executive summary |
It has been more than forty years since the war in Vietnam ended, but “peace has not arrived completely.” As the Anthropologist Mai Lan Gustafsson observed,
“Vietnam is haunted by the War. It is everywhere, manifested in bomb craters and amputated limbs, in daily television reports listing those still missing from the war, in soap operas dramatizing love among the trenches, on the radio in songs about soldiers longing for their mothers, in family altars in nearly every house bearing photographs of some long-gone child or spouse or parent.” Vietnam has reconciled with America, but reconciliation among Vietnamese is still a work in progress. The human, material and natural loss caused by the war is felt by all sides. However, political and internal divisions prevent equal recognition of all these loss, and thus, the atrocities both sides committed against one another.
Connecting Vietnam aims to provide Vietnamese youths from all sides a chance at reconciliation. We cannot move forward without looking backward. We cannot know who we are and where we want to go without knowing our past. Following the wisdom of Maya Angelou, we believe that “history, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” For ourselves and future generations to be liberated from the visible and invisible effects of war, we are committed to facing our painful history and listen deeply to stories that are often silenced. Through traveling to pilgrimage sites that are symbolically and spiritually importance to the people that lived through the war, pilgrims will be able to commemorate the painful loss of our ancestors, and meditate on the root causes of how the Vietnamese people came to a divisive point of killing one’s own. Furthermore, we will trace the footsteps of brave conscientious individuals that fought for peace and reconciliation who can inform our vision for a reconciled, connected, dignified and liberated Vietnam that had reclaim all parts of its history. |
pilgrimage as method |
“It is not an escape like tourism, but a return to the center of pivotal events that have marked us and to narratives implanted in the land itself. The pilgrim's journey seeks a restoration of wholeness by a recentering, reentering, and recovery of history.” We do not believe in learning history just as an intellectual exercise. History, as James Baldwin said, is carried “within us.” We are “unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
A pilgrimage is a journey to physical sites that ultimately, help us to go deep within. Pilgrimage is about inner-cultivation of reverence, deep listening and compassion. We seek to use these historical sites as mirrors to look deeply into our own heart to find reconciliation and healing within ourselves. Through being present to the stories of sites and people, we seek to understand more about who we were, who we are and who we could be. |
stories and sites |
Over the course of Vietnam's history, internal division among the Vietnamese people has been a repeating pattern that can be traced from the political conflict between the Trinh and Nguyen lords since 16th to early 19th century up until the period of Vietnam War. In its most recent manifestation, internal division has evolved into a full-scaled civil war down to the family level between Northern and Southern Vietnam that lasted for twenty years. At its apex, internal division has led to Vietnamese killing Vietnamese. To face this silenced history head on, we will be traveling to recognized and unrecognized historical sites that have witnessed this dark chapter of Vietnam's past. These are the centers where “pivotal events that have marked us” and the land with historical injury of colonial violence and internal division.
Aside from sites of violence, we will also travel to sites where resistance, healing and reconciliation took place. These are the physical places that hold sources of hope, compassion and transformation. They are where our ancestors have seek to response to the violence of internal division with love. By the virtue of doing so, they have transformed the karmic energies of the country, and consequently, the course of history toward healing and reconciliation as opposed to division. |