-Tonight, we'll be learning about immigration
and community memory.
And as part of those themes,
it's important to recognize that here at MOHAI,
we're on the historic and contemporary lands and waters
of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Muckleshoot,
and all Coast Salish people.
Historically, native communities were forcibly removed
from this place,
with lasting impact on the land, water, and people.
Therefore, it's critical that we hold deep respect and gratitude
for their unbroken stewardship of this place.
And we encourage you to visit the websites of local tribes
to learn more about the people whose land you're on.
Tonight's speaker is Thanh Tan,
an award-winning multimedia storyteller based in Seattle.
Her work has been published in local and national media,
including KUOW, KCTS, This American Life,
and The New York Times.
Creator of the Second Wave Podcast,
Tan has also produced documentaries,
founded Viet Fact Check and archives
South Vietnamese ephemera.
Please give her a warm welcome.
[ Applause ]
-Good evening.
Thank you so much to everyone who's in our audience,
and also to anyone who's watching.
I'm going to try to be mindful that there --
it's not as easy to watch this presentation
when you are online,
so I will try to speak slowly, which is not my strong suit.
I talk fast. So audience, help me out.
If I'm talking too fast, just, hey, like, slow down.
You know, calm.
Like many of you, I'm really nervous and scared,
and there's a lot going on right now.
So I hope tonight is interactive.
If anyone online does have questions,
please put them in the comments,
if possible, and then if our staff and team,
maybe raise your hand or signal to me.
I want to make sure that we get to any questions
that people out there may have.
And for all of you who are here, we do have a microphone.
And I want this to be interactive
because what I'm going to show you today is not a result.
It's actually the beginning of a journey
to try to contextualize and to humanize a lot of the people
that you're going to see.
And so if you see yourself or you see someone you know,
like, raise your hand.
And I'll try to pay attention
because I've been shocked in just the last couple days
of trying to identify and thinking,
I think I recognize this person,
and it turns out it's my friend's father.
You know, that kind of thing.
So and I think the first slide here, I put a picture of a bag.
And I think -- I hope you all can take a moment to reflect.
Even though I'm focusing on the Vietnamese experience,
I think there's so much --
there are universal themes that can apply to anyone.
And I put this picture here because it's a photo of the bag
that held my parents' -- all of their belongings in the world
that they had when they escaped from Vietnam in 1978.
They were in a refugee camp in Malaysia for six months,
and they resettled.
They were helped and sponsored by people here
in Washington State.
And so my mother showed me this about 10 years ago.
And their boat had capsized, so they lost everything.
And they had some,
you know -- they had few things they were able to save,
and they amassed some things in the camps.
But I hope you all think about if you were forced to flee,
if you had to leave,
what would you take with you if this was all you had?
And sometimes you have nothing, no material things.
All you have are your memories.
And when I saw this bag, my parents kept the tag.
And, you know, they like keep everything.
And the tag has my dad's name.
And just knowing that you flew Malaysian Airlines
to come here to the United States.
And my mother says that this looks like a bag,
but it was actually a little girl's tank top.
And in the camps at that time, refugees would leave in waves.
So once someone sponsored you and you were leaving,
you would give, leave behind, objects and things
that other refugees could still keep.
So my mom says this was a little girl's tank top
and she sewed it up in order to carry the paperwork
that they were able to take with them.
And so just think about that.
What would you take with you if you were forced to flee?
Before I start tonight, I have some so-called caveats
that I want to share with you all.
I want to acknowledge that the Vietnam War's impact,
it extends way beyond Vietnam.
And the Vietnam War also shaped the histories
of all of Southeast Asia; Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines.
And I want this presentation and any storytelling
that I do to acknowledge that complexity,
that even though we call it the Vietnam War,
it had -- it just stretched so much further than Vietnam.
Also, I am not a refugee or an immigrant.
And I am an American-born person of Vietnamese heritage,
and I benefited from birthright citizenship,
and I'm the first American-born in my family.
And I don't think I ever thought about that.
You don't think about it
until all of a sudden it's at risk of being taken away.
And it's weird to think about this benefit
that perhaps I just totally took it for granted
and didn't think about it.
And also, I'm not here today to debate the rights and wrongs
of communism, or to talk about rescue,
or to talk about just gratitude as a daughter of refugees.
I'm here as a citizen archivist,
and my focus and my practice is really on trying
to rehumanize people
who have been oftentimes reduced to stereotypes.
In doing this work also,
it's about confronting some hard truths and embracing nuance.
And I really believe strongly that we,
as refugees and immigrants, we're allowed to be fully human.
And I think I grew up very much believing I have to be perfect
and I have to earn my spot in America
because my parents dropped everything and lost everything.
And it always -- I felt that pressure.
And I don't want to feel that pressure.
It's like I get to make mistakes and, you know,
I don't have to be perfect.
I struggle with this.
I go to therapy every single week to try to deal with this.
But, you know, the idea is if we look at these things
and we talk about it,
maybe we can let go of that need for perfection
and allow all of us to live with our, you know, full complexity.
The images and the stories that I'm sharing today
primarily come from my personal archive.
But I also found myself drawn to collecting things
that I'm presenting today from a trip
to the Washington State Archive in 2015
with former Secretary of State Ralph Munro,
wonderful, generous public servant.
And when he found out I was working at The Seattle Times
back then, and he said, you come down Olympia
and I will come with you and guide you through the archive,
and we'll look at my papers, we'll look at Dan's papers.
And we did that.
And from that, I made a whole lot more.
But these are the photocopies because I was so intrigued
because I felt like it was opening up this portal
to the past that I had no idea about.
And I felt a lot of things,
and I'm still trying to process that.
And so this is a starting point to me,
and I feel that there's a lot more to explore.
Also, my presentation today is going to go beyond Seattle,
and it's going to focus on Washington State as a whole.
There's also going to be references to other states
and how they responded to Vietnamese refugees
and also to policy that was coming out of Washington D.C.,
which certainly had an impact because federal support
and federal funding and support
from the top-down from the White House
was absolutely essential to Washington State's
response after the end of the Vietnam War.
And the overarching goal here
again is to create space for some reflection and learning.
I do not have the full context for every story,
and I think that now is the time.
Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War,
now is the time to fill in those blanks.
And so I invite you to please help me.
Help me and -- help me out
because I see value in building a community archive.
And so if you do have knowledge to share,
if you have photos you'd like to find a space for,
you know, raise your hand, come talk to me afterward.
I'll leave my contact information.
I think it's important to also ground ourselves
in what was Washington State's connections to the Vietnam War.
For many of you, I'm sorry because you lived through it,
so I shouldn't really be telling you this,
but I'll just very broadly.
Obviously, we have Joint Base Lewis-McChord,
major training and deployment center supported by U.S.
soldiers in Vietnam and -- supported U.S.
soldiers going, serving in Vietnam,
Bangor Naval Base and Boeing, which, of course,
manufactured military aircraft and a lot of the equipment
that was used extensively throughout that war.
Here in Seattle, on the home front,
there was a lot of activism going on.
May I ask anybody in the audience old enough, like,
or wise enough, I guess, to remember that era around 1975,
the Vietnam War era, seeing it on television?
Anyone here active in anti-war, the anti-war movement?
Okay. So that was going on.
Camp Murray at Fort Lewis is a historical site
that temporarily housed the first Vietnamese refugees
who were resettled here after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
And then, of course, from that,
we see the growth of the Vietnamese community,
which is now 82,000 people, 82,000-ish strong statewide.
At the time also, U.S.
Senator Henry Scoop Jackson,
was a staunch backer of military funding
that had an impact on defense policy.
And I think it's worth noting too that Boeing thrived.
And when the war ended, some of you may recall,
I wasn't born yet, but I have heard
that it was a tough time for Boeing in the '70s.
And once the war ended,
it did lead to a lot of job losses
and economic changes here. And then also by the 1980s,
Washington State honored its Vietnam veterans
with memorials like
the Washington State Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Olympia.
I was born and raised in Olympia,
so I -- that was like the park for us.
Like anytime anybody visited, my mom and dad were like,
we're going to the wall, you know.
And every memorial day,
my dad and the Vietnamese community would get flowers
and would take it out there to honor the veterans.
And, of course,
Vietnamese Americans continue shaping the state's cultural
and political landscape.
We all know Vietnamese food.
We all know someone who's Vietnamese, I'm sure.
I'm going to split today's presentation
into a few different -- three different chapters.
But we'll start with early days.
And I wanted to share that recently,
MOHAI, after asking me to give this presentation,
I asked to go take a look in the archives
and -- the archives out in Georgetown.
And I was absolutely floored,
because I think I've always had this idea
that our story didn't begin until April 30th, 1975,
which is the day that Saigon fell to communism.
