Remembering South Vietnam

In her 2010 memoir Tales from a Mountain City, Quynh Dao – who was 15 at the fall of Saigon in 1975 – describes returning to Dalat, a city in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, at the end of the war. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had looted her family’s home and made bonfires of their books and magazines: 

There were hundreds of issues of Life magazine, Paris-Match, Reader’s Digest, father’s lifetime collection of books, the comics we children read … the simmering fire devoured the pages slowly, surely, from the edges of the pages to the spines. 

A few weeks later, the NVA evicted Dao’s family. Escaping Vietnam by boat in 1979, Dao fled to a refugee camp in Malaysia, and then to Australia as one of millions of ‘boat people’. By then, South Vietnam, the country in which she had been born and raised, no longer existed.

The misperception that the Vietnam War was fought between Vietnam and the US largely persists. But there were two Vietnams: the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), each with allies drawn along Cold War divisions. As of 31 January 1975, South Vietnam was recognised by 95 countries, while North Vietnam was recognised by 65. Official US figures record 254,256 South Vietnamese killed and 783,602 wounded in action during the war, more than five times the number of US casualties. As these statistics only cover 1960 to 1974, the true figure is surely much higher. South Vietnam had by far the highest casualty rate of all the allies but this fact is now often forgotten – along with the very existence of the country itself.

Burning books

For the historian of South Vietnam, texts and documents are a problem. One of the first acts after the fall of Saigon in 1975 was the burning of books at the Khai Tri publishing house in Le Loi street in Saigon, as the communist authorities targeted publishers, educational institutions, and bookshops in the former South. The Catholic priest André Gelinas reported that many of the 80,000 books held at the Alexander of Rhodes Centre in Saigon were burned between 1975 and 1977. Boi Tran Huynh, the daughter of the owners of South Vietnam’s second largest bookshop in Bien Hoa, recalled how:

After 1975, all the books were confiscated and taken away by the government, including all the textbooks of biology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, all the dictionaries and you know things that are not ideological. Mathematics is mathematics whether you’re communist or capitalist, Russian or American. They came in trucks and took everything away.

Some 400 South Vietnamese writers, poets, and journalists were sent to re-education camps in June 1975. Books and journals that were judged to be reactionary were banned on 20 August with the lengthy list of banned works further expanded in March 1976 and May 1977.

But the destruction was not only carried out by the communist authorities. Many South Vietnamese households burned, destroyed, or otherwise disposed of photographs and documents in an attempt to hide their identities. In his essay collection Perfume Dreams, the Vietnamese-American writer Andrew Lam (whose father was a general in the South Vietnamese military) recalls how, aged 11, he followed his mother’s instructions to remove ‘pictures from album pages, diplomas from glass frames, film reels from metal canisters, letters from desk drawers’ before setting them on fire. By the time he had finished, ‘the mementoes of three generations had turned into ashes’.

Refugees

The loss of photographs, identity papers, letters, and other memorabilia was compounded by the refugee exodus in the two decades after the war. The movement was one of the most visible mass migrations of the late 20th century. A 1990 report prepared by Stephen Denney for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights noted that

6.5 million people in the former South were compromised due to their family associations. After the war, one million people were interned in re-education camps, another million were forcibly sent to ‘New Economic Zones’ in previously uninhabited rural areas, while free speech and movement were curtailed. The postwar authorities discriminated against three defined groups: those who were associated with the former South Vietnamese government; the ethnic Chinese (who, from 1976, were forced to register as such); and Amerasians, the children of Vietnamese women and American personnel.

More than two million people left Vietnam in the two decades after the war, and the plight of the boat people received global coverage. The international response was unprecedented, involving major conferences held at the UN in Geneva in 1979 and 1989, and the resettlement of South Vietnamese refugees in 50 countries worldwide. The UN recorded 839,228 Vietnamese arrivals at camps operated by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees between 1975 and 1997, though this number does not include the 134,000 who were evacuated to the US in 1975, the 263,000 who fled to the People’s Republic of China in 1978-79, and the 623,509 who left under the Orderly Departure Program in 1979-97.

Most refugees left Vietnam without documentation. Many drowned in the Mekong delta while attempting to reach the coast. People who lived in riverine and coastal communities in southern Vietnam described floating corpses washing up on riverbanks or beaches in the postwar years. Most were those of women and children, and, as they carried no identity papers, their families could not be notified. They were buried in unmarked graves.

Escapes from Vietnam were arranged in secrecy because people did not want to draw the attention of the authorities or implicate family members. Alongside these escapes were government-sponsored departures in which the new Vietnamese government was involved with overseas crime syndicates in organising the trafficking of refugees, charging them an average of $2,000 in gold and confiscating their houses and goods. This semi-official means of escape was a form of state-sanctioned expulsion. Refugees were promised safe passage, but most drowned. The total number of refugee deaths remains unknown, but most estimates suggest that 500,000 people died at sea. Many boat people believe that for every boat that made it, one did not and that one million people perished in the South China Sea.

In memoriam

The death toll of the exodus, the disappearance of so many, and the absence of human remains have led to ambiguous and unresolved forms of grieving and mourning in the Vietnamese diaspora. Nothing now remains of the great network of camps that provided refuge to millions of Indochinese refugees in the postwar years, with the exception of Galang Refugee Camp in Indonesia’s Riau archipelago and the ruins of Bidong Refugee Camp in Malaysia. Memorials to the camps were unveiled in both Galang and Bidong in 2005. Both memorials bore the same inscription commemorating the boat people ‘who perished on the way to freedom’ and were the product of fund-raising efforts by the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia, North America, and Europe. Designed by the Archive of Vietnamese Boat People in Melbourne, and carved by Indonesian stonecutters, the memorials resembled large tombstones. However, after the Hanoi government complained that the memorials ‘denigrated the dignity of Vietnam’, both the Indonesian and Malaysian governments yielded and ordered their destruction. Despite protests, the Bidong memorial was destroyed in October 2005 and the Galang memorial was removed by 2008.

Oral history

The story of these memorials demonstrates a tangible effort by the South Vietnamese diaspora to remember, while their destruction shows that the Vietnamese state remains sensitive about the memory of South Vietnam and its refugees. But South Vietnam has a huge, global diaspora – one that is increasingly engaged in the memory of the war. While the destruction of cultural artefacts means that much was lost during the postwar years, new oral history archives are being created. In the US collections such as ‘Viet Stories: Vietnamese American Oral History Project’ at the University of California and the Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation oral history interview collection at Rice University contain hundreds of oral testimonies. In Australia, oral history projects on Vietnamese veterans and the second generation of Vietnamese Australians created in 2013-14 and 2018-22 are preserved in the National Library of Australia. They include an account by Nguyen Van Luyen, who was a 22-year-old armour officer when he was badly wounded in action in 1974. Interviewed in 2013, he remembered: ‘We were fighting in bad conditions, with no help … I am proud of what we did because we still fought on, we only stopped when we were ordered to do so by President Duong Van Minh.’ Vu Van Bao, a Chinook pilot who had just turned 27 when the war ended, recalled how: ‘We, the South, we just defended ourselves. We did not go up to the North. We were fighting but also building our country.’ Thanh, who did not want to be identified by her full name, is a former captain in the Women’s Armed Forces Corps. ‘Each year, I return to Vietnam to visit invalid soldier brothers that have and are still living in extreme hardship in our home country’, she stated. ‘These are people who have lost a part of their bodies on the battlefield … I always think of my native land … It is the pain that makes you remember.’

Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen is Professor of History at Monash University. Her books include South Vietnamese Soldiers: Memories of the Vietnam War and After (Bloomsbury, 2024).