The Vietnam War (1954–1975) ended half a century ago with the fall of Sài Gòn on April 30, 1975. It was a momentous event that abruptly concluded an era in Vietnamese history. Decades of fighting suddenly ground to a halt, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) ceased to exist, and the country was reunified after twenty years of territorial partition. Former enemies regarded each other with wariness and curiosity as they contemplated the reality of coexistence. What did the arrival of peace mean for a deeply divided country? Would former opponents reconcile, or would wartime animosities fester despite formal reunification?
On the fiftieth anniversary of the close of the conflict, we offer thirteen original translations of songs, memoirs, and fiction that illuminate Vietnamese experiences of the war’s end and its aftermath. The accounts reflect a wide range of political perspectives, from ardent anti-communism to committed communism, and highlight the enduring partisan differences that divided many Vietnamese long after the war. At the same time, the pieces emphasize shared sentiments and experiences, such as the yearning for peace and reunion, the pain of separation from loved ones, the ache of homesickness and dislocation, and the difficulty of overcoming differences. Together, these translations depict the coming of peace as an experience that was simultaneously collective and partisan.
Even at the very moment of national reunification, shared sentiments largely failed to transcend political differences. Instead, it was partisan affiliation that shaped how many Vietnamese experienced the end of the war, and the year 1975 held profoundly different meanings for various factions, as the translations included in this issue reveal. The fall of Sài Gòn was a joyous victory for supporters of the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam) and the communist-led National Liberation Front (NLF). Military success vindicated their long years of hardship, and celebrations spontaneously erupted in North Vietnam and rural areas formerly controlled by South Vietnam. Soldiers, guerillas, and their families looked forward to happy, triumphant homecomings, and southern peasants who had borne the brunt of the war in the countryside welcomed the liberation. Neutralists shared in the happiness too. These South Vietnamese peace activists and intellectuals had opposed the RVN’s war against communism and agitated for a negotiated peace. Now, they were eager to mediate a national reconciliation and rebuild their war-torn homeland. In contrast, the end of the war was a painful defeat for Vietnamese who supported the RVN. They sank into despair and feared political retribution at the hands of the enemy. Some decided to flee rather than risk an uncertain future under communist rule; others stayed, by choice or by circumstance, and adopted a cautious “wait and see” attitude. As the contrasting responses indicate, the end of the fighting highlighted partisan divisions rather than erasing them.
Political cleavages arguably grew wider in the aftermath of the conflict, as the communist leadership pushed through a coercive process of national reunification. Three different Vietnamese belligerents had fought over Vietnam during the war—the DRV, the NLF, and the RVN—and the first two had endorsed a plan for gradual reunification that would take place over a dozen years or more. But the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) discarded the plan following the fall of Sài Gòn. Instead, the DRV, which soon renamed itself the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), insisted that the entire country should be immediately placed under a single, unitary regime and proceeded to disband the NLF. The party awarded the most powerful positions in the postwar regime to North Vietnamese communists, while sidelining noncommunist leaders of the NLF and stalwart southern party members.1 With their sacrifices forgotten and their contributions ignored, southern revolutionaries felt neglected by the regime. The SRV also cast aside the neutralists, considering them suspicious for their failure to join the party, and the southern peace activists felt betrayed by their erstwhile allies. Far from uniting the population, the SRV’s divisive policies deepened differences, and the process of national reunion proved deeply troubling to many would-be supporters of the government in the southern half of the country.
The SRV was harshest toward its vanquished foe. The authorities accused former military officers, government officials, and anti-communist intellectuals of the fallen republic of committing political crimes and imprisoned them in so-called reeducation camps [trại cải tạo]. Detainees endured terrible conditions in the camps and often served indefinite sentences. The SRV further punished elites of the old regime by pushing them to the bottom of the new social order. The authorities instituted a system of classification based on family background [lý lịch gia đình]. A “good” background indicated that one’s family was once lower class or had supported the NLF or the DRV, but a “bad” background meant that one’s family was formerly prosperous or had supported the RVN. The party gave priority to Vietnamese from good backgrounds for government jobs and admissions to university while discriminating against those from bad backgrounds.
Other policies sought to erase all vestiges of the RVN’s civil society, culture, and economy. The communists dissolved organizations and political parties that had been active under the RVN, scrapped the republic’s educational curriculum, and banned music and literature from before 1975. The freewheeling capitalism of the RVN was another target, and the postwar government abolished private businesses and imposed a state monopoly on food and essential commodities. The abrupt shift to a command economy caused severe shortages and drove countless middle- and upper-class families into poverty. Faced with repression and hardship, many former citizens of the RVN came to believe that their best hope was to escape the country. In the two decades following the conclusion of hostilities, hundreds of thousands fled Vietnam and resettled permanently in the West.2 The postwar migrants and the evacuees who left in 1975 formed a refugee diaspora that identified with the fallen republic.
Unsurprisingly, partisans of the RVN experienced the aftermath of the war as a time of separation and rupture rather than reunion. Refugees who had resettled abroad wondered if they would ever set foot in their homeland again; prisoners feared that they would never be reunited with their families; and family members longed for news of their absent loved ones. Well-off supporters of the old regime remembered the fall of Sài Gòn as the turning point in their fortunes, when they suddenly lost wealth and social standing. They yearned for their old lives but felt cut off from the past, forbidden even to listen to the songs and read the books that reminded them of happier times.
Many families in urban South Vietnam were of mixed political composition, and the troubled process of national reunification proved especially difficult for them. Some families were divided between anti-communists, neutralists, and partisans of the NLF. Others included southern regroupees: that is, Vietnamese communists from South Vietnam who had gone north in 1954 to join the DRV when the country was partitioned. Still others included northern émigrés, meaning migrants from North Vietnam who had traveled in the opposite direction in 1954 to avoid living under communist rule. After the fall of Sài Gòn, NLF partisans and southern regroupees returned to their families, and some North Vietnamese came south to visit long-lost relatives. Yet the reunions could prove awkward and tense. Spouses reunited only to discover that one or both had remarried and started second families, and children struggled to bond with parents and half-siblings that they met for the first time. Physical distance and wartime antagonism had weakened familial bonds, and many reunited families found themselves divided by distrust.