I didn't realize that even before that,
in the weeks before that, April 3rd, 1975,
Washington State was preparing
to receive orphans and Operation Babylift was going on.
President Gerald Ford was allowing for the children.
Supposedly children who did not have parents
were airlifted out of Vietnam toward the end of the war.
And so these are photos from Sea-Tac of families
who were coming to adopt children,
Vietnamese children and babies.
And I was really moved by this photo
because those babies, there was one child who came,
and they took the child to the hospital
and the child didn't make it and died,
and there was a memorial held.
And I'm very curious who these people are.
And I look at that little coffin and it just makes me really sad.
So by May 8th, a month later, 1975,
this is Governor Dan Evans.
He announced that the State of Washington
would agree to participate in the resettlement
and the sponsorship of at least 500 refugees from Vietnam.
And this made Washington State a pioneer,
and this made Governor Dan Evans really unique.
At that time,
as he has told this story, I've interviewed him about this,
Democratic Governor, Jerry Brown,
in California initially did not want to receive
Vietnamese refugees.
The first 130,000 Vietnamese
who were evacuated at the end of the war were taken to Guam,
to the Philippines,
and then resettled first at Camp Pendleton
and then at other military bases around the country.
And as the story goes,
Jerry Brown did not want to receive them,
because there was anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiment.
There was a belief that they would come and take jobs,
and he apparently did not want them there.
And our Republican governor said,
it's the right thing to do to help.
And so he sent a young aide named Ralph Munro
to go check out Camp Pendleton.
And Ralph went down and took these photos
and brought them back.
And this is Camp Pendleton.
And this is, as you can see, rows and rows of tents
where they housed many of the first Vietnamese refugees
you see on the bottom right,
lining up, constantly lining up for food and for services.
And Ralph writes that when he went down there,
he was shocked to see that everybody was kind of equal.
The Prime Minister of Vietnam, Nguyen Cao Ky,
was among the people like everybody else.
Everyone was living in a tent.
Everyone was starting with nothing.
And these are some scenes from the camp,
which I've always just been intrigued with.
Clearly, they were washing their own clothes.
You had also members of the U.S.
military who were serving the refugees.
And you see a lot of really big, huge oversized jackets.
So I think they were also wearing
like military-issue clothing.
And this is -- I call this the power of a four-page memo.
This was Ralph's memorandum to Governor Dan Evans
reporting on what he had seen and also recommending
that Washington State could take action.
He described the condition in the camps.
He had conversations with the refugees
to ask them about what their skills were,
what they had done in Vietnam,
and really brought back and was the eyes and ears
to be able to tell the governor,
I think there's a place for them here in Washington State.
And that same day, on May 20th, 1975,
this was received from the city council.
And at the time,
the city council passed a resolution 24913,
and I'll just read like a little excerpt.
The City of Seattle welcomes refugees from political
or religious persecution.
And that if the federal government rescues
Vietnamese refugees and brings them to safety in Seattle,
the City of Seattle will do its part to cooperate in all ways
to make each refugee welcome.
And I think this is, it speaks to our values as a city.
I'm not surprised that Seattle would be generous.
And there are a lot of press releases in the archive,
in the Washington State Archive,
where Dan Evans was really good at communicating
this is the plan. On May 22nd,
he was pleased to announce
that Washington citizens are welcoming
the Vietnamese refugees.
About 300 offers of sponsorship
had already been received by that point
and the center is continuing to receive about 35 a day.
Sponsorship would be local citizens, private citizens,
churches, organizations.
Governor Evans asked the citizens of Washington State
to step up at that point
and more or less serve as brothers and sisters,
or guides, or mentors to the refugees.
And how did he do that?
He did that by sending a letter and posting it in the camp.
And the one on the left that you see is in English.
Greetings.
The people of the State of Washington
wish to extend to you
the opportunity of making your new home with us
here in Washington.
And going on to tell them things like
within the State of Washington,
there are at least 450 Vietnamese
who have already settled here.
They were primarily the wives of military veterans.
With their support,
your family should be able to adjust to everyday living
and a new surrounding much more quickly.
They warn, number two,
the climate here is very pleasant and mild.
Includes good months with sunshine,
several months with cooler wet weather,
and a good blend of temperatures.
And then they translated that letter
into Vietnamese on the right.
This was the letter that was distributed at Camp Pendleton.
I found this photo on top in the archive,
and I imagine that maybe that's where they posted it.
And that was the center,
that was the hub, and these people were looking at that.
And apparently about 1,000 people
initially indicated interest.
And the concept was, again,
Washington State would receive 500.
Do we have anyone in our audience today who remembers,
either was a refugee themselves
or knows like was a sponsor to a Vietnamese family in 1975?
Okay.
But Tan, you were at another camp, right?
Where was your family? You were in Arkansas?
Fort Chaffee? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, there were several,
but Pendleton was the big one and lots
of new stories came out.
And when they did come to Washington State,
Fort Worth was -- not Fort Worth, sorry.
Fort Lewis was -- some of the barracks
there were kind of reconfigured
and they turned it into Camp Murray.
So you see here some of the families that come.
And there's a lot of food.
I feel like there's a lot of photos in the archive
where they ate a lot.
And you see this is the memo.
It's like there's always lines for food.
It's like food unites us. Everybody likes food.
Washington National Guard, Camp Murray.
So you see they turned this sign,
The Vietnamese Assistance Center.
It was open here in Washington State for several months,
I think through the fall of 1975.
And this is a photo of the first busload of people
who were brought here from the airport.
And again, it doesn't exactly jive with what my idea
of being a refugee is,
because this man, like he's got cool sunglasses, you know.
He looks like really slick.
And look, there's this like woman with an ao dai, long hair,
and, you know,
it's like they don't look like they're struggling, you know.
But his name is Binh
and he ended up actually going to Olympia.
And you'll see some more photos of him moving forward.
But this is one of the first refugee families stepping
off of the bus in May of 1975.
And some photos from that first meeting,
because the governor was really good
at galvanizing people to rise up to get the media to come cover.
There are news stories about these poor refugees
just being attacked with cameras.
And on the upper left-hand corner,
like that is the group of women who were already here.
They worked through the Red Cross.
They were in community
and they welcomed the people from like off of the buses.
On the right is, again, that same family.
That man that you see with his children, with his wife.
And as it turns out, we are family friends.
And he was -- and he's also in the lower photo as well.
You see, this is Governor Dan Evans, and he is --
obviously, the cameras are pointed at him
and he's interviewing a couple of the refugees.
I would love to find this footage.
I'm sure that King, or Com, or somebody probably has it.
But, you know, they have a wonderful story because Binh,
who you see that were on the upper right-hand corner,
became -- he joined DSHS and he worked with refugees,
Vietnamese refugees,
for many, many years after coming here in 1975.
And his son Sung, who is second from the left, the little boy.
So Sung has a son named Nathan. And in 2021,
I personally got involved with some friends
in helping to sponsor Afghan refugees.
And Nathan came out of nowhere and Nathan was like,
I really want to help.
And he was like 18 years old.
And he ended up convincing his family
to co-sponsor the first -- privately co-sponsor,
the first Afghan family to come to Washington State
under our pilot program. So very weird, like, you know,
like full circle moments a little bit.
But he had not seen these photos
until he saw MOHAI post this on Instagram.
He's like, that's my family.
And I love that, you know.
And so it's like he -- it just came from somewhere.
But his father is Sung,
who was one of the first sponsors
of an Afghan refugee family in 2021.
And I just think that's amazing.
This headline cracks me up, Welcome to America;
Now Smile For The Camera.
And, you know, they talked about Binh Duong.
And they talk about him here,
but they don't actually quote him.
Duong's wife and children were blocked by onrushing,
reporters, photographers, and cameramen
who, triggered by the AP reporters,
moved, squeezed into a circle
around the slight Vietnamese refugee.
So I mean, it was a great photo op,
but you didn't hear from the refugees at that time,
and I wonder why.
I don't know if it was a language barrier,
if it was more about the visuals.
But they obviously were paraded around.
And I was terrified of doing this
to the refugees that we helped.
It was very like, no media.
You know, when they came out at Sea-Tac,
just times have changed, you know.
Because we didn't really have a say.
It was like, if you want help and if you want to be here,
the media's going to be there
and they're going to be in your face,
and you just have to accept it.
This is the full article from The Olympian, tiny letters.
And I didn't bring my reading glasses,
so I'm not going to read it here for you.
But some photos from inside the camp
of the refugees awaiting sponsorship at Camp Murray.
And it wasn't just Vietnamese,
there were also Cambodian refugees also
who were at Camp Murray, and again, eating really well.
And I thought this was interesting because over --
during those first few months, the state was mobilizing,
the federal government was mobilizing
and trying to understand,
what do we do with these 130,000 people that we evacuated?
