Echoes of Saigon: Healing Journeys of Vietnam’s War Refugee Children

Hanoi/Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – Victoria Ngo, a daughter of war refugees, began to explore her Vietnamese identity during her college years in the United States in the 1990s.

As the oldest child in a family of refugees with a Vietnamese father of Chinese heritage, Ngo was raised in a community where Chinese was the primary language, leading her to initially identify mainly as Chinese.

However, as a curious student, she began to recognize the nuances of her Vietnamese background differing from those of her Chinese peers.

Her quest for understanding her identity intensified over the years, fueled by unanswered questions about Vietnam from her parents and relatives.

“I lived among those who spoke only Chinese. My siblings and I attended Chinese school on weekends,” she recounted to Al Jazeera.

“I also speak Vietnamese, and my name reflects my Vietnamese heritage. My experience is deeply rooted in being Vietnamese as I came here as a refugee during the influx of Vietnamese refugees,” she shared.

Yet, discussions about Vietnam were scarce, especially regarding the war that wrapped up 50 years ago with the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces.

Seeking to uncover her family’s history, Ngo decided to attend a conference at her college about the Vietnam War, believing it would make her father proud.

His reaction was shocking and severe.

“He exclaimed, ‘If you attend that conference, you are no longer my daughter!’” Ngo recalled.

“I was taken aback, thinking I was merely attempting to learn about our past, but he insisted: ‘That is not our history.’”

Ngo’s story resonates with many Vietnamese families who escaped their homeland following the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.

The fall signified the war’s conclusion and the reunification of North and South, with Hanoi becoming the capital of a unified Vietnam.

However, numerous individuals connected to the US-backed government of South Vietnam, including civil servants, soldiers, and businesspeople, chose exile rather than live under a communist regime.

Too much had been sacrificed during the conflict, with many, like Ngo’s father, unable to reconcile with former adversaries.

For some, fleeing the country meant escaping potential persecution, as they believed staying in Vietnam post-war was too risky.

‘There is this void in our history that doesn’t get talked about’

US-supported conflicts in Indochina left devastating consequences. Laos and Cambodia faced an estimated 1.45 million deaths due to US bombings.

In Vietnam, the communist North incurred around 1.1 million military deaths, while more than 254,000 fell on the side of the South Vietnamese government. Including civilian casualties, the total death toll from the Vietnam War is conservatively estimated at 3.1 million.

Post-war, the victorious communist forces inherited a devastated country. Northern regions faced relentless US bombings, rendering railroads unusable and destroying major roads. The economy was in shambles following decades of conflict, beginning with French colonial rule in the late 19th century.

Conversely, urban areas in Southern Vietnam fared relatively well, while rural regions were devastated, as these areas often became battlegrounds in guerilla warfare.

The agricultural lands and forests were contaminated through the US’s use of Agent Orange—a toxic chemical compound sprayed to strip away tree cover from communist fighters.

Millions suffered the effects of Agent Orange, with at least 150,000 children born with severe physical, mental, and developmental disabilities, and others still experiencing repercussions today due to ongoing soil contamination.

Unexploded ordnance, totaling hundreds of thousands of tons, still “pollutes” about 20 percent of Vietnam’s land, a legacy of the millions of tons of munitions used during the conflict, according to the Vietnam National Mine Action Center.

While April 30, 1975, marked the conclusion of the war for the North Vietnamese, for many from the defeated US-backed government and South Vietnamese populace, it initiated a protracted separation from family, often meaning time in “reeducation camps” or exile to Western nations like the US, Australia, Germany, and Canada.

Before Saigon’s fall, Ngo’s father was a high school principal in South Vietnam. After April 30, 1975, he went through two reeducation camps before making the desperate choice to flee the country with his family on an overcrowded, rickety boat in 1978.

The family spent several months in a refugee…

They camped in the Philippines before being accepted as refugees by the U.S.

When Ngo and her family arrived in the U.S. in the early 1980s, they had lost everything. Her immediate family, along with two aunts, uncles, a grandmother, and other relatives, lived together in a small two-storey subsidized housing unit in Los Angeles that measured just 30 square meters (323 square feet).

Her father was unable to teach in the U.S. and worked as a deep-sea fisherman, taking on various odd jobs to provide for the family.

According to Ngo, the Vietnam they escaped from became a painful memory to be buried.

“There’s this gap in our history that often goes unmentioned. We don’t fully understand what happened in the past,” she told Al Jazeera.

This feeling of profound loss resonates with many Vietnamese refugee families, as the scars of their history echo through generations.

In some families, discussing the war can ignite strong emotions and bring back troubled memories. Because of this sensitivity, it’s sometimes better to remain silent about those experiences.

‘Deep Pain from Her Past’

Cat Nguyen, a young poet of Vietnamese descent, encountered similar reluctance when discussing her family’s wartime experiences.

Now living in Ho Chi Minh City—formerly Saigon, renamed in honor of the founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party—Cat Nguyen noted that little was shared about their family history prior to their migration to the U.S.

