Not just rescue: rethinking 30 April 1975 and Vietnamese diasporic history
In the American imagination, the iconic image of a helicopter on a Saigon rooftop, with a long line of South Vietnamese desperate to escape, has often served as a visual shorthand for the end of the US war in Vietnam and the ensuing refugee ‘crisis’. The image telegraphed numerous, sometimes contradictory ideas. On the one hand, it visually communicated US military failure and withdrawal. On the other, it signalled a new moment of US ‘rescue’, and arguable ‘redemption’ with the US providing safe passage for South Vietnamese allies who wanted to leave. It also firmly forged the idea in public discourse that all Vietnamese who left were ‘refugees’.
My research disrupts many of these presumptions and decentres the United States. It tells a longer history, emphasising the importance of Vietnamese activism, host country politics, and the complexity of international refugee policy.
First, in the United States, the fixation of Vietnamese refugees in 1975, I argue, needs to be revised. It is true that in 1975, approximately 120,000 Vietnamese fled South Vietnam and sought refuge in the United States, Canada, Australia, and France. The United States accepted the vast majority of Vietnamese, not as ’refugees’, but as ‘parolees’, using a loophole in US immigration law to get around US restrictions and resettle tens of thousands of people relatively quickly.
That said, most of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who fled the country did so after 1975. To date, the vast majority of US writing, encompassing the scholarly, fictional and autobiographical, focuses on the 1975 generation. However, in doing so, it misses the main story. Many in Europe and Southeast Asia might remember the publicity and images that proliferated about the ‘boat people’ in 1978 and 1979. This too was not the end of the story. Vietnamese displacement continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s by land, sea and via the Orderly Departure Programme.
For these individuals, the question of whether they would be granted refugee status became more and more precarious over time. Host countries often labelled the Vietnamese as ‘illegal immigrants’; in 1979, the UNHCR brokered an international conference reclassifying Vietnamese as ‘refugees’; and then in 1988, Hong Kong and the subsequent 1989 UNHCR-sponsored Comprehensive Plan of Action treated all incoming Vietnamese as ‘asylum seekers’. The result was a controversial ‘screening’ process, even for those who had come to expect the US’s support in a Cold War context. Their stories demonstrate how precarious refugee status could be. And while it remains true that displaced Vietnamese had far greater chances of gaining resettlement in a majority white Anglophone country than almost any other national group, it is also worth remembering the repatriation of close to 100,000 people back to Vietnam in the 1990s.
Second, through my research, I found countless examples of Vietnamese activism in the camps and in the diaspora. These images stand in stark contrast to the iconic 1975 photo of Vietnamese standing in line or later images of Vietnamese stranded in boats, presumably waiting for American or European ‘rescue’. Alongside these well-known photographs, I found visual examples of protest and political activism at every level. In Guam in 1975, roughly 1,500 Vietnamese fought to return to Vietnam, mobilising through ritualistic head shavings, hunger strikes, and demonstrations. In contrast, Vietnamese in Hong Kong organised equally militant campaigns against repatriation in the early 1990s. These could be either peaceful demonstrations or chaotic events, often defined by the Hong Kong Correctional Department’s use of tear gas and force. These demonstrations within the camps resonated with diasporic activism on the other side of the Pacific, as Vietnamese Americans formed organizations, lobbied Congress, raised money, and coordinated legal support for Vietnamese in the camps.
“Four of the 20 repatriates have their heads shaven at Camp Asan at the beginning of the 36-hour hunger-quiet strike. Sept. 13, 1975.“
Courtesy of the US National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 319, Box 19, declassification number 984082.
The stories, protests, and images I document reframe the camps as places of activism and the Vietnamese as political actors. Vietnamese people engaged in many types of political action in the camps, sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful, sometimes diplomatic, and other times militant. Vietnamese in the camps and the diaspora also did not speak in a unified voice, and by tracing their stories, I analyse the multiple ways they sought to achieve their aims.
“Rebel” – University of California Irvine Libraries, Southeast Asian Archive, Paul Tran Files on Southeast Asian Refugees
Third, Vietnamese did not, of course, go from the rooftops of Saigon directly to southern California. Helicopters simply cannot fly so far. Boats, even the rare seaworthy ones, also did not journey far outside Southeast Asia. As a result, Vietnamese had to transit to a third place before they could reach the United States, or another resettlement country. Instead of focussing on the trauma of the escape itself, my scholarship homes in on refugee camps in Guam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. Local and regional politics shaped how the Vietnamese were treated. For example, in 1975, the US brought over 100,000 Vietnamese to Guam for processing. As a US colony, Guam had little control over the doubling of its total population in a matter of weeks. In this way, US colonial history from the late nineteenth century became closely tied to its military empire of the late twentieth century. In contrast, in Malaysia, local politicians saw the incoming Vietnamese through the prism of race relations between Malay and Chinese nationals; and in the Philippines, the Catholic Church and Ferdinand Marcos shaped the country’s refugee policies. Finally, in Hong Kong, local leaders and politicians viewed the Vietnamese camps through Hong Kong’s transition from British to Chinese sovereignty, raising still more questions about the legacies of imperialism, humanitarianism, and human rights campaigns.
This research compels writers to look more closely at the domestic politics of host countries during contemporary so-called ‘crises’. Here I am thinking of the US southern border, the politics of Mexico, and Mexico’s own relationship to Central American countries.
On this anniversary, 30 April – which is alternately called the ‘Fall of Saigon’, ‘Liberation Day’, ‘Reunification Day’, and ‘Black April’ – I would like to move away from the images of those final US helicopters. Instead, I suggest a new view, one that looks beyond 1975 and recognises the precarity of refugee status over decades; one that recognises the camps and places in between as specific, rather than interchangeable places; and one that recognises the importance of refugee activism and political agency.
The header image shows the front cover of the author’s book, In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates (University of California Press, 2020).