And there was a lot of debate about this.
And I don't know who this Joshua Eilberg is.
He's not a Washington person.
But this was in Dan Evans papers,
and I thought it was interesting
because imagine all these refugees come,
they're sponsored out of the camps.
And this person wrote about, I am distressed to hear reports
that a member of the President's Advisory Committee on refugees,
I won't say her name,
has adopted a paternalistic approach to the Vietnamese
and Cambodian refugees,
and has displayed an elitist attitude with regard
to her work with these refugees. It is indeed disturbing
that Mrs. Ender's views may be interpreted
as reflecting the sentiment and disposition
of the administration
and other members of the advisory committee
toward these refugees.
And as a result,
this could seriously jeopardize future resettlement efforts.
This committee envisioned
that the refugees would be treated not only
with care and compassion,
but with dignity. It was certainly not intended
that the refugees become a ready supply
of household servants for wealthy Americans
or the unfortunate victims of misplaced humanitarianism.
Refugee placement and resettlement
is a serious business
and the President's Advisory Committee was not designed
to provide a part-time hobby
or a self-glorification vehicle for board wives
of State Department officials.
If these news reports are accurate,
I strongly suggest that Mrs., be immediately asked to resign
from the President's Advisory Committee.
And I thought this was interesting
because sometimes you think maybe in the old days
there was just racism
and maybe they just didn't get a say in what, you know, happened,
refugees didn't have a say in what happened to them.
And I think in this case,
I'm really glad that there were people looking out
and who called out this kind of behavior.
And in a lot of the paperwork that I've looked at as well,
there's notes from a social worker here
who was trying to work with a group
of Vietnamese refugees of six Air Force pilots,
former Air Force pilots,
and they were trying to learn English
so they could become pilots here in Washington.
And in her note, she talked about some of the challenges
and how moved she was by the process
of just getting to know these guys
and getting to understand some of them
were able to come with their families,
others were not able to come with their families
and left people behind in Vietnam.
And she said she would never forget the quotes from them.
And this is from somebody named Thanh, not me,
Air Force Major for the Republic of Vietnam, saying,
"You must understand, we have spent whole lives flying.
Always in the air. We feel like birds.
Now that we cannot fly, we feel as a bird with the wings broken,
and we must walk on the ground with the chickens."
And I think this reflects the fact
that for so many of them coming here was a loss of identity.
And to go from being an Air Force pilot
who were the mavericks, you know,
like the hot guys of South Vietnam,
and to come here and to be told like, there is nothing.
You need to start somewhere, you know.
So you're going to work on farms,
you're going to work in chicken coops, and that kind of thing.
This quote stuck out to the social worker.
She said it made her determined to try
to help them find self-sufficiency
and to find a future for themselves here in Washington.
And, you know, this other quote is from somebody named Kiet,
who was a former helicopter pilot and officer
shot down three times during the war.
But again, when these people came here,
they were not considered U.S. veterans.
They never got any kind of --
they did not get the same benefits that American veterans
who had fought in the Vietnam War got.
But this person said,
"I think it will be very beautiful
to fly in this country.
I have never flown with no one shooting at me."
And I don't know.
I would love to find out did any of them actually become pilots?
I've heard of one Vietnamese American pilot
for Alaska Airlines, and I think he was within this group.
But, you know, they're just those stories you just wonder.
And, you know, in the notes she talks about,
there's a couple who really, really struggled with English
and there was no way
they were going to be able to resume their careers.
And the next chapter I'm going to talk about
is kind of re-finding our voice
once we were resettled in community.
I wanted to talk about Dat Moi
because this is another pioneering move
by the State of Washington,
which I thought was really unique.
They recognized that a part of helping refugees
to resettle here was not only
did you need to teach them English,
but they needed information.
They needed accurate information.
And so Washington State was the first
to fund a Vietnamese language newspaper in the country.
And this newspaper ended up becoming a hub of information.
People outside of Washington State
would ask -- they would pay.
They wanted this newspaper sent to them.
So they would be in the Midwest or somewhere,
but they heard there was this Vietnamese language newspaper
funded by the State of Washington.
And not only that,
but people like Ralph Munro and state officials,
they recruited the refugees to basically find your own voice,
write your own information in your language
so that it's accurate and that people understand.
But they also wanted -- they said, you know,
we've got to get funding
from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities
from Washington State Humanities.
And I thought about how like that's so powerful.
And like right now, we're looking at --
those funds are at risk or going away.
And so we don't --
you know, it took advocacy by just people
who had more knowledge,
you know, to be able to secure something like this.
And Dat Moi existed bilingual,
Vietnamese and English from 1975 until 1987.
And these are photos
that I found in the archives of the editor, Vu Duc Vinh,
who was a high-ranking government officer
in South Vietnam,
resettled here and became the first editor of the newspaper
and a community leader as well. And the picture above,
you can see all of the different issues, you know.
And I love the idea of there just being this like newspaper.
I mean, I used to work for a newspaper.
It's like a family.
And this is a photo of the staff.
I don't know who's in here but I suspect it's the staff,
it's community members.
Vu Duc Vinh, the editor, is in the middle.
And I think there are some celebrities in here
because this is another photo
and this right here,
that person is Hoang Thi Tho,
who is one of the great songwriters,
composers, entertainers, cabaret organizers of South Vietnam.
And I suspect that there were Vietnamese artists
who would come through Seattle,
and they would entertain and put on concerts for the refugees.
And so they were probably having a party
and having a great time, you know.
But you see faces like that
and, again, they don't look like they're struggling.
They look like they're having,
like they're happy, you know, with their lives here.
But one of the things that Vu Duc Vinh --
I have a book that I brought.
And this is a book that I acquired from his son.
He passed away in 2005.
And in 2015, his son gifted this to me,
and it's a collection of his father's writing
from his time as editor Dat Moi.
And there's only three articles in here
that are in English language.
And when I first read this 10 years ago,
I was really moved because it opened my eyes
to what was going on in the minds of these refugees
who did not know whether they were going to stay
or if they were going to go back to Vietnam,
who very much wanted to go back to Vietnam,
but felt they couldn't
because it was a communist country at that point.
And Vu Duc Vinh wrote this in December.
Hold on a second.
He wrote this in December of 1976.
Look at the truth to locate obstacles.
During the past months,
I had the chance to note some opinions expressed
by the Vietnamese themselves
about the relationship between each other.
A Vietnamese singer and a Vietnamese songwriter
who had traveled a lot throughout the United States
and had contact with thousands of Vietnamese
in different states, said, "We Vietnamese are so divided."
A Vietnamese Buddhist monk who has been in this country
for years and now operates a pagoda in the West,
expressed a similar judgment,
"We Vietnamese are so separated from each other."
A Vietnamese Catholic priest in Washington State,
during a recent conversation, raised a question,
"How to unite the different newly established associations?"
A letter written by a Vietnamese refugee
who was now settled in France disclosed,
we are coming here in great numbers,
but each of us is in his own world.
Our relationship has loosened very much.
The phenomenon of our discord is so obvious
that I think it's not necessary to go over it.
Certainly, this is very unfortunate.
But considering the facts that brought us to this new land,
we should realize that it is quite normal.
We had to leave our motherland in a situation of defeat,
without leadership in the last minutes.
We left voluntarily.
The rich and powerful people traded for their passports
and got out of the country secretly.
The others fought each other for a seat on a plane
or a place in a ship.
In order to survive,
each of us had acted instinctively,
and therefore the moral value in each person
had been diminished during the evacuation of 1975.
Our idols have come down.
We were absolutely equal on the flights
and on the ships of evacuation.
The ego in each of us has been revealed so clearly
that each lost some respect for the other.
When we arrived in this new society,
once again, there were no criteria
to evaluate the real values in each of us.
Due to the language barrier,
many had to take inappropriate jobs not equivalent
to their positions in the old country.
In contrast,
some found in this country a better job than they had before.
Thus, no one can win enough respect from the other
and no voice can have common appeal.
Meanwhile, the newly established associations,
which are considered a medium for gathering people,
still don't have enough time
and means to prove their effectiveness
and to win the confidence of the people.
Many associations have been established so far,
but not many of us are ready to participate in them yet.
Perhaps it is because we still can't forget
the bad reputations of the associations in Vietnam.
They had been established for the sole purpose of,
"Signing resolutions to support the administration rather than
to serve the common good of their members."
Although many associations have now clearly stated
that they will not be used for any political purpose,
it's not easy to persuade the people to trust or believe them.
Besides, for many of us,
the period of one year
is not enough to solve all our important problems,
such as learning English or getting some job training.
Generally, we are still too busy
to be able to make useful contributions.
Our memories are still etched with the images
of the evacuation during the summer of 1975
and our prejudices about the Vietnamese associations
in Vietnam are still ingrained in our minds.
