Community, History, Refugees, Vietnam

DVAN in France

January 13, 2020

By Isabelle Thuy Pelaud

Thi Bui conducting an interview with Dante in Moria village. Dante is a refugee from Afghanistan, born in Iran to parents who fled war in Afghanistan when they were younger than him. Photo courtesy of Thi Bui (6/26/19).

Thi Bui conducting an interview with Dante in Moria village. Dante is a refugee from Afghanistan, born in Iran to parents who fled war in Afghanistan when they were younger than him. Photo courtesy of Thi Bui (6/26/19).

Are stories and poetry by diasporic Vietnamese writers relevant to today’s refugee crisis and surge of nationalism in the West? It is in part to answer this question, that DVAN is organizing a Writers Retreat in France for eleven diasporic Vietnamese writers that reside in France, Germany, Israel, the U.S. and Vietnam this summer (June 15-25)*. Attending will be Viet Thanh Nguyen, Anna Moï, Doan Bui, Hoai Nguyen Aubert, Vaan Nguyen, Nguyen Qui Duc, Pham Thi Hoai, Anh-Thuan Doan, Angie Chau, Aimee Pham and Dao Strom. This retreat will take place in a beautiful manor located in the small village of Vezelay, a medieval village in the heart of Burgundy known for its UNESCO classified basilica and wine patrimony. We are inviting these writers to work on their writing and engage in dialogues meaningful to them and to the society they live in, which we will published in an anthology titled Dialogues Across Borders. The retreat will conclude with panel discussions at the Mediatheque Melville in Paris on June 27. This public event is organized in collaboration with French Vietnamese organization ICIVietnam.

To prepare for this retreat, I went to France last summer. To learn more about the refugee situation in Europe, I visited graphic novelist Thi Bui in Lesvos, a Greek island that has become a transit site for refugees and displaced people from 58 nations. Thi Bui was interviewing refugees for over a month, for her next book Nowhereland. This new book, she explained, argues “against borders and the unjust treatment of people who are migrating to get to a better life.”  As we sat on top of the roof of her apartment overlooking an unkept garden, Thi exclaimed: “The world has even more refugees now than in the middle of the Vietnamese exodus, even more than after World War II. How can this be possible?”

I knew about the refugee crisis in Europe, but as I listened to her report, I was taken aback by its scope. I did not know that over 70.8 million people are forcibly displaced today, twice the level of 20 years ago (and this is not taking into account Venezuela)! Post-colonial legacies, wars, domestic conflicts, globalization, and climate change have increased these numbers at an unprecedented rate. Last year alone, 2.3 million people risked their lives to escape their country. In 2015 and 2016, more than 1.2 million people registered for asylum in EU member states.  These numbers are absolutely mind-boggling.

As I witnessed Thi interviewing refugees and listened to her passionate discussions, I could not help but think of the Vietnamese refugees of forty years ago in the U.S.. In the 1980’s, about one million Vietnamese were sent to reeducation camps or to new economic zones. In Syria, more than 500,000 people died, and half of the population was displaced after 7 years of conflict. About 75,000 Syrians have been arrested by their government and are missing. After the Vietnam war ended, 200 000 Vietnamese died in the Pacific. Since the early 1990s, 2000 migrants died in the Mediterranean sea (see Doan Bui’s “Boat People: The dead in the Sea” in l’Observateur, 2014).

Soon after our discussion, Thi made arrangements so that I could speak with the UNHCR Assistant Liaison Officer Theodoriss Alexellis. I was surprised to hear from him about the high number of children in the camps in Lesvos. At first, the majority of those arriving on the coast were men, Theodoriss said. Now, 40% are children. Like Vietnamese children who left by boat on the Pacific in the 1980s, these children are at times not told where they are going when they leave Turkey, or why they left home. Some are told they are on vacation (See Doan Bui’s “Touristes et Migrants, Les Visiteurs de Kos”, 2015). 16% of these children are unaccompanied. According to Theodoris, they are the ones most at risk, vulnerable to gangs and sexual violence. They cannot receive a formal education until they leave the island (up to a year). Unlike adults who receive a meager stipend (90 euros a month for men and 80 euros a month for women), children, camp volunteer Lexine Alpert told me, are only given bread and a glass of milk for breakfast, uncooked rice and chicken in a small packet for lunch and one boiled egg for dinner. Children have been seen using drugs inside the camps, she added. Stories of refugee children reminded me of children held in cages and separated from their families on the Mexican border. When I was in college, I was taught that refugees vote with their feet. There were hardly any discussions then of refugee children sent away alone or forcefully separated from families. The common association made between modernity and progress is fraught.

