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The literature of the Vietnamese diaspora is full of ghosts: fallen soldiers; parents left behind; siblings lost at sea.
Looking at the history of Vietnam in the 20th century, it is not hard to see why. The second world war was followed by a longer war against the French, which was, in turn, followed by an even longer war against the Americans. Across 30 years of war, somewhere between 1 million and 2 million Vietnamese were killed in the fighting. We can’t be sure of the exact number – perhaps because of the industrial scale of the slaughter, or as Gen William Westmoreland, the commander of the American forces in Vietnam, once said, “Life is cheap in the Orient” – and so not worth the counting. Nor did war’s end bring an end to the dying: of the million or so refugees who fled on boats from the communist regime, 100,000 to 200,000 never made it to land.
For the diaspora, these ghosts can return at any moment. But they are especially concentrated around one date: 30 April 1975 – the Fall of Saigon. Growing up, I had the images of this day seared into my memory by the photographs my parents kept and the stories they told: the families desperately trying to get on the last helicopter leaving the American embassy; the South Vietnamese soldiers stripping off their uniforms in the streets; the family friend – a high-ranking officer in the South Vietnamese army – killing himself rather than be captured. This year marks 50 years of those images – a half century of mourning the loss, not only of family and friends but the loss of a homeland.
Like all diasporas, we are haunted by these losses. Each 30 April, we try to make these absences present through memory. And we do so in the face of twin threats. In Vietnam, the victorious government celebrates the date as the anniversary of liberation – there is no space for unofficial remembering. And in the countries where we sought refuge, we have always had to contend with the Westmorelands who say “the ‘oriental’ doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the westerner”. We find ourselves having to assert, over and over again, the value of our lives.
But what does it do to our pain to have to remember it like this?
There is a danger, common across diasporas, that in honouring our own dead, we do so to the exclusion of others’ ghosts. Jewish historian Jordana Silverstein writes of the way “narcissistic emotions” feed into “larger narcissistic political projects”: white fragility is central to reproducing white supremacy.
We can see something like this dynamic playing out in the way the Vietnamese diaspora remembers 30 April. We mourn our own ghosts and leave it at that. For one thing, Vietnamese refugees and their families have failed, as a community, to properly reckon with our role as settlers here in Australia. I know from personal experience that it is too easy for non-white communities to disavow the ways we benefit from Indigenous dispossession by centring our own stories of dispossession and marginalisation. As if by remembering what my family fled – the tanks rolling into the presidential palace, the prison where my grandfather was held for 10 years – I can somehow exempt myself from the consequences of living on stolen lands.
Silverstein writes that “some feelings have the weight of hegemony behind them”. That hegemonic weight comes more easily for some: think of the elevation of Andrew Bolt’s “devastated” feelings in response to Indigenous academic Marcia Langton’s claiming he subjected a woman to foul “racial abuse” (which drew an apology from her and the ABC). For refugee and migrant communities, it takes a lot more effort to align their feelings with hegemonic power – an effort that is inevitably wasted. The sight of South Vietnamese flags flying proudly outside the US Capitol during the insurrection on January 6 was not enough to save Viets from anti-Asian hate during the pandemic. Nor does Vietnamese hostility to more recent refugee arrivals – often expressed as a recycling of the same racist tropes used against us when we arrived – ward off anti-Asian racism here in Australia.
More insidiously, the anti-communism of 30 April commemorations – even when not explicitly militaristic – tends to set the Vietnamese diaspora against other forms of communal and solidaristic politics. It is a way of remembering past suffering that keeps the community fixed in time – politically as well as emotionally. Yet it does not have to be that way. As Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning The Sympathiser, argues, a just ethics of memory “strives to remember one’s own and others”. This is a kind of mourning that draws us out of ourselves – refusing narcissistic exceptionalism – and draws connections between others’ pain and our own.
Nguyen draws precisely this kind of connection in his recent writing on the genocide in Gaza, which he says is “not an incidental event that can be ignored but a fundamental event like the Vietnam war”. Nguyen’s focus is on American imperialism, and the complicity of Americans who say nothing against their government’s unstinting ideological and material support for Israel’s assault. But even for diasporic Vietnamese outside the US, this connection between Gaza and Vietnam places a special responsibility on how we mourn: as we remember mass graves in Huế, we must also remember – and condemn – mass graves at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis and Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza city. And as we continue to insist that Vietnamese lives were never cheap, we must remember that today it is Palestinian lives – figured by Israeli politicians as “human animals” – that are deemed dispensable. Only through solidarity will we do justice for our ghosts.
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