Moreover, we are now facing a lot of difficulties
during this beginning period in the new land.
We still feel much attachment to the motherland
and are still pained with the idea of having left for good.
Not only do we harbor resentment against those
who are responsible for our defeat,
we also blame God for being unjust.
Since God is so abstract, we blame those who are next to us,
our compatriots who are suffering the same fate.
All those factors are really the main reasons
that lead to our discord
and cause much difficulty in our effort at uniting.
I mean, is it just me? Like I just hadn't --
to be able to understand what was going on in their minds
at that time,
you know, I just hadn't thought about that until I read.
I didn't know.
And I think it made me think of my own mom and dad
because they didn't complain.
Like they didn't -- I knew there was a lot of pain,
but they're like, there's no time.
We don't have time.
We don't have the luxury of slowing down.
We just have to move on and we have to survive.
And that's caused a lot of discord.
And I think even though we're 50 years removed,
I see a lot of --
I'm very inspired by what we see
in our Japanese American community,
which it took generations,
took decades to be able to look at what happened
during World War II and to say that was wrong.
That was an injustice.
To put Japanese Americans into concentration camps.
It took decades
for the Jewish community to be able to talk about
and acknowledge the horrors of the Holocaust.
And I think that, you know, we, Vietnamese or Southeast Asians,
we're sort of in that spot where it's like,
if we want to heal
and if we want to make sense of what is our shared history,
especially with those who are still surviving
and are still connected, you know,
to what happened in 1975, now is the time.
Like we have to be looking at the past
and trying to understand it and talking about it.
When I was at MOHAI a few weeks ago, I went through --
they have a beautiful and amazing archive
that I would highly encourage anyone
who is Southeast Asian or has -- from a refugee family,
they have many, many files there
that are all about like documenting
the Southeast Asian refugee experience
and specifically the Vietnamese experience too.
And so I just took the afternoon, went out there.
They brought out all of these folders.
And they digitized.
They digitized a lot of this as well.
And I just wanted to --
I'm not going to read through each of these,
but I wanted to show you all scenes of after they rebuilt,
what was going on.
And this is Quoc Nam
who was broadcasting for Saigon Radio in Seattle,
August 21st, 1996.
Photos by Mike Urban from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
He founded Saigon Radio in October, 1993
as the first Vietnamese language radio program
in the Pacific Northwest.
I don't know. I don't think it exists anymore.
He's a former Vietnamese military officer immigrated
to the United States in 1976.
He lived in Kansas City, Seattle, and San Jose,
founded newspapers in each place,
and moved back to Seattle in 1993
and launched this radio station for
approximately 50,000 Vietnamese Americans living in the area.
So here he is in Rainier Valley.
And I'm really curious, what happened to the radio station?
I also love the fact
that look at all those cassette tapes and CDs,
you know, at the time.
So he was playing music,
probably telling stories in community.
And that was 1996. So that's 21 years.
Imagine it takes 21 years to build up to a point
where you can have a studio.
And I think what the people who came here in 1975 probably,
I don't think any of us realized that there would be wave
after wave of Vietnamese refugees coming.
This is just, you know, a quick timeline; 1975,
you had the fall of Saigon.
So then you have the initial evacuation of 100,000 --
30,000 South Vietnamese refugees.
And then between 1977, 1979,
the boat people crisis arises
and we have more expanded refugee admissions.
This would be where my family -- for any of you
who may have heard about my podcast called Second Wave,
I called it that because my family was part
of the second wave of refugees who fled by boat.
And then in 1980, the Refugee Act of 1980 is huge,
creates the standardized refugee admission system in the U.S.
Raised the annual refugee cap.
And that was a direct result
of the Southeast Asian refugee crisis.
And that program is gone. It's shuttered at this time.
1988, Amerasian Homecoming Act.
So at that point,
basically, the children of veterans
who had served in Vietnam.
So these were children who were half White,
half Black, half Latino, you know.
Those children who had been left behind in Vietnam
were granted special immigration status
and allowed to come here to the United States.
They have a tragic story.
Many of them were called children of the dust in Vietnam
and were looked down upon.
And then when they did come here,
their families took advantage of that opportunity
to come with them.
And there are many a horror story about that experience
because they came here
and they were left once again like dust
by their family members.
And then in the 1990s,
we started to see an influx of humanitarian operation program
and orderly departure.
So this would be veterans
who -- South Vietnamese veterans
who were imprisoned by the communists
after the end of the war for a minimum three years.
You could then apply for special status
to resettle in the United States
and to bring your family under the age of, I believe it was 21.
So that led to another wave.
And as a kid,
I saw all of this
because I would see new Vietnamese kids coming
into school all the time.
And I was so consumed at the time with like,
I don't want to be called a boater, you know.
I don't want to be like fresh off the boat.
And I just wanted to be this little American kid.
And I'm so ashamed that at the time,
when you don't know and you look down on a man who's in his 50s,
and he comes here and he's broken
because he's been imprisoned
and his dignity has been taken from him for 15, 16, 17 years,
shame on me for just not knowing at the time.
But, you know, then what we have in the mid-'90s
is the normalization of relations between the U.S.
and between Vietnam.
And nowadays, it's quite -- you have students who are coming,
you have family reunification.
But again, all of that is currently at risk.
And I will be frank and say that I wish --
if we knew our shared history,
would we be as vocal as Japanese Americans have been
against injustice that we're seeing?
I'm very curious why we are not louder,
why we're not saying something
about what is currently happening
with the refugee admission system in the U.S.
But this is the reality.
Some photos from resettlement through the years.
And my dad is the one, the middle picture in the top.
Immediately after arriving here in 1979,
he joined with the Vietnamese American community,
and they would go out to the State Capitol
constantly to protest.
And he's holding a sign
that says rescue people from the South China Sea,
because he had just gone through that experience.
And they did this on a regular basis, I heard, for years.
I don't know when they stopped.
I don't know how effective it was.
And then on the bottom,
when I told you all that,
you know, I'm the kid in that red vest,
that it was we would take everybody.
Anybody who came to visit Olympia,
my parents were so proud to take them to the wall.
And the thing is, another shame on me moment is I always --
I felt like we were going there to thank America
and to thank American veterans for giving their lives
and for serving in Vietnam.
I did not know that we were too afraid to even ask,
could we recognize the South Vietnamese allies
who fought alongside American soldiers?
Their names are not etched on the wall.
They have not been allowed an official memorial.
And yet South Vietnamese veterans like my dad
and a lot of our uncles, you know, and our family members,
they still show up and they still try to honor,
but they can't even honor themselves,
which is really sad to me.
And you see a community throughout the '80s
and the '90s becoming more civically engaged.
That's Governor Booth Gardner on the left.
I don't know if he was signing something.
I don't know what the context is behind that.
You see a group of Vietnamese Americans
on the steps of the Capitol in Olympia.
And you also see down here,
this is a photo from obviously an American
who is helping refugees to probably learn English,
because churches and community spaces,
they would hold classes for the newcomers.
And this was happening throughout the '80s
and throughout the '90s.
And I wanted to show this photo.
It's not the best quality.
It's from a magazine that I scanned.
But the woman on the left,
her name is Fern Powers,
and Fern was a bus driver
and Baptist Christian woman in Olympia.
She personally sponsored hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of refugees from Southeast Asia
because she said Jesus told her to, and also Governor Evans.
She saw an article
and the governor asked people to stand up.
And she was a bus driver.
So she, you know, would use her bus.
And I went to visit her. She's passed away.
But I went to visit her. I tracked her down in like 2015,
somewhere around there, and she told us stories about
how she had been warned by people in the community,
you've done enough.
Like stop helping them.
Like we don't have enough resources to help these people.
They're not assimilating. They don't want to be one of us.
And she said, no, these are people who need help.
And I just look at people like her
and I'm less afraid of religion.
You know, when I hear about or when I think about people.
And everybody in the Vietnamese community in Olympia,
they called her Ba Fern, which is Mrs. Fern.
They all knew her and they all loved her.
And this is a photo --
she turned her home into a community center
for all of the recent refugees,
especially the unaccompanied minors.
Thousands and thousands of people came to the U.S.
as children and she would have clothing and food.
And her husband, her children were all in
on helping the community in Olympia.
And these are photos from her collection
that she shared with me before she passed away.
I don't know any of the names,
but obviously, these are groups of unaccompanied
and refugee youth who they took.
It looks like they took them on outings.
It looks like someone here graduated.
I think that's Capital High School in Olympia,
like my high school, my alma mater, where I went.
And they look like they're having a great time,
but there's also some serious trauma.
And throughout this entire time, mind you,
I think anybody who's --
we didn't talk about trauma in the '80s and '90s.
You just didn't. And so I look at these now
and I wonder how much were you masking, you know?