When I returned to Paris to fly back to the U.S. where I live, I met with journalist and writer Doan Bui (author of The Silence of my Father). She reminded me that during the Cold War, the enemy in Europe was the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Refugee policies in the U.S. and France accepted refugees to highlight human rights violations caused by Communism. Afterwards the Berlin Wall fell, refugees continued to flee persecution, but more countries closed their doors to them. It is no coincidence that in the late 1970s, France upheld the ship “l’Île de Lumière” who picked up tens of thousands of boat people in the China sea as a humanitarian symbol, and that last year, ship Aquarius Dignitus lost the authorization to rescue refugees in the Mediterranean sea.

Today, the U.S. is receiving 85% fewer refugees than in the late 1970s. Doan sent me articles she wrote in which she compared Vietnamese refugees to current refugees in Europe. There have been times, she writes, “when people from Syria, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and other countries, sank their boats close enough to the coast in order to be rescued.'' Some she writes, make it and some don’t. What are left then are objects and body parts; sometimes few bodies make it to shore. Thi sent me a photo she took of discarded vests. They tell stories of their own. Orange life vest jackets are from Syrians, while the black ones, which fall apart and at times do not even float, are from Afghans.

Lifevest Mountain. Photo courtesy of Thi Bui (6/26/19). For more on this, see Doan Bui’s “A Lesbos: Le Photographe et l’Enfant Mort”, 2015.

Lifevest Mountain. Photo courtesy of Thi Bui (6/26/19). For more on this, see Doan Bui’s “A Lesbos: Le Photographe et l’Enfant Mort”, 2015.

Europe is tearing itself apart in large due to this refugee crisis. As it was the case for Vietnamese boat people in the 1980s, compassion fatigue toward them is rampant. European countries established quotas on the number of refugees they can accept, and have forced Greece since 2016 (because of its large debt to the EU), to process refugees and asylum seekers. Displaced people were expected to be sent back to Turkey when their applications were declined (in exchange for Turkey’s cooperation, the EU has agreed to speed up negotiations on Turkey’s EU membership). This plan did not work according to plan however, and hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers are now trapped in Athens, their visible presence the locus of agitation of the extreme right movements.

Before going to Lesvos, I stayed in a nearby island called Ikaria to write my family story. There, I met a tourist from Austria who expressed fear and great concerns about the large number of refugees that in his words, were “flooding” Austria to take advantage of their resources at the expense of locals. I wished I knew then that countries that accept the larger number of refugees are poor, and for the most part, not European countries. In 2017, the ten countries that hosted the most refugees, Thi told me, were Turkey (which accepted 3,480,348 refugees); Pakistan (1,393,143); Uganda (1,350,504); Lebanon (998,890); Iran (979,435); Germany (970,365); Bangladesh (932,216); Sudan (906,599); Ethiopia (889,412); and Jordan (691,023). There is something terribly humbling and revelatory to these numbers. And Austria is not on this list. Volunteer Lexine Alpert said that refugees specifically state that they do not want to go to Austria.

Forty years ago, Vietnamese refugees were accused too of being economic migrants that came to the U.S. to take advantage of the welfare system. A dispersal policy was put in place to spread Vietnamese across the country so that they would not create ethnic enclaves of people of color like Cubans in Miami, and not dry up the welfare system of one state. The policy was also designed so as not to remind people of a war America had just lost.  Once dispersed all over the country, Vietnamese refugees were supposed to be invisible, and with this invisibility they will be rendered silent, and their perspectives would be lost. This policy too did not work according to plan, as many refugees ended up moving on their own accord. Vietnamese were not seen as the “good” model minority then. On the contrary, media coverage of Vietnamese gang activities and the accusation that refugee were economic migrants taking advantage of the American welfare system was rampant in the mid-1980s. In response to the recurring accusations that refugees are economic migrants in Europe, UNHCR Liaison Officer Theodoris Alexellis exclaimed: “People would not leave everything they know, travel for miles and risk their lives and those of their children if they did not have to!” (interview 6/24/19). One ought to remember that like refugees in Europe today, many Vietnamese refugees of forty years ago too where not seen as possessing the biological attributes necessary to assimilate in the West.

