Kỳ Duyên. Paris by Night music floods the house, and you complain yet again to your mom, “Má, why do you always listen to this sad, slow music? Can’t you listen to something fun?”

Your mom looks a bit affronted, saying, “Con, if only you understood the meaning of the songs that we listen to! Not songs about sex and partying like you kids listen to nowadays. These are the songs that have meaning!”

And you roll your eyes, kiss your mom goodbye, and drive back to college.

***

Since the Fall of Saigon, music has expressed our parents’ experiences and struggles. This music, often reflected through genres such as “trữ tình (bolero)” and “vọng cổ (literally “longing for the past”),” developed in South Vietnam, preserved for decades by the overseas community and eventually became re-popularized in Vietnam and around the world. This is not just “Vietnamese” music, this is the music of Vietnamese refugees, of exiles expressing their innermost feelings through music.

In South Vietnam, the first roots of modern music were produced by the likes of Trịnh Công Sơn, Văn Cao, and Phạm Duy. These often reflected on love and separation, as many Vietnamese saw their loved ones separated from them due to war and were forced to part from their families due to violence. Lam Phương’s “Thành Phố Buồn” (City of Sadness) highlights the pain experienced by Vietnamese people:

“Rồi từ đó vì cách xa duyên tình thêm nhạt nhòa.
Rồi từ đó trốn phong ba em làm dâu nhà người.
Âm thầm anh tiếc thương đời.
Đau buồn em khóc chia phôi.
Anh về gom góp kỷ niệm tìm vui!”

“Our long-distance love faded since we parted.
The ups and downs of life made you become another man’s wife.
In silence, I mourned our lives.
In sorrow, your tears filled the separation.
I returned only to find solace in the fragmented memories.”

For the Vietnamese people, the impending loss of their country is not just the loss of a nation, but the loss of love, the loss of relationships, and the loss of humanity.  “Đại Bác Ru Đêm,” (Cannons Echo at Night) sung by South Vietnamese singer Khánh Ly illustrates the experience of being a Vietnamese in a battlefield of war:

“Hàng vạn tấn bom trút xuống đầu làng
Hàng vạn tấn bom trút xuống ruộng đồng
Cửa nhà Việt Nam cháy đỏ cuối thôn.
Hàng vạn chuyến xe, claymore lựu đạn
Hàng vạn chuyến xe mang vô thị thành
từng vùng thịt xương có mẹ có em.”

“Thousands of bombs rained down on the villages
Thousands of bombs poured down on the fields
Vietnam’s houses blazed through the hamlets
Thousands of vehicles carrying claymore grenades
Thousands of vehicles carrying into the city
the corpses and bones of our mothers and sisters.”

Over the decades after the Fall of Saigon, millions of Vietnamese refugees escaped by boat to build new Vietnamese communities in Australia, the U.S., France, Canada, and many other countries. And with them, they brought the pain of the war and turned it into a new genre: music reflecting the pain of the loss of their homeland, the pain of fleeing from the country in which they were born, and the pain of assimilating into a new culture.

Easily the most famous song about the Fall of Saigon in the diaspora community (re-sung continuously by Vietnamese-American entertainment companies such as Asia Entertainment and Thúy Nga) is “Sài Gòn Vĩnh Biệt” (Goodbye Saigon)). In it, the Vietnamese community reflects on their abrupt goodbye from their old city, no longer called Sài Gòn, and the promise of coming home one day, as one comes home to a lover:

“Sài gòn ơi, tôi xin hứa rằng tôi trở về
Người tình ơi, tôi xin giữ trọn mãi lời thề
Dù thời gian, có là một thoáng đam mê
Phố phường vạn ánh sao đêm
Nhưng tôi vẫn không bao giờ quên.”

“O Saigon, I promise that I will return
My lover, I will keep the vow forever
Time might be but a flash of passion
The street has a myriad of stars
But I shall never forget.”

As Vietnamese slowly trickled into other countries and reflected on the sufferings and pain they went through in order to escape Vietnam, the pain of the war and loss of homeland became a new genre mixed in with songs lamenting the loss of life and tribulations as boat people and having to assimilate into a new and foreign culture. Như Quỳnh, a Vietnamese singer for Paris by Night, sings “Đêm Chôn Dầu Vượt Biển” (The Night I Bury Oil as I Cross the Sea), reflecting on the experiences of the boat people:

“Đêm nay đêm tối trời anh bỏ quê hương
Ra đi trên chiếc thuyền
Hy vọng vượt trùng dương
Em đâu đâu có ngờ đêm buồn
Bỏ lại em trăm nhớ ngàn thương
Hò ơi! Hò ới! Tạm biệt nước non”

“Tonight in the darkness
You (my lover) left home by boat
Hoping to cross the ocean
I did not expect sadness to creep into the night
Leaving me with pain and longing
Oh! Oh! Goodbye my homeland.”

The New Generation

These feelings of pain were not limited to the older generation. New Vietnamese Americans who came to the U.S. as children were forced to confront their new realities of bullying at schools, inner-city poverty, and discrimination, using rap and hip hop as new forms of expression. Khanh Nhỏ, known as one of the first to ever rap in Vietnamese, raps in “Đời Anh Thanh Niên” (The Life of a Young Boy) about his journey of coming to and growing up in America:

“Có anh thanh niên
khôn lớn lên từ tây nguyên
gia đình anh không chiụ cãnh khỗ nên cha và anh mới vượt biên đi vượt biên
bằng chiếc thuyền
chỉ có cha và anh chung quanh vắng tanh
chỉ có anh và cha người ở bên nhau.”

