Viet students at USC meet, talk flags

(I broke this entry into two parts. The background information is in a prior entry here.)

Something funny happened at the forum. Tensions dissolved and a spirit of compromise and accommodation set in as two separate groups of Vietnamese students at the University of Southern California agreed to respect each other’s flag.

That Vietnamese with different opinions can actually work together was something new. You may think Viets working with Viets is only natural, but many will tell you that it really is new.

As Viet Nguyen, USC Associate Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity and a panelist at the forum remarked, “Compromise is not common language in the Vietnamese-American community, when it comes to issues relating to communism.”

Held in a classroom in the VKC building, the forum quickly filled up soon after the doors opened. Sitting on the panel are, from left to right: Jade Agua, Assisistant Director of the Asian Pacific American Student Services and moderator; Vu Nguyen, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and president of VISA; Anthropology Professor Janet Hoskins; the previously mentioned Professor Viet Nguyen; and Chris Tran, an undergraduate Computer Science student and president of VSA.

Among her other research, Professor Hoskins has done considerable work relating to Caodaism, a new universal religion born in French-occupied Vietnam in 1926. Coincidentally, Professor Hoskins showed her documentary film on the religion at Nguoi Viet in February, and was surprised to see protesters out front. She had thought they were protesting her.

VISA is the Vietnamese International Students Association, comprising mostly of students from Vietnam going to USC on a student visa. VSA is the Vietnamese Student Association, mostly Vietnamese-American student. VISA considers the official flag of Vietnam (red with yellow star) to be their flag. VSA advocates for the now-called Vietnamese Heritage and Culture Flag, the flag of former South Vietnam (yellow with three stripes).

The leather jacket in the photo belongs to Thien Giao, reporter for Radio Free Asia’s Vietnamese service, who flew into town just for this. Also covering the forum are a number of Vietnamese-language media: Nguoi Viet daily news, Little Saigon Radio and Viet Tide magazine, SBTN-TV, Little Saigon TV, and Hon Viet TV from Houston.

The forum did start out with a little apprehension on both sides. As VISA’s president Vu Nguyen said, the foreign-exchange students from Vietnam were “concerned that the Vietnamese community is asking to take down our flag.”

Yes, “our flag” he said. While recognizing that all Vietnamese on both sides suffered during the war, Vu Nguyen insisted that the red flag represents all 80 million people of Vietnam. He repeated several times that the red flag “is not the communist flag.” Apprently referring to the hammer and sickle banner, Vu Nguyen said that “communists have their own flag.”

The VSA’s Chris Tran assured the audience that the students at USC were “not asking the university to just take down that flag,” but told everyone, “We feel we as Vietnamese-Americans are not represented by that flag.”

Taking a position that may raise eyebrows in some quarters, Chris Tran said, “If that flag represents you, then we don’t feel it is our place to ask for the university to take it down.”

That one statement defused a lot of tension in the room.

Nonetheless, continued Tran, the red flag that had represented the suffering of their parents, “does not represent us.” Many other cultures are also not represented by the flags outside the VKC, and instead USC flies the banner of the governmental powers that oppress them. Armenia is an example.

Then Tran made a radical proposal: Either fly both flags or take down the entire flag display, “so that there’s no political drama” and not cause any pain to anyone.

That surprised the man to his right, Professor Viet Nguyen, who quickly endorsed the no-flag proposal. “Nations are not homogeneous, and flags cannot represent all the people within the boundaries of that nation-state,” he said.

A question also arose – why the yellow flag in the first place? It’s not any country’s flag any more, and if you’re Vietnamese-American, should you not fly the Stars and Stripes?

Professor Nguyen gave an interesting answer. “There is a precedent for a body of the community, not an official flag of any state or country. That is the POW-MIA flag, flown on flag poles all over the country.”

The Vietnamese-American people’s attachment to South Vietnam’s flag, he said, reflected their frustration that their perspective had been erased. Vietnamese-Americans “bear the tremendous burden that their sacrifice had not been acknowledged in the United States.”

Professor Hoskins agreed. “The feeling that South Vietnam was more or less forgotten is fairly accurate,” she said. She told the story that “Intelligent, well-informed students coming into my classes may be aware of the history of the Vietnam War, but they have no idea of South Vietnam or the Vietnamese-American perspective.”

Even the story of the boat people, a major international preoccupation just two decades ago, is only dimly registered in the conciousness of most Americans. “We may be aware that there are the boat people,” Professor Hoskins said, “but we don’t know the story behind the tragedy. What they went through in Vietnam and why they had to leave.”

A representative from the Union of VSA’s, Phong Ly, stood up and said that “to understand the (yellow) flag, you must understand the suffering of the boat people.” Ly called on Vietnamese-American students to “listen to our parents’ stories, how they were persecuted. To them, they had lost their country, lost everything. The only thing they have left is the flag.”

An interesting observation came from Phuong Nguyen, a graduate student in American Studies. There’s a need for “sensitivity over why the community is so upset,” he said. When the war ended, the new government “destroyed museums, libraries, burned books. There was a concerted campaign to erase the memory of the former South Vietnam.” Phuong Nguyen told the story of his visit to Vietnam, where he observed “an elaborate event put up by the government, bigger than anything anyone ever put up in Little Saigon. This shows how powerful a government is in propping up the history they want.”

In that light, therefore, the community’s attachment to the yellow flag is a “grass root effort to preserve their version of the past.”

OK, so the community has a reason to be attached to the yellow flag. But why should USC care?

Student Diane Watkins Cholakian (left), from the Armenian Student Association, which co-sponsored the forum, said, “The issue is representation. Many cultures in the student body are not represented.” She pointed out that the VKC display does not have the Armenian or the Azerbaijani flag.

The non-representation does not end there. Professor Hoskins pointed out that two important other groups are also absent: The Tibetan students, and the Palestine students. And on the other hand, the Taiwan flag does fly at VKC even though Taiwan is not a country recognized by the United Nations.

What next? Toward the beginning of the forum, the moderator read out the official university position. The flags at VKC, said USC, “represent international students and the university has no intention to make any changes.”

Chris Tran raised VSA’s concern. “Will we have this forum and then nothing happens?”

That feeling was apparently shared by many, but Agua and the Director of the APA Student Services Sumi Pendakur assured the audience that results from the forum will be percolated up the university administration.

There may be space elsewhere in the university, said Agua, for the display of more flags that are more representative of the student body.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Should They Stay Or Should They Go?