excerpt from The Introduction ©

 

In 1980, after a short stay in San Diego, I took a full-time position at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, as Director of a large program for Vietnamese refugees. At the time, civic leaders in Orange County were feeling the impact of Vietnamese refugees coming from camps in Southeast Asia into an overwhelmingly white, conservative region. At that time, Orange Country was considered a “bedroom community” of Los Angeles.

 

Why I was given the job is unclear. What was clear was that I hardly fit the value system for which Orange Country was famous. Until January, 1980, I lived and worked in Berkeley, California, politically and socially the polar opposite of Orange Country.

 

I had, since 1974, worked as the Educational Coordinator of Adelante, a community project in Berkeley for immigrants from Latin America, the bulk of whom were from Mexico.

 

Perhaps, I was hired because I had experience with large-scale immigrant programs.

​

Perhaps not.

 

The interview, if that’s what it could be called, was held at the tony home of the President of Orange Coast Community College. Two or three other members of the Orange Coast Community College District Board of Supervisors were there with their wives.

 

The Supervisors were all men, pudgy to overweight, and pink. Their wives were pink, too, and came from Stepford.

 

Drinks were served. The President’s daughter performed mechanically on the piano.

 

I was being accepted and invited into a Club of Pink Men. We socialized, though the underlying mood was humorless because the situation was humorless.

 

Slowly, it was revealed that the Solons of Newport Beach were frightened of what was happening demographically in Orange County, but since the Reagan administration had thrown enormous amounts of Federal money at the problem, they were anxious to get on with it. They wanted someone they could trust to run a program for which they were unqualified to run and, since I, too, am pink, perhaps that played a part in their decision to take me on.

 

But I am pink in more ways than one. Since the Civil Rights Movement, I had recognized myself as an egalitarian. A socialist. A pinko. Those interviewing me didn’t understand the subtle shades of pink.

 

“We have a problem,” the President said.

 

The problem, I thought, was clear. There were no Vietnamese present and there was no humor.

 

The refugees who were arriving in great numbers had gone through unimaginable hardships. These were not the ’75ers, those who had arrived directly in Orange Country as the South Vietnamese government collapsed. No refugee camps for these folk, who quickly settled into posh suburban life in Laguna, sent their children to private schools, and spoke French as well as English and Vietnamese, sometimes Chinese.

 

Those arriving daily in large numbers were the “Boat People” and the “Walkies.” Maybe some had hidden wealth, but most were lucky to escape Vietnam with their lives. They were not rich and they were anxious about the future, rightfully so because of the hardships and horrors they had endured in the open sea in dinghies not meant to be there, ever fearful of drowning or, worse, Thai pirates, or walking, hungry and sick, through hostile jungles in Cambodia—escape by sea or land from Vietnam to refugee camps that were themselves scenes of overcrowding, fear, and hostility.

 

When I heard the amount in the budget I would control, I gasped inwardly before replying, “That’s a fair amount. I am sure I could easily cut 10%.”

 

I said that because, at the time, President Reagan was slashing assistance programs across the country and mentioned 10% as an across-the-board target for administrators.

 

I thought the Supervisors, fiscal conservatives all, would be impressed.

 

They weren’t.

 

“If we don’t spend it all, then the next budget year we’ll be cut that amount.”

 

Quick-witted, I replied, “I can spend it. We’ll have the best program in the country.”

 

Austerity is for the other guy and it was no different in Orange County, the home of the John Wayne International Airport.

 

I do not necessarily agree with the individuals interviewed in this book. I was not with them to agree or disagree. I was there to learn to listen and empathize, whether I agreed or not. Listening is the first, necessary step of empathy. 

 

The names you see here are pseudonyms given by me with the help of a translator, though all of those interviewed spoke English at various levels, from rudimentary to advanced, and the interviews were conducted in English with occasional assistance of a translator.