Reunion could be bittersweet even for the victors and their families. Unlike servicemen who served in the RVN, North Vietnamese soldiers fought farther away from home and often could not visit their families during the entirety of their service. After the war, they returned to transformed landscapes and altered families. American bombing had destroyed familiar landmarks, elderly parents had passed away, spouses awkwardly became reacquainted with each other, and childhood sweethearts had married other people. Moreover, soldiers found that the war had irrevocably changed them, and they felt haunted by the memory of deceased comrades and war trauma. Thus, for the conflict’s winners as well as its losers, the cessation of hostilities did not reliably usher in the uncomplicated peace and reunion that was the dream of every war-weary Vietnamese.
The End of the Vietnam War in the Existing Literature
Over the last half century, non-Vietnamese scholars of the Vietnam War have dedicated most of their research examining America’s role in the conflict, rarely shining the spotlight on the Vietnamese who participated. Even less attention has been devoted to the role of South Vietnamese combatants.
Since around the turn of the twentieth century, a handful of important new studies have begun to reexamine South Vietnam in its own right. These works study the young republic as a quickly evolving postcolonial nation, legitimate as any other, grappling with long decades of war and the challenges of building a representative form of government.3 A younger generation of scholars is now also studying the institutions, the culture, the ideas, and the citizens who shaped the budding republic.
Though the principal figures and aspirations that shored up the South Vietnamese state are now clearer than before, few scholarly works have provided a full account of its last days. Lumbering tanks at the Presidential Palace, helicopters full of evacuees, desperate men braving the high seas—these images of Sài Gòn’s final hours have since become iconic. But those who wish to understand the critical historical dynamics of the war’s denouement have only a handful of publications to turn to. Some were penned by American policymakers, most were written by journalists who stayed to the last, and virtually all saw print in the 1970s–1980s.
The best-known work on Sài Gòn’s fall may be Frank Snepp’s controversial memoir Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End Told by the CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam.4 A tale of American incompetence, the memoir has been called Snepp’s “brave unburdening.”5 For the chief analyst of North Vietnamese strategy who spent over four years in Vietnam running the CIA’s informant networks, the folly of American policy lay in its flawed intelligence system. According to Snepp, high-ranking Americans failed to finalize an evacuation plan and held out hope for a last-minute settlement mediated by China and the Soviet Union. None was to be had. When this became apparent, American officials found themselves dashing for the choppers amid communist air and artillery assault, leaving behind thousands of South Vietnamese who had been on their payroll.
Outside the decision-making circle, American journalists who witnessed the fall have recounted, scene by scene, how North Vietnamese forces took out the nerve centers of the capital. In The Fall of Saigon: Scenes from the Sudden End of a Long War (1985), David Butler, then a stringer for NBC radio, describes the RVN’s last fifty-five days, beginning with North Vietnam’s attack on ARVN troop positions in the Central Highlands.6 He draws on interviews and previously published accounts to recreate the final moments of the war—cable traffic between Ambassador Graham Martin and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; Dương Văn Minh’s last-ditch attempt to broker a ceasefire; and young embassy officials rushing Saigonese onto helicopters as the city’s defenses crumbled.
International newsmen who made Sài Gòn their home have also published accounts of the fall. The Florentine Tiziano Terzani was the first Western reporter to tour the Mekong Delta provinces, where South Vietnamese garrisons fought to the end, and to visit Hà Nội after April 30.7 The stories he collected would later make up Giai Phong! The Fall and Liberation of Saigon (1976), which provides a glimpse into Hà Nội’s earliest attempt to turn Saigonese into “revolutionary men.”8 Whereas Terzani saw “general euphoria” on the first day of May, for the French journalist Olivier Todd, Sài Gòn’s discipline completely broke down.9 Many government offices and military depots were ransacked. Statues and symbols of the South Vietnamese regime were destroyed. All the while, armed North Vietnamese soldiers “crisscross[ed] the city in requisitioned vehicles” as South Vietnamese paratroopers fought the last of the brushfire war.10
After the 1980s, few scholarly monographs studying the events of Spring 1975 saw print. Then, in 2012, George J. Veith published Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973–1975, taking readers from battlefield combat to high politics in a thorough account of Sài Gòn’s undoing.11 The book is the first in a two-part volume on how Hà Nội’s men managed to seize the South. Veith draws on a vast body of primary sources, memoirs, and interviews to build his arguments. The communist government, he contends, flouted the Paris Peace Accords and stormed Sài Gòn with brute force because it saw the South “as a viable entity that might become too strong to overcome.”12 South Vietnamese forces, despite tactical blunders, could have prevailed in this all-out military strike if American aid had not been cut. In the end, Hà Nội’s high body count shows that “the southern state was too strong to destroy by subversion alone.”13
Beyond academe, the Vietnamese on the ground who saw the endgame unfold have set down their stories in their own language. Fiction, poetry, and memoir are their chosen forms. The best-known work may be Sài Gòn ngày dài nhất [Sài Gòn, the Longest Day] (1988), a memoir by the famed South Vietnamese novelist Duyên Anh.14 Between 1963 and 1975, this prodigious writer, having published fifty novels and short stories, earned a towering reputation among the Sài Gòn literati. Caught up in the events of 1975, Duyên Anh could tell that the end was coming. In Sài Gòn, the Longest Day he recounts the final twenty-four hours, before the last of the old life was snuffed out. Instinct told him that cadres would come for him, as they would every writer who had spurned communism.15 Duyên Anh did not imagine then that he would be branded as “one of the ten most dangerous authors” and that the new government would keep him in reeducation camps for six years before PEN International and Amnesty International stepped in to secure his release.16
The former South Vietnamese Marine Lieutenant Cao Xuân Huy has also written an unflinching account of the March 1975 battles, when Hà Nội launched a large-scale offensive to capture the Central Highlands. Tháng ba gãy súng [In March, My Gun Broke] (1989) recounts the collapse of the South Vietnamese military from the perspective of a rank-and-file soldier.17 Cao Xuân Huy describes how South Vietnamese defenders, abandoned by their allies and leadership, were left to fend for themselves as enemy forces advanced on major cities. Under constant fire and without ammunition, soldiers and civilians desperately evacuated from the highlands, fearing reprisals if they were captured by the enemy. Cao Xuân Huy was taken as a prisoner of war in March 1975. The communist government kept him until September 1979.18
