For the accompanying video presentation, visit “The Impact of Silence on Cultural Memory” on YouTube.
My family fled Vietnam on the very last day—April 30th, at the final possible hour. That morning we were all huddled in Bác Loan’s house. He wasn’t there. After much cajoling on the part of his family, he’d reluctantly boarded a plane to America ahead of the Fall. Despite possibly being the most targeted by invading forces, his home, outfitted for the worst, offered us the best shelter. Most of the world knew him as “Brigadier General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan,” the subject of Eddie Adams’ photograph, “Saigon Execution.” Though venerated in South Vietnam, he was feared and misunderstood everywhere else. I only knew him as “Bác Loan.”
Our flight out of Saigon began seconds after President Dương Văn Minh’s 9:30 a.m. radio order richocheted devastating words against the walls of Bác Loan’s home: “all Republic soldiers are hereby ordered to lay down their weapons.” The adults roared in anguish. Raw fear and desperation gripped us as we tore through Saigon’s chaotic streets to the airport.
We had neither time nor luxury to transport more than our own bodies. And even in that, we almost failed. For a few minutes that felt like a lifetime, I was left standing on the flight line staring into the empty hull of an inoperable plane while my family sped away towards another cargo plane.
Though I’m relaying them chronologically, my memories of the Fall are a blur of non-sequential flashes and sensations: the sheer oddity of being in a car, a lamp falling onto my head, and panicked people darting in the streets. Out of all of the fragments of that morning, there is one scene that stands out with stark clarity: my mother weeping as she prepared to leave her country and family behind. They remained trapped in Huế, the site of South Vietnam’s worst massacre during the civil war.
Other than these memories, stories about our escape and the country we lost were never told, only imagined. See, in my family, things are just known, as if infused from the silence. Though my essays indicate otherwise, I did not grow up steeped in South Vietnamese patriotism. The politics of the war, South Vietnam, and anti-communism was not drilled into me at an early age. Instead, what I experienced was a complete and absolute silence. And elders who sank all of their love and energy, my uncle included, my uncle, especially, into our survival.
This silence began within months of setting foot in California when I was introduced to daily schoolyard beat-downs for my inability to speak English. In a proactive attempt to prevent further violence, my family instituted a “no-Vietnamese” rule. For a decade, rather than lessons on our language, history, and heritage, I was instead schooled to silence until it became a part of my identity.
In contradiction to the silence, I also faced a repeated critique: “mất gốc.” It was an inevitable scolding that I received whenever I said or did something so “American” that it rendered any remnant of my heritage nonexistent. Translated, “mất gốc” means the loss of heritage.
Though perhaps not intended to wound, to my young ears it carried the same venom as playground taunts. Like the bevy of racial slurs directed at me – “gook,” “jap,” “chink,” and even the “n-word” – it cut at me, delivering a criticism of some innate wrongness I could do nothing about. Unlike the slurs, which carried empty stereotypes, being called “mất gốc” was devastating because it hinted at a truth. I often received it with paralysis, stunted into a state of grief, longing, and loneliness far too intense for my young soul to bear.
Other than criticism, I received no specific instruction to replace my lack with knowledge. I was simply expected to know how to be Vietnamese.”Honor our sacrifices,” they said. But, they didn’t tell me what those sacrifices were. No one spoke of the thousands who died on the “Highway of Horror” in 1972 as they fled Quảng Trị during North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive. Nor did anyone mention mortar fire raining down on civilians escaping the Central Highlands a month before their escape. It was only through personal research that I learned of the murderous Land Reform Campaign in North Vietnam that drove my paternal family southward in 1954 along with a million refugees.
Of course I understand why. Some wounds are too deep for words. The hardest thing about silence—whether family-imposed, community-imposed, society-imposed, or self-imposed—is its deceptive universality. It’s so quiet that you think that it’s quiet for everyone else. But what’s actually happening is the gradual extinction of your stories and your identity through isolation. Like the “re-education camps,” this silence slowly strangles our experienced realities until we’re too hollow to convey them. We begin to doubt our own truths. Even now, writing these words, I’m seized by uncertainty.
Maybe it’s just me.