Thi was clearly moved by what she saw, heard and learned on Lesvos. She is compelled to do something about it and is determined to use her inner fire and her talent as an artist to fight the compassion fatigue and racism that fuel refugee narratives, and by extension policies and attitudes toward refugees. I asked Thi right before I left the island, what she personally got out of her work. She responded: 

It made me have more empathy toward my parents to speak to people who just came through some of the things that they went through. You are so disadvantaged when you are a refugee, you are treated like a beggar, you are treated like you do not deserve anything; so any small thing people give you, you must be grateful for. So you are reduced to only being able to ask for basic things like food, a blanket, somewhere to live, and maybe a little bit of health care. And you are supposed to be grateful for it. You are just trying to survive, you have to accept this. You are in a position of need. My parents had to do this, and in the process they had to shut down so many parts of themselves to be able to endure it. It takes much more than basic things to be a human being, and be a happy human being. So as their child, when one wants to express oneself as an individual, this is such a luxury, it is difficult for them to understand. I could continue talking about intergenerational trauma and the pain of being the child of a survivor, or I can reignite my empathy for my parents in this moment. I can shift half of my worry to help people have their needs met, instead of making it all about myself.

On this European trip, I heard people talk about South Asians who voted for Brexit to shut the immigration door behind them. I am sorry but our families did not go through everything we’ve gone through so that we lose our empathy and humanity.

A few days before I left the island, Thi arranged for me to speak with a young refugee from Congo whose boat sank a few days before. He and the rest of the passengers were in the water for over an hour. Seven people around him died. Next to him was his sister-in-law, her eyes were glazed and fixed on the ground, uneasy. When I introduced myself as half Vietnamese, he looked up and smiled, and said that in 50 years, his soon-to-be-born child may have the same wonderful life that I have now. This was a misunderstanding because my mother was not a refugee, but when I relayed the story to Thi, she said she received a similar reaction when she talked to refugees.

She said:

It is humbling, what I have is such a gift, our lives, even imperfect as they are, we are living their wildest dreams…What I want to preserve in Vietnamese people who have gone through the refugee experience, is we hold the gift in a way; we managed to survive, we have the gift of perspective. Having gone through deprivation and displacement, we should understand what it feels like, and understand what people need who are going through that. If we pretend that we do not understand, then we shut down our own humanity.

I agree with Thi. I am now reminded of another tourist I met in Ikaria, from Italy. This man introduced himself as a medical anthropologist who trains medical doctors to work with refugees with PTSD, a term that was created to address the mental hurt American G.I.s, coming back from the Vietnam War, experienced. What is most important, he said, was to help refugees reframe the narrative they carry. By using rituals from the culture refugees comes from, he tells them that they are not victims, but rather, experts of their experiences. This shift of narrative, he explained, was central to their ability to heal. I can see this. Thi is using her perspective as an expert of her family experience to positively impact the world around her. She heals through empathy.

What is the role and place of the diasporic Vietnamese intellectuals and artists in society? Is it to represent the community or be free from the obligations to represent? But if freedom is tied to the very story we have in our head and can be reframed, could this question be too narrow, too simplistic in a way. I asked Thi how she saw her role as a Vietnamese American writer. She answered:

My identity is not wrapped up in the idea of being a writer. I see myself as a human being that knows how to do a couple things better than others. I can write and I can do other things.  I got lucky and got to be a writer. And now that people are giving me the microphone, I can use it to help people, or think who can I pass this microphone to? It is such a joy ride right now. This is all very new. I was an educator for a decade, and it is only a few years ago that I started to call myself a writer. It is freeing.

This may be where freedom lies then, somewhere between the capacity to move out of oneself and in Thi’s case, the ability to turn one’s suffering into a tool of social change. For her freedom is about finding a purpose and the courage to open one’s heart toward the plight of others. The process of becoming free starts with listening.