Many others suffered a similar fate, though very few have written an account of their experience.19 In 2012, Huy Đức, an investigative reporter from Vietnam, published a critically acclaimed two-volume account of the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, detailing the political, social, and economic policies the VCP enacted to build socialism in the southern half of the country. The volumes include a richly researched chapter on reeducation, in which Huy Đức recounts the steps the VCP took to incarcerate an untold number of former South Vietnamese.20 Already on April 18, 1975, when North Vietnamese forces took over the Central Highlands and victory seemed in sight, Secretariat Directive 218-CT/TW was promulgated, instructing cadres that
in dealing with officers, all must be rounded up, taken into custody, educated, and [made to] perform labor…As for thugs, intelligence elements, military security, psychological warfare officers, pacification operatives, and ringleaders of reactionaries,…all must be rounded up for long-term reeducation, held in a secure and secluded location, and closely monitored.21
Within days of Sài Gòn’s fall, the communist Military Management Committee issued a flurry of communiqués directing officers of the ancien régime to present themselves at various gathering points. They were told to bring enough food and personal effects to last ten to thirty days. Nothing had yet been said about how long they would be kept. Official figures show that 443,360 Saigonese reported in early May.22 By the end of the year, “at least one million supporters and employees of the Sài Gòn regime had presented themselves.”23 How many among them returned home, how many were interned indefinitely, how many were killed? To this day, “no one outside of Vietnam knows.”24
To Be Made Over is among the best literary and historical records of what took place in the prison camps.25 Published in English in 1988, the stories which make up this collection—selected and artfully translated by Huỳnh Sanh Thông—depict camp life not with bitterness, but with “calm and wry humor.”26 The volume includes a story about an inmate, a respected novelist, who was “game enough to stand up to the victors, endangering his health, gambling with his life.”27 When he starts a hunger strike, the camp warden confiscates his water and locks him up in solitary confinement. The novelist “dickers and haggles for the best bargain possible,” but, knowing that “his death would [amount] to nothing, he calls it quits” on the third day.28 How would his communist interrogators classify this brief act of defiance, the narrator wonders. Bourgeois nationalism? Nihilism? Or just the foolishness of a man longing to be free?
Since 1995, when the United States renewed ties with the socialist republic, many works of fiction from Vietnam have been translated into English.29 The novels of Dương Thu Hương and Bảo Ninh, in particular, have revealed how ordinary men and women experienced the war in North Vietnam.30 Meanwhile, the Vietnamese diaspora have quietly collected and preserved an archive of literary and philosophical works from the South. The translated memoirs of Nhã Ca and Phan Nhật Nam have exposed Western readers to the barbarism revolutions can unleash.31
Though increasingly more Vietnamese fiction is being translated in English, a collection that offers diverse political perspectives on the war—communist, anti-communist, neutralist—has yet to appear. This special issue aims to fill that gap by featuring the writing of authors who are North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and non-aligned. It aspires to do something akin to what Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s 1988 anthology has done for students of the history of postwar reeducation—to provide a more nuanced, well-rounded account of the historical dynamics of April 30, 1975 and the years that followed.
Selection Criteria
We have assembled this collection to appeal to students, teachers, general readers, and researchers. Our selection rested on two main criteria. First, we chose Vietnamese texts that are engaging and accessible but have yet to be translated. We wanted to invite readers into a different linguistic world in which Vietnamese musicians, writers, and intellectuals produce creative works for fellow Vietnamese about their shared experiences. Although there is a growing body of Western-language works by Vietnamese authors, these works largely aim to explain Vietnamese experiences to Westerners; we have excluded these.32 We also selected texts that feature dramatic plots, relatable characters, and intense emotions to pique the interest of readers who may be encountering Vietnamese literature, nonfiction writing, and songs for the first time. The readings require no knowledge of Vietnamese culture or history, and explanatory notes provide context when necessary.
Second, our collection highlights the diversity of Vietnamese perspectives to challenge the easy assumption that there was a singular Vietnamese experience of the war and its aftermath. The texts reflect what happened to men and women, soldiers and civilians, the young and the elderly, educated elites and humble foot soldiers, and refugees who fled the country as well as Vietnamese who chose to stay. Equally important, the collection spans the political spectrum. Readers will find communist denunciations of the RVN (for example, in Hữu Phương’s short story “Ba người trên sân ga” [Three on a Station Platform]) as well as anti-communist critiques of the SRV (for example, in Nguyễn Mộng Giác’s short story “Về nguồn” [Back to the Source]). We also intentionally chose works by intellectuals and artists from different generations and stages of their career and who worked in a variety of genres. Some contributors were already famous figures during the war, such as the North Vietnamese intellectual Vương Trí Nhàn and the South Vietnamese writer Nhã Ca. Others, like the novelist Bảo Ninh and the musician Việt Dzũng, came of age during the conflict and rose to prominence only afterward. The youngest contributor, Phan Thúy Hà, was born after the war and published her first book in the late 2010s. The genres in the collection include music, poetry, memoirs, diaries, short stories, and novels to showcase the range of artistic forms that Vietnamese have used to represent their historical experiences.
The collection also emphasizes the diversity of Vietnamese audiences. Wartime divisions and postwar migration have created distinct but overlapping communities of writers, musicians, readers, and listeners. Việt Dzũng composed “Một chút quà cho quê hương” [A Few Small Gifts for the Homeland] after resettling in the United States. This mournful song describes a refugee’s gnawing worry as he or she prepares a care package to send to family left behind in Vietnam. The song was and remains enormously popular among Vietnamese refugees living in the diaspora, but it is little known domestically because it has never been publicly performed in Vietnam. Cultural references in some texts also interpellate specific Vietnamese reading audiences. Bảo Ninh’s short story “Tết năm ấy, sau cuộc chiến” [Tết That Year, After the War] mentions several classic North Vietnamese, Chinese, and Soviet films that are widely known by city people who grew up in the DRV but are likely unfamiliar to Vietnamese who did not. In this way, our collection brings together works that were originally created for different groups of Vietnamese and places them in dialogue with each other.
