In her 2010 memoir Tales from a Mountain Metropolis, Quynh Dao – who was 15 on the fall of Saigon in 1975 – describes returning to Dalat, a metropolis in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, on the finish of the battle. The North Vietnamese Military (NVA) had looted her household’s dwelling and made bonfires of their books and magazines:
There have been a whole bunch of problems with Life journal, Paris-Match, Reader’s Digest, father’s lifetime assortment of books, the comics we kids learn … the simmering fireplace devoured the pages slowly, certainly, from the perimeters of the pages to the spines.
A number of weeks later, the NVA evicted Dao’s household. Escaping Vietnam by boat in 1979, Dao fled to a refugee camp in Malaysia, after which to Australia as one in every of tens of millions of ‘boat folks’. By then, South Vietnam, the nation through which she had been born and raised, now not existed.
The misperception that the Vietnam Warfare was fought between Vietnam and the US largely persists. However there have been two Vietnams: the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), every with allies drawn alongside Chilly Warfare divisions. As of 31 January 1975, South Vietnam was recognised by 95 international locations, whereas North Vietnam was recognised by 65. Official US figures report 254,256 South Vietnamese killed and 783,602 wounded in motion throughout the battle, greater than 5 occasions the variety of US casualties. As these statistics solely cowl 1960 to 1974, the true determine is unquestionably a lot increased. South Vietnam had by far the best casualty price of all of the allies however this reality is now usually forgotten – together with the very existence of the nation itself.
Burning books
For the historian of South Vietnam, texts and paperwork are an issue. One of many first acts after the autumn of Saigon in 1975 was the burning of books on the Khai Tri publishing home in Le Loi avenue in Saigon, because the communist authorities focused publishers, academic establishments, and bookshops within the former South. The Catholic priest André Gelinas reported that most of the 80,000 books held on the Alexander of Rhodes Centre in Saigon had been burned between 1975 and 1977. Boi Tran Huynh, the daughter of the homeowners of South Vietnam’s second largest bookshop in Bien Hoa, recalled how:
After 1975, all of the books had been confiscated and brought away by the federal government, together with all of the textbooks of biology, arithmetic, physics, chemistry, all of the dictionaries and you realize issues that aren’t ideological. Arithmetic is arithmetic whether or not you’re communist or capitalist, Russian or American. They got here in vans and took the whole lot away.
Some 400 South Vietnamese writers, poets, and journalists had been despatched to re-education camps in June 1975. Books and journals that had been judged to be reactionary had been banned on 20 August with the prolonged listing of banned works additional expanded in March 1976 and Could 1977.
However the destruction was not solely carried out by the communist authorities. Many South Vietnamese households burned, destroyed, or in any other case disposed of pictures and paperwork in an try to cover their identities. In his essay assortment Fragrance Desires, the Vietnamese-American author Andrew Lam (whose father was a common within the South Vietnamese army) recollects how, aged 11, he adopted his mom’s directions to take away ‘photos from album pages, diplomas from glass frames, movie reels from steel canisters, letters from desk drawers’ earlier than setting them on fireplace. By the point he had completed, ‘the mementoes of three generations had become ashes’.
Refugees
The lack of pictures, identification papers, letters, and different memorabilia was compounded by the refugee exodus within the twenty years after the battle. The motion was one of the crucial seen mass migrations of the late twentieth century. A 1990 report ready by Stephen Denney for the Legal professionals Committee for Human Rights famous that
6.5 million folks within the former South had been compromised as a consequence of their household associations. After the battle, a million folks had been interned in re-education camps, one other million had been forcibly despatched to ‘New Financial Zones’ in beforehand uninhabited rural areas, whereas free speech and motion had been curtailed. The postwar authorities discriminated in opposition to three outlined teams: those that had been related to the previous South Vietnamese authorities; the ethnic Chinese language (who, from 1976, had been pressured to register as such); and Amerasians, the kids of Vietnamese girls and American personnel.
Greater than two million folks left Vietnam within the twenty years after the battle, and the plight of the boat folks acquired world protection. The worldwide response was unprecedented, involving main conferences held on the UN in Geneva in 1979 and 1989, and the resettlement of South Vietnamese refugees in 50 international locations worldwide. The UN recorded 839,228 Vietnamese arrivals at camps operated by the UN Excessive Commissioner for Refugees between 1975 and 1997, although this quantity doesn’t embody the 134,000 who had been evacuated to the US in 1975, the 263,000 who fled to the Individuals’s Republic of China in 1978-79, and the 623,509 who left underneath the Orderly Departure Program in 1979-97.
