INTRODUCTION SOUTHEAST ASIAN AMERICANS comprise one of the newest communities to be added to the American narrative, and one of the newest communities to be added to the Asian American experience. While Chinese Americans can date their ancestry back to the early 1800s, the story of mass migration of Southeast Asians to the United States started in the 1970s in the aftermath of the U.S. occupation of Southeast Asia during the ruthless Khmer Rouge genocide, bombings in Laos, and Vietnam War. Together these wars claimed millions of lives between 1955 and 1975, including innocent men, women, and children. Among those harmed were the 2 million victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide, and the tens of thousands of people who were victims of the mass bombing of Laos—the most heavily bombed country per capita in world history. Millions more were affected by Agent Orange, a herbicide deployed in Southeast Asia that is now linked to certain cancers. The relationship between the U.S. and the people of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam began decades before Southeast Asians arrived in America, as the U.S. government had been heavily involved in these countries to combat the spread of communism. Many Southeast Asians worked alongside the U.S. in these efforts to fight for democracy within their own countries. For example, Vietnamese refugees worked with the U.S. government during the Vietnam War as translators and civil servants; Khmer refugees assisted the U.S. military during its occupation of Cambodia; and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency recruited and trained Lao and Hmong soldiers to serve as guerrilla fighters in the Secret War in Laos. When the U.S. withdrew and these countries fell to communist powers,
SOUTHEAST ASIAN AMERICAN JOURNEYS
A NATIONAL SNAPSHOT OF OUR COMMUNITIES /
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