However, no single collection could ever cover the full range of Vietnamese representations of the war’s end, and ours is no exception. Perhaps most conspicuously, our collection contains no examples of socialist realism, the dominant mode of art and literature in communist-dominated Vietnam. Socialist realist texts depict the war as a glorious struggle to save the nation from the American invasion, and there is a voluminous body of short stories, novels, poems, and songs written in that vein about the conflict. But there are far fewer socialist realist works about the postwar years, most likely because writers found the larger-than-life style more suitable for capturing the drama of war than for capturing life in peacetime. We hoped to include Xuân Hồng’s popular socialist realist song “Mùa xuân trên Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh” [Springtime in Hồ Chí Minh City], a celebration of the North Vietnamese liberation of Sài Gòn composed in the spring of 1975. Unfortunately, we were unable to persuade the copyright holder to grant us permission to publish the song lyrics in translation. However, we did include Hữu Phương’s “Three on a Station Platform,” a short story that conforms to many conventions of socialist realism while also pushing beyond the constraints of the genre.
The literature of Renovation [Đổi Mới] is deliberately underrepresented in our collection. This wave of novels and short stories burst onto the domestic Vietnamese literary scene during the heyday of Renovation, meaning market reforms, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Northern Vietnamese writers who had supported the DRV rejected socialist realism and portrayed the war in a more critical or even cynical manner. The literature of Renovation quickly became popular in the West, and several dozen novels and short stories from this corpus are now available in translation in multiple Western languages.33 Given that English-language readers have easy access to such works, we decided to include only one piece, by Bảo Ninh, as a representative sample.
Indeed, we intended for our collection to highlight Vietnamese voices that are underrepresented in translation, especially those of the NLF, southern regroupees, neutralists, and anti-communists, but the task proved more difficult than we anticipated. Of these neglected voices, only the anti-communists have produced a significant body of work comparable to the northern-dominated literature of Renovation. The postwar government apparently provided less generous educational support to southern guerillas and southern regroupees than to North Vietnamese veterans, and there is a paucity of southern communist writing about the end of the war. The SRV distrusted South Vietnamese neutralists, and most of them did not enjoy the freedom to write critically about the transition from war to peace. We selected two texts to represent the neutralists, the memoirs of the former student activist Đoàn Văn Toại and the opposition legislator Lý Quí Chung, but we did not receive permission from the copyright holder to publish an excerpt of the latter.
In the end, our collection favors works by Vietnamese anti-communists who were former citizens of South Vietnam and who left the country as refugees. Their departure gave them the artistic freedom to produce a rich body of literature and music that has flourished in the Vietnamese diaspora. Several contributors endured years as political prisoners before being able to go abroad, including Nhã Ca, Nguyễn Mộng Giác, Tô Thùy Yên, and Trần Dạ Từ, and we feel a special commitment to amplifying their voices. Additionally, we hoped to include an excerpt of Duyên Anh’s coming-of-age novel Nhánh cỏ mộng mơ [A Dreaming Blade of Grass] about a teenage boy who escapes Vietnam by boat after his father is sent to reeducation camp. Regrettably, we were unable to secure permission to translate this work. Our difficulties with permissions speak to the political constraints and sensitivities that Vietnamese artists and intellectuals have faced under multiple regimes.
There are still other voices that are not included. The collection exclusively features works by ethnic Vietnamese authors; there are no pieces from the perspective of ethnic highlanders, Chams, Khmers, ethnic Chinese, or Amerasians. We were unable to identify Vietnamese-language texts reflecting these perspectives.
Major Themes
The thirteen pieces in this collection cluster around four related themes.
Peace, Reunion, and Separation
First, the fantasy and reality of peace frames the collection as a whole. The anthology opens with two South Vietnamese songs that envision the end of the war as entailing a joyful reunion with loved ones and compatriots. In Nhật Ngân’s heartfelt tune “Một mai giã từ vũ khí” [One Day I’ll Bid Farewell to Arms], a South Vietnamese soldier yearns to lay down his weapons, return home to his sweetheart, and lead a quiet, rustic life in a country untroubled by war. Even broader in scope is the vision of peace in Trịnh Công Sơn’s song “Nối vòng tay lớn” [Join Hands in a Great Circle], which imagines that the end of hostilities will bring about genuine national unity. The song predicts “From all over the land our brothers and sisters return / We come together happily like swirling grains of sand in a sandstorm. / We join our hands to make a great circle of Vietnam.” The imagery of the gathering sandstorm and circle of hands suggests that Vietnamese people will finally unite and transcend their political differences.
The reality of peace shattered such fantasies, however, and several texts highlight the disunity, discord, and separation that characterized the end of the war and the postwar years. In Phan Thúy Hà’s elegantly simple novella “Người bên sông Ngàn Sâu” [The Man by Ngàn Sâu River], a young North Vietnamese soldier advances southward from the Central Highlands toward Sài Gòn during the DRV’s final offensive against the crumbling southern regime. He yearns to be accepted by civilians on the other side but is distressed to see waves of South Vietnamese civilians fleeing his army in terror. This experience is a poignant reminder that numerous Vietnamese experienced the conflict as a civil war as much as an international one.
Even homecomings could be less than harmonious. In Hữu Phương’s “Three on a Station Platform,” the faithful Mrs. Cảnh waits two decades for the return of her husband, a southern regroupee, and is deeply hurt to learn that he married a second, younger wife in North Vietnam. Mr. and Mrs. Cảnh resume life as a married couple, but her jealousy and his abiding love for his other wife poison their relationship.
