Journal of Social History

Stur, Heather, Marie

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shaa002pmid: N/A

Forty-five years on, Americans have written a Vietnam War story that is about them. Historians, journalists, veterans, antiwar activists, filmmakers, and politicians have emphasized the war’s impact on the United States military, the home front, and policymaking. When American writers have occasionally incorporated Vietnamese voices into the story, they have come from the National Liberation Front or Hanoi. These approaches to the Vietnam War have marginalized the perspectives of non-communist South Vietnamese, including the refugees who fled Vietnam in the aftermath of war and eventually landed in the U.S. Scholars such as Long T. Bui are working to incorporate these overlooked actors into the mainstream Vietnam War narrative, expanding and complicating it as they do. In the dominant U.S. memory of the Vietnam War, the conflict ended on April 30, 1975. On that day, the last Americans remaining in Saigon, along with those South Vietnamese who managed to get into the U.S. Embassy compound, scrambled aboard helicopters as NLF and North Vietnamese troops advanced on South Vietnam’s Independence Palace. Yet that take on the war forgets the far-reaching consequences that have shaped the lives of the South Vietnamese since 1975. Focusing primarily on refugees who made their way to the U.S., Bui calls for a “Vietnamization” of Americans’ memory of the war so that these hidden figures from South Vietnam can be brought into full view. Approximately one million Vietnamese refugees, the majority from southern Vietnam, entered the U.S. from the fall of Saigon into the 1980s. The first wave of refugees, about 130,000, consisted mainly of South Vietnamese political leaders and military officers, as well as those who had worked closely with the Americans. They went first to refugee camps in California, Arkansas, Florida, and Pennsylvania. From the camps, churches and other humanitarian organizations helped resettle them in communities throughout the U.S. Vietnamese enclaves took root in Orange County, California; Houston; New Orleans; and the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. In the late 1970s, another wave of refugees fled the financial troubles that resulted from the new Vietnamese government’s efforts to institute a state-controlled economy. Many of these exiles were Chinese-Vietnamese business owners who lost their enterprises to the government. International observers nicknamed this wave of refugees “boat people” because of the crude vessels many of them used to escape Vietnam. Refugees who fled in this wave often washed up first at UN and Red Cross refugee camps throughout Southeast Asia before gaining entry to the U.S. Political prisoners and South Vietnamese military veterans formed a third wave of refugees who left Vietnam through the Orderly Departure Program, an agreement between the governments of the U.S. and Vietnam to allow legal transfer of those who sought to migrate to the U.S. The experiences and postwar lives of the Vietnamese in America are legacies of the Vietnam War that exist on the margins, at best, of the Vietnam War narrative. Bui proposes to amplify South Vietnamese voices by examining archival sources, literature, the politics of Vietnamese-American communities, attitudes of the first generation of Vietnamese-Americans born in the U.S., and the return of Vietnamese exiles and their children to Vietnam. He begins his study with a discussion of Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center and Archive, host to a large and diverse collection of archival materials related to the Vietnam War and its aftermath. VNCA’s founder, James Reckner, made a concerted effort to collect documents and oral histories highlighting South Vietnamese perspectives and voices. Even VNCA’s recognition was limited, though, Bui found in his research at the archive. American perspectives still dominate the collections, leading Bui to conclude that novels, family histories, interviews, and the personal collections of former refugees could fill in the archival gaps. Bui spends a chapter analyzing Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, a tale of two refugee families from South Vietnam, as a metaphor for the challenges in creating war memories and new identities in a diaspora. Political and generational differences also make identity formation difficult, Bui explains, in his discussion of anticommunism, censorship, and arguments over queer visibility in Orange County’s Little Saigon. Bui also shows how the perpetual nature of American militarism in the story of South Vietnam is evident in the service of second generation Vietnamese-American soldiers who have done tours of duty in the twenty-first century wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. While some members of the second generation deployed to war zones as American soldiers, others have traveled overseas to Vietnam in search of their heritage. The tension between an American future and a Vietnamese past, Bui argues, is another factor that complicates efforts to create a South Vietnamese memory of the Vietnam War and a solid postwar identity. Bui’s work is an important—indeed, vital—scholarly intervention in the historiography of the Vietnam War. The book’s jargon-laden writing, rambling sentences, and confusing theoretical musings ensure that its impact will remain inside the ivory tower, where academics who are well-trained in critical theory can decipher the prose. But subsequent scholars no doubt will build on the essential foundation Bui has laid and will heed his call to place South Vietnamese voices at the center of the Vietnam War story. Those writers should also pay attention to Bui’s reminder that the memory of the war is as contested as the war itself was. Published by Oxford University Press 2020. This work is written by a US Government employee and is in the public domain in the US. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)