Photo by Twink Stern
Vu-Duc Vuong grew up in Vietnam, and later studied at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he obtained a B.A., two Masters and a J.D. He became a refugee after 1975 and subsequently a naturalized citizen of the U.S. He directed the Center for Southeast Asian Refugees Resettlement for 15 years and has taught at several universities. He is teaching “Fifty Years After the War: Reminiscence and Perspectives on Vietnam and America” with us this summer.
April marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. As someone who straddles both Vietnam and the United States, how are you reflecting on this milestone?
Fifty years is a long time. People roughly my age have had decades to experience and reflect on the impact of this war, whether one is American or Vietnamese or citizens of another country. By the next 50th anniversary, all of us will be gone. So this course is an opportunity to reflect on that part of our lives: How did we survive? What do we carry with us? Is reconciliation possible? What can we learn from it? Or what can/would we share with our grandchildren? We’ll discuss history and the war, but not exclusively. Our experiences and our survival matter.
Everyone’s lenses will be different.
Yes, both as individuals and as holders of our countries' histories. Vietnamese look at the war one way, Americans look at it another way. And so do the Laotians, Cambodians, Chinese, Thai, Koreans, Russians, French, and so on. Generations play a part too. For many years, I took students in the U.S. to study and explore Vietnam while also trying to lay the foundations for a Liberal Arts program there to promote understanding.
You came to the United States in 1968. Hard to imagine a more fraught and conflicted time to be here, especially as a young person. How did you absorb what you were seeing around you?
I arrived here in January 1968 as a delegate from Vietnam to the World Youth Forum. Since the end of WWII, each year the WYF brought about three dozen delegates from the same number of countries to stay with American families and attend high schools to interact with and talk about their respective countries to American students.
Soft diplomacy.
Yes, we were a form of people’s diplomacy. But we were all so young and green, so perhaps it benefited us more than the American students we met. The Tet Offensive, for instance, occurred less than a month after I arrived in New York, so I was struggling to figure out what happened in my home country while trying to give a context of those events to my classmates. It took me decades to understand Vietnam and the United States.
The day Saigon fell, April 30, 1975, marked also the first time in my life that guns fell silent in Vietnam. But the war did not end, and two months later, refugees came to St. Louis, Missouri, which is where I lived at the time. Back then, I was perhaps the only bilingual person in town, so resettlement work seemed pre-ordained.
Did your family stay in Vietnam or migrate here?
The majority of my family stayed in Vietnam. Like most immigrants everywhere, I adapted to my country of choice while keeping a keen interest in the place I left. With the ease of communication and travels over the last few decades, it is possible for new citizens anywhere to balance their identities with and their contributions to both places.
What do you hope OLLI members will take away from your course?
For four sessions in June, we will look back together at the events that shaped our lives, in so many different ways. I hope that we can take a broader perspective about the war itself and about the world that we’re about to leave behind. Perhaps we are glad about certain achievements or perhaps we may regret certain actions or choices that we made, or did not make. And is there anything that we would like to share with the next generation? That is what I hope they take away.