The Vietnamese Turn

On this day, fifty years ago, the event, widely known as the Fall of Saigon, effectively marked the end of the Vietnam War. It’s an event that you have both personal and professional connection to – as a refugee and as an historian of the Vietnamese diaspora. Can you talk about the ways that your family history and your work as an historian influence each other?

Nathalie Nguyen: My parents, my family were refugees, political refugees after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. And our story is unusual because we weren’t actually in Vietnam at that time. I wasn’t born in Vietnam, and neither were any of my siblings – we were all born overseas, and the reason for that is that my father served as a diplomat for the Republic of Vietnam.

My father comes from a very old North Vietnamese Buddhist family, a family of scholars that he has traced back to the sixteenth century – it’s a family that really valued its links to kin and land in the North. What broke this connection to kin and land was the advent of Hồ Chí Minh to power. Like most members of this very large family, my father left the North in 1950, and he was really lucky – the only reason he wasn’t conscripted into the Northern army, like his best friend and uncle, was because he wasn’t home at that time. He moved south and ended up going to France, where he did his master’s and doctorate, and eventually worked as a diplomat for the Republic of Vietnam. He met my mum in London.

She was a very bright young student in Vietnam, who did her baccalauréat at the age of sixteen. At that stage, the grandes écoles in France did not admit women, so she figured she’d try for either Oxford or Cambridge. Her English wasn’t great, so she went to boarding school and studied English. She then sat for the entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge, and both offered her a position. She chose Cambridge, and read economics at Newnham College.

After my mother graduated, my parents got married and my father worked in London, New Delhi, Paris, and Tokyo, which is where our family was when Saigon fell in 1975. So, we came to Australia from Japan. My parents were fortunate in that my father had played tennis with a number of Australians when he was Consul-General in New Delhi. Personal friendships matter a lot, and that is how he knew some of the Australians he later wrote to after South Vietnam fell. It was that personal connection in India.

When I won a Harold White Fellowship in 2007 to research Vietnamese refugees at the National Library of Australia, I did all this additional work at the National Archives, and I saw my father’s name there. It was a complete shock. I mean, my father had told me that it wasn’t easy to be admitted to Australia, but I didn’t realise that our family history would be in the archives, and that I would see his name, his signature, and all these extraordinary cables which recorded the fact that my father had written to two prominent Australians, both of whom were established figures in Australian foreign policy, Sir James Plimsoll and K.C.O. ‘Mick’ Shann, then serving as ambassadors to the Soviet Union and Japan, and that they both interceded for our family to be admitted to Australia as political refugees.

I still find it extraordinary that there was this three-page document in the National Archives which included a list of Vietnamese refugees who had been admitted to Australia by the Foreign Minister, Don Willesee. But Whitlam was in power at that time in Australia, and he made no secret of the fact that he supported the North and was unsympathetic to refugees from the South. In fact, Whitlam intervened personally after the decision had already been made – I found in the archives Whitlam’s hand going through this list of refugees and writing, ‘No’. He was contradicting decisions made by one of his own senior ministers. It’s an extraordinary example of micromanaging. There were actually two documents: one with Whitlam’s handwriting; and another one with that of a senior public servant who basically copied the Prime Minister, underlining the fact these were the Prime Minister’s annotations. I was really distraught when I saw this. I didn’t cry while I was at the National Library, but when I went back to where I was staying, close to ANU, I cried and cried.

As part of the Harold White Fellowship, you present a lecture both to the general public as well as to the library staff. I kept on putting this off because I found the experience so upsetting. So eventually Margy Burn contacted me and said, ‘Nathalie, when are you coming to give us your Harold White Fellow Public Lecture?’ So, I had to return to Canberra and work on this lecture. I was really nervous because Whitlam is such a revered figure in Australian politics, and I knew that there would be Whitlam Scholars in the audience, as well as academics, members of the general public, students, public servants. I remember there was total silence in the lecture, and at the end people said it was a shock to them to see what Whitlam had done, and to see the archival record. But people were also enormously supportive, so I was very grateful for that.

This was in 2008. In 2011, I was on a six-month research fellowship at the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford, and I started going to the Oxford Transitional Justice Research group’s seminars in the Faculty of Law. I’m not in law and I didn’t know anything about transitional justice, but I found this whole concept of transitional justice – of reconciling perpetrators and victims in societies post-conflict, post-genocide, generating trust in some of the state institutions, and dealing with victims – really interesting, even if the realisation is that it’s actually very difficult to draw communities together, especially when they’ve been through something as traumatic as genocide. They invited me to present a paper, so I gave an updated version of that original paper at the National Library of Australia, and it was extremely well received. One of the organisers edited a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, and invited me to submit my paper as part of it. That article was published in 2015, and eventually won an award.