Were you masking?
Were you hiding your pain and what you were feeling?
And, you know, bless the people
who gave these young people an opportunity to go out
and to see community and see the world.
This is a picture of Hoi and Nguyen Tran family
at their sponsor's home in Kirkland in June 26, 1975.
Hoi Tran had been a Major in the South Vietnamese Air Force.
What I love is that mom is knitting, you know.
And nothing's going to stop her.
I hope that brought her a lot of joy.
Who's this family?
You know, like, I would love -- do they know that their photo,
that this was in the Seattle PI's archive
that's now at MOHAI?
Amerasian children arriving at Sea-Tac Airport,
February 1st, 1983.
An Tran holding baby during reunion at Sea-Tac Airport,
February 23rd, 1993.
And in the caption, I mean, look at this woman.
In 1954, An Tran sent six of her children
from their home in North Vietnam to South Vietnam
to escape the impending rule
of the North Vietnamese communist government.
An and her husband followed their children
but were captured at the border and sent to separate jails.
The husband escaped to South Vietnam,
but An was returned to the North
where she lived with her eldest daughter
and gave birth to her youngest child,
unaware of the fate of her husband.
The Nguyen family was eventually able to notify
An that they had arrived safely in Saigon
but they feared imprisonment or death
if they attempted to return North for her.
After Saigon fell in 1975, a daughter who worked for the U.S.
government was able to get the Nguyen family
on a plane to the U.S.
Tau Nguyen, the husband,
tried unsuccessfully to bring his wife to the U.S.
by official channels.
And An herself made
three unsuccessful attempts to flee by boat.
After hearing of Tau's death in 1987,
An gave up her plan to immigrate,
instead staying in Vietnam with her two children.
The family, however, persevered
and An received permission to immigrate in 1993.
On February 23rd, 1993,
An Tran was greeted at Sea-Tac Airport
by a large group of family and friends,
including the six children she hadn't seen in 39 years
and their families.
In this photo,
An Tran meets one of the youngest members of her family
during the reunion at the airport.
And this photo was taken by Paul Brown or Paul Joseph Brown
for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Thirty-nine years to reunite a family.
Can you imagine?
And that was the story for so many people who came in 1975,
or boat people who came throughout the '80s.
It took many, many, many years
for them to reunite with their loved ones.
A little girl, Bao Chao,
with South Vietnamese flag at Hing Hay Park,
Seattle, May 1st, 1982.
And that flag she's holding is very significant
for South Vietnamese.
I think Americans will know it
as that usually signifies the Vietnam War
in an American context.
And for the South Vietnamese,
that was the flag that they recognized,
was the yellow flag with the three red stripes.
They do not like to recognize the current flag of Vietnam
today,
which has become a major --
it's a polarizing issue within our community still.
In this photo,
Dai Vu and his brother looking at a family photo in Seattle,
on October 14th, 1979.
He arrived as a 10-year-old in the U.S.
with his father and two older siblings,
after living in a Malaysian refugee camp for five months,.
All of the family's money went into the boat passage
for the four,
and Dai's mother younger siblings
had to be left behind in Seattle.
Dai attended school at Lake City Elementary,
where he struggled to understand his lessons
and to communicate with his classmates.
His uncle,
who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975,
was the Vietnamese English teacher at the school.
Dai studied basic English and the culture of the U.S.
with other Vietnamese students in his uncle's
classroom each day.
Here, Dai Vu and his brother
look at a photograph of their family
that had been taken when they lived together in Vietnam.
And they just look so wistful.
And this photo was by Dale Blindheim.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing his name right.
Binh Huynh with the training diploma Seattle,
December 17, 1982. Looks like in 1982,
the Asian Counseling and Referral Service in Seattle
ran a 15-week vocational and language course
to help Southeast Asian refugees in the Seattle area
become more independent.
Students took English in the morning,
classes in vocational skills
each afternoon to prepare them for employment
as janitors or custodians.
Here, Binh displays the diploma he received
upon completion of the class.
He owned a fabric shop in Vietnam before leaving in 1979
and now had a job as a janitor for Seattle City Light.
Photo by Jennifer Werner.
Thuc Vu with students at Evergreen High School
in White Center, May 5th, 1989. He taught Cambodian
and Vietnamese students primarily at the school.
This photo's also by Jennifer Werner Jones.
Thuy and Xuan Vu and family
at home in Olympia, September, 1985.
They're family friends, and I went to high school with Leyen,
the little boy on the right.
He was a year older than me and his sister, Maian,
is the person on the left.
And Thuy is a PhD.
So he's retired now and he teaches economics.
But for a time,
they were sort of known as like the educated family in Olympia.
So everybody kind of looked up to them.
He also ran the refugee office for a while as well.
So it was fun to see familiar faces in the archive.
Four people eating at a restaurant
in Little Saigon, Seattle.
Didn't identify what the restaurant was.
I'm very curious. I don't know. Is this Huong Binh like 1993?
Is it Pho Bac? Who are these people?
The bun rieu they're eating looks really good.
Theresa Vu,
preparing bowls of pho at Pho Bac restaurant in Seattle,
January 14th, 1993.
The matriarch of the family that still owns Pho Bac today.
Thien Dac Nguyen mopping the floor in Seattle,
February 18, 1976.
So the caption here said that by early '76,
there were more than 4,000 Vietnamese refugees
in Washington State.
Most had held positions of some status in Vietnam
and earned decent incomes.
They were now competing with Americans for scarce jobs,
and their options were complicated by the lack
of a cohesive public program for Asian immigrants
with political struggle among local community groups,
private refugee agencies, the state government,
and the federal government over the kinds
of services which should be provided
and how they would be financed and staffed.
Many ended up in menial jobs with little time or resources
to take classes which would improve their prospects.
So here, Thien Dac Nguyen, 27 years old,
a former lieutenant in the Vietnamese Navy,
mops floors in the U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization building in Seattle.
He had no family here and was saving money to go to school
so he could get a better job.
Photo by Howard Staples.
What's next?
I mean, that's just a sample of some photos.
We have a slideshow that I could show you,
but I don't know how we're doing.
It's 7:30 and I want to make sure
that we have time to discuss.
So I'm going to talk about what's next for me
is more exploration.
These are places,
but I also encourage you and the people
that you know to do this exploration
while you can and while we still have some connection
to the people who have this memory
and can provide details like, such as,
where was your family from in Vietnam?
How did they come? Do you know what year they came?
Those little details can really help.
And from then,
its research at the Washington State Archives,
University of Washington Collections, Wing Luke Museum.
Obviously, my next step is I'd really like
to take a look at the papers
of Washington State elected officials,
past and present, Scoop Jackson. My dad and his sponsor
tried valiantly to look for their family friends
who were missing at sea.
And I want to find that letter.
You know, what was that letter like?
And my dad couldn't -- didn't know how to write it on his own.
And so his American sponsor, Roger Stenberg,
wrote the letter and sent it.
And I'd love to find it because that mystery still haunts
that family in Vietnam today. To this day,
they were never able to find three children in their family
that they put on a boat.
And what would it be like to just try to trace
that a little bit and to -- I want them to know
that they weren't forgotten.
Like my family got very lucky
and everyone survived the boat ride,
but there were so many people who are going to be forgotten
and lost to history.
And obviously, MOHAI here, it's an incredible collection.
I think there's a lot more to explore.
And again, not just the Vietnamese experience,
but also Cambodian, the Lao community,
the Filipino community, and the Thai community and beyond.
And I'm really interested in exploring
community archival efforts and storytelling.
And I hope during our presentation --
during our Q&A I would love ideas from you.
Like what are -- is there an appetite
for us to be able to hold space to be able to do this?
Why is it important?
You know, how I love to solve problems.
And so it's like,
how can I help to facilitate that using my skills
and my passion as a storyteller? Yeah.
So if you want to collaborate
or support my independent work, contact me.
My email is tt@thanhtan.co or come talk to me afterward.
And some questions that I wanted to open up to think about
because I would love your thoughts
on the Vietnam War and you. I'll put this out there.
What historical context and challenges
have you and or your family faced after the Vietnam War?
You don't have to be Vietnamese.
You could be part of like, you know,
related to or adjacent to a family
that had sent an American son or friend,
you know, whatever, to Vietnam to fight in the war.
When we think about the global refugee crisis today,
examining the current situation,
including conflicts in regions like Syria,
Afghanistan, and Central America
that have led to mass displacement of people,
what do you think we still need to -- what can we learn?
What do we need to know about
those experiences happening right now?
Shared experiences.
Lessons learned when we're reflecting
on the Vietnamese American experience here in Washington
and seeing the massive amount of community work
that it took to help resettle Vietnamese here.
And also call to action.
