Search

tuannyriver

website & blog of Tuan Hoang, Pepperdine University

Open Search
Category

Vietnamese diaspora

Song of refugees #8 – Hát Cho Người Ở Lại (Sing for Those Staying Behind)

This post is the only one in the series without a YouTube video.  In fact, here is the only online link to the recording that I could find, and the upload is hardly perfect.  It’s true that I’d like to throw in one or two obscure songs in a list of mostly well-known tunes.  Even there I was quite surprised at the Internet neglect of this song.

December 1, 2016: The link above still works, but I’ve just uploaded the song on YouTube and it has better audio quality.

Continue reading “Song of refugees #8 – Hát Cho Người Ở Lại (Sing for Those Staying Behind)” →

0

Song of refugees #9 – Khóc Một Dòng Sông (Cry A River)

The lyrics of this song are simple: possibly the simplest from this list of ten.  But at times simplicity is equivalent to power, and I think this song is quite powerful.  The most interesting find during my Internet search for recordings is the following video of a performance by several Vietnamese American girls in the Seattle area.  The young singer speaks in Vietnamese at the start:  I love this song because through my grandparents, I understand the feelings of people having to live far from their families, friends, and homeland.

Continue reading “Song of refugees #9 – Khóc Một Dòng Sông (Cry A River)” →

3

Song of refugees #10 – Sài Gòn Vĩnh Biệt Tình Ta (Saigon, Farewell Forever My Love)

Knowing that I’d like to start this series with a song related to Saigon, I nonetheless had a hard time deciding from several choices. Travel turned out to be the decisive factor, and being in Houston this weekend prompted me to settle on Saigon, Farewell Forever My Love.  Its authors were two refugees who settled in the Houston area: one not long after the Fall of Saigon; the other sometimes in the early 1980s. [Correction: Both came to Houston in 1975; see the note from Jason Gibbs among the comments below.]

Continue reading “Song of refugees #10 – Sài Gòn Vĩnh Biệt Tình Ta (Saigon, Farewell Forever My Love)” →

4

Vietnamese in Central & Eastern Europe

Update Jan 27, 2016:  I’ve reviewed the dissertation for the website Dissertation Reviews.

On New Year’s Eve, I finished reading a terrific dissertation about Vietnamese in the former Czechoslovakia.  The author is Alena Alamgir (Rutgers 2014), and her work is about a bilateral labor program between the DRV and Czechoslovakia from 1967 to 1989 that sent Vietnamese from the European country for training and work in a variety of industries. The field is historical sociology – it won the Theda Skocpol Award from the American Sociological Association last year – and the dissertation utilizes a good deal of documents from the National Czech Archives, including materials from three governmental agencies in the Cold War era.

Continue reading “Vietnamese in Central & Eastern Europe” →

0

Song of war #2 – Đêm Nguyện Cầu (Night of Prayer)

Belief in God tends to be strong for people living amid warfare. It is hardly a surprise then that prayer finds its way into music written during war.  It was surely the case with popular music in South Vietnam.

Since this is the week of Christmas, it is worth mentioning that one the most popular South Vietnamese albums is filled with prayer.  It is the third album of the fine series Sơn Ca (Birdsong), and the title is simply Giáng Sinh: Tình Yêu và Hòa Bình: Christmas: Love and Peace.  It features some of the biggest names in the Saigon music scene at the time: Thái Thanh, Khánh Ly, Thanh Lan, Giao Linh, Lệ Thu, Anh Khoa, etc.  (A recording from Elvis Phương would have completed this A-list.)

Continue reading “Song of war #2 – Đêm Nguyện Cầu (Night of Prayer)” →

3

Initial thoughts on “Terror in Little Saigon”

Grading and other obligations kept me from watching this documentary when it was first shown on PBS last week.  But I read the written narrative on the ProPublica website (which isn’t a transcript of the documentary but shares the same materials), and finally watched the documentary online last night.  Here are some thoughts after watching it.

Continue reading “Initial thoughts on “Terror in Little Saigon”” →

11

Twenty Vietnamese songs on war and refugees

Bài lời Việt theo sau bài tiếng Anh. Hai bài hao hao nội dung nhưng không giống hẳn. The Vietnamese portion follows the English. I cater each language to different readers and they aren’t entirely the same.

April 30 was of course the climax of the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of mass Vietnamese migration to the U.S.  But there’s still a lot of the anniversary year left.

11188332_10101652019521487_5536541487843968518_n
April 30, 2015 in Little Saigon, Orange County

Tomorrow is the first day of classes at my institution, and I will continue to honor this anniversary by posting about Vietnamese music related to war and refugees throughout the fall semester and into the spring semester.

KEEP READING!

6

Starting point for a literary history of Vietnamese in the U.S.

What did the first waves of Vietnamese refugees in America think about themselves? What was their mindset regarding their place in the world?  Is it possible to write a coherent literary history of their experience?

164871-VHNT-130417-VienLinh-400
Cover of the book under discussion, next to a collection by Thái Tú Hạp published three years later ~ Source: nguoi-viet.com

The search for answers can take different directions and have different starting points.  In my opinion, it isn’t a bad idea to begin with a collection of poetry, essays, memoirs, and fiction entitled Tuyển Tập Thơ Văn 90 Tác Giả Việt Nam Hải Ngoại 1975-1981: Selected Poetry and Prose from Ninety Vietnamese Writers Abroad, 1975-1981 (Missouri City, TX: Văn Hữu, 1982). KEEP READING!

1

Conference report: Vietnamese in America since 1975

Posted on VSG on April 14, 2015

11150887_769683229793570_161372729725463775_nConference report: “Vietnamese in America Since 1975: History, Identity, and Community,” Occidental College, April 11, 2015

On this day, a dozen of scholars in history, religion, and the social sciences gathered at Occidental College for meals and conversations.  KEEP READING!

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