Like a lot of your work, that article, ‘Memory in the Aftermath of War: Australian Responses to the Vietnamese Refugee Crisis of 1975’, intertwines the ‘personal’ with the ‘formal’, family with national and transnational histories. I guess this applies to your father as well – he was also an historian – and it’s fascinating the way that history provides both a larger context for your family narrative and exists within that narrative as a continuing practice.

In an interview with the Australian Historical Association, you say that ‘[your father] had in effect lost his country twice’. There’s something about internal forced migration which maybe gets overlooked in accounts of the Vietnam War. When we think about refugees, we think of movement across the boundaries of a nation state, but that internal movement is quite important to register.

NN: Yes, there have been two major mass migrations across state borders in the modern history of Vietnam. One of those was after partition in 1954 when one million Northerners fled south across the border. And, of course, the other mass migration was after 1975 when over two million people left Vietnam in the twenty years after the war. That earlier mass migration is often forgotten. Even that figure of one million, I would guess, is an underestimate because people like my father actually left well before 1954. People started leaving in the late 1940s, at the end of World War II when there were significant purges in which about 50,000 people on both sides of politics were killed. (Though, as French historian François Guillemot points out, they were much more systematic on the Viet Minh side.)

There were probably up to 100,000 people, mostly communist cadres, who did move from the South to the North, but it wasn’t comparable. It was clearly a mass movement from North to South. People were voting with their feet based on their personal experience of living under communist rule in the North, something most people in the South didn’t know anything about. While I was at the National Library, I remember speaking to one of the library staff who was a university student in Saigon in the 1970s, and he remembers stories that the Northerners told people about what had happened there prior to their departure in ’54, ’55. Like a lot of people, he didn’t really believe them; he thought that these stories were exaggerated. It was only after 1975 that the reality really sunk in for people in the South. But at that point, it was too late. The only way to deal with this was to escape.

To me, it says something good about human nature, in a way, that we find it hard to believe some of the most extreme accounts of atrocities. But, especially after everything that happened in World War II, you’d think people would pay a bit more attention to survivors or refugees when they speak about what actually happened to people they knew, or to family members, or to fellow villagers.

Regarding that element of disbelief and the kinds of moral, but also epistemic, barriers that come up when one hears about these extremes: do you also encounter that in your teaching, or are there certain gaps – in terms of lived experience or otherwise – that you need to push students across to make them understand the reality of the predicaments that force people to migrate? Is that a kind of pedagogical issue as well?

NN: It’s interesting because the Vietnam War is one of these wars where everybody feels they know exactly what it was about because it’s been so prominent in popular culture. People have seen films about the war. They’ve seen the photographs of the monk burning, of the little girl running down the road with napalm, of the South Vietnamese general shooting the Viet Cong soldier. They commonly assume that (a) the war was between America and Vietnam; and (b) it was an immoral war. We should never have gotten involved. Those are the two major points in the orthodox understanding, and the reason why it’s so familiar is because it’s been repeated over and over. It’s very difficult to wean people away from this narrative. But that’s what I do in the way I teach the Vietnam War.

I can see puzzlement initially, but then the students who stick around do get the message by the end of semester. The way I teach the Vietnam War is to ask students, first of all, why they’re interested in doing a unit on the Vietnam War, and, secondly, what does Vietnam mean to them, and what does the Vietnam War mean to them? Then I challenge all of that. There are always those students who will stick with the orthodox view because that’s the only one they’ve heard and the one that they can easily read up on, because the mass of US historiography on the war has been orthodox in nature.

What I teach students is that there are three major approaches to the Vietnam War. The first is the orthodox approach, which has dominated academia for about forty, fifty years and repeats a very well-known narrative that’s US-centric: it’s about US policy, the decisions of US presidents, US policymakers, the US military, US experiences, and US responses and disagreements about the effectiveness of that policy or otherwise. The other aspect of orthodox historiography is that it generally ignores the South, and is sympathetic towards the North. It’s US-centric on the one hand, but also communist-centric on the other.

Then there’s the revisionist approach, which was always a minority approach. What’s interesting about it was that its exponents were generally those who had either served in the Vietnam War, or who had been involved in policymaking during the war. One thing I’ll say for the revisionists was that at least they took South Vietnam seriously and recognised it in their research. But it was also still from the viewpoint of the US.

And then the third approach, which has come into effect the last twenty years, is the Vietnamese turn in Vietnam War historiography. Where earlier historians couldn’t speak or read Vietnamese, there’s a new generation of scholars who have Vietnamese language skills. So, this new generation is able to do archival research in Vietnamese and can bring into this historiography Vietnamese voices, perspectives, and experiences. They recognise the Vietnamese as active agents in the war, and they take South Vietnam seriously. This approach recognises that there were several political tendencies in Vietnam from the early 1920s onwards, and several possible paths for Vietnam. And in fact, South Vietnam – the Republic of Vietnam – was one of these paths.