For South Vietnamese who identified with the RVN, peace often brought painful separation from their homeland and their loved ones. A counterpoint to Trịnh Ngân’s dream of homecoming, Nam Lộc’s plaintive song “Sài Gòn ơi! Vĩnh biệt” [Oh Sài Gòn! Farewell] describes the wrenching pain of leaving home on the eve of Sài Gòn’s fall. Tô Thùy Yên’s eloquent poem “Tháng Chạp buồn” [Sad January] captures the despair of a prisoner longing to see his family for the Lunar New Year after eight long years in a reeducation camp. In these accounts, peace falls far short of the dreams of reunion.
Reeducation
Reeducation [cải tạo] is another major theme. The term “reeducation” refers to the attempt by socialist states to create new socialist men. Under Stalin and Mao, reeducation practices hardened into a set of techniques to eliminate—through arrest, interrogation, and long imprisonment—those who were seen as a threat to the communist regime. During the First Indochina War, the Việt Minh had herded political opponents into labor camps.34 Lý Bá Sơ, the most notorious of the camps, was known as a place where “prisoners entered never to return.”35 Later, Hồ Chí Minh’s government codified reeducation as a policy in Resolution 49-NQTVQH, issued in 1961.36 “Counterrevolutionary elements”—the state’s enemies—were then systematically rounded up and sent to labor camps for reform.
After toppling Sài Gòn’s government, Hà Nội set up a vast network of reeducation camps, stretching from the north to the south of Vietnam, to incarcerate those it saw as politically dangerous. Aurora Foundation estimated that, between 1975 and 1988, at least 150 camps and prisons held over a million politicians, writers, artists, teachers, religious leaders, businessmen, and former members of the South Vietnamese administration.37 The camp foremen ruled their fiefs by subjecting their captives to hard physical labor—quarrying rocks, felling trees, building houses, and clearing minefields. Starvation preyed on the prisoners endlessly. According to some survivors, those who tried to escape were tortured to death.38
To this day, the VCP has not released any official records on the camps. The Vietnamese public has nothing more than the accounts of inmates who survived.39
The authors Nhã Ca, Trần Dạ Từ, Tô Thùy Yên, and Nguyễn Mộng Giác, whose works are included in this special issue, were arrested and sent for reeducation after 1975. Through feats of courage, they managed to preserve their minds and their will, then to write movingly about their experiences. In the poems by Trần Dạ Từ and Tô Thùy Yên, the prisoners long to again be in the fold of a community, as a “man in the family of men.” The young girls in Nhã Ca’s novel grow up in broken families—fathers held in camps, siblings escaping overseas. Still, they must keep quiet as their teacher chants clichés about socialist morality and the ideals of the revolution.
Literature and the Arts
In addition to reeducation, the VCP carried out policies governing literature and the arts to create a new class of Vietnamese. “The New Vietnamese”—intelligent, muscular, industrious, and supremely dedicated to world revolution—would stand shoulder to shoulder with the “New Socialist Man.” Creating generations of New Vietnamese meant, above all, wiping out the old way of life. After unseating the republican government, Hà Nội launched a fierce “struggle against the reactionary and depraved culture” of the South. This was based on a belief that South Vietnamese culture had awakened in people their most degenerate sensibilities—philistinism, debauchery, recklessness. The New Vietnamese, by contrast, was imagined to be biologically and culturally pure. He was meant to bear—as depicted in Nguyễn Mộng Giác’s searing sendup “Back to the Source”—the genetic standard for generations of Vietnamese to come.40
Beliefs about cultural purity had devastating consequences in postwar southern Vietnam. Already in May 1975, young revolutionaries could be seen going from house to house, confiscating and burning books on the streets.41 Shock brigades stormed print shops, libraries, bookstores, cafes, theaters, and dance halls to seize materials, sometimes arresting shopkeepers. They instructed citizens to inform on their neighbors. Soon, children denounced their parents; siblings turned one another in to the authorities since “a relative by blood may well be an enemy of the spirit.”42 Nhã Ca depicts how everyday Vietnamese used the denunciation campaigns to settle personal grievances. Young denouncers were treated as heroes by the party-state.
The crusade to eradicate “debased, reactionary culture” [văn hoá phản động, đồi trụy] targeted not only South Vietnamese cultural materials but also the men and women who produced and circulated them.43 Vương Trí Nhàn, a North Vietnamese journalist sent to Sài Gòn to document the takeover, recorded in his diary these words from Trần Bạch Đằng: “Eighty percent of intellectuals [are] scoundrels.…There must be punishment. Our children have been poisoned.” The propaganda tsar of the NLF reminded his men that “the people have not sacrificed their lives for us to succumb to feelings of leniency and forgive” South Vietnamese intellectuals. This hatred fed long campaigns to terrorize South Vietnamese writers and artists [chiến dịch khủng bố văn nghệ sĩ].44 Intellectual persecution peaked in 1976, when the most prominent thinkers were rounded up for reeducation.
Migration
The end of the war produced waves of internal and external migration. Within Vietnam, the hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese troops who were stationed in the southern half of the country during the war returned to their families in the north.45 As Bảo Ninh recollects in “Tết That Year, After the War,” the soldiers who returned home faced a grim reality. Many of their childhood friends and old classmates—the boys who went off to war—would never come back. According to the SRV, over 1,100,000 communist fighters died during the war.46
Some among the Việt Minh combatants who regrouped to the North in 1954 reunited with their families after the war. For them, twenty years had gone by since they were last with their kin. Joy, bitterness, confusion, and envy must have shaded their reunions. And as Hữu Phương compellingly portrays in “Three on a Station Platform,” the same mixture of feelings might mend old quarrels or create rifts too deep to overcome.
A staggering number of South Vietnamese fled the country by air, by sea, and on foot. Over 130,000 escaped in 1975, many airlifted out as North Vietnamese forces took over Sài Gòn.47 Once in power, the VCP implemented a series of policies to collectivize agriculture, centralize political power, and realize the ideals of revolution. It confiscated more than 30,000 private businesses, nationalized key sectors of the economy, and, between 1975 and 1979, sent over 1.5 million former citizens of South Vietnam to till land and live in uninhabitable frontiers.48 These so-called new economic zones [vùng kinh tế mới], designed to redistribute the southern Vietnamese population and reduce the influence of the urban elite, were described by runaways as “barren labor camps.”49 Poverty, persecution, and racial hostility between the ethnic Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese touched off another mass exodus from southern Vietnam in 1978. Many more would follow.
