I grew up learning history as facts printed in textbooks and recited by our teachers. History was in black and white, filled with dates and landmarks I crammed into my head for exams, only to be forgotten a few weeks after. History was heroic tales wrapped up in victorious endings for some and defeated ones for others. There were right and wrong, winners and losers, the powerful and the powerless, the blinded mass and the visionaries. History was an inanimate flow I never learned to question, or see my own self in it.
Studying abroad in the US for college shifted my perspectives. I vividly remember a dinner with some of my American friends during my freshman year, when one of them brought up the topic of the Vietnam war. It took me a few seconds to process the word “Vietnam war", since in Vietnamese we call it the “American war". My friends then mentioned how they were taught the Vietnam war was rationalized as the fight for capitalist values, that the war was a necessity before a domino effect threatened to engulf Asia, and probably the whole world, in communist regimes. I was shocked. Up until that moment, the American war to me had simply been the Vietnamese win against American invasion - the fight for so-called national freedom and unity. From the conversation with my friends, I realized the same history can take different shapes and stories to different people. It is never the monochromatic picture I was once used to.
The more time I spent abroad, the more I grew conscious of my Vietnamese identity. “The Vietnam war" seems inseparable from being Vietnamese (with or without American citizenship) in the US, no matter how much time has passed. Most Americans - friends, professors, strangers - would ask for my opinions about the war, (un)consciously expecting me to speak for my people. All Vietnamese American authors I read deal with - if not obliged to do so - the ever-lasting traumas of the war across generations. Most Vietnamese Americans I've met, including my relatives here, have a part of their history rooted in the war.
As a result, I felt compelled to dive deeper into what this war means to my Vietnamese. My efforts, however, have been restricted mostly to academic realm. Sure I wrote a research paper about “war babies" - Amerasians born by Vietnamese women and American soldiers - for my history class. Sure I read history books and watched documentaries to expand my understanding of how the war was viewed from different sides. Sure I read poems and novels to get in touch with the human side of the war, to put a face on loss and sacrifice. Yet, something is still missing. the me in this story.
I have not, or maybe did not dare to, position(ed) myself in the flow of history, to connect my own being to the war. I had been stuck in this dimension of me being born in peacetime and the war long buried in the past. I approached history as artifacts, rather than clues to understand myself, my family and my ancestry better. Though super obvious, it was only recently that I acknowledged my mom's side once served in the US-backed South Vietnamese army. The truth is, I had always tiptoed on the topic of war with my beloved ones, even when I knew that my grandfather on my mom's side passed away while fighting for the war, that some of my granduncles went through reeducation camps, that my relatives set their first steps in the US as war refugees and that my parents grew up in a chaotic post-war period. I sought to grasp the pain of loss in others, but forgot to look inwards and reconnect with the sacrifices evident in my own root.
Such recognition urged me to join this history project. My utmost intention for the trip is to personalize history, meaning to map out my family’s stories in the grander historical flow. In doing so, I hope to unpack the pieces of history I carry through my being, and to honor and remember the lives my ancestors have lived - both in their truest and most vulnerable forms.