Routledge Handbook of Asian Diaspora and Development

Ajaya K. Sahoo, Ajaya K. Sahoo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000366884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This handbook offers an analysis of Asian diaspora and development, and explores the role that immigrants living within diasporic and transnational communities play in the development of their host countries and their homeland. Bringing together an array of interdisciplinary scholars from across the world, the handbook is divided into the following sections:

• Development Potential of Asian Diasporas
• Diaspora, Homeland, and Development
• Gender, Generation, and Identities
• Soft Power, Mobilization, and Development
• Media, Culture, and Representations.

Presenting cutting-edge research on several dimensions of diaspora and development, Routledge Handbook of Asian Diaspora and Development provides a platform for further discussion in the fields of migration studies, diaspora studies, transnational studies, race relations, ethnic studies, gender studies, globalization, Asian studies, and research methods.

PART I

Development potential of Asian diasporas

1

Making sense of the past

The Vietnamese diaspora in Australia and transgenerational histories

Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen

There were three notable second generation Vietnamese achievers in Australia in 2013: medical doctor Jenny Tran won the Australia-at-large Rhodes Scholarship to study global health at Oxford University; pianist Hoang Pham won the ABC Symphony Australia Young Performers Award; and Midshipman Nam Nguyen was the Australian Defence Force Academy’s top graduate, winning the Commander in Chief Medal and the Megan Ann Pelly Perpetual Memorial Award (see Victorian Government Health Information, 2013; Dow, 2014; Vu, 2014). All three are the children of refugees, and were shaped by their family background. Their parents formed part of the mass exodus from Vietnam that followed the communist takeover of South Vietnam and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Tran’s parents were boat refugees who left Vietnam separately and reached Malaysia and Thailand before her father arrived in Australia in 1975 and her mother in 1977; Pham’s musician father escaped from Vietnam by boat with his wife and baby son in 1985 before reaching Indonesia and resettling in Australia; and Nguyen’s father fled his country by boat before arriving in Malaysia in 1983 and Australia the following year, and sponsoring his girlfriend from Vietnam to Australia in 1990. While the second generation of Vietnamese in Australia includes high achievers as noted above, it also comprises those who suffered from disrupted education and broken families. The divide between notable achievement on the one hand and problems with adaptation on the other hand is a distinguishing feature of the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia.

Drawing on an oral history project conducted in Australia,¹ this chapter will focus on the narratives of second generation Vietnamese and the ways in which they have dealt with difficulties in transgenerational communication and attendant gaps in transgenerational histories. As noted by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, a primary aim of oral history ‘has been the empowerment of individuals or social groups through the process of remembering and reinterpreting the past, with an emphasis on the value of process as much as historical product’ (Perks and Thomson, 2016, p. xiv). The life narratives explored here illustrate different approaches to the challenges of uncovering family histories, dealing with underlying trauma, and coming to terms with heritage. The first case study involves a young woman who was born in 1994 and turned to volunteering in Australia and internationally while the second case study is that of a young man who majored in psychology and became a counsellor for first and second generation Vietnamese. I argue that these strategies not only provide a means of filling in the gaps and silences in their family histories and their knowledge of the first generation’s experiences but also constitute a means of understanding their own lives as well as those of their parents’ generation. By choosing to take on life paths that involve altruistic activities in the first case, and meaning-making in the second, these second generation Vietnamese have formulated a way to connect with the first generation, shed light on transgenerational histories, and help themselves while they help others.

The Vietnamese diaspora

The Vietnamese diaspora that followed the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the end of the Vietnam War was one of the largest and most visible mass migrations of the late 20th century. More than two million Vietnamese left their homeland over two decades. The Vietnamese exodus was driven by widespread state repression in postwar communist Vietnam, including the internment of one million people in reeducation camps (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2000, p. 82), the forced de-urbanization and displacement of another million people to New Economic Zones in rural areas, the execution of 65,000 citizens (Desbarats, 1990, pp. 60–63), restriction of free speech, movement, and religion, and discrimination directed against three specific groups in society: all those associated with the former South Vietnamese government, ethnic Chinese, and Amerasians (Desbarats, 1990, pp. 47–66; Hitchcox, 1990, pp. 36–68; Valverde, 1992, pp. 144–161). Postwar Vietnam was therefore marked by internment without trial, forced displacement, forced labour, and the marginalization of significant segments of the population on political and ethnic grounds. Social and familial networks in the former south were ruptured as family members disappeared into the reeducation camp system, the New Economic Zones, or as escapees. By 1979, more than 700,000 Vietnamese had fled their country (Robinson, 1998, p. 50). The plight of the boat people received extensive exposure in the late 1970s and 1980s, with estimates of refugee deaths at sea ranging from 100,000 to more than one million (Hitchcox, 1990, pp. 11, 85; Robinson, 1998, p. 59). The scale of this diaspora was unprecedented in Vietnamese history, as was the international response, which involved two major conferences convened by the United Nations in Geneva in 1979 and 1989 to deal with the Indochinese refugee crisis, the implementation of the Orderly Departure Program (ODP) and the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA), and the resettlement of Vietnamese in 50 countries