“My family, specifically my grandmother, held onto significant pain from her past,” Cat Nguyen shared with Al Jazeera.

Her family’s political history is quite complex.

On her mother’s side, her grandfather was a revolutionary who fought against French colonial rule, while on her father’s side, a grandfather was part of the South Vietnamese government, and her maternal grandmother served as the principal of an American-English school in Saigon.

In 1975, both branches of her family left Vietnam despite their differing political views.

Cat Nguyen’s father was 10, and her mother was only 13 when they fled their homeland. The suddenness of their departure impacted them deeply, as they were uprooted to start anew in the U.S.

“The initial years in the U.S. were filled with sorrow: facing challenges adapting to a new country, a language they didn’t speak well, and a culture that was foreign to them,” Cat Nguyen recalled.

The trauma of leaving Vietnam was made worse by official narratives that portrayed the refugees as abandoning their country at a critical time of reconstruction.

This year’s 50th anniversary of Saigon’s fall will be commemorated by the Communist Party of Vietnam as a day of unification and “liberation of the south.”

This narrative resonates with the efforts of millions of Vietnamese in both the north and south who made immense sacrifices during the war; however, the party’s historical account is limited in scope.

To this day, the stories of many in southern Vietnam and their perspectives on the conflict—what fueled their resistance to Northern leadership, including Ho Chi Minh—are often overlooked in celebratory narratives.

In this pivotal historical turning point, southern Vietnamese who became refugees are often depicted as traitors or puppets, misled by enticing propaganda from their adversaries.

Such narratives further exacerbate the sense of displacement felt by Vietnam’s diaspora communities. This contributes to the lingering resentment some older refugees feel toward the Vietnamese government, as exemplified by Ngo’s father.

This multi-generational grievance becomes evident when parents from refugee backgrounds see their children being exposed to positive portrayals of a thriving Vietnam five decades post-war, which they dismiss as “the North’s propaganda.”

‘You Crossed an Ocean for Me to Cross Another’

It’s not just the official history of present-day Vietnam that poses challenges.

Cat Nguyen recognized gaps in the depiction of the war while perusing American high school textbooks.

In those books, a mere “small paragraph” covers Washington’s extended military involvement in Vietnam, which led to millions of casualties and scattered refugees, focusing mainly on “the U.S. fight against communism in Vietnam,” as Cat Nguyen noted.

Despite portraying sympathy for their former South Vietnamese “allies,” she pointed out that the narrative remains primarily U.S.-centric, subjecting Vietnamese refugees to an “Americanized perception.”

“An Americanized perception of refugees suggests that Americans view all Vietnamese as either perilous communists or helpless, infantilized refugees,” Cat Nguyen explained.

Such storylines bolster justifications for U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, framed as an effort to “save” the Vietnamese from their own circumstances and communism.

“While it’s undeniable that Vietnamese refugees endured significant suffering, this perception diminishes their human agency and dignity, relegating them to a framework that reinforces white supremacy,” stated Cat Nguyen, who has resided in Vietnam for over two years.

Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh…

In his book *Nothing Ever Dies*, Nguyen observed that Vietnamese refugees in the US found limited opportunities to share their immigrant experiences and to “insert themselves into the American dream.”

However, Cat Nguyen eventually lost faith in that “dream” and its associated “capitalist propaganda.”

According to them, the “American dream” has obscured “the history of the US’s genocide against Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Black and other racialized groups, and violent colonial and imperial endeavors.”

It’s not that Cat Nguyen didn’t attempt to integrate into US society. Instead, from a young age, they felt a constant sense of being different in a place that “never regarded them as American enough.”

“As I grew up, I saw parts of my Vietnamese identity slowly fade away. It wasn’t until my grandmother passed away—the one who taught me the most about my roots—that I began to desperately yearn for a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual return to my ancestral homeland and reclaim my humanity,” Cat Nguyen expressed.

In their quest for reconnection, Cat Nguyen has engaged in various art projects, including poetry, performance, and filmmaking, that incorporate elements of Vietnamese folklore and traditional musical instruments, aiming to “unapologetically” reaffirm their commitment to opposing “colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism.”

Identifying with Vietnamese revolutionary fighters from “the other side,” Cat Nguyen discussed discovering personal strength in their wisdom and sacrifice for their cause.

This conviction doesn’t dismiss the suffering of Nguyen’s family as refugees in the US; instead, it recognizes the intertwined intergenerational trauma that the official narrative of Vietnam often overlooks.

One of Cat Nguyen’s poems honors their late grandmother: “You crossed / an ocean / for me / to cross / another and then you crossed / a world / before I / could follow.”

Ngo never attended the university conference on the Vietnam War that her father had threatened to disown her over years ago.

She chose to respect her father’s wishes. Over time, however, she has come to view the events in Vietnam during and after the war from the North’s perspective—albeit critically.

