Lý Diệu Anh was just 6 when she learned of the Vietnam War.
Her parents did their best at the time to explain how her grandfather, who had just migrated to the U.S., was imprisoned in a concentration camp, but it mostly went over her head.
Now, as a 16-year-old, she’s part of the Vietnamese Student Association at her high school in Garden Grove and eager to preserve the culture and history of Vietnam. And for her, that includes keeping the memory of Black April alive.
Fifty years ago, on April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese forces captured the city of Saigon, the capital of then-South Vietnam, ending the war and prompting an exodus of South Vietnamese refugees, including Anh’s parents, to the U.S. It has come to be known as Black April. Many of the refugees eventually settled in Orange County’s Little Saigon, which is home to the largest concentration of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam.
Black April can mean different things to different people, especially depending on the generation. Anh said she’ll be taking part in a special ceremony at her school Wednesday to tie yellow ribbons on a replica model of the USS Midway. The yellow ribbons symbolize the soldiers who died in the war, including Americans.
”We'll have them [the students] write messages to their family members that were lost,” Anh said. “There were at least 2 million people who fled Vietnam, and at least half of them perished in the seas.”
Black April, she said, is a big part of the Vietnamese diaspora’s identity.
“In my family, we talk about it all the time,” she said. “A lot of people in my family worked for the U.S. or they worked in the Southern Vietnamese government. So once Saigon fell ... a lot of their houses and their families were subject to investigations, torture — we had to burn everything in our houses,” she said.
If they don't speak about it, Anh added, what transpired is at risk of being forgotten.
“It's something that we talk about all the time just to maintain it and kind of nurture it,” she said.
Unspoken but not forgotten
Eric Ngo’s family didn’t really discuss that fateful day in Saigon. The now 24-year-old, who serves as president of Union of Vietnamese Student Associations of Southern California, said he learned more about those events in high school. At his home, his grandfather would share relics and stories of the war, but never really delved into the fall of Saigon.
“ I wouldn't be here if it weren't for my family, who suffered through months in refugee camps, crazy amount of days and weeks on a boat on their way to Thailand,” he said. “These stories and these experiences that my family talk to me about growing up are things that I used to continue to push myself to do better as a future physical therapist and a person who's in healthcare.”
The stories of how his family and others reached the U.S., he added, inspires him to achieve the American Dream.
Ngo said he’ll commemorate Black April at the city of Westminster’s annual event at Sid Goldstein Freedom Park.
A story that is more than the war
Tracy La, co-founder and executive director at VietRISE, grew up in San Diego confused — her grandfather, who served in the South Vietnamese military, didn’t want to go back to Vietnam, while her parents raised her to be proud of her Vietnamese culture.
“ We were taught our culture, we were taught about our celebrations, holidays, we were pushed to remember to speak Vietnamese, follow certain traditions at home in the household, certain gender expectations,” she said.
Then, when she moved to Orange County after high school, she started to see her culture in a negative light. She began to see gender expectations as part of the culture. Politicians, she said, weaponized the community’s stories for political gain. And she would watch other Vietnamese people exploit her parents.
A class in college shifted her perspective. It led to her interviewing her father to learn about his trauma — after the Vietnam War, he was drafted to serve in a proxy war in Cambodia before ending up in a Thai refugee camp. She later canvassed during an election cycle, meeting people in the community and learning their stories, which eventually led to her creating VietRISE in 2018.
Black April, or as La calls it, Reunification Day, is an opportunity for intimate conversations with her team about how they can honor the struggles of their parents and grandparents, while also honoring their culture in their own, unique way, she said.
In December, La visited Vietnam for the first time with her parents, who were excited to have the family visit their homeland.
”There were times where I saw a look in my mom's eyes I'd never seen before, but it just made me empathize with her more and have a better understanding of why she is the way she's today,” she said.