Can you say a little more about what it means to take South Vietnam seriously? Are you talking about recognition of its legitimacy and distinctness as a polity? Or are there cultural aspects that need to be acknowledged alongside the political differences?

NN: The American historian Keith Taylor makes the point that divisions between North and South go back to the seventeenth century and are deep-seated. Also, as noted by American-Canadian historian Christopher Goscha, a lot more research needs to be conducted on the birth and evolution of the State of Vietnam, which was established in 1949. In 1950, the Soviet Union and the PRC recognised the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), North Vietnam, while Britain, the USA, Australia, the Vatican, and others recognised the State of Vietnam. In 1952, 10 out of 11 nations in the UN Security Council approved the application of the State of Vietnam to become a member of the United Nations, but the Soviet Union vetoed membership. After partition in 1954-55, the Republic of Vietnam, South Vietnam, was established. As of 1 January 1975, South Vietnam was recognised by 95 countries, and North Vietnam was recognised by 65 countries, most of them from the Soviet bloc.

The issue of legitimacy is an interesting one. There were no elections held in North Vietnam, and yet there are a lot of arguments about elections in the South. Were they democratic? There were problems as historical studies of the First Republic under Ngô Đình Diệm and the Second Republic under President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu have pointed out, but for some reason, it’s all one way – all the focus is on the problems in the South. All of that is being addressed now with the Vietnamese turn in the historiography of the war, but there’s still a lot more work to be done. It’s still a long way from coming anywhere near the mass of orthodox historiography on the war.

To come back to your question about culture: there’s a lot of new scholarship about the flourishing culture in the South. A recent article points out that there were something like 180 publishers in South Vietnam before 1975. But after 1975 the North burnt books. You hear that in personal testimonies – such as that of Quỳnh Dao, who returned to her home, which had been occupied by the North Vietnamese army in Đà Lạt, to see Time Magazine, Paris Match, lifetime collections of books and encyclopaedias and dictionaries all burning. One of the first places targeted was Khai Trí Publishing House in Lê Lợi Street in Saigon, one of the big publishers in the South. There’ve been some interesting reports about book burning in educational institutions, too. It’s not very widely known that some 400 South Vietnamese writers, poets, and journalists were arrested in June 1975 and sent to re-education camps or interned. Scholars are now really interested in studying South Vietnamese libraries, novelists, poets, and artists. There’s a recognition that there was this very rich, artistic, literary cultural life in the South, all of which was destroyed in 1975.

Our contemporary geopolitical landscape is one that is structured around the partitions in the wake of the Second World War. What’s significant, or perhaps even singular, about partition in Vietnam?

NN: Neither the DRV nor the State of Vietnam wanted partition because each side believed that they represented the whole of Vietnam. The DRV vision of Vietnam was an entirely communist country. The South wanted a republican Vietnam. There was a Cold War context with allies on either side, but if you want to distil the war to its simple essence, that was what it was about. People often forget that there were two parts to the 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended the Indochina War and divided Vietnam. The armistice, the agreement to cease hostilities, was signed by the countries that took part. The second part – the Final Declaration of the Conference – was unsigned. The State of Vietnam had objected to the Accords all along. The North wanted partition at a different parallel, but, under pressure from the Soviet Union and the PRC, was forced to accept it at the 17th parallel.

After partition, it was presumed that Hồ Chí Minh would have won the Accords’ proposed elections for reunification given that the population in the North was larger than the South’s. But it’s worth noting two points. Firstly, how you could have held fair elections with a one-party state in the North and a relatively open state in the South with lots of different factions, lots of different interest groups, is anyone’s guess. Secondly, it’s worth recalling, again, that a million Northerners voted with their feet against Hồ Chí Minh’s regime. If you’re interested in all the details about the Accords, there’s an article by an Australian diplomat, Alan Watt, that lays to rest a lot of the myths about the Geneva Accords.

I always think of South Vietnam as being unlucky, because when I compare the Vietnamese with the Korean case, there wasn’t an equivalent idealisation of the North in the latter. No one thinks about North Korea the way they thought about North Vietnam – as this socialist paradise with a wise benevolent leader called Hồ Chí Minh. Yet that was one way that Vietnamese partition was interpreted; the North became idealised as Vietnam got caught up in the politics of the international anti-colonial movement.

A more balanced view of what actually happened is beginning to emerge now, but it’s a long way from setting the record straight. It’s very exciting historiography, because it’s happening right now.

Our conversation brings to mind a review we recently published by Patrick Mullins that addresses how difficult it is to loosen the grip of popular mythologies that have the foreign policy bureaucracy and military behind them. Does oral testimony – interviewing actual veterans in addition to consulting state archives – help with this loosening?

