The ‘1975’ project helps Vietnamese refugee families open up about their past

Hung Vu, who lives in Dorchester, Massachusetts, once served as a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese Army.

As a young man, he hoped to be part of rebuilding his conflict-ridden country. But when Saigon fell to Communist forces in 1975, Hung Vu became a political prisoner instead, and that hope was soon lost.

Along with the other South Vietnamese who had allied with the US, he was sent by the Communist regime to a “reeducation camp” in the forest, where prisoners were subject to brutal forced labor, disease and hunger for years. 

“I was lucky enough to make it out alive,” he said. “But many of my friends did not.”

Now, 50 years after the end of the war, a new initiative aims to tell this and other often overlooked parts of Vietnamese American history. “1975: A Vietnamese Diaspora Memorial” is a public art project spearheaded by Lead Artist Ngoc-Tran Vu, and Linh-Phương Vũ, oral histories director.

Hung Vu was eventually released, and he and his family joined the nearly 800,000 Vietnamese refugees who migrated to the US between the 1970s and 1990s. Many initially fled by boat and airlift, living in refugee camps across Southeast Asia before being resettled. Hung Vu came to the US later through a humanitarian visa granted to former prisoners of war.

In the US, his daughter, artist Ngoc-Tran Vu, saw Vietnam veterans’ names etched into war memorials, but never the names of Vietnamese soldiers like her father who fought alongside them and later became American.

“The grief is still very much there,” Ngoc-Tran Vu said.

In response, Ngoc-Tran Vu, together with her colleague Linh-Phương Vũ, initiated a community-driven project, “1975: A Vietnamese Diaspora Commemorative Initiative.”

Unlike traditional memorials, it aims to center Vietnamese perspectives and focuses on the lasting impact of war on families and communities. The installation, currently in its design phase, will feature a banyan tree that is native to Southeast Asia, and represents the community’s growing roots in the US.

The project’s proposed site — pending city approval — is Fields Park in Boston’s “Little Saigon,” a neighborhood known for its phở shops and bubble tea, as well as a Buddhist temple that sits among triple-decker apartments. It’s home to one of the largest Vietnamese American communities in the northeastern United States.

A generational divide

The collaborative memorial design process, with its ongoing community gatherings for feedback, has revealed a generational divide. Community elders wanted the depiction of a boat to represent their migration trauma, while younger generations who were born and raised in the US prefer the theme of resilience and rebuilding, reflecting identities that go beyond war.

In part, this rift is being bridged by the oral histories component of the project, for which Linh-Phương Vũ is director. An instructor in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, she is working with second- and third-generation Vietnamese American students to gather these community stories.

Instead of meeting on campus, she takes her students to Fields Corner, where they interview shopkeepers, community leaders and grandparents about being Vietnamese refugees. It’s a chance for the students to reconcile their textbook learning with people’s actual lived experiences.

“These stories are literally blowing their minds about what the history actually was,” she said. 

“The darker stories, the 16 or 17 (failed then repeated) attempts to get on a boat as a refugee,” added student Angelina Nguyễn, whose uncle survived a labor camp and whose parents fled Vietnam by boat as teenagers. “Women on the boats would be robbed by pirates or raped or thrown overboard even.”

These elder narrators serve as stand-ins for their own parents, who may not be able to share their own stories because of language barriers and the rift between generations in immigrant families. The interviews help to humanize their parents and serve to buffer their triggers caused by post-traumatic stress disorder.

“There’s this gap, we just couldn’t understand each other,” Nguyễn said. “I’m able to understand them now. I’m able to give them that grace that I wasn’t able to give them before.”

Now, she empathizes with her parents’ seemingly apathetic responses to violence or death in their neighborhood. For them, it serves as a protective mechanism, a way to be able to regulate their emotions, and she understands the historical context behind their responses.

Hung Vu, who serves as a cultural adviser to the memorial project, said it gives him hope to see the work that young people are doing. The “I Voted” stickers and reminders for community meetings on the walls of his Fields Corner apartment evidence this new hope. 

In reality, both generations face high rates of anxiety and depression, which are heightened by the racism they face in the US, stresses associated with assimilation and barriers to seeking care.

Younger people are often also managing the stress of parental expectations, including a push for academic achievement. Psychologists categorize this pressure as a type of trauma response, an effort to ensure safety and provision for their families.

A recent study by the Asian American Foundation showed that 48% of Asian American youth scored above the threshold for moderate depression, and nearly 35% of youth said that parent training programs could be part of a potential solution to their challenges.

“Talking with family members about the past can be a starting point,” said Dr. Cindy Liu, the professor at Harvard Medical School who led the study. “Understanding the experiences of their older generation can be healing for youth, but asking families to share their stories before they are ready can be a traumatic experience.”

Linh Vũ, who also trained as a mental health clinician, concurred. She knows that asking someone to retell a difficult story can retrigger their trauma and can also cause secondary trauma in the students who are learning their community’s stories for the first time. So, she connects them with culturally competent therapists to help them to process what they are hearing.

Last month, the 1975 team hosted an event marking the fall of Saigon — also known as Black April — at Boston College High School. The event brought together hundreds of community members: youth in tunics, elders in military regalia and even Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu.

There was music, dancing, art and an interactive exhibit designed by Linh Vũ’s students. Visitors entered a dark room, each carrying a glass jar filled with lights to illuminate displays representing aspects of a refugee’s journey: a tunnel with wartime newspapers, a refugee’s suitcase, a replica of an escape boat and a large-scale map for visitors to mark their own migration.

At the exhibit’s end, visitors placed their lanterns on a collectively illuminated wall, whose glow seemed to say that it’s possible to do both: remember a community’s history of trauma and war and to have hope in the resilience of its rebuilding across generations.

To see photos of the new memorial design and to learn more about the project, go to 1975VietDiaspora.com. Special thanks to the Solutions Journalism Network HEAL fellowship for support on this story.