My last post is about Ngô Đình Diệm’s older brother Archbishop Thục, who got mixed up with several reactionary groups during the 1970s and 1980s before reconciling with the Vatican and living out his last year among a religious order of Vietnamese men in Missouri. Since then, I’ve read some more materials and learned about something I didn’t know before: a group of Catholic refugees led by a traditionalist and anti-Vatican II priest by the name of Trần Văn Khoát.
Continue reading “Fr. Trần Văn Khoát and Catholic refugees in Beaumont and Port Arthur”
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”
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)”
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.]
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””
tuannyriver 
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