The only time that I’ve seen anyone related by blood to Ngô Đình Diệm – Ngo Dinh Diem for readers that are used to the English spelling – occurred exactly thirty-three years ago this month. The town was Carthage, Missouri, best known as the American headquarters of a large Catholic order of Vietnamese American priests and brothers. The person was Ngô Đình Thục, Diệm’s older brother and the former archbishop of Huế. Along with tens of thousands of Vietnamese Catholics, I was attending the annual Marian Days weekend with my family and people from southern Minnesota. Unfortunately I don’t remember much about the Archbishop except that he presided over one of the masses with a visiting bishop from Vietnam.
Continue reading “Buổi nói chuyện về người Việt tị nạn với dân biểu Stephanie Murphy”
Geographically speaking, there are two ways of viewing Vietnamese Americans in Lincoln, Nebraska. One is to group them among Vietnamese in the Midwest. It is a vast region that includes large communities such as Chicago and the Twin Cities, and smaller ones such as Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Grand Rapids, MI. Continue reading “Interviewing historians: Kurt Kinbacher on Vietnamese in Lincoln, Nebraska”
Click here for Lan Chu’s introduction.
Here for Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar’s article.
And here for my article.
My last post is about a long history article on American Catholicism. This post is about another long one: my own. It is published in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and the entire issue should come out by the end of the month.
Continue reading “My article on reeducation camps and anticommunism”
This song is most interesting because the original lyrics were written in Paris by the writer Minh Đức Hoài Trinh: in 1962 or thirteen years before the Fall of Saigon.
Continue reading “Song of refugees #3 – Ai Trở Về Xứ Việt (Who Are Returning to the Viet Land?)”
Ask Vietnamese to name Vietnamese female singers that they love, and you can expect to hear many names. Ask them to name a Vietnamese female songwriter, and just about everyone will be stumped by the question. For there has been little recorded popular music written by Vietnamese women. I have no explanation for the wide discrepancy. But such was the case, at least in South Vietnam and the postwar diaspora.
Continue reading “Song of refugees #4 – Anh Vẫn Mơ Một Ngày Về (I Still Dream of Returning One Day)”
This popular song did not cross my mind at all when I first conceived this list. A passing comment from Jason Gibbs, however, made me think more about it. Later, reading a published comment from the song’s composer prompted its inclusion. It is the least conventional choice for this list, since there isn’t anything overtly about refugees. Yet for reasons below, it speaks subtly about the experience of adjustment to the new land by Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. and elsewhere during the 1970s and 1980s.
Continue reading “Song of refugees #7: Tôi Với Trời Bơ Vơ (Me and the Lonely World)”
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