Stateside Michigan –
It’s been 50 years since the collapse of the South Vietnamese defense against the Viet Cong led to the reunification of North and South Vietnam under a communist government. The fall of Saigon led to the evacuation of around 125,000 South Vietnamese people who resettled in cities across America, including Kentwood, a suburb about 15 minutes outside of Grand Rapids.
Students and staff at East Kentwood High School are participating in storytelling events this week to mark the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
Art teacher Le Tran and her colleague, social studies teacher Matthew Vriesman, have been working with students who interviewed their own family members about their immigration stories.
Tran said she had been thinking about the 50th anniversary since the start of the school year. She encouraged the students she works with in the Asian Student Union to think of ways to commemorate the occasion. After being approached by a contact at the Grand Rapids Public Museum, the project began to take shape.
This Wednesday, students will take the stage at the museum to share what they learned for an event titled, “GR Stories: This is our home now, 50 years of building community after Saigon.” They will also take part in a second event at the Gerald R. Ford Museum this Saturday.
Christina Le is one of those students. She said she saw the project as an opportunity to connect with her history and parents. While she’d heard some things about her parents’ lives back in Vietnam, they had never really sat down and talked about what it meant for them to immigrate to America.
“It’s not really something you bring up over dinner or something all at once,” Le said. “It was a good way to connect with them and really reconcile that difference and maybe learn about different sides of my parents.”
Le learned that it took her parents years of waiting before they were granted refugee status in the United States. And while they never doubted that immigrating to America would bring more opportunity, doing so meant leaving behind a tightknit family network.
“I remember we’d be stuck on these awkward international calls where my parents were like, ‘Say hi to your relatives,’ and I’d be like, ‘Man, I have no idea who all these people are,’” Le recalled. “But I knew that they were important to my parents because my mom had ended up raising a lot of her younger cousins and siblings.”
Working with students on this project has been personal for Tran. In 1975, a 10-year-old Tran came to America as a refugee from Vietnam with her father and five other siblings.
“I remember coming here and noticing the beauty of the landscapes, and then the silence of the streets,” Tran said. “[It] is not busy and noisy like Vietnam that I’m familiar with. So, it was a totally strange environment for me.”
Her mother, and two other siblings, were unable to evacuate Vietnam with the rest of the family. It would be 10 years before the family was reunited. Tran remembers that the early years after immigration to the U.S. were difficult on her father. He got a job at a paper mill, walking, then biking, to work everyday. Her older brother and sister also got jobs. And after just 11 months in their new home, they were able to purchase a house as a family.
When Tran was 20, her mom and remaining siblings immigrated to the United States. She remembers her parents sharing stories of the difficulties they each faced during the time they were separated.
“We led totally different lives,” Tran said. “Over here, we were enjoying our new life and going forward, and over there, it was just surviving and waiting for a day to come here.”
The stories collected by students will be presented at events on May 7 and May 10 at the Grand Rapids Public Museum and Gerald R. Ford Museum. They will also be preserved in the National Archives.
Hear the full conversation with Le Tran and Christina Le on the Stateside podcast.
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