Event

Alvin Khiêm Bùi (CUNY, Brooklyn), with commentary by Khoi Nguyen (Penn)

“Vietnamization”, Taiwan's IndoChinese Refugee Camps and the Making of Chinese-Vietnamese Americans

On January 22, 2023, less than 24 hours after the deadliest mass shooting in the history of Los Angeles County, major news sources reported conflicting information about the 72-year old shooter, Huu Can Tran: that he was “an immigrant from China” (CNN) yet “born in Vietnam” (NY Times). Two months later, Ke Huy Quan, who graduated from a high school in the neighboring city of Alhambra, won an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Asian and Asian American netizens and news outlets began to claim and debate whether Quan was Chinese or Vietnamese, with one outlet opting for “Vietnamese-born”.

This talk looks at how Vietnamese, Taiwanese and U.S. policies affected ethnic Chinese first in, and later, from southern Vietnam (“Hoa”) and Hoa reactions to these policies. I first look at the Republic of Vietnam’s “Vietnamization” policies (1955-1975) which attempted to “assimilate” (đồng-hóa/同化) the Hoa as fully-fledged Vietnamese nationals of a new postcolonial nation-state. I then reconstruct Taiwan’s role in the IndoChinese refugee crisis. As a non-UN member state by the peak of the crisis in the late 1970s, Taiwan’s contributions to the IndoChinese refugee crisis are not recorded in UNHCR statistics, which detail the global nature of resettlement (across the “Global North”). Many Hoa resettled in the United States, where their experiences in Vietnam were reconfigured in a new racial/ethnic landscape. By observing one ethnic community over half a century, my talk seeks to transpacificize across Critical Refugee, Southeast Asian, East Asian, Asian American/diasporic, and Cold War studies.

Alvin Khiêm Bùi is Research Fellow at the University of Oregon’s Global Studies Institute’s US-Vietnam Research Center. He will join Brooklyn College, City University of New York as Assistant Professor of History of Asian Peoples in Diaspora in Spring 2025. He received his PhD in History from the University of Washington, Seattle and has published in Asiascape: Digital Asia on Saigonese motorbike YouTubers and their diasporic Vietnamese audiences.

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