The refugees who left after 1975 either overlanded to Thailand or took to the high seas in tiny boats. To an American journalist who visited the refugee camps, these vessels were so fragile that they looked “like broken eggshells or crumpled leaves.”50 Việt Dzũng was among the wretched voyagers. As one of the few spared by the unforgiving sea, this musician has set down haunting words to tell the world of his countrymen’s fate.
Conclusion
Although countless Vietnamese longed for peace and unity, political differences colored their experiences and official policies carried out by the communist government after the war deepened the rift between them. Consequently, their interpretations of the war and its aftermath were often contradictory, encompassing both reunion and separation, homecoming and exile, liberation and imprisonment, and reform and repression. This collection juxtaposes diverse perspectives to capture this varied kaleidoscope of meaning. In doing so, the readings invite a fuller and more nuanced understanding of a turbulent time.
We believe that the diversity and accessibility of the collection make it ideal for teaching at the college and high school levels. The clashing perspectives may stimulate critical thinking, and the engaging human stories should encourage students to develop empathy for Vietnamese on all sides of the war. Additionally, the multiple genres represented in this issue make the readings appropriate for a range of disciplinary and topical courses—including courses on history, literature and culture, ethnic studies, war and peace studies, Vietnam, the Vietnam War, Southeast Asia, and Asian America. Ultimately, we hope the collection will inspire a young generation—coming of age half a century after the war ended and unburdened by wartime partisanship—to grapple with Vietnamese historical experiences in all of their complexity.
Notes
Huy Đức, Bên thắng cuộc: Giải phóng [The Winning Side: Liberation] (Los Angeles, CA: OsinBook, 2012), 251.
Quan Tue Tran, “Responding to and Resettling the Vietnamese ‘Boat People’: Perspectives from the United States and West Germany,” in Refugee Crises, 1945–2000, ed. Jan Jansen and Simone Lessig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 181.
For example, Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Jessica Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Sean Fear and Tuong Vu, The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975: Vietnamese Perspectives on Nation Building (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020); Nu-Anh Tran, Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022); Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu, eds., Building a Republican Nation in Vietnam, 1920–1963 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2023); Trinh M. Luu and Tuong Vu, Republican Vietnam, 1963–1975: War, Society, Diaspora (University of Hawai‘i Press: 2023).
Frank Snepp, Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End Told by the CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1977).
Ibid.
David Butler, The Fall of Saigon: Scenes from the Sudden End of a Long War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985). For Frank Snepp’s review of this work, see Frank Snepp, “The Fall of Saigon,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1985.
Tiziano Terzani, Giai phong! The Fall and Liberation of Saigon, trans. John Shepley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 17.
Ibid., 190.
Tiziano Terzani, “Vietnam: The First Year,” The New York Review of Books, July 15, 1976.
Olivier Todd, Cruel April: The Fall of Saigon, trans. Stephen Becker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), 377. The Australian journalist Alan Dawson has also recounted the events leading up to the end of the Vietnam War in Alan Dawson, 55 Days: The Fall of Saigon (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977).
George J. Veith, Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973–1975 (New York: Encounter Books, 2012).
Brian P. Farrell, review of Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973–1975, George J. Veith, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 45, no. 3 (2014): 484.
Ibid.
Duyên Anh, Sài Gòn ngày dài nhất [Sài Gòn, the Longest Day] (Los Alamitos, CA: Xuân Thu, 1988).
“Tôi sợ hãi vô cùng: Vì tôi chưa hiểu Cộng Sản sẽ dành cho những nhà văn chống đối họ cách chết nào, lối chết nào, kiểu chết nào.” Ibid.
Todd, Cruel April, 398.
Cao Xuân Huy, Tháng ba gãy súng [In March, My Gun Broke] (CA: Nhà Xuất Bản Việt Nam, 1989).
Ngô Thế Vinh, “Tháng ba gãy súng” [In March, My Gun Broke], Văn Việt, November 16, 2010, https://vanviet.info/tu-lieu/thng-ba-gy-sng/.
The most well-known accounts of socialist reeducation camps in postwar Vietnam are Lê Hữu Trí, Prisoner of the Word: A Memoir of the Vietnamese Reeducation Camps (Seattle, WA: Black Heron Press, 2001); Nghia M. Vo, The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam (MacFarland, 2004); Tran Tri Vu, Lost Years: My 1,632 Days in Vietnamese Reeducation Camps (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1988); Nguyễn Hữu Lễ, Tôi phải sống [I Must Live] (Westminster, CA: LIDO Printing, 2003); Hà Thúc Sinh, Đại học máu [Blood University] (San Jose, CA: Nhân Văn, 1985); Tạ Tỵ, Đáy địa ngục [Hell’s Abyss] (San Jose, CA: Thằng Mõ, 1985).
On June 1, 2024, the VCP arrested and detained Huy Đức for his editorial commentaries on the political issues confronting Vietnam. For insights into this investigative reporter’s biography and his views on the Vietnam War, see Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm and Peter Zinoman, “Interview with Trương Huy San (Huy Đức),” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 19, no. 3–4 (2024): 64–123.
Đảng cộng sản Việt Nam [Communist Party of Vietnam], Văn kiện đảng toàn tập [Complete Document Series of the Party], vol. 37 (Hà Nội: Chính Trị Quốc Gia, 1998), 121–125. Cited in Huy Đức, Bên thắng cuộc, 27.
Huy Đức, Bên thắng cuộc, 27. See also Hoang Minh Vu, “Recycling Violence: The Theory and Practice of Reeducation Camps in Postwar Vietnam,” in Experiments with Marxism-Leninism in Cold War Southeast Asia, ed. Matthew Galway and March Opper (Canberra: Australia National University Press, 2022).
William Duiker, Vietnam Since the Fall of Saigon (Athens, OH: Center for International Studies, Ohio University, 1989), 12.
