Vietnamese Focus: From Refugee to Dynamic Community By Vũ Quý Hạo Nhiên Written for BBC from California Translated by Phan Anh Huy September 14, 2015
A release form from The Republic of Viet Nam for Nguyen Thanh Lam in 1976. A letter from a dentist if Virginia sponsoring a colleague Quynh Nguyen & his family to the US in 1975.
A few Vietnamese newspapers published right at Guam in the beginning of May ,1975. A set of immigration documents which includes lung x-rays inside a handbag that ICM had given to the refugees who were making their way to the USA. Those objects and more, are displayed at the Old Courthouse in Orange County, California, until February of 2016. The exhibition named “Vietnamese Focus: Generations of Stories” consist of history and art, and is organized by the University of California Irvine’s Vietnamese American Oral History Project (VAOHP).
This exhibition includes videos, photographs, documents, and artifacts which presents the life stories of, and showcases a rich diversity of the Vietnamese American community in Orange County, which have been collected from VAOHP and from UCI’s Southeast Asian Archive. Almost two-thirds of the objects are on loan from individuals for this particular exhibit. “The first generation of Vietnamese refugees are quickly passing; the stories and histories that they have lived through will forever disappear if we don’t collect and maintain them,” said Tram Le, assistant director of VAOHP and co-curator of this exhibition. There is a 17-minute film, from Khiem Photo Video, recorded in 1975, when the Bolsa neighborhood was beginning to develop, when there were just a few shops with Vietnamese names. The goods that the Vietnamese needed were sold, and many of the items purchased were that which Vietnamese bought to sent home to their families. Asian foods, fabric, medicine, and immigration services. These original shops no longer exist, but new ones are replaced and Phuoc Loc Tho is now well known.
The early development of Little Saigon was not smooth: The exhibition displays a letter from a former mayor of Westminster, Kathy Buchoz, who opposed a request, with more than a hundred signatures, demanding the city retract the operating license of a Vietnamese supermarket on Bolsa Avenue. The letter also demanded that the city stop issuing business licenses to the Southeast refugees in the Vietnamese sector. Professor Linda Vo, co-curator and director of Asian American Studies at UCI, explains that the research and collecting of documents for this exhibit had started a long time ago. “Right when I first pursued my doctorate degree, I had already researched and wrote about Vietnamese America, I had volunteered for many local Vietnamese organizations, and this knowledge and the relationships I’ve made are invaluable foundations for collecting the material for this exhibition.”
Writer/Author Nha Ca stands next to her internationally published works (Photo: Charlie Van Le) The Southeast Asian Archive was founded in 1987, and the VAOHP program had to for an entire decade before it was founded in 2011. “VAOHP started the interviews and collected the oral histories from the Vietnamese in Orange County since 2011,” said Tram Le. It wasn’t until April 2015, that Dr. Linda Trinh Vo, Tram Le, and Dr. Thuy Vo Dang published a book called “Vietnamese in Orange County” (Arcadia Press). “To turn history into a dynamic story, we needed to construct an ambience within which the public could listen to stories, live the journeys, and see these objects with their own eyes. We knew that we had to build an exhibition with history, art, and stories.”
The artistic facet of the exhibition consists of nine works of art by Trinh Mai, Artist-in-Residence of VAOHP. One of the pieces is named “Quiet”, an installation. From the ceiling in the center of the main exhibition space, Trinh Mai hung long white sashes, and on each of those sashes, a portrait of a Vietnamese individual who went missing during their journey to freedom. These sashes represent mourning sashes, traditionally worn at Vietnamese funerals. About her artwork for this exhibition, Trinh noted, “Only heroes sacrifice themselves for their freedom. These are peoples who realized the value of their life, the lives of the next generation. And they had fought by simply keeping their will to live. These are our neighbors in the community, and in truth, we are living among heroes.” Linda Trinh Vo, Director of VAOHP, described the exhibition as “a humble project to tell a story of the Vietnamese American experience from our point of view, with a limited budget and manpower”. “In this empty room, we wanted to challenge the old story of the “rescue narrative”, in that we were victims, passive, or the “model minority” living the “American dream”. These are foolish and senseless misconceptions.
Tram Le and Linda Trinh Vo have a big goal for this exhibition. According to Tram Le, “We want to erase these misconceptions that the public have for the community, which leads to discrimination and prejudice.” Linda Trinh Vo added, “We want to elaborate many aspects and different angles of our history, of the people who must face out-of-ordinary choices of life.”
The exhibition will continue until Feb 2016. Linda Trinh Vo and Tram Le will publish a book catalogue, condensing all contents of the event, and if possible, will make it a traveling exhibition for other communities.
Written by Vu Quy Hao of Orange County, according to his point of view.