Refugee Cultures: Forty Years after the Vietnam War
On 1 October 2015, in the midst of the current Syrian refugee crisis, AJ+ an online news and current events channel produced by the Al Jazeera Media Network, published a video titled "I Was a Boat Person: Vietnamese Refugees Look Back." The three and one half minute video features interviews with several Vietnamese Americans who were refugees of the Vietnam War writers Aimee Phan and Andrew Lam; dean at the City College of San Francisco Minh Hoa; media consultant Sonny Le; and humanitarian Diep Vuong and who attest to making escapes just as dangerous as those of Syrian refugees today. The video makes this parallel between the two refugee groups explicit, juxtaposing footage of Vietnamese boat people with that of Syrian boat people in faded black and white and sepia tones, so that a viewer cannot immediately distinguish between them. Le says: "God, if you look at homes in Aleppo in Syria, Vietnam looked like that after the war." This resemblance in visual signifiers is noted when Minh Hoa says, "When I saw the picture of the little boy on the beach in Turkey, that really brings back lots of sad and horrifying memories." Establishing affinity between these two refugee groups separated by forty years, geography, and entirely different sets of historical and political circumstances, the video appeals to not only shared experiences of suffering but also the moral obligation that state governments, particularly the US government, have to both groups. Phan says: "Whenever I hear that the Vietnamese resettlement was the last global resettlement of its kind, it's frightening because it's not like there are no more refugees. I have this fear that there are millions of people out there who don't have the resources that we benefitted from and that I feel we gave back to." Le makes the political appeal explicit: "If you look today, I mean, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, those people wouldn't have left hadn't it been for regional conflicts of which the US has a hand in." Minh Hoa echoes: "I truly