“…no one outside of Vietnam knows how many prisoners, political or otherwise, the Vietnamese are holding.” Douglas Pike, “Vietnam During 1976: Economics in Command,” in “A Survey of Asia in 1976: Part I,” Asian Survey 17, no. 1 (1977): 38. According to Terzani, who had remained in Vietnam after the flag change, “some 250,000 people disappeared into the remote jungle concentration camps that are distributed over the whole country.” Quoted in Nguyễn Văn Canh, Vietnam Under Communism, 1975–1982 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1983), 192.
Huỳnh Sanh Thông, ed., To Be Made Over: Tales of Socialist Reeducation in Vietnam (New Haven, CT: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1988).
Ibid., xi.
Nguyễn Mộng Giác, “Suicides,” in To Be Made Over: Tales of Socialist Reeducation in Vietnam, ed. Huỳnh Sanh Thông (New Haven, CT: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1988), 203.
Ibid., 205.
See, for instance, Linh Dinh, ed., Night Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011); Le Minh Khue, The Stars, the Earth, the River: Short Stories by Le Minh Khue, ed. Bac Hoai Tran and Dana Sachs (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1997); Nguyen Huy Thiep, Crossing the River: Short Fiction by Nguyen Huy Thiep, ed. Nguyen Nguyet Cam and Dana Sachs (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2008).
See Duong Thu Huong, Novel Without a Name, trans. Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson (New York: Penguin, 1996); Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); and Dang Thuy Tram, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram, trans. Andrew X. Pham (New York: Crown Publishing, 2007).
See Nha Ca, Mourning Headband for Hue: An Account of the Battle for Hue, Vietnam 1968, trans. Olga Dror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Phan Nhat Nam, Peace and Prisoners of War: A South Vietnamese Memoir of the Vietnam War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2020).
For a sample of Vietnamese-authored works in Western languages that treat the end of the war and its aftermath, see Jade Ngọc Quang Huỳnh, South Wind Changing (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1994); Nguyễn Qúi Đức, Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994); Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge (New York: Viking, 1997); Linda Lê, Les Trois Parques [The Three Fates] (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1997); Duong Van Mai Elliott, The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Vietnamese Odyssey (London: Harper Collins, 2000); Kien Nguyen, The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002); lê thi diem thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Nam Le, The Boat (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 2008); Kim Thúy, Ru (Montreal: Libre Expression, 2009); G.B. Tran, Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (New York: Villard Books, 2010); Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (New York: Grove Press, 2015): Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2017); Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (London: Penguin Press, 2019); Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, The Mountains Sing (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2020); Khuê Phạm, Wo auch immer ihr seid [Wherever You Are] (Munich: BTB, 2023).
The most widely available works are by the two internationally renowned authors from this wave of literature, Bảo Ninh and Dương Thu Hương. Bảo Ninh’s Nỗi buồn chiến tranh [The Sorrow of War] has been translated into English, French, and Swedish and became an international bestseller. See Bảo Ninh, Le chagrin de la guerre [The Sorrow of War], trans. Phan Huy Đường (Arles: Editions Philippe Picquier, 1994); The Sorrow of War, trans. Frank Palmos and Phan Thanh Hảo (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995); Bảo Ninh, Krigets sorger [The Sorrow of War], trans. Sune Karlsson (Stockhold: Norstedt, 1994). Ten of the Dương Thu Hương’s novels and a collection of her short stories have been translated in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. See Dương Thu Hương, Les paradis aveugles [Những thiên đường mù; Paradise of the Blind], trans. Phan Huy Đường (Paris: Des Femmes, 1991); Dương Thu Hương, Paradise of the Blind [Những thiên đường mù], trans. Phan Huy Đường and Nina Mcpherson (New York: Penguin, 1993); Dương Thu Hương, Roman sans titre [Tiểu thuyết vô đề; Novel Without A Name], trans. Phan Huy Đường (Paris: Des Femmes, 1992); Dương Thu Hương, Novel Without a Name [Tiểu thuyết vô đề], trans. Phan Huy Đường and Nina Mcpherson (New York: W. Morrow, 1995); La valle dei sette innocenti [Tiểu thuyết vô đề; Valley of the Seven Innocents], trans. Gudio Cenciarelli (Rome: Edizioni E/O, 2005); Dương Thu Hương, Histoire d’amour racontée avant l’aube [Chuyện tình kể trước lúc rạng đông, Love Stories Told at Dawn], trans. Kim Lefèvre (La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 1995); Dương Thu Hương, Au-delà des illusions [Bên kia bờ ảo vọng; Beyond Illusions], trans. Phan Huy Đường (Arles: Philippe Picquier, 1996); Dương Thu Hương, Beyond Illusions, trans. Phan Huy Đường and Nina Mcpherson (New York: Hyperion East, 2002); Olre ogni illusione [Beyond Illusions], trans. Serena Lauzi (Milan: Garzanti, 2004); Dương Thu Hương, Memories of a Pure Spring [Lưu ly], trans. Phan Huy Đường and Nina Mcpherson (New York: Hyperion East, 2000); Lied van herinnering [Lưu ly; Song of Remembrance], trans. Han Meijer (Amsterdamn: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2000); Dương Thu Hương, Myosotis [Lưu ly; Forget Me Not], trans. Phan Huy Đường (Arles: Philippe Picquier, 2001); Dương Thu Hương, Memorias de un Manantial [Lưu ly; Memories of Spring], trans. Clara Cabarrocas (Barcelona: Ediciones del Bronce, 2003); Dương Thu Hương, La sorgente degli amanti [Lưu ly; The Spring of Lovers], trans. Serena Lauzi (Milan: Garzanti Libri, 2010); Dương Thu Hương, L’embarcadère des femmes [Bến không chồng; The Wharf of Widows], trans. Cam-Thi Doan and Emmanuel Poisson (La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 2002); Dương Thu Hương, L’imbarcadero delle donne senza marito [Bến không chồng; The Wharf of