How can you actively support and advocate for the rights
and the well-being of refugees,
both in your local community and on a global scale?
Those are all questions
that I hope my presentation maybe helped you think about.
If I could get some help with getting that slideshow up,
and we can talk about the slideshow.
But I mean, I would love to open up the floor.
Any thoughts, questions, insights, people you recognize?
Yeah, go ahead.
Not all at once.
Hi Tan.
Hold on.
We're going to bring a microphone to you.
-Hey, Tan.
Can you talk about the documentary
that you're working on?
-Yeah, I am working on a documentary
about the last person,
the last South Vietnamese veteran rescued
from the last battle, major battle of the Vietnam War.
And his name is Chanh Nguyen, and he is 86 years old.
Two-time bronze star recipient.
One of the most decorated soldiers
in South Vietnamese history.
And he's in Detroit, Michigan today.
But he's had a really extraordinary life
that tracks with the Cold War.
And I got to know him,
become really close to him after 10 years of reporting on,
documenting, and taking portraits of his unit.
They are the ARVIN,
the Army of the Republic of Vietnam's 18th division.
Their stories are going to be lost
because they were on the losing side.
And many of them suffered greatly
and were imprisoned after the war,
and their history has been actively erased in Vietnam
and forgotten or people don't care here in the U.S.,
because they lost.
And there's a lot of bitterness about it,
but I don't want those stories to be forgotten.
And so I'm currently working on an independent
documentary feature-length film project about Che.
And I've done the interviews,
I've gone out there to visit him,
and I'm looking to finish it.
So if anyone here feels a connection to that story
or to the veterans of South Vietnam, please come find me.
Thank you for asking.
I'll probably try to get something out
by April 30th this year,
which is the 50th anniversary.
But there's going to be a lot more work
to be done on that project.
Thank you. -So I'm really curious.
One thing I love to ask people is --
I'm interested in the arts,
and when people see themselves in art
that they're taking in as a child or growing up.
And I'm wondering if you had any experiences with,
you know, representation of Vietnamese Americans that you --
that really stuck with you,
or meant a lot to you,
or conversely was harmful in some way?
Yeah.
-Yeah, I think -- I mean, I was born in 1981, 43 years old.
A child of the '80s.
I just didn't -- there are so many ways
to answer this question.
I didn't see like our stories like represented on screen
in a meaningful way.
What I did see, and I shouldn't have seen as a kid,
was, you know, cousins and my father and people
so desperate for Vietnamese content
that they were watching Oliver Stone movies.
They were watching Platoon.
They were watching Heaven and Earth.
And these movies -- and I was a kid, right?
And you'd kind of get nightmares.
You're like, what is this?
And you think of Vietnam as being helicopter,
rice paddies, and weapons, and women who are not human,
and are girlfriends are, you know, like getting raped.
And I don't think that was good.
And I think it probably -- I couldn't name it for a really,
really long time, which is like, you know, it was internalized.
I don't want to say -- it's not colonization
because I didn't live under colonization.
It's not that. Internalized racism, in a way,
where I just kind of accepted.
And I think also felt until very recently
that I don't really have the agency
to like change that depiction, you know.
Like we are in the minority.
And also my -- I was raised in a family
and in a community that very much bought into be quiet,
work hard, merit works, and we just need to survive.
So I see some heads nodding
because I don't think I'm the only one who felt that way.
I think that's a very universal issue,
which is why, again, I'll emphasize that seeing
how other communities have processed their shared history
and shared traumas,
I'll say it again,
the Jewish community and seeing
how Japanese Americans have organized
and kept that history alive through archival,
through oral history, it's so important.
And we do have to model that so that people know that it's okay.
Because I think far too many people are living in isolation.
I can't tell you how many Vietnamese Americans of all ages
I've interviewed in my career who are like,
I don't really have a story to tell, but they do.
And they really --
they don't want to tell it because of the shame,
because they think they're the only ones who have endured it.
And I think that's really too bad.
So but it's a process. I wouldn't say -- you know,
I kind of flipped a switch at some point
and then started talking a lot.
Got really personal as an editorial writer,
as a podcast host and reporter, as an opinion writer.
I really -- kind of the pendulum swung and I'm like,
I'm going to say what I want to say.
And it was hard for my community to accept that
and my own family members to accept it,
because we've gotten very comfortable
in being the good refugees,
and no one wants to question or, you know, deal with shame
and the fact that sometimes terrible things happened
as a result of not processing our trauma.
And we pass that down to the next generation.
I mean, I don't want to pass that down.
I'm trying to be a cycle-breaker.
And so I think seeing what other communities have done
and seeing other Vietnamese writers
and Vietnamese artists just practice their craft
and tell the stories that they want to tell,
I have to actively remind myself
that I do not have to give into scarcity mentality,
which is that there's only room at the top for one
or two perspectives.
Like we all have stories that we can share, you know.
So I hope that helps. Thank you for the question.
Can you get the microphone
so that the audience online can hear you?
-I'm curious about your education in United States,
what your interests were, academic interests?
Because I'm thinking you studied ethnic studies
or something like that.
-Well, no. Yeah, no. I went to USC in L.A.
I studied international relations and
broadcast journalism.
And my husband's here.
I've threatened to like,
maybe I should go for a master's or a PhD, and he's like, no.
But yeah, I don't have formal training in ethnic studies
or in, yeah, in history. Like, I don't.
-So just further with international relations at USC,
what facet of international relations did you --
were you attracted to?
-Well, I think that -- I mean, at the time I was at USC,
they kind of like really encouraged us.
I just wanted to study journalism and get out
and go work and go report.
That's really all I wanted to do.
But I think it was sort of there was encouragement
to breadth with depth and to try to pick up another degree,
if possible, and something that was going to help
with critical thinking skills.
Journalism is very much a craft.
It doesn't matter if you have a PhD from Columbia,
it doesn't make you a great journalist.
And so the international relations was
to really understand like critical thinking and analysis
and understanding foreign relations.
I loved the concept of the UN and what the UN does.
I loved the Olympic movement.
You know, it was things like that,
and obviously, coming from a family that,
you know, endured the Vietnam War.
But that was not the reason.
The Vietnam War was not the reason
that I wanted to study international relations.
-You wanted to understand the world?
-Yeah, I just -- I really just wanted to tell stories, yeah.
-Thank you.
-I'm just really curious.
Okay.
I'm just really curious why you thought
that she was majoring in ethnic studies.
-Because I'm a former academic person.
I was in Vietnam before the war
and I came back to finish school in California
when the riots were being held all around me.
And that's when ethnic studies began,
and that's when women studies began,
and the Indian awareness and lots of awarenesses.
And I know that what we study forms our thinking.
And when you say critical thinking,
critical thinking was something I heard in academic circles.
You know, suddenly we were taught to think critically.
I'm from Hawaii.
So I didn't grow up being critical.
In Hawaii, you just got to float.
You know, I grew up in a beach town.
So in a sense, I came from non --
I'm going to exaggerate and I'm not insulting myself or Hawaii,
but growing up in Hawaii when I did,
we were just -- we just enjoyed being and, you know,
just little hometown.
So with my evolution through --
from being born in Hawaii and then my life path,
and I noticed -- I'm trying to answer your question.
I noticed how my mind evolved.
East West Center began University of Hawaii,
and then suddenly on campus
there were scholars coming from Asia and America.
So that's why I ask.
-Can we maybe get a shift for other people
to ask some questions? There was somebody who was.
-Well, I can share with you that,
well, I am a first generation or first wave Vietnamese
that came to United States.
My parents came to the United States in '75.
And there were -- and we were sponsored by a church
in Victoria, Texas in '75.
Actually, my family did come to Seattle in 1976.
And Huy and Muy Thiang were my aunt and uncle.
And in fact Vu, I think that's his name,
that's also my uncle, part of my family.
You mentioned about shame,
and I think that a lot of it -- at least I don't feel shameful.
I am a Vietnamese refugee.
I'm very grateful for America to accept us.
And I feel -- and I don't identify myself, by the way,
as Vietnamese American.
I'm an American of Vietnamese descent
because this is my country.
I actually went to Cornell to get a PhD in sociology
to understand my experience adapting to United States.
So I think that there is a need to talk about this,
and there are many academician who have,
you know, touch on this.
But I don't know if it's shame that stop us from talking.
I think a lot of it is pain,
having to relive that painful day.
Like, for example,
my family escaped from Vietnam on the last day, April the 30th,
leaving the last boat or ship from Vietnam,
flying the last Vietnamese flag.
And the communists were, I guess, shooting canon at us.
And our ship was sunk in the China Sea for three days.
We sent SOS to many ships
and were not being rescued until a Danish ship rescue us
and took us to Hong Kong,
where they opened the first Vietnamese refugee camp.
So shame, I'm not sure. That's not my experience.
