What to expect from the oral history interview

Since our official launch last month, inquiries have trickled in via Facebook, email, and face-to-face encounters about ways to participate in the project. Some folks want to have their parents be narrators for the project. Some folks want to be narrators themselves. Some want to contribute their time and resources to this project as volunteers. We at VAOHP welcome all these forms of engagement! There are two main ways of participating:

1. interviewee/narrator: you will share your life story with an interviewer and your interview will be part of the collection of Oral Histories archived at UC Irvine’s Southeast Asian Archive and made available online.

2. volunteer: you may work on different aspects of the project, including recruiting narrators, interviewing narrators, transcribing interviews, translating interviews from Vietnamese to English, photography, etc. The work is plenty and the personnel and budget are both limited, so please contact Thuy Vo Dang (thuy.vodang@uci.edu) for more information if you would like to be a volunteer with the project.

Additionally, if you have skills and resources in the area of film-making, sound-editing, or web design, we can really use your expertise.

Now, to demystify the oral history interview process, here is a quick step-by-step guide to the oral history interview.

1. Once you have agreed to participate as a narrator in the Vietnamese American Oral History Project, you will be asked to sign a human subjects consent form in order to fill out a Narrator Biographical survey. The survey gathers essential contact information as well as brief biographical details such as when and where you were born, year you immigrated to the U.S., and so on.

2. Once the survey is complete, you will be required to fill out a second consent form for the actual interview, where you grant permission for us to audio-tape the interview and add your story to the VAOHP collection archived at UC Irvine.

3. Once the tape recorder is on, you will be asked a comprehensive set of questions about your life–your family, education, work, memories of Vietnam, the migration experience, and life in the U.S. The interview should take approximately 2 hours, but the total time spent with your interviewer might be about 3 hours.

4. The interviewer will take a photograph of you to include with your audio-recording and transcripts. You may also wish to donate documents and images that reflect some aspects of your life story you wish to preserve for the future. These documents and images can be originals or we can scan copies to process as part of the collection.

5. Once the interview is over, the VAOHP team will transcribe your interview and send your transcripts back to you for minor editing and approval before we archive and present the materials online.

It is commonly understood that “history” privileges major events, general trends, and notable leaders. The personal, intimate, and every-day forms of knowledge and experiences of any particular time period would be lost without life stories preserved by projects such as the VAOHP. We are here to preserve the stories of Vietnamese Americans living, persevering, creating, and thriving in the latter half of the twentieth century. These life narratives will contribute significantly for later generations striving to understand how Vietnamese Americans lived, what they lost, how they rebuilt, what they passed on, and most importantly, what their lives can illuminate about the major events and trends of official “history.” We hope you will help us spread the word and help us build a strong, prolific collection of Vietnamese American oral histories.