“There was once a young boy
growing up in the Central Highlands
His family was suffering
So he and his father decided to cross the sea
By boat
Only him and his father
Around them just emptiness
Only him and his father
Two people together.”

Khanh Nhỏ would eventually become one of the most popular Vietnamese American rappers whose musical style inspired many up-and-coming rappers in Vietnam.

Easily the most well-known song among Vietnamese American youth growing up in the 1990s was “Vietnamese Gang,” by ThaiVietG and Khanh Nhỏ:

“We be the realest gooks that you ever know,
we be the thuggish ass Vietnamese fools up in P O bro,
so slow your roll, don’t wanna step,
cause if you try to, I’m a have to ride through,
and put your ass in check foo,
it’s like that my crew, we be the real cats,
come to bomb on Vietnam tatted on my back,
family love got my mind giving a fuck,
shedding blood for the homies on the block bumpin’ slugs,
cause it’s the gang that I bang with,
rollin’ with five real motherfucking g’s and ya’ll still can’t hang bitch,
showin’ no love in enemies gettin’ served,
when we walk up out the room all you heard, what bitch?”

At face value, this is simply a song about pride in Vietnamese gang life, but at the core of the lyrics is a remarkable interweaving of both American and Vietnamese culture integrated into a new kind of Vietnamese family, the most important unit in Vietnamese culture and society. In a new country where Vietnamese Americans faced constant discrimination, being called “gooks” and having to confront the existing gangs in their area, Vietnamese American gangs, as expressed here, were a way to find Vietnamese pride and reinvent Vietnamese family values into their new identity as an American gang. The call to “shed blood for the homies,” “preserve fraternity,” and be proud to be “a strong and numerous Vietnamese people,” are all re-imaginings of cultural pride and family values inserted into a Vietnamese American identity.

Vietnamese people in the diaspora number around 4.5 million today, many of whom are second and third generation—born and raised outside of Vietnam and making a name for themselves in their own unique fashion. And for many of them, their refugee past is simply a memory—fragmented from the stories their parents have told them, entrusted to them to preserve and reshape in their own lives.

Thao Nguyen, who formed the indie band Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, performs the song “Temple” as a tribute to her parents’ past as Vietnamese refugees:

“I lost my city in the light of day
Thick smoke
Helicopter blades
Heaven on earth I’ve never moved so fast
You’ll never know the fear your mama has
I know your father can’t call anymore
He never meant to be a man of war
But we found freedom what will you do now
Bury the burden baby make us proud.”

Thao Nguyen, a second-generation Vietnamese American woman, narrates the story of her parents’ escape to America and acknowledges the responsibility she has as a child living in the freedom that her parents did not have. She attempts to make the most of it as she “buries the burden” to make her parents proud of the life she created in America.

And while many Vietnamese Americans have used their artistic ability to reflect on their parents’ past, many others have made their Vietnamese identity central to the new social and political events raging in a racially diverse and globalized America. Mixed Miyagi, who is half-Black and half-Vietnamese and raised in Miami, raps in the song “Ngày Nào Cũng Vậy” (Every Day is Like This) about the racism that black people face in America, especially in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020:

“Mình là con lai gốc việt, thì để ta kể một câu chuyện
Đời mình khổ không bằng ai, mong bạn hiểu được nỗi phiền
Giờ mình trôi như chiếc thuyền, hơn nữa mình không biết điều khiển
Mơ là sẽ có một ngày thế giới này có sự bình yên
Tìm ở đâu vì hy vọng cho hạnh phúc cũng như không
Thấy người da đen tàn sát, thiệt là buồn hơn mùa đông”

“I’m a Vietnamese hapa so let me tell a story
My life is miserable like anyone, hope you understand my troubles
Now I’m drifting like a boat
Moreover I don’t know how to control it
Dreaming that one day the world will have peace
Where do I look? Because hoping for happiness is pointless
Seeing Black people slaughtered, truly sadder than winter.”

Starting out the music with the South Vietnamese flag in the backdrop, Mixed Miyagi uses his biracial identity to bring the issue of racism and violence against Black people to a community that would normally not have access to the personal experiences of being Black in America. For someone who is “not truly Vietnamese yet neither truly black,” he embraces his unique identity and mixes his rap in both English and Vietnamese to express it.

Forty-seven years after the first Vietnamese-American communities settled into America as refugees, there has been an explosive boom of different art, literature, and music that capture pain, that capture sadness, that capture a hope for a new world and a new identity. In a community with diverse singers from multiple generations that include former South Vietnamese singers like Khánh Ly, Vietnamese who came as youth like Như Quỳnh and Khanh Nhỏ, and second-generation Vietnamese born and raised in the country their parents fled to, such as keshi, Mixed Miyagi, thuy, Thao Nguyen, and many more, we can truly see and appreciate how much our community has evolved and grown in so many different ways. This is the music of the diaspora—a genre built and developed independent of the culture it came from that continues to reverberate in the societies they originated from as well in the culture and homeland of their ancestors.

(Special thanks to Than Nguyen for translation help for this essay).

Joseph Nguyen is a Vietnamese American born and raised in Orange County, California. Joseph received his B.A. at UCLA and M.A. at Columbia University, writing his thesis on Northern Vietnamese Catholic refugees who fled south in 1954 and then overseas after 1975. Joseph is currently serving as a high school teacher in Phú Thọ, Việt Nam through the U.S. Fulbright Program.