Has leaving Vietnam as refugees impacted what it means to be Vietnamese American?

Vietnamese American politics is a complex and multilayered engagement with United States politics, Cold War history, and ongoing transnational relationships with the homeland. For half a century, anti-Communism has been the dominant community politics for many Vietnamese Americans of the first and second generation, particularly those whose lives were impacted by war and displacement. This political ideology has often erupted in censorship, protest, and violence across many Vietnamese diaspora communities in the United States and around the world.

Vietnamese American anti-Communism can be understood through the frame of Cold War anti-Communism pervading much of American politics in the 1950s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. However, this should not be our only frame of reference, as this community’s politics has been shaped by a particular refugee discourse fraught with tension and irresolution.

More than an ideological opposition to socialism, Vietnamese American anti-Communism must be further placed within historical context. We must understand it as a political discourse emerging from the civil war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam; the evacuation of the South’s urban elites in 1975; the exodus of refugees from the late 1970s to the late 1980s; and the reeducation camp experiences of men and women from the former Republic of Vietnam. These particular historical events frame and help to reinvigorate anti-Communism as a political and cultural movement in and outside the United States.

Historically, many Vietnamese Americans are united through an “imagined community” defined by shared anti-Communist beliefs and expressions, despite their heterogeneity in class, education, region, and religion. This conservatism and pervasive anti-Communism shows up quite visibly today in places like Orange County’s Little Saigon, home to many officers of the former Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), and immigrants sponsored via the Orderly Departure Program from 1979 to 1994, including former political prisoners who served a minimum of three years in Communist reeducation camps.

Their experiences of persecution and imprisonment during wartime by the Việt Cộng and in the postwar years by the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam, have influenced the diasporic community’s politics and its attitude towards mainstream America and Vietnam. A significant percentage of Vietnamese American voters have favored the Republican party, evidenced by the long tradition of support for GOP candidates in local and national races.