But I know I’m not alone. Silence just makes us feel like we’re alone. When I ask the younger generation about their family’s migration, most only know the basics, sans emotion or details.
“They came on a boat.”
“April 30th, 1975. They were in Guam.”
Almost universally, most have been cautioned: “Forget about the past.” I’ve even been chastised: “Why do you want to know?” — as if the desire to know or the knowing is wrong, in and of itself. The problem is, for me, the forgetting or being forgotten is even more painful than experiencing. What is the point of my suffering if it cannot become transformative? This is the foundation of my personal resilience – how I have excelled beyond trauma. Silence is not my strong suit.
Sister to being instructed in silence is the burden to nurture and maintain it, even though, at this point, I’m not sure why I’m doing it. The result is, in families and communities where silence has calcified into tradition, stories become buried so deep that they never surface. Then, if, by chance, they do, those who ask the questions, or speak up, or write about it, face criticism and sometimes condemnation. I have been ordered to “stop writing” numerous times.
I wish I could tell my uncle’s story. I wish I knew my uncle’s story. Not just his, but also the uncle who escaped from a concentration camp after a decades-long imprisonment, the great-great uncle’s anti-colonial activism, the grandmother’ herbal medicine trade, the star-crossed lovers who disappeared at sea…and so many more. Unless we bridge the distance created by the silence that generations of colonialism and civil war have embedded into us, it will become an instrument of our own erasure.
***
The best that I can do is share my fondest memory of Bác Loan from one of his annual west coast visits. Time spent with him was precious because we only saw him once a year. Our family, once only a Vietnam city-length away from each other, is spread out in the U.S. – separated on opposite coasts by the width-distance of twelve Vietnams. Over the years, in America, I’ve learned to spread out connections with family so that they marinate in my heart during long separations.
It was 1980 and I was ten years old. As the eldest refugee cousin on the west coast, I was tasked with taking him on a tour of Little Saigon in Westminster, California. It was a place I knew well since our family set up the first storefront. I knew who he was, but it was a non-judgement knowing with no real understanding of the war. To me, he was just like my other uncles – all of whom competed to be the life of the party. He was serious, and yet, he was goofy. Jokes and stories streamed from him, nonstop.
The first stop of this tour was a Franco-Vietnamese restaurant which I had only been to on the most special of occasions, this being one of them. The first thing I did in the restaurant was look at the menu. There was filet mignon, Châteaubriand, Café du Monde, and chocolate croissants. But there was one menu item I brushed over: escargot.
I could not understand why anyone in their right mind would walk into a fancy French restaurant and order snails to eat. A product of the Fall of Saigon which had taken me from the only home I knew and thrust me into a violent post-war American setting with traumatized adults, dread defined my every waking moment. Fear rippled through me at the thought of eating something creepy crawly. This was the era of living in roach-infested homes and I screamed at the sight of all insects and bugs.
What if they start crawling around in my stomach?
I was about to order the poulet rôti au riz and a chocolate éclair when, just over the top of my menu, I saw these big bug eyes. It was my uncle peeking over the menu at me. I lowered my menu just a little. He tapped the menu where it said “escargot.”
“Get it,” he encouraged me. And I was like, ew, no, what!?! And he just smiled at me.
“Try it,” he said and shrugged. And something in the glint in his eyes, his goofy smile, and his calm, gentle, supportive manner gave me the confidence to overcome my fear. So I ordered the escargot. When they came out, there was this prolonged moment of silence where he’s just staring at me: his eyes were wide, his smile broad, his mouth hanging open in anticiption.
Let me pause to say that, at ten years of age, this was the first time anyone had ever taken the time to revel in my discovery. I was a Vietnamese kid and the eldest daughter. My job was to be a good helper. When I wasn’t helping, my job was to merge back into the wallpaper and stay there. Be good, be obedient, be quiet.
But have thoughts and opinions? An independent existence? That wasn’t a part of the job description. To make matters worse, things were rough for me. I received daily beat-downs at the hands of bullies, told to “go back home” to a country I knew nothing about, Americans threw rocks at me, and bullets were shot through the front windows of our home and shop.
At that time, and for the first two decades of my life, I felt so completely alone in the world. So to be treated as an individual, with my own interests and opinions, was so amazing that it cemented this otherwise mundane lunch date in my mind – forever.