 

For me, there was only one narrative, not many, and each of these voices were expressions of that one story that needed to be told

 

Vietnamese Diaspora is not “oral history” nor was it ever meant to me. It is my attempt to understand suffering and anxiety. Oral history, for me, is too easily stuck in a quagmire of detail that is subjective and always incomplete—and, like all subjective narratives, susceptible to exaggeration, evasion, and deception. I wanted more. Indeed, it is these subjective aspects of oral history that make it valuable historically. Oral “history” is about the teller of the tale, not its objective reality.

 

Many of the stories I heard overlap because these interviews are a snapshot of a specific time and place—1980-1984, Orange County, California. The interviewees were asked to tell their stories from Vietnam, beginning when they liked, to the present. Their stories are their own and I rarely said anything, usually to repeat a phrase just said as an encouragement to clarify, sometimes an inquisitive “Oh?” intended to spur the interviewee on. They didn’t need much encouragement. Theirs is an epic tale of the 20th century.

 

Throughout, I am a silent presence in the text you read. Occasionally, interviewees make reference to me. I do not respond. My role was to listen sympathetically, not pass judgment, and listen.

 

As a consequence of the open-endedness of these interviews, there are certain themes that overlap that are topical to the time and, therefore, lost in time and meaningless to the reader.

 

Many of those interviewed speak of a Vietnamese mafia (or lack of one) in Orange County, corrupt Vietnamese doctors scamming MediCal, Refugee Camps in Southeast Asia, Premier Ky, who lived in Orange County, the ‘75ers (those who escaped at the end of the war), racism, and educational programs. These were in the news at the time and, as is to be expected, opinions vary from person to person as well as within a single interview, which appears contradictory, but, even as these inconsistencies—some small matters of dates and names, some large matters of fact--arise, the truth of a particular matter emerges slowly and changes as interviewees tell their stories.

 

The reader should remember that those being interviewed had been traumatized by history, that shame, embarrassment, suspicion of the interviewer, and other painful and fearful psychic matters that we can never know or understand came into play. The purpose of memory is not always to recall accurately what happened in the past. Sometimes, it is a way of protecting the present. The reader does not have the privilege of nitpicking inconsistencies and does so at the risk of not listening to the tragedy being told. I remind the reader that classical tragedy is not found in death. Death, Aristotle taught us, is for the living an escape from tragedy. These interviews are tragedies.

 

At times, you will find, the opinions and values of those being interviewed take place in a field of irony of which the interviewee is unaware. As the interviewee speaks of a past, an ironic present encircles them. The ironies of history and poetic justice prevail. 

It was not facticity or objectivity that I sought.

 

Newspapers are often cited as examples of non-fiction, vehicles of fact, but are just as often cited for their ideological and propagandistic distortions. As non-fiction, they present “facts.” Not truth. I was looking for truth, not facts.

 

Think of this. Shakespeare, Dante, Whitman, Dostoevsky, Cao Xueqin, and countless others wrote fiction, and we prize them because they wrote the truth. Which is more truthful, in that case, non-fiction or fiction? Which is more accurate?

 

The first-person accounts given here are a form of storytelling that transcends the divide between fiction and non-fiction.

 

In another project I created while directing the Orange Coast College Refugee program, I took two well-know, comic-strip characters from Vietnam—Lý Toét and Xã Xệ—and, using an all-Vietnamese cast and production crew, made a half-hour sitcom. I did this to solve the problem of the pink men mentioned above: no Vietnamese, no humor.

 

When the film was released as a way of “mainstreaming” refugees into American culture and society, the first scene— Lý Toét and Xã Xệ at the door of an aircraft arriving in Los Angeles, disembarking—the audience of Boat People and Walkies roared approval.

 

If Lý Toét and Xã Xệ could do it, they could, too.   

 

I interviewed over 100 individuals, then selected the 18 you will read in Vietnamese Diaspora.

 

No individual “fact” was changed, nothing added. The words are their own. 

 

These 18 individuals you are about to meet are real. They carry the burden of truth—and do it well.

 

They speak with the single voice of the many.