Generations of stories: Artifacts, photos and a tattered map piece together history of the Vietnamese who settled here – OC Register (Aug. 24, 2015)
OC REGISTER | AUGUST 24, 2015 | UPDATED 11:00PM
BY TOM BERG / STAFF WRITER – [link to the article]
SANTA ANA – It is just an old hand-drawn map.
But it helped one man save 80 refugees in a boat lost at sea.
That man had to fend off pirates, change course from Malaysia to Thailand, and navigate by stars after his compass was stolen.
“That’s my keepsake,” Dung Van Tran, now 64 and living in Fountain Valley, says of the map he quietly tucked away for 34 years. “Every time I see it, I feel happy.”
His map is part of a new exhibit called “Vietnamese Focus: Generations of Stories,” which weaves hundreds of oral histories, photographs, documents, art displays – even a wedding dress – into a powerful story about the enduring human spirit.
Co-curator Linda Trinh Vo has been collecting refugee stories for years. And she noticed a recurring theme: Many ask, “Why do you want to interview me?” They feel their story is not that special.
So Vo began assembling the stories, first as an oral history project, then as a book and now as an exhibit that runs through February at the Old Orange County Courthouse. It details the history of the refugees settling in Orange County, home of the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam.
“Some of the things that happened are unimaginable,” says Vo, a UCI professor and director of the Vietnamese American Oral History Project. “Our history is painful. I think art is a way to express the pain in a way that people can connect with.”
It’s also a way to preserve a story not found in history books – about those who made it to America.
And those who did not.
Ghosts and tea bags
The dead play a prominent role in this exhibit.
They look down from 92 white cotton sashes draped from the ceiling; they look up from 63 resin-coated tiles that took four days each to make; and they peer out from inside 118 tea bags set in tea cups.
The unspoken message is: Don’t forget us. We are part of your story too.
“I’m here because of them,” says Vietnamese American artist Trinh Mai, of Long Beach, who created these art displays, many with images of relatives.
“Whatever the American dream means, I’m living it because of them.”
One installation called “Quiet” evokes ghosts hovering just overhead.
It started when Mai found a box of letters donated to UCI’s Southeast Asian Archives.
“For the sake of humanity, I ask you to please help us find our two daughters,” one began.
Vietnamese parents wrote the letters, with accompanying photos, to an international agency, seeking help in finding children missing since the Fall of Saigon.
Mai reproduced each child’s face onto the end of a 12-foot sash. Then, using an old typewriter, she typed out the accompanying letter in full, along with her own response.
“I wanted the public to see them because they were forgotten,” she says. “They were stuck in some file on some shelf.”
The sashes hang too high to read, but Mai doesn’t mind.
“It keeps people curious,” she says. “And looking up is a sign of respect, like a child to an elder.”
She walks from display case to display case. The 63 resin-coated tiles represent six generations of her family tree and those who “made difficult choices to allow us to have a life here.”
The 118 tea bags represent all the good times drinking tea with her grandmother listening to family stories.
And then she comes to a map. The map. And its importance.
Big dreams
How this exhibit evolved is a story itself.
In 2011, Vo created the Vietnamese American Oral History Project at UCI.
“American history books are written from an American perspective,” she says. “And in Vietnam, they’ve erased that history. We knew there was a gap to fill.”
Soon after, she began copying the photographs, letters and other documents refugees brought in to interviews.
“We realized these were getting lost, destroyed or thrown away,” Vo says.
Those materials led Vo and UCI colleagues Tram Le and Thuy Vo Dang to publish their book “Vietnamese in Orange County” (Arcadia Publishing) earlier this year.
But still, they wanted to do more.
“We dreamed big, right from the beginning,” Vo says. “We wanted to do a book, an exhibition, a documentary, but it was just a wish list.”
In November, OC Parks invited them to do an exhibit in the old Orange County Courthouse’s historical gallery marking the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and arrival of Vietnamese in Orange County. The women jumped at the opportunity. Exhibit highlights include:
• History: Eleven panels tell the story of Vietnamese settling in Orange County, with chapters on raising families, earning a living, politics, education and entertainment.
• Biographies: Banners feature the personal stories of 12 Vietnamese Americans with photos and text culled from the Vietnamese American Oral History Project.
• Art: Several major art displays highlight the refugees’ choices, journeys and new lives here.
• Photography: More than 200 photographs vividly illustrate the exhibit, including the Orange County Register’s archival photos. They include the newspaper’s portraits of new arrivals living in Camp Pendleton’s tent city in 1975; members of a refugee family getting the keys to their first car; and students at La Quinta High School, where three out of four students now are Vietnamese American.
• Display cases: These use personal items – suitcases, blankets, tuberculosis X-rays, diaries, even a wedding gown that one man retrieved for his wife after he was imprisoned in a re-education camp for 14 years – to bring stories to life.
“It’s the complete way to tell the story,” Vo says. “You see their photos, their artifacts in 3D and read their stories.”
One of the exhibit’s first visitors wept while looking at the map that Dung Van Tran used to carry 80 refugees out of Vietnam.
“It’s so emblematic of the collective experience,” says Little Saigon physician Mai-Phuong Nguyen. “People got on boats and threw caution to the wind, just having faith they’d land somewhere – and that anywhere was better than communist Vietnam.”
The journey
Several themes run throughout the exhibit: sacrifice, rebirth, heroism.
“There are so many people with amazing stories in our community,” says Vo. “But none of them feel theirs is exceptional because others have similar stories. To Vietnamese, it’s just part of our experience.”
That’s another reason for the exhibit, she says – to spur reluctant refugees to talk to their children about their past.
“I grew up without knowing anything about my Vietnamese American history,” Vo says.
“I don’t want to see future Vietnamese American kids not knowing about their family history, their community history. It’s who they are.”
Last summer, while wrapping up a workshop teaching families how to preserve documents, a man walked in with a tattered map.
It was hard to read, she says, but told a powerful story.
In 1981, Dung Van Tran, who had served in the South Vietnam navy during the war, was asked to pilot a 45-foot boat with 84 refugees to Malaysia. Four times pirates attacked, eventually taking his compass and writing on the map: You go to Songkhla (Thailand) 250 degrees.
With no compass, Tran waited till nightfall to follow Sirius, a star in the Canis Major constellation, to stay on course.
He eventually landed in Thailand without losing a life.
“It just touched me – the will to survive,” says artist Mai, who turned a copy of Tran’s map into an art exhibit.
“He was responsible for 84 people on the boat and every one of them made it. This is a hero.”
The map resonates with people, she says, because ultimately we all are presented opportunities in life to help someone else, to better someone else’s life – to be a hero.
When asked, many of the immigrants welcomed the opportunity to share their stories and their treasures.
“Any time I see the map, I feel happy,” Tran says. “Because I’m in a country with freedom.”
For more stories about the Vietnamese community, visit the Register’s Little Saigon site at ocregister.com/littlesaigon.
Contact the writer: tberg@ocregister.com