CYPRESS, Calif. — Thirty- four years after tanks smashed through the gates of Saigon’s Presidential Palace, marking a symbolic end to the Vietnam War, the bitter memories still burn among many of the refugees who live in Orange County’s Little Saigon.
As decades passed and the memories of war fade with many Americans, community leaders in the largest Vietnamese enclave in the U.S. want to remind a new generation of the suffering and hardship that took shape on a day they still call “Black Friday.” Some in the community worry that younger Vietnamese — fully Westernized and many reconciled with the Vietnam of today — will forget why their parents and grandparents fled their homeland, that the memories of the communist takeover will slowly dissolve.
Somber moments
To serve as a reminder, a group of community leaders is staging a photo exhibit at Cypress College that captures somber moments — the helicopters lifting people to waiting aircraft carriers, the desperation of the so-called boat people trying to float to freedom, a man dressed in the South Vietnamese military uniform paying respects at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington.
The exhibit, which opened last week, comes on the heels of a controversial exhibit the college hosted in February by Brian Doan, a local Vietnamese- American photographer whose photo of a girl posing with the official flag of Vietnam and a bust of former communist leader Ho Chi Minh was protested as being propaganda and deeply offensive. Doan argued he was exercising the very freedom that Vietnamese sought when they came to America.
Campus officials refused to remove the art but invited community leaders to organize their own exhibit on campus to teach students about the history of Vietnamese refugees.
“I feel saddened that many people do not know about April 30,” said Lac Tan Nguyen, president of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, who organized the exhibit. “They don’t know until they listen to us or hear our stories. A lot of people don’t understand why we protest and why we feel hurt every time we see the communist symbol.”
Memories too painful
Nguyen said it has been difficult to pass along stories about the history of the war because there is no natural forum and, for some, the memories are still too painful to share. When the war ended, thousands of former South Vietnamese soldiers and government officials were forced into “re-education camps” or fled the communist government by boat, some perishing at sea.
The photo exhibit, which includes discussions by several refugees, is unique because organizers are reaching outside the sympathetic confines of Little Saigon, home to about 150,000 Vietnamese-Americans.
Here, 3 square miles of noodle shops and banh mi stores are spread through Westminster, Garden Grove, Fountain Valley and Santa Ana.
Dozens of yellow- and red-striped flags of the fallen South Vietnam hang on lampposts, and there is a statue honoring U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers near Westminster city hall. Street protests still erupt anytime someone is suspected of being sympathetic to the communist government.