I mean he had stopped everything just to share the experience with me – and there was a whole lot of everything. People came by every minute to shake his hand, thank him, invite him places, pay for the meal, and to give him gifts.
They just wanted to touch him.
But for those few precious seconds in which I had a snail floating in a soup spoon, he waved everyone off. And so I fed myself the snail. And as I chewed it, he held my gaze, his expression curious.
“Thích không? Ngon không?” | “Do you like it? Isn’t it delicious?”
I remember feeling important. I remember how it felt because I’d never felt it before. And it would be decades before I would feel it again. No one had ever made me feel like I mattered. And it was a weird feeling.
Almost as weird as chewing on a snail that tasted like the spicy, tangy, fishy sauce it had been marinated in. I remember biting into it, cutting it into tiny bits, feeling out the texture, swallowing it, and him watching me. I was surprised that escargot tastes like shrimp, oyster, and octopus all in one. And that I actually liked it. At the end of the meal, he asked me if I would ever order it again.
“Nope! Not for me!” I said to his uproarious laughter.
So, although the world has a different memory of my uncle, this is one of many beautiful memories I have of my uncle. Of the many adults in my childhood, he was only one of two adults who took the time to look me in the eye, to speak to me, not at me, and to truly see me.
I do not believe that this was unique to me. If you ask people who knew him, they’d tell you what a caring, brave, compassionate, hard-working, and empathetic man my uncle was. But how are we to know this, if our history can only be found in the gaps left by silence?
If I did not share this story, as silly as it is, you would have a hard time finding an intimate glimpse into the personality of this brilliant, charming, and enigmatic man. For rare personal anecdotes, you’ll have to scour the Vietnamese comment sections of social media posts and stories penned in Vietnamese memoirs.
Without these personal accounts, there are only caricatures painted by the white hands of the media. The one American journalist who knew him the best, Eddie Adams, most likely chose silence over the blasphamy characteristic of the 1970s media circus. These all tended to skew representations of my uncle in the name of politics to the detriment of his family’s safety. So for him, silence was a necessity.
This was a departure from the uncle I knew who was the actual life of the party. His annual visits were defined by raucous dinners where he roasted people from the head of a table. At these all-night dinner parties, guests were prone to jumping out of their seats, bursting with laughter or counter-tales. In addition to the caucophany, however, there was also meditation. It was not uncommon to see him deep in conversation with an old friend until the sun rose.
Thus, in contradiction to the instruction to do otherwise, I am claiming my uncle. These words, this essay, will be the first time. The decision to do so has been terrifying. It has taken me, a 1.5er, almost three decades to come to this point. Imagine how silence must weigh on our elders.
***
OK…so “Saigon Execution.” I’m going to cover it because I know that readers expect it. Try as I might, try as Eddie Adams did, he could not separate my uncle from the photograph that brought him both remorse and fame. “Saigon execution” became a part of my identity even before I knew about myself. I don’t know how I knew about it or when I first saw it. It feels as if I was born with it embedded in my bones.
When I was a child, every single April, every single year, it aired on television. You’d see the images, the video footage over and over again. And when I saw it, it was like seeing myself, my family, on the screen. And maybe, from 1968 and leading into 1975, on a global scale, it became to the outside world, a part of all of our identities, the South Vietnamese people. Today, “Saigon Execution” is not just a symbol of the Vietnam War, it has sprouted wings, and become an American, if not international, iconoclastic cultural symbol.
The video footage, as I learned from Autopsy: The Death of South Vietnam by General Lâm Quang Thi, was altered. The Western world, it seemed, in the era of the first televised war, really craved these mangled images of our bodies. Thirteen years before “Saigon Execution,” pictures of our first South Vietnamese President, Ngô Đình Diệm, with his brains and blood all over the floor, made front line headlines. It is clear that we, the Vietnamese, were pawns in a wider global conflict, and our bodies, mangled, sliced, amputated, dying, burnt, naked, served as evidence of that conflict.
The reality is, the rest of the world saw us before we even saw ourselves. In this war, our agency, our voice, the people of South Vietnam, was silenced, erased, or ignored. The media catered to the western eyes which demanded more, sooner, bloodier…so NBC, unsatisfied with how slow real life was, spliced the footage so that when you watched it, everything was instantaneous.