As I am preparing for the DVAN’s retreat in France this coming summer, this work is becoming more personal. France is the country where I grew up being called Chinese—in a bad way. I teach about the impact racism has on Asian Americans in the U.S. in part because I can relate so well to older Asian Americans who experienced such intense racism in the late 60s and 70s. The French Vietnamese community is divided along politics and class lines, between those who immigrated in the first half of the 20th century as workers and students, and those who arrived as refugees after 1975. They live in different neighborhoods, attend different churches and temples, go to different events. To break class and race barriers is extremely difficult there. I hope that after our residency, members of both communities will attend the panel discussions in Paris; and that writers from different immigration histories will be open to productive dialogues with each other and with the audience.  Some are children of former enemies. It does not escape me that this first of its kind gathering is made possible in large because DVAN co-founder Viet Nguyen is choosing to use his celebrity status, financial resources and time to support other diasporic Vietnamese writers, regardless of class, gender, sexuality and migration history. It comes from a place of empathy, something which is at the very core of DVAN. For the panel discussions in Paris, I foresee asking writers how they relate to this current crisis in Europe, and how they see their role as creative intellectuals in their respective societies. I want to ask them if they always feel free to express themselves as they wish in their perspective country. I’d like to know what freedom means to them. Mostly, I want to create spaces whereby stories and poetry by children of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants illuminate and complicate current discourses on race or immigration. I believe that to be able to engage in dialogues and speak to power reflectively and without fear is both healing and necessary.

If you have questions you wish for DVAN to ask these writers at the public event in Paris, please share them here.

*This Residency is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Surdna Foundation, as well as DVAN Honorary members Jade Vu Henry and Ly Tran, and Gold Sponsors Julien Nguyen and anonymous donor.

About the Authors:

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is Professor in Asian American Studies at SF State University, and Director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). She is the author of This is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (Temple University Press, 2011) and Co-Editor of the award-winning Troubling Borders: an Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora (University of Washington Press, 2014).

Thi Bui is a cartoonist, whose debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, March 2017) received an American Book Award, was a National Book Critics Circle and Eisner finalist, and been selected as a Common Book for UCLA and several other colleges and universities, and an all-city read by Seattle and San Francisco Public Libraries.  She is the illustrator of A Different Pond, a children’s book by Bao Phi (Capstone, August 2017). Thi teaches in the MFA program in Comics at the California College of the Arts.

Comments:

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Nguyen qui Duc

January 30, 2020 • 6:56 PM

Many thanks, Isabelle. Gand Thi and Viet).

Quế Mai

February 5, 2020 • 6:36 PM

This article brought tears to my eyes. I work with Afghan refugees in Jakarta and I experience personally their struggles. The world indeed needs more love and empathy. Isabelle and Thi: you are strong women with wonderful voices and such compassion, I am so honored to know you and I admire you work.

Frieda Orbach

March 12, 2020 • 9:06 PM

When we inform ourselves about refugee “crisis”, we think about it in terms of numbers. I think its far more, if not equal, to read anecdotes about the people in these refugee situations. It not only allows us to connect with people more, but it also humanizes their stories and the lives. Writers like you are critical in connecting people in this way.

Ryan Phung

March 12, 2020 • 11:27 PM

I got chills reading this inspiring piece.
“I could continue talking about intergenerational trauma and the pain of being the child of a survivor, or I can reignite my empathy for my parents in this moment. I can shift half of my worry to help people have their needs met, instead of making it all about myself.”
I feel like this for me is a reminder that writing can be a form of activism, of not just self-discovery and self-reflection but of social change as well. The anecdotes about how the refugees hope their children can have the wonderful life that you have now is a reaffirmation that we shouldn’t just use our privilege to write about our parents, but to write for them and to use writing as a means of advocating for people with similar experiences to them.

Tsung Wei Chao

March 17, 2020 • 11:28 AM

It was really eye opening to read this piece and consider the experiences of French Vietnamese. Given how divided they are in France, I wonder what would it take for them to build bridges with each other? Also, I really admire what the DVAN is accomplishing. Raising discussions to link the past and the present together, and work towards a better future.

Haneen Mohamed

March 17, 2020 • 6:59 PM

This was a very telling and very interesting piece to read. It is sorrowful to grasp just how much institutional violence refugees face at national borders, no matter where in the world. What struck me was the idea of “compassion fatigue”, or the idea that Europeans believe in fact that there can be such thing as ‘too much compassion’.  I find this interesting because it seems that Europe and the U.S mistake the basic (but conditional) human decency they provide to refugees (fleeing countries they destabilized) as acts of profound compassion and benevolence. I appreciated that you discussed the struggles of refugees from a rich global perspective.

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