I'm very proud
of what the Vietnamese have accomplished in this country.
You know, I am first generation in this country
and I have a doctorate from an Ivy League institution.
I know that Julie Pham, for example, you know, from Oxford.
There are so many Vietnamese.
So I don't know if it's shameful,
but I think that it is very painful,
especially for my parents' generation to talk about
that experience and the racism that we experienced
when we came to this country,
for me especially because I live in Texas.
So that's the reason why I asked you about -- you know.
I think that everyone, whether you're in communication,
or whether you're a scientist, or whatever,
I think that there's going to be that moment in time
that we're going to ask that question.
You know, for me,
because I'm first generation, it's very poignant.
But for the second generation, right?
Ameri-Vietnamese who were born in America,
they're going to have that question, right?
About their family, about their history.
-Yeah.
And I recognize my privilege having not been
first generation.
I was not on the boat.
I did not go through what my parents went through.
And I think that distance and that time,
I just -- I recognize my privilege as well.
But, you know, we all -- I think --
and it's a very personal journey for everybody.
It really is.
I'm not here to speak for all Vietnamese.
We are not a monolith. So for some, it's too painful.
For others,
it's too much shame that we don't have the tools to process.
Everyone has a different reason for why they do
or do not want to talk about the past and process their trauma.
But thank you.
-We got a question from the live stream.
-Thank you.
I'm just wondering if you have any recommendations for books
either about Vietnamese American or Vietnamese history
that maybe influence you? -There are so many books.
I will say I have a huge --
I have like a ton of academic books
that are just too dense and too much information
for me to kind of. Like, someday I will read this.
No, I tend to -- the stories that I process,
Viet Thanh Nguyen,
obviously The Sympathizer was a big one
that I think opened up my eyes.
But he would be the first to say he's not the only one.
He wasn't the first. He's not the last.
So there are so many Vietnamese writers.
Nguyen Phan Que Mai and, you know,
Kevin Nguyen is another author.
Like people who are writing both fiction and nonfiction.
And there is --
I do need like -- there's a robust academic world,
as well,
of people who have studied Vietnamese American studies
and what, you know, in our experiences.
So I think this is a "let me Google it for you" situation
and a lot of books and reading will come up for you.
But I think personally,
where my head is at right now
is looking at these photographs and ephemera I collect.
I literally -- I collect ephemera from --
I have a dealer in Vietnam, like pre-1975,
trying to understand what were they reading,
what was informing them.
I have a massive collection of pre-1975
Vietnamese records because I believe music and song
and the lyrics contain a lot of the stories
that are sometimes too painful for our community to talk about.
And so I'm trying to find other avenues other than,
you know,
directly sometimes asking somebody to relive
something terrible that they don't want to talk about.
But I find that the music, it's a very like universal language.
And so I learn a lot from listening to the music,
from looking at the lyrics,
from Googling the lyrics, translating the lyrics,
and having conversations sometimes with my parents,
not about, hey, tell me about that thing that happened to you,
but what does this song mean for you?
Or what music did you listen to
when you were in the military, dad?
What did you listen to when you were a young man, you know?
So those are the kinds of stories.
I wouldn't say I'm not really -- I have a ton of books,
but I'm not reading them.
I'll just be totally honest about that.
How about someone who hasn't asked a question yet,
and then I'll come back to you.
In the --
-Where is it? -In the front.
-I just want to start off by saying thank you for doing this.
And second question is,
were you always close with your family
in regards to like talking about deep stuff like this?
-No.
-So I'm second generation and the older I get, you know,
I just want to get in touch with that side
and learn about that past with my mom.
Would you have any recommendations of like
how would you start with that?
-Yeah. -Especially with -- sorry.
Especially with like that language barrier of like
I know more English than I do Vietnamese,
and vice versa, my mom knows more Vietnamese than English.
-Yeah. -So it's a little hard there.
-No, I think sometimes, you know what it is?
There's things that you can do on your own
that your parents don't have to be involved with.
You know, like I learned how to speak Vietnamese
and not from like reading and going to Vietnamese school,
but by watching like Hong Kong dramas that were translate --
dubbed badly into Vietnamese.
But I was so obsessed with the story
that I learned my Vietnamese from that.
And so that's what I've done on my own.
Whatever I have to do to try to like understand it and learn it.
And nowadays, you have tools like Duolingo.
You know, there's so many.
So there's the things that you can do on your own.
But I think that there are other things
that you can do with your family through experience
and just like being able to make eye contact with each other,
because there's a lot that happens that's unspoken as well.
So maybe if, you know, find out --
I don't know what your family likes to do.
My mom loves to cook and so that was something that --
you know, teach me how to cook.
She's like, every woman has to have a signature dish, you know.
And so she has like no issues with teaching me
how to like cook a recipe, right?
And then just little tidbits come out of that.
And, you know, things like,
I collect this music and sheet music.
And I took the sheet music down to show my dad
because it was something that we could --
he could explain to me
because he understands it so much better, right?
And so it was interesting
because in just looking at the sheet music,
my dad who was like,
I have no stories to tell, you know, whatever.
And then looking at the sheet music he told me about being --
when he was 16 or 17 years old,
he went to try out for the national school,
the Conservatory in South Vietnam, and he was accepted.
And he could have chosen the path of becoming a guitarist
and hanging out with all the singers and stuff, you know.
But he decided to go to college and continue and pursue
and, you know, ended up becoming a teacher
and then also a civil servant,
and also was in the military as well.
So it's like -- and it was weird.
Just kind of like, you play guitar?
Like, I had no idea, you know.
Because once he came here, he shed that identity.
It's like, I don't have time to feel joy, you know.
I have things I've got to do for my community, for my family.
And so just those little tidbits will just tell
you so much about your parents.
And so and if I can help you,
I'm happy to recommend some songs, you know,
that you can ask your parents, hey,
will you explain what this is to me?
And this is where translation tools are your friend.
And it really -- I've seen this happen in listening parties.
I've seen how it draws people together.
It's really -- it's fascinating.
So some little tidbits for you. -Thank you.
-Yeah.
-Hi. -Hi.
-Thank you so much for all those tips
that you just shared and techniques for how to get --
how to open up those conversations
with your relatives.
I'm wondering, for those of us who are not trained journalists,
do you have any recommendations of tools and tips
for us when it comes to, you know,
recording those or documenting those stories
with our relatives?
-Oh, yeah.
I've recorded many conversations without my dad knowing,
you know, and -- I mean,
because sometimes the moment you tell them -- let me tell you,
the moment you tell them, it's like,
can I sit you down and interview you?
They're like, no, I have nothing to say.
And they're really, really self-conscious.
My dad's the type of person he'll write like his responses.
And so I would just, again, it's the whole,
I go down to Olympia, can we have lunch?
And we sit there and we talk
and do these things kind of come out.
Or we watch Paris by Night together, you know.
Like it's, again, it's the act of doing things
and then asking them to explain to you.
And I don't know about you,
I understand Vietnamese trust me way better than I can speak it.
And I can't really read
and write on like first grade level, barely.
You know, so you can do it.
Like, if I can do it, you can do it, you know.
I promise you.
So it's finding those things
that -- those experiences that you can enjoy together.
And then if you have your iPhone, it's so easy,
record, you know.
And you're not going out there.
My family has -- like they've gotten in the habit of like,
this is not for you to write about, you know.
And so you don't have to worry about that.
You're not --
you know, this is just for your own personal archives.
So always having that phone there.
Press the voice memo when you're having these conversations,
when something's coming out. It's okay. Yeah.
-Sorry, I have a question from our live stream first.
I have somebody watching.
They are interested to know
if you are taking any help with making a documentary.
They're a filmmaker who's interested in working with you.
-Oh, lovely. Okay. Yeah, contact me.
I'm rebuilding my team right now.
I need a lot of help.
It depends on what they want to do,
but yes, please get in touch with me.
I'm looking for producers.
I'm looking for people who are interested in engagement.
I'm looking for archival support, you know, all of that.
So yeah.
-And what might be the best avenue for contacting?
-Email me or go to my website, thanhtan.co.
There's a contact form there.
But I did put my -- I don't want to put this on the internet.
Is somebody going to like -- let's see here.
-Well, I think if it's your website,
that will possibly work, yeah.
-Go to my website and contact me there.
Yes, thank you. -Thanks.
-And my name is spelled T-H-A-N-H, T-A-N.co.
No, M.
-Thank you. -Thank you. Okay.
There's a person in the yellow jacket.
-Yeah, thank you for all of this.
It's great. I came here -- in 1975,
I was in Olympia
and I did work with Vietnamese refugees over the summer.
And I guess I was just sort of hoping
that maybe somebody might be here.
You know, I, of course, lost contact so many years ago,
but I guess I don't know.