Instantaneous.
That’s how quickly that image masked over the stark reality of the Tet Offensive. Americans didn’t hear about how my uncle had been up since before dawn, running from siege to siege, saving lives, preventing deaths, trying to manage an invasion before it became a massacre. Though he was able to prevent a massacre in Saigon, he could not do that for his hometown, my hometown, of Huế.
He could not be in two places at one time.
After Tết Mậu Thân, my uncle returned to the city where he’d been raised. He returned to the murder of over 3,000 people. Among these were people he’d gone to school with, served in the military with, shared meals with, and prayed with.
My mother’s family was taken hostage during the month-long siege in Huế. Public trials and executions were held. My mother speaks of streets lined with blood and bodies. Of the 17,000 homes in the city, only 7,000 were left standing. My uncle returned to Huế to help build over 700 homes for the displaced.
For those who survived Huế in the diaspora, we have South Vietnamese writer, Nhã Ca to thank. She did not choose silence. Instead, she memorialized her experiences in her book, Giải khăn sô cho Huế (Mourning Band for Hue). For this, she was later arrested and condemned to re-education.
For those who survived in Saigon, my uncle and the men he commanded, were credited for saving lives. My uncle is well-known among South Vietnamese for his bravery, leading the charge for every battle, a trail of soldiers behind him. During the Tet Offensive, he and his men risked their lives to prevent the massacre that occurred in Huế. A massacre that Vietnam and America has all but forgotten. But America has always done funny things with massacres, like forget about them.
Every November, we celebrate Thanksgiving but fail to memorialize the massacre in 1637 of over 700 Pequot men, women and children on the banks of the Mystic River in Connecticut. After the massacre, Governor John Winthrop of the Connecticut Bay Colony declared that for the next 100 years, a “Thanksgiving” feast would be held to celebrate the event. In the same vein, America has yet to do justice to the over 100 separate massacres of African Americans after the Civil War. Massacres such as the 1921 Tulsa Oklahoma race riot and the Arkansas Elaine Massacre.
For some of these, there are shrines and memorials to make sure that Americans don’t erase these events from their cultural memory. I can only hope for the same for the Massacre in Huế. For only when the sacrifices, experiences, and pain suffered by the South Vietnamese are acknowledged and recognized by Vietnam can true reconciliation occur.
***
In the past five decades, memoirs, novels, and essays from both sides have sparked the younger generation’s interest in understanding their parents’ suffering. As Vietnam publishes new works, the diaspora responds with dozens of competing titles—many self-published. The same elders who hushed us into silence realized that, unless they spoke up, the prevailing narrative orchestrated by Vietnam would dominate. This was a prospect that many, even those within Vietnam, found intolerable.
Through diasporic works, we’ve learned about the early lawlessness of South Vietnam that President Ngô Đình Diệm sought to control. We know well the refugee experience from graphic novels (The Best We Could Do – Thi Bui, Vietnamerica – G.B. Tran), poetry (Night Sky with Exit Wounds – Ocean Vương and Inside Out & Back Again – Thanhha Lại), memoirs (Sigh, Gone – Phuc Tran), and novels (The Gangster We Are All Looking For – lê thị diễm thúy, Things We Lost to the Water – Eric Nguyễn). Vietnamese historians have written about the revolutionary work of building a young nation amid a war (The Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975 – Tuong Vu). We’ve also learned about the tortuous experiences of South Vietnamese loyalists in concentration camps after the war (Prisoner of the Word – Lê Huê Tài, Flowers from Hell – Nguyễn Chí Thiên).
From the opposing side, through memoirs like Trương Như Tảng’s A Vietcong Memoir, Doctor Đặng Thùy Trâm’s Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, and novels by Bao Ninh (The Sorrows of War) and Dương Thu Hương (Paradise of the Blind), we’ve learned about the struggle of communist and their later disillusionment under communism.
Despite this outpouring of literature, silence persists in our families. Many of us remain ignorant of our own histories. Some are even explicitly warned never to ask. Rather than learning about ourselves from living witnesses, our family members, we must seek our mirror in the pages of a book written by a stranger.
