Young Vietnamese-Americans Struggle with Bicultural Identity

By Christine Gralow

Henry Nguyen's father fled Vietnam on April 30, 1975, a date ingrained in the memory of the Vietnamese-American community. As North Vietnamese communists stormed Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, Nguyen Van Thach, then a major in the South Vietnamese Air Force, flew 48 people to safety in a crammed C47 under heavy enemy fire.

His plane heavily overloaded with refugees, Nguyen barely took off from Tan Son Nhut airbase in Saigon. He flew first to Con Son Island off the coast of Vietnam, but the runway there was overcrowded and chaotic. He continued to Bangkok and managed to land at Utapao Airport.

"(He) left in the final minutes before the fall of Saigon," Nguyen said of his father. "He was able to see first hand the communists sacking and setting ablaze the capital of the South Vietnamese nation."

The day before, Nguyen's mother, Nguyen Mai Anh, scrambled onto a plane at Tan Son Nhut with her two sons, Tuan, 3, and Thi, one month old. They arrived first at Con Son Island, where they were transferred to an evacuation helicopter and then to a U.S. Navy carrier that took them to Subic Bay Naval Base near Manilla.

"To make room for so many people on a single carrier, they pushed overboard the aircrafts the Vietnamese refugees flew in," Nguyen said.

In mid-May, Nguyen Van Thach was reunited with his wife and two sons at a refugee camp on the Midway Islands. The family lived there for about one month before being transferred to another refugee camp in Arkansas. They then moved to Colorado, California and Texas, where their youngest son, Henry, was raised.

Today, Nguyen, 21, is the president of U.C. Berkeley's Vietnamese Student Association (VSA). He represents a new generation of Vietnamese-Americans who, raised in the United States, are struggling to understand their history, preserve their heritage and respect their elders. While double majoring in Computer Sciences and Nuclear and Electrical Engineering, Nguyen sets aside time each week to meet with VSA's cabinet.

From traditional dances in silk ao dais to hip hop dances in trendy clubwear, VSA sponsors diverse events that represent Cal's Vietnamese students. Last spring, as part of their annual cultural performance, VSA staged a 'sliding doors' play that explored two possible fates of one Vietnamese family. One fate was "what if they didn't make it on the boat," said Lea Chuong Duong, VSA's internal vice president. "And the other side is, what if they did make it. One of the sons was spoiled rotten in America, while the other son worked really hard just to be a tourist (guide) for the American people. On the American side, the children had lost some sense of the culture."

Doung's family left Vietnam in 1984, when she was six. Her father, like Nguyen's, was a South Vietnamese soldier, but he stayed behind after the communist takeover. Duong is not sure exactly how long or where her father was imprisoned in a communist re-education camp, but she knows he was lucky to escape. Somehow, her family fled by boat, first to the Philippines, then to Malaysia and California.

"It was very secretive," said Doung, 23, a senior in legal studies and optometry. "I remember them discussing what to do if the boat sank, or if the government caught us and shot us down."

Duong's father is one of an estimated 35,000 survivors of Vietnam's communist re-education camps who have resettled in America. Vietnam Human Rights Watch estimates that at least one million people have been imprisoned and 165,000 killed in those camps since 1975. About 995,000 Vietnamese people, including American-born children, live in the United States today, with Orange County, Los Angeles and San Jose supporting the largest Vietnamese-American communities. Although U.C. Berkeley's total student population is over 40 percent Asian, Vietnamese students comprise just three percent of all students. Last fall, of more than 31,000 U.C. Berkeley students, 762 were Vietnamese—687 undergraduates and 75 graduates.

When a handful of South Vietnamese refugee students founded Cal's VSA in 1979, the fall of Saigon and the horrors of the Vietnam War were fresh in their minds. Today, most VSA members were born in the United States, and many have never been to Vietnam. Their refugee parents now look to them as the future of the Vietnamese-American community, and the two generations often clash over cultural and political ideals.

"There's this constant struggle there that the older generation look at us at VSA, and they say: 'Oh, it's just a bunch of new kids, and like all they want to do is have fun. They've forgotten their culture,'" said Catherine Van Khanh Tran, VSA's cultural chair. "But the thing is we haven't forgotten our culture. We were never exposed to that culture."

Bac Hoai Tran, who has taught Vietnamese language classes at Cal for nine years, says he is starting to see more Vietnamese students in his classes who were "born and raised in America or came over when they were five or six."

Tran currently teaches three Vietnamese classes with a total of 89 students. The majority of his students are what he calls "heritage learners," or ethnic Vietnamese students. "They want to rediscover their roots, recapture their heritage," he said, "but it doesn't have to be (through) a trip to Vietnam."

Of 54 students who responded to a survey in Tran's class this fall, 48 said their parents identify as refugees. Three students said they didn't know, and three said their parents do not identify as refugees. Such numbers suggest that stories like Nguyen's and Duong's are far from rare at U.C. Berkeley. While attending one of America's most competitive universities, these students must also grapple with harrowing family histories and political tensions within their communities.

"It's really hard because my dad...is anti-communist, and he's taught us why," said Duong. "A couple months ago in the summer, a lot of singers from Vietnam came over to San Jose and they were doing a performance at the Marriot, near Great America. And I am American, Vietnamese-American, and I viewed it as like, 'Oh great!' cause they're great singers. I've heard their voices, I really wanna' see how they are in person, 'cause I've seen how Vietnamese people sing in America, and I want to compare it.' But the older generation see it as communists trying to come over and take over the Vietnamese community around here...and so there is always a conflict between the newer generation and the older generation where we don't understand yet...I just wanted to see the singers."

Tuan Ha, VSA's external vice president, said conflicts also arose last year when a graduate student from "the older generation" was on VSA's cabinet. "We wanted to throw, like, a dance, but then he's like 'what is rave music and what is the hip hop and how come there's no Vietnamese music?'" Ha said. "We were trying to accommodate to the younger generation, and he wouldn't understand, and we never got points across."

Sifting through mixed messages from their elders and serving as bicultural role models for their own generation are not easy tasks. But VSA's leaders continue to discuss new ways to organize their community. Next semester, they will help lead U.C. Berkeley's first Southeast Asian cultural show with students from throughout Southeast Asia.

"Being a Vietnamese-American born in America, I want the older generation to understand that we didn't lose any culture," said Khanh Tran, 20, a double major in molecular cellular biology and American studies. "We just have a different culture."