“I definitely see that when things become too centralized and authoritarian, corruption arises. But with strong and capable leadership, efficiency can be achieved,” shared Ngo, who has lived in Vietnam for over 20 years.

Similar to Cat Nguyen, Ngo acknowledges the trauma her family members from the South endured.

This understanding led her to pursue a career in psychology and public health, focusing on underserved communities. She is now an associate professor of community health and social sciences at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.

“One reason I work with marginalized and vulnerable populations is that I understand what it’s like, having grown up as a refugee and lacking resources in my early years,” Ngo explained.

After spending over two decades in Vietnam, Ngo has concentrated on enhancing primary care clinics’ ability to support economically disadvantaged individuals facing mental health challenges.

“My experience as a refugee has profoundly shaped my thoughts on human conditions and the social and economic resources needed to assist marginalized and displaced individuals,” she mentioned.

Both Ngo and Cat Nguyen, as part of the Vietnamese diaspora, carry a deep understanding of Vietnam’s complex and painful history, which is often overlooked in the conflicting narratives of North and South.

Divided by the flag

Kevin D Pham shared a common narrative from his upbringing in a Vietnamese refugee family in San Jose, California.

“I was often told by my family and teachers that communists were inherently bad,” remarked Pham, an assistant professor of political theory at the University of Amsterdam.

Pham’s paternal grandfather was imprisoned by communist Viet Minh forces in the 1950s, while his maternal grandfather died from malnutrition in a reeducation camp after 1975.

From an early age, Pham learned to take pride in his Republic of Vietnam family heritage. Although he appreciates this viewpoint, he did not embrace it without question. After finishing university, he spent eight months in Vietnam, which opened him up to sympathize with perspectives from “the other side.”

While growing up in the US, he recalls how his uncle, a pilot, often reminisced about his glory days fighting against “the communists” during the war.

Conversely, Pham’s father was only 16 when he was forced to flee Vietnam and had limited direct exposure to combat. Nevertheless, he remained fiercely loyal to the US-backed Southern government.

Pham recounts that older Vietnamese men would salute as he and his dad drove through San Jose in his father’s vividly colored yellow Ford Mustang, which was custom-painted to reflect the South Vietnamese flag with three horizontal red stripes.

In contemporary Vietnam, the South Vietnamese flag remains a controversial symbol.

Among ardent Vietnamese nationalists, the southern “three-stripes,” or “ba que,” flag is often disparaged as a symbol of betrayal and defeat. Any affiliation with the former government’s flag has also been used to stigmatize individuals.

Earlier in 2023, Hanni Pham, an Australian-Vietnamese singer with the K-Pop band New Jeans, faced backlash during a flag controversy when online activists noticed a South Vietnamese flag in her social media posts.

A video recording reveals a flag during a visit to her grandparents’ home.

The only place in Vietnam where you can still see an authentic three-stripe flag is at the newly opened Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi, where it is showcased as a historical item.

Efforts to heal Vietnam’s troubled past have been ongoing for decades.

In 1993, during his term, Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet led the Communist Party’s Politburo in a groundbreaking resolution aimed at fostering reconciliation. The initiative encouraged the nation to “respect differences, work together to dismantle prejudices, hatred, and look towards the future”.

Kiet, who was personally acquainted with the struggles of Vietnamese refugees, spoke in a 2005 interview—both praised and scrutinized—about April 30, 1975, describing it as a “great victory” yet one that left “millions happy and millions grieving.”

“It’s a scar that requires healing, not one we should allow to keep bleeding,” he stated.

In November, then-president To Lam made a notable visit to Columbia University in the US, alongside Lien-Hang Nguyen, the daughter of a refugee family who became the first director of Vietnamese studies there and has sought to bridge connections between the diaspora and Vietnam.

This encounter symbolized a growing sense of unity and reconciliation among Vietnamese people historically divided by the impacts of war and differing political views.

Kevin D Pham observed that individuals with strong opinions about the North-South divide in Vietnam often label the opposing side as “puppets”—those who support the South Vietnamese government are termed “puppets” of the Americans, and those backing the North as “puppets” of the Soviet Union and China.

“Both sides often perceive the other as thoughtless puppets, lacking their own agency,” Pham explained, noting this perception shows a “lack of curiosity” that hinders genuine reconciliation.

“I advocate for understanding various viewpoints,” he asserted.

Cat Nguyen finds it intriguing that the current Vietnamese national flag—featuring a yellow five-pointed star against a red background—once brought painful memories for those in the US, but has now become a unifying symbol within Vietnam.

This was exemplified when the Vietnamese national football team triumphed in the 2024 ASEAN championship in January. Cat Nguyen noted the jubilant crowds flooding the streets celebrate a sports victory, separate from any political context.

“I empathize with the suffering experienced by both sides, regardless of whether they identify with the three-stripe or the red flag,” Cat Nguyen expressed.

“Violence touched everyone’s lives, and ultimately, I attribute the most responsibility to US imperialism.”

Additional reporting by Duy-Minh Nguyen in Ho Chi Minh City