Most refugees left Vietnam with out documentation. Many drowned within the Mekong delta whereas trying to achieve the coast. Individuals who lived in riverine and coastal communities in southern Vietnam described floating corpses washing up on riverbanks or seashores within the postwar years. Most had been these of girls and kids, and, as they carried no identification papers, their households couldn’t be notified. They had been buried in unmarked graves.
Escapes from Vietnam had been organized in secrecy as a result of folks didn’t need to draw the eye of the authorities or implicate members of the family. Alongside these escapes had been government-sponsored departures through which the brand new Vietnamese authorities was concerned with abroad crime syndicates in organising the trafficking of refugees, charging them a median of $2,000 in gold and confiscating their homes and items. This semi-official technique of escape was a type of state-sanctioned expulsion. Refugees had been promised secure passage, however most drowned. The overall variety of refugee deaths stays unknown, however most estimates counsel that 500,000 folks died at sea. Many boat folks consider that for each boat that made it, one didn’t and that a million folks perished within the South China Sea.
In memoriam
The loss of life toll of the exodus, the disappearance of so many, and the absence of human stays have led to ambiguous and unresolved types of grieving and mourning within the Vietnamese diaspora. Nothing now stays of the nice community of camps that supplied refuge to tens of millions of Indochinese refugees within the postwar years, except Galang Refugee Camp in Indonesia’s Riau archipelago and the ruins of Bidong Refugee Camp in Malaysia. Memorials to the camps had been unveiled in each Galang and Bidong in 2005. Each memorials bore the identical inscription commemorating the boat folks ‘who perished on the way in which to freedom’ and had been the product of fund-raising efforts by the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia, North America, and Europe. Designed by the Archive of Vietnamese Boat Individuals in Melbourne, and carved by Indonesian stonecutters, the memorials resembled giant tombstones. Nonetheless, after the Hanoi authorities complained that the memorials ‘denigrated the dignity of Vietnam’, each the Indonesian and Malaysian governments yielded and ordered their destruction. Regardless of protests, the Bidong memorial was destroyed in October 2005 and the Galang memorial was eliminated by 2008.
Oral historical past
The story of those memorials demonstrates a tangible effort by the South Vietnamese diaspora to recollect, whereas their destruction reveals that the Vietnamese state stays delicate in regards to the reminiscence of South Vietnam and its refugees. However South Vietnam has an enormous, world diaspora – one that’s more and more engaged within the reminiscence of the battle. Whereas the destruction of cultural artefacts signifies that a lot was misplaced throughout the postwar years, new oral historical past archives are being created. Within the US collections equivalent to ‘Viet Tales: Vietnamese American Oral Historical past Venture’ on the College of California and the Vietnamese American Heritage Basis oral historical past interview assortment at Rice College comprise a whole bunch of oral testimonies. In Australia, oral historical past tasks on Vietnamese veterans and the second technology of Vietnamese Australians created in 2013-14 and 2018-22 are preserved within the Nationwide Library of Australia. They embody an account by Nguyen Van Luyen, who was a 22-year-old armour officer when he was badly wounded in motion in 1974. Interviewed in 2013, he remembered: ‘We had been preventing in dangerous circumstances, with no assist … I’m happy with what we did as a result of we nonetheless fought on, we solely stopped after we had been ordered to take action by President Duong Van Minh.’ Vu Van Bao, a Chinook pilot who had simply turned 27 when the battle ended, recalled how: ‘We, the South, we simply defended ourselves. We didn’t go as much as the North. We had been preventing but in addition constructing our nation.’ Thanh, who didn’t need to be recognized by her full title, is a former captain within the Ladies’s Armed Forces Corps. ‘Annually, I return to Vietnam to go to invalid soldier brothers which have and are nonetheless dwelling in excessive hardship in our dwelling nation’, she acknowledged. ‘These are individuals who have misplaced part of their our bodies on the battlefield … I at all times consider my place of birth … It’s the ache that makes you bear in mind.’
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen is Professor of Historical past at Monash College. Her books embody South Vietnamese Troopers: Reminiscences of the Vietnam Warfare and After (Bloomsbury, 2024).