Widows], trans. Nguyen Van Canh and Guido Lagomarsino (Milan: O Barra O, 2008); Dương Thu Hương, No Man’s Land [Chốn vắng], trans. Nina Mcpherson and Phan Huy Đường (New York: Hyperion East, 2005); Dương Thu Hương, Terre des oublis [Chốn vắng; Land of Oblivion], trans. Phan Huy Đường (Paris: Sabine Wespieser Éditeur, 2005); Dương Thu Hương, La tierra de los olvidos [Chốn vắng; Land of Oblivion] (Madrid: Kailas Editorial, 2006); Dương Thu Hương, Dalla terra di nessuno [Chốn vắng; No Man’s Land], trans. Serena Lauzi (Milan: Garzanti, 2007); Dương Thu Hương, Intinéraire d’enfance [Hành trình ngày thơ ấu, Journey in Childhood], trans. Phan Huy Đường (Paris: Sabine Wespieser Éditeur, 2007); Dương Thu Hương, The Zenith [Đỉnh cao chói lọi], trans. Stephen B. Young and Hoa Pham Young (New York: Viking, 2012); Dương Thu Hương, Au zenith [Đỉnh cao chói lọi; The Zenith], trans. Phuong Dang Tran (Paris: Sabine Wespieser Éditeur, 2009); Dương Thu Hương, Sanctuaire du coeur [Hậu cung của con tim; Sanctuary of the Heart], trans. Phuong Dang Tran (Paris: Sabine Wespieser Éditeur, 2011); Dương Thu Hương, Les collines d’eucalyptus [Đồi bạch đàn; The Eucalyptus Hills], trans. Phuong Dang Tran (Paris: Sabine Wespieser Éditeur, 2014). Additionally, numerous short stories and a few novels by other writers of Renovation literature have been translated into various Western languages. For a sampling of these collections, see Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, The General Retires and Other Stories [Tướng về hưu], trans. Greg Lockhart (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1992); Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, Un général à la retraite: Nouvelles [The General Retires: Short Stories], trans. Kim Lefèvre (La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 2015); Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, Soffi di vento sul Veitnam: Il generale in pensione et altri racconti [The Wind Blows in Vietnam: The General Retires and Other Stories], trans. Tu Quan Tran and Luca Tran (Milan: O Barra O, 2008); Der pensionierte general: Erzählungen [The General Retires: Short Stories], trans. Gunter Giesenfeld and Marianne Ngo (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2009); Lê Minh Khuê, The Stars, the Earth, the River, trans. Bac Hoai Tran and Dana Sachs (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1997); Hồ Anh Thái, Behind the Red Mist [Trong sương hồng hiện ra], trans. Nguyễn Quí Đức (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1998); Hồ Anh Thái, Bakom den röda dimman [Trong sương hồng hiện ra; Behind the Red Mist], trans. Jan Ristarp (Stockholm: Tranan, 2007); Hồ Anh Thái, L’île aux femmes [Người đàn bà trên đảo; The Island of Women], trans. Janine Gillon and Phan The Hong (La Tour d’Aigues: Aube, 2003); Hồ Anh Thái, Women on the Island (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Hồ Anh Thái, Apocalypse Hotel [Cõi người rung chuông tận thế], trans. Jonathan R.S. McIntyre (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012). Additionally, there are a number of anthologies of contemporary Vietnamese literature that include the literature of Renovation. See Wayne Karlin, Lê Minh Khuê, and Truong Vu, The Other Side of Heaven: Post-War Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1995); Nguyễn Bá Chung and Kevin Bowen, eds., Six Vietnamese Poets (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2001); Wayne Karlin and Hồ Anh Thái, eds., Love After War: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2003); Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock, eds. and trans., Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
Nguyen Van Canh, Vietnam Under Communism, 1975–1982 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1983), 188.
“…trại Lý Bá Sơ của Việt Minh, được thiết lập từ hồi Pháp thuộc, là nơi tù đi không có ngày về.” Song Nhị, Nửa thế kỷ Việt Nam: Bút ký [Half a Century of Vietnam: A Memoir] (San Jose, CA: Cội Nguồn, 2010).
Viet V. Le, “Vietnamese Re-education Camps: Do They Violate Both Traditional and Modern Vietnamese Criminal Law,” Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law 145 (1994), 145–180.
The Aurora Foundation was founded by Ginetta Sagan, a renowned human rights activist, in 1981 to document civil rights abuses in Vietnam and Poland, and later in countries with authoritarian governments. Aurora Foundation, Violations of Human Rights: The Socialist Republic of Vietnam: April 1975–December 1988 (Atherton, CA: Aurora Foundation, 1989), 40–41.
See Father Andrew Huu Le Nguyen’s account of the torture he witnessed and endured during the thirteen years he was held in reeducation camps. Nguyễn Hữu Lê, Tôi phải sống [I Must Live] (San Jose, CA: Radio Đáp Lời Sông Núi, 2003).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: Volume 1 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), xviii. For a summary account of the Vietnamese reeducation camps, see Huy Đức, Bên thắng cuộc, chapter 2, “Reeducation.”
See Trinh M. Luu, “Vietism: Human Rights, Carl Jung, and the New Vietnamese,” in Republican Vietnam: War, Society, Diaspora (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022).
Nguyễn Hưng Quốc, “Số phận của văn học miền nam sau 1975” [The Fate of South Vietnamese Literature After 1975], Voice of America, November 28, 2014, https://www.voatiengviet.com/a/so-phan-cua-van-hoc-mien-nam-sau-bay-muoi-lam/2532570.html; Todd, Cruel April, 395.
Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London: Granta Books, 2005).
Trinh M. Luu, “The Sorrow of War: Socialist Economic Crime and Spectral Realism,” in “Law, Literature, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2019), 46–75.
Huy Đức, Bên thắng cuộc, 35–36.
William Shawcross, “In a Grim Country,” The New York Review of Books, September 24, 1981.
“Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting for North,” Associated Press, April 4, 1995.
Demmer, After Saigon’s Fall, 56
Marjorie Niehaus, “Vietnam 1978: The Elusive Peace,” Asian Survey 19, no. 1 (1979), 86.
The Washington Post, “Hanoi Rebuts Refugees on ‘Economic Zones,’” The Washington Post, August 16, 1979.
William Shawcross, “The Boat People in Peril,” The New York Review of Books, November 23, 1989.
University of California Press