NN: There are people in the American and Australian military establishment that have very much recognised what the South Vietnamese did. As far back as 2004, Jeffrey Grey – arguably Australia’s foremost military historian before his sudden death in 2016 – recognised a significant gap in the historiography of the Vietnam War: the people at the war’s centre, particularly those living in the Republic of Vietnam. It’s interesting for me to see that some of the most sympathetic responses are from people who worked with the South Vietnamese military, people who had direct knowledge and spent years working in Southeast Asia.

But the way the US reported their actions in Vietnam, a lot of it is them blowing their own trumpet. They weren’t the only ones who did the fighting – South Vietnam lost more than five times the number of men than the US, something that’s completely forgotten. The official figures, published in some of the US military histories, are even often ignored. The US records go from 1960 to 1974, and they recognise 254,256 South Vietnamese killed in action. That’s already more than five times the number of US killed in action. But they don’t include deaths before 1960 and deaths in 1975, which brings the total number of South Vietnamese killed in action closer to 300,000. One of the major scholars on Vietnam, Neil Jamieson, wrote that this was basically one in nine soldiers killed. Effectively everyone lost a family member – a parent, sibling, spouse, child – and the grief that people dealt with had a massive effect on South Vietnamese society, and it’s compounded when people ignore that.

The aspects of history that people dismiss are always interesting. I have said to students that you can see this in later wars, in some of the comments on Afghanistan, for example, that criticise the Afghans for not fighting. The US forces lost over two thousand people; the Afghans lost over forty thousand people. The same patronising and dismissive tone is used about the South Vietnamese in a way that justifies what eventually happened.

Let’s conclude by turning the focus to diasporic contexts in Australia and other places. To what extent are the conflicts and partitions you’ve mentioned still embedded in the identities of the people and communities that you’ve interviewed?

NN: I think it’s very strong in the older generation. In terms of the overseas diaspora, first of all, you have refugees from all three regions – north, south, and central. That’s one thing. The populations vary depending on the country.

When you look at France, which has had Vietnamese students since the 1920s and several waves of Vietnamese migrants, it’s a very different story. You have Vietnamese communities who have been there for generations, some of whom would have sympathised with the North. Vietnamese from more recent waves post-1975 have a very different profile. And then you have places like Germany where there are two quite distinct Vietnamese communities. One is the post-1975 refugee community that went to West Germany; the other community is made up of the masses of Vietnamese workers sent as labour to Eastern Europe by Socialist Vietnam. There’s some interesting scholarship on the movement of labour in the socialist world: Vietnamese workers who were sent to East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia. There were Vietnamese Communist Party elite who studied in the Soviet military academies in Moscow. So there are whole divisions in that sense.

In Australia, the US, and New Zealand, the bulk of the Vietnamese community dates from post-1975. There were small numbers of students beforehand, but essentially it was all from that point on. The majority of the Australian Vietnamese community would be the refugee community, though I’m sure there are more recent migrants who identify themselves with the current government or the current country. But even many of the people who came under the so-called family reunion policy were essentially linked to the refugee movement.

What were some of the effects of the refugee movement on the local communities in terms of how the latter perceived the war?

NN: France is an interesting case, because there were many French intellectuals who initially opposed American intervention in Vietnam and were sympathetic towards the North. But then after 1975, when they saw what happened, they publicly changed their positions – even Jean-Paul Sartre! Some people got so upset about the human rights abuses in post-war Vietnam, that they got together and tried to do something. Take, for example, an organisation like Un Bateau pour le Vietnam (‘A Boat for Vietnam’), which was founded by Bernard Kouchner, who also founded Médecins Sans Frontières and later Médecins du Monde. They put together a ship called Île de Lumière to go out and rescue Vietnamese boat people.  

It’s quite remarkable that Kouchner and others, recognising what happened after ’75, did something about it. It didn’t happen in the US, where people were curiously silent about the refugee movement and the fact that up to a million people might have lost their lives at sea. The American approach to human rights that’s only concerned when abuses are being committed by US soldiers is very lopsided, and, understandably, a lot of South Vietnamese refugees get very upset about it. They ask, Why is it that you’re prepared to write hundreds of articles about one particular incident because US soldiers were involved, and yet completely silent about all these other deaths that have occurred? Some of the most prominent figures on the French Left didn’t stay silent.

Thank you for being so generous with your thoughts and expertise on this very historic anniversary, Nathalie.

NN: Thank you for your questions. This is the work I do. It’s quite hard at times, because it’s not just academic for me. When I teach students about this history, a lot of it is actually my family history. I’m very open about this fact and I think you need to be, because then people know where you’re coming from, and it explains my own perspective. I’m conscious when I teach that I’m a minority voice presenting a minority view on a minority history … but it’s heartwarming when students come to terms with that. It’s the hidden nature of this history – the fact that it isn’t well-known – that really grips them.