-We have a grandson of someone who came in '75.
We're here, so. From Olympia.
-Oh, really? Nice. -Yeah.
-Anyway, yeah,
I just -- I was hoping that maybe I see anybody
that might have been there at that time in Olympia in 1975.
-Oh, there's a whole community.
There is a whole community of people
and they love to get together.
There's a group I had the chance to go to.
Maxi Minh, he's a doctor here, and he had this meeting
of all these Vietnamese people who came in '75.
And my dad was invited, so he brought me, and it was so great.
They had this huge speaker system with like karaoke,
like on the side of his office, you know.
And they were just talking about
how proud they were of their kids,
and, you know, it was great.
But they had that bond of having been
among the first two were here.
So in Olympia, it's the same thing, yeah.
But --
-Yeah, I wonder how many people stayed on in Olympia?
-Quite a few.
We had a quite --I mean, I was born and raised.
I didn't leave Olympia until I was 18 years old.
So it was a formative experience.
And I was very much like feet in two worlds for sure.
You know, Vietnamese at home,
Vietnamese school on Fridays, local events with community.
But at school,
I, you know, was very much entrenched in a different world.
-Yeah, exactly.
-Yeah, but thank you for reaching out to help too.
I know that you're not the only one.
I know there's at least one other person here.
I'm just staring straight at her.
Look at me.
Who has also stepped up to help refugees.
So to all of you in the room who have done that
at some point in your life, thank you.
I don't know how we're doing on time.
Do we -- are we -- I'm happy to finish answering any questions.
-It's a little over 8:00.
Okay. -We can do a couple more.
-Okay. Any other insights or questions?
-I just I wanted to say I attended a lecture at UDub,
and this Vietnamese Viet Q had just received tenure
and had published a book about the trauma.
The thesis was the trauma that Vietnamese Americans felt.
Her generation is just -- I think your generation,
their parents never talked about what happened.
So that was her main theme, I believe.
And that was last year the book was published.
So what you're saying I think is accurate.
When you read -- you talked about trauma,
that was her words.
-Yeah. -That was her word.
And so what you talk about, interviewing your family,
I think that that's something that is very current now,
the importance of listening to family members
and showing interest.
Otherwise the stories are lost. -Yeah.
Well, this is why it was my history.
It was the humanities classes I took that were --
would give those assignments, talk to your parents,
talk to your -- somebody in your family.
So that kind of -- you know, like I was interested.
I knew, I was aware of my family's history,
but I have to say that the -- probably the thing --
the moment that really hit me was --
and this could be a resource for some of you, may not be.
I would look up the case, Tan -- Le versus Tan or Tan versus Le,
which is a famous defamation case
that was decided here in Washington State.
Tan is my father.
My father was falsely accused of being
a communist Vietcong agent in Olympia.
And I was a journalist in 2009
and got subpoenaed to come back to Washington and testify.
And I had no idea that my father was --
that this had been going on.
I knew that the politics in our community was really scary,
but I didn't know the extent of it.
And I would say that the two weeks in that courtroom
of watching people on both sides,
all Vietnamese be cross-examined,
talking about the roots of why they believe what they believe,
the trauma they had been through,
it was so heartbreaking for me.
Because it was seeing firsthand there was the war
that ended on the battlefield,
but now they --
because they have had no means of being able to process this
in a healthy way --
I don't think PTSD is uttered in a lot of --
in much of our community.
So they were projecting that pain in really unhealthy ways.
And when I was in that courtroom for two weeks,
like watching this unfold, it was eye-opening for me.
I think that was my -- like my friends,
I was in Idaho at the time,
and my friends were like -- it was kind of like,
you know, Beyonce, people were like, Beyonce's Black?
Like, there was a moment where she just kind of crossed over,
I'm going to own my blackness.
And for me, it was that moment that I was like,
I'm going to embrace my Vietnamese heritage,
because I didn't know.
And maybe if I had known,
it would've stopped my father from going through
this incredibly painful ordeal, you know.
And so that case though, covers a lot.
Not just defamation law,
but it also covers quite a bit about Vietnam War
and the impact that it had on the refugees
who came here to the U.S.
And so I would just recommend that.
It's a well-known case study, Tan versus Le.
-Hi there. I'm in the back. -Hi.
First off, I just want to say thank you so much
for all of this and all of the work that you do.
I know that you are one of the first Vietnamese Americans
to serve it in an on-air capacity
for a commercial television station in the United States.
And, you know, I don't --
I know you don't talk about that all that often, but --
-I forgot.
-That inspired me 20 years ago to follow in your footsteps.
And I just want to say thank you for that.
Secondly, I'm curious,
because you eventually -- you know,
you worked in commercial television
and then you switched to public television.
-Yeah. -Why did you do that?
And then also, was there an aha moment, I guess,
when you decided like,
this is the work like I want to dive into
or was it just kind of like a,
you know, just upon reflection of just, you know,
your family's like, you know, collective history.
Just can you expand on that a little bit more?
-Yeah, the first question is public media rules.
When I was in college, like I really, I was like,
I want to go to 60 Minutes, and that's it, you know.
And I did an internship at NPR. I had interned at Nightline,
and somebody that I had interned there,
he was at NPR West and that changed my life.
Just like three months of being in the NPR office
and I understood like, this is public media.
You know, it wasn't sensational. It was very calm.
And I felt like, gosh, this is like meditative, you know.
And so it was -- but then I was like a newbie.
I had just graduated, and it was --
at some point,
it became I wasn't going to get a job in public media.
It was like sell pantyhose at Nordstrom
for $12 an hour in L.A. or move to Boise, Idaho
and become a television news reporter up there.
And so eventually, it wasn't -- I didn't have that choice.
We were just starting off. So I went into commercial,
you know,
local television news as a general assignment reporter.
But I always --
I loved listening to public radio, just the tone,
the type of storytelling.
And I just always believed that maybe that's where I belong.
And so I was a local TV news reporter for five years
for the CBS station in Boise.
And then I moved to Portland, Oregon,
and I was with the ABC affiliate there,
and hated my life every day.
Like I was being sent up into helicopters,
you know, to like cover a crime scene that had, you know, ended.
Like something that had happened like hours ahead of time.
And I remember covering like a dam.
Like something like they had a dam explosion,
and the anchor was like, Tan, what was the view like?
What did you see up there?
And I was like, what you just saw.
Like -- You know.
And so it was like really ridiculous
and it was just this race to like state the obvious.
And I just couldn't handle it.
And so I literally -- I quit my job.
I was supposed to do a three-year contract.
A year and a half into it, I'm like, I'm taking a pay cut.
I'm going back to Idaho.
I'm working for Idaho Public Television.
That's all there is to it.
So it was just a period in my life,
quarter life crisis, 25 years old, you know,
and made that decision.
And so I've always had a special place like
in my heart for public media.
And Idaho Public Television and PBS
was also where I learned to moderate debates,
to produce shows, to direct -- produce documentaries,
like long-form treatments.
And it was just a different purpose.
It was like public interest.
It's like they say that, you know,
in exchange for the use of the public airways,
you're supposed to provide a service.
And I did not feel like I was doing that
when I worked in local TV news.
And I didn't like who I was, you know, in that space.
And so I made a change and I took a risk.
But I have no regrets about it.
And I'm really sad to see
that public media is getting attacked today.
It's terrible.
But maybe we have to lose something
before we like understand its value.
It feels like that's happening with a lot of things.
And then the second question that you asked me,
I think it was sitting in that courtroom in Olympia,
Washington, in Thurston County in 2009 at like,
you know, economy was -- had tanked at that point,
you know,
and here I was watching my dad probably
at the lowest point in his life, you know,
being attacked and being accused of being the enemy.
Nobody wants to see that happen to someone that they love.
And I am like a spitting image of my dad in a lot of ways.
I'm totally his daughter.
And so I think that was the need to try to fill in these blanks.
It's like I have to explore these Vietnamese stories
because -- I'm watching how not processing it is doing damage to
my family and to also other families and to our community
in some ways, you know. So but I don't take it lightly.
It's been very -- it's been an up and down.
Like I just know my limits.
The last few years I have not -- I talk about my family less.
I don't really show pictures of them, you know, anymore.
And so the music, the archival work,
the things that are already public and out there,
I see a lot of value in this
because I need to leave my family alone and let them heal
and process in their own way.
Does that make sense?
So I would say, yeah,
the courtroom in 2009 was probably the --
that was the turning point.
And my friends in Idaho were like --
because I used to like -- I was mountain bike.
I did a lot of White people stuff,
you know, and my friends like -- people were like,
you are like really Vietnamese?
I'm like, yeah, I am, you know.
So yeah. So it's been a bit of a journey.
Okay. I think we're past eight o'clock.
If there are no more questions, I'm happy to stick around.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.