From these pages, we piece together how our parents once lived moment to moment, their breath held in agony and anxiety. We know they paid dearly for “freedom” but rarely grasp that its cost may have been their sanity or their spirit. We acknowledge their survival as fact without confronting its shadow—for each elder who made it, dozens were left behind.
We recognize our elders’ deep gratitude for their survival, yet cannot pierce their grief. It is the same grief that obscures larger truths: the imperial forces behind their suffering are the same ones that crushed Black, Brown, and working-class Whites in America. Try as we might, we cannot sever the cord that links the trauma of events suffered in Vietnam to the distantly related but unconnected movements in America today. Silent is the discourse between parent and child who stand peering at one another across a divide of complex history, muddled and distorted by silence.
Sole reliance on these works also risks amplifying the one – or two – voices, at the cost of the many. In the Vietnamese American diaspora, many have complained of community pressure toward a mono-voice – a single accepted opinion or narrative that is tolerated. This is yet another form of silencing. In fact, the South Vietnamese people are as diverse as any other people. During the Vietnam War, there were numerous political factions with competing revolutionary visions in South Vietnam. “Revolution” cannot be claimed by only one single entity.
For example, South Vietnam’s journey from feudalism under the Nguyễn lords to President Thiệu’s democratic experiment amid civil war was remarkable. This attempt at democracy was itself a revolutionary act. Before Saigon fell, a bicameral National Assembly—with both House and Senate—had taken root. This fledgling democracy, though flawed by the censorship and suspended liberties characteristic of an anticommunist posture, represented a radical departure from centuries of traditional rule.
In short, written work cannot replace the critical conversations that are not happening. We will eventually witness the deaths of suvivors of the Vietnam War still separated from one another, each side fervently marooned on their own islands, unable to bridge the pain of all that has been lost between them. After they’re gone, we will inherit the task of repaving this stony road passed down through silence.
But how do we sift through the rubbish of the past fifty years? There are so many festering wounds. “Re-education” is one of them. After Saigon fell in May 1975, anyone connected to South Vietnam’s government or military—writers, artists, journalists—faced forced “re-education.” They were imprisoned indefinitely and handed paper and pen and commanded to chronicle their lives back three generations. So silence wasn’t an option. Only selective silence. For those on the outside, they spoke or stayed quiet according to a calculus of survival, each word or its absence potentially fatal.
So our history is locked in this destructive cycle where many of us in America had to be silent to survive, while those who were forced to reveal themselves in Vietnam were silenced, sent to concentration camps where many died, their stories hidden behind barbed wire.
Thus, from every angle, silence holds power over how our history is told, who gets to tell our history, and what elements of it are told or erased. Our own silence is further complicated by the silence of others. America has its own coffins despite the existence of thousands of pre-and post- Vietnam war books. One such incident involving my uncle illustrates this.
In 1978, while South Vietnamese lives were rotting in concentration camps or blistering under open sun in rickety boats bound for “tự do,” anti-immigration sentiment fueled stricter scrutiny on immigration. Politicians called for the deportation of South Vietnamese refugees believed to have committed war crimes. My Uncle was on the top of this list.
Congressional hearings were held and the photographer of “Saigon Execution,” Eddie Adams, was called to testify against my Uncle, but instead, Eddie testified for him, alongside countless others. President Jimmy Carter, halted the attempt to engage in deportation proceedings, stating that “such historical revisionism was folly.” But what did Carter mean?
I have two theories. My first second theory is this: South Vietnamese refugees were victims of a terrible war. My uncle was a victim of an attempted massacre that received skewed, negligent, and some will argue, unethical media coverage.
At the core of my second theory is silence, but this time American silence. Maybe Carter, whose slate was built on humanitarianism, was refocusing Americans on their own ethical responsibilities in Vietnam rather than allowing them to “cleanse” their involvement by scape-goating my uncle.
Maybe Carter called it “folly” because he realized that the act of altering America’s cultural memory of the Tet Offensive was not only unjust, it was unwise, especially since America had their own massacres against the South Vietnamese people, the “Mỹ Lai” massacre for one, to contend with.
The attempt to deport my uncle unfolded during the same bitter period as the court-martial of Lieutenant William Calley—the only person convicted for the massacre of 504 women, children, and elderly men by one hundred American soldiers. Calley received a life sentence that quickly dissolved. Despite overseeing the largest (known) mass murder and sexual violence committed by a military unit in the 20th Century, Calley became a cause célèbre. Americans flooded Washington with demands for mercy. As a matter of fact, one of Carter’s first acts as the Governor of Georgia was to declare “American Fighting Men’s Day” and to protest Calley’s conviction, calling him a “scapegoat.” By 1976, Calley had served only 3.5 years in the comfort of his own home under house arrest, never experiencing a single hour behind civilian bars.
The deportation drama also played out two decades before The Toledo Blade exposed the war crimes, killings, and sexual assaults perpetrated by the American army unit, “Tiger Force,” in the Central Highlands in 1967.
I recently visited the Mỹ Lai Massacre Memorial in Vietnam. The site unfolds across 41 immaculate hectares, features an air-conditioned museum and a stunning landscape of haunting artistic tributes to the 504 people who were tortured, assaulted, and murdered. Their names are etched on a large black marble plaque. Overall, it is a majestic commemoration of the attack that occurred on March 16, 1968, several weeks after the Massacre at Huế which began on January 31st, 1968 and lasted for 26 days. Although the death toll is contested, it is estimated that between 2,800 and 6,000 lives were lost in Huế for which there is…
…nothing.
Maybe Carter called it “folly” because he saw the entire picture – and not just one picture.
And so we’re back to “Saigon Execution.”
***
Photographs are silent. They don’t speak and yet they communicate a whole lot. But photographs are also incomplete. They capture something that is already lost, a moment in the past. In the words of Uyen P. Dang:
Pictures are NOT mirrors, only windows. They do not speak. Silence is one of their preconditions. The photograph is only a suggestion of the activities unfolding within it, an opening into what we know nothing about for the most part, except that something or someone once existed. A photo is silence made visible.
We think of silence as a blank space, but it is not. Within that space of silence are all the things that we’ve inherited and all the things that our ancestors have been whispering to us every time we place offerings on their altars. While we’re speaking to them, filling them with our wishes, they’re filling us with their silence. And we, standing at their altars, translate their silence into cultural memories.
When I am in front of my uncle’s altar, what I hear echoed in the silence is the mantra that he lived and died by: “Tổ quốc, Danh dự, Trách nhiệm.” It is the mantra of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Loosely translated, it means “Motherland, Honor, Responsibility.” My uncle lived by this mantra at a cellular level, from his family to his country.
In this modern era – this is what these terms means to me:
- Tổ quốc – to have a commitment and loyalty to my ancestral roots
- Danh dự – to live with honor and honesty and to ensure that our experiences and sacrifices are recognized and not erased
- Trách nhiệm – to have agency and to hold responsibility for the amplification of my people’s stories
And where my only source material is silence, I believe it is my duty to peer into that silence, to listen to the voices of those who came before me and to do my best to activate their silence into stories.
***
There are days when the silence swallows everything, and desolation lingers in the air. In those moments, I’m ten years old again—transported back to a world of loneliness and isolation so vast that it threatened to devour me. In these moments, my thoughts always return to that single, indelible moment in a Franco-Vietnamese restaurant when my legs were still too short to touch the ground. Across from me sat my uncle, a counterweight to the fear that stalked me relentlessly. This fear—which clouded my world and would continue to shadow me for years—made me flinch at everything, made me afraid of my own voice, made me afraid of my own thoughts.
On that day, I remember how, for one crystalline moment, my uncle quieted the chaos in my mind and introduced a feeling that was completely foreign to me – trust. Experiencing this allowed me to overcome my fear – not just of eating a creepy-crawly snail – but of making a choice in a state of being where such an act was forbidden. I was able to do so because I trusted that he would be there to experience it with me, support me, and take care of me if it didn’t go well.
My uncle heard and saw me and, in doing so, planted a seed that took me decades to nourish — the radical notion that I could shape my own destiny. In short, he ensured that I had agency.
This is what my uncle did for the South Vietnamese people.
My uncle stood and faced the repercussions of the weight of South Vietnam and its people and the weight of all of the ghosts of the Tet Offensive. And he did so with grace, wisdom, compassion, and an innate strength that I experienced on many occasions, but that most of the world has been deprived of because of silence.
