On April 17, over 25 community members gathered in the Student Union at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to hear from professors across the country about their research on the impact of the fall of Saigon.

The fall of Saigon marks when the North Vietnamese Army captured the capital city, Saigon, and ended the Vietnam War. The country became ratified under communist rule, which led to a refugee crisis as people tried to escape the new regime.

“It’s weird saying it’s been 50 years in my household,” Andrew Lee, sociology professor at Arizona State University, said. Andrew Lee’s father served in the military in Vietnam, and his whole family moved to America in 1991.”We talk about it like it’s just yesterday. The stories my mom has, the stories my sisters have, it’s so fresh.”

Phung Su, a sociology professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, focuses on “marriage migration and labor migration out of rural Vietnam. Basically Vietnamese women who married Korean and Taiwanese men, and Vietnamese men who migrate to the cities for labor.”

Su was raised in Southern California with many other Vietnamese families who left Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. She described a desire to understand Vietnamese people outside of her personal understanding of Vietnamese Americans.

One panelist, Khoi Nguyen, an American studies professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, works to understand the genealogy of the refugee, partly because of his experience growing up in Bridgeport, Conn.

“Growing up, I always was told I am Vietnamese or a refugee, and the fact that anytime I still introduce myself to folks and they’re like, ‘where are you from?’ That much dreaded question, the second I say I am Vietnamese, they’re like, ‘oh, you’re a refugee,’” Nguyen said.

After their short introductions, the moderator, C.N. Lee, a sociology professor at UMass, asked the panelists several questions, centered around the legacy of the fall of Saigon.

Nguyen was in Vietnam in April of 2022 and was able to experience the “grand” commemoration of the fall of Saigon. But they saw a completely different side during Vietnam National Day in September.

“This is something that we actually never really talk about, particularly in the U.S., and within my family, there’s two Independence Days in Vietnam,” Nguyen said. “One from France and one from the U.S. … These markers allow us to not only remember, but also so willingly forget what actually happened, or are we scripting the narrative of what happened?”

The Refugee Act of 1980 defined what a refugee is and offered services to help refugees resettle in America, “but a closer look is actually that [Act] was to exclude Vietnamese refugees in particular, to put a limit of how many people could come in,” Nguyen said.

“I think we’re at a point where we can nuance those conversations,” Nguyen said, emphasizing the importance of understanding the holistic experience and narrative compared to the one you are taught to believe.

Christina Hughes, a sociology professor at Macalester College, also researches the refugee experience after the fall of Saigon. Her parents were among the first resettled refugees. They were originally placed in Oklahoma and Idaho but decided to move to Southern California shortly after.

An audience member, Kimberly Enderle, a PhD student and UMass U.S. Army veteran, asked the panelists, “What [is] your sense of [home]? Where do you really feel like home is? And do you feel more grounded in Vietnam? Where do you feel like home feels most normal for you?”

Nguyen said, “Home is a fraud question for me,” elaborating, “When people ask where you’re from, Connecticut is my answer. And they’re like, ‘No, where are your parents really from?’ I’m like, Bridgeport, Connecticut, duh. So I think like that pushing back. I’m not a foreigner, but I’m also not at home, but I can never claim a home no matter where I am.”

“I think home is where community is, and also this sounds obnoxious, but it’s also where I can find a good Banh Mi sandwich, so if there’s none that’s not home at all,” Su said.

The second part of Enderle’s question focused on the re-education camps that the recently installed government used to “round up members who were a part of the South Vietnamese government,” Su said.

The detainees were often starved, forced to work, beaten and subject to horrible conditions, Su explained. Both Andrew Lee and Su’s fathers were kept in re-education camps after the fall of Saigon.

“When we talk about the war, we often talk about exodus. We rarely talk about what does it mean to live through a labor camp,” Su said.

During COVID-19, she sat down with her father and started asking questions about the eight years he spent in the labor camps with his brothers.

“I think there’s something very unique about going through that experience,” Su said. “Which is why the ones that he talks to now are the same people who went through that experience, which is why there’s a sense of camaraderie and it holds them together.”

Andrew Lee’s father was in the camps for seven years and Andrew Lee said he “never had the courage when he was alive to sit down and ask him about the labor camps.”

“I was just so young and immature,” Andrew Lee said. “I just didn’t have the language to really ask serious questions. And perhaps it was me afraid of what he would say.”

Several other audience members shared their personal backgrounds and experiences they had in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.

“It’s been 50 years, but those feelings are, I mean, they’re still very visceral,” Andrew Lee said.

C.N. Lee summed up the collective emotions in his speech:  “My family’s experience is just one small part of the larger constellation of personal stories, collective shock and trauma, eventual rehabilitation and opportunity, national reckonings and lessons to be learned and ongoing, political, economic, military and cultural dynamics that continue to reverberate in the U.S., in Vietnam and around the world today.”

Alexandra Hill can be reached at [email protected].