How do we do the same for ourselves? How do we create a safe and nurturing environment for our elders and for those of us, like me, who have inherited their silence and the fear that comes with it so that we can be brave enough, like my uncle was his whole life, to share our stories? Only by doing so can we collect a more complete archive of our collective history as the South Vietnamese people with all of our nuances.
***
They say that history is written by the victors. But “winning” and “losing” are subjective qualifiers. After fifty years of transformation, does Vietnam have the egalitarian, communally-centered ideal that they sought for? Is the “independence” felt both nation-wide and at an individual level? Do the people feel liberated? Is the economy communally centered such that there is no wealthy upper echelon far removed from the people, and no such thing as abject poverty?
And what of comments such as that of currently imprisoned dissident journalist, Huy Đức:
My book begins on April 30, 1975 – the day many people believed that the North liberated the South. Many people, looking back carefully over the past thirty years, are startled by the feeling that the liberated side turned out to be the North.
Bên Thắng Cuộc (The Winning Side)
In those fifty years, South Vietnam expelled itself from the country and spread itself and its people throughout the world, re-establishing thousands of “Little Saigons” in over a hundred countries. Despite the “Fall of Saigon,” Saigon has refused to fall. Even with its new name, people inside and outside the nation persist to call the city “Saigon.” Rather, the South Vietnam of today is neither bound by land nor borders. We, the refugees, were its first cartographers.
In the diaspora, we are as diverse and complex as we’ve always been. There is not just one voice or one image that represents us, but a multitude. This is the direct manifestation of the tự do that millions of us died for. We only lose, if we don’t engage in critical thought and reflection with one another in the exercise of that freedom. We only lose if we don’t co-create our future by recognizing, mourning, and honoring our collective past. We only lose if we’re silent.
Fifty years after the Fall, I am my elders’ worst nightmare – a child who will not forget, a child who refuses to leave the past behind. At the Fall of Saigon, I was only four years old. My elders had hoped that my youth and silence would protect me. But neither can trick the mind into forgetting.
I cannot forget the sadness that consumed me on the eve of Saigon’s fall as I stood wringing my hands at my mother’s despair. I did not understand why she wept and why her hands trembled as she folded our lives into a small square container. I did not understand why I had been thrust into the backseat of a metallic thing that moved – a car – and why, in that car, a lamp knocked me on the side of my head. I did not understand the panic of people running in the streets, the ARVN uniforms we ran over, nor the gigantic mouth of a cargo plane that faced me at the end of the hectic drive. I did not understand that, for a brief moment in time, I was almost left behind.
I should have forgotten those prolonged moments when I stood, confused, staring up at a towering C-10 before a man who, for fifty years I thought was Bác Loan, rescued me. I did not learn until this year, that it was not Bác Loan who lifted me into his jeep, but his younger brother, a man with an identical face. Two things had to happen for me to learn this: (1) I had to ask an elder, and (2) they had to answer. Truthfully.
These memories, rather than being swallowed and erased by my youth and decades of silence, have, instead, haunted me all of my life and filled me with an inexplicable hunger, despite the best efforts of my elders.
No one in my family has been able to prevent, despite efforts to censor me, the infinite number of times that my mind replays what I cannot forget: my mother’s tears at the Fall of Saigon.
Z.M. Quỳnh is a Vietnamese American dancer, performance artist, and writer whose short stories, essays, and poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Vice Terraform, Masque & Spectacle, Kweli Journal, Strange Horizons, Glittership, and in the anthologies: The SEA is Ours, Genius Loci: The Spirit of Place, People of Color Destroy Science Fiction, and Luminescent Threads – Connections to Octavia Butler. Zora is an award-winning community organizer, DEI & leadership developer, and social justice movement strategist. Zora is the winner of the 2021 San Francisco Foundation Nomadic Press Literary Award. Zora has received scholarships to attend the Kweli International Literary Festival, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, VONA, Writing The Other, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop. Zora is a frequent book reviewer and essayist for diaCRITICS (diacritics.org). You can find Zora sipping boba at zmquynh.com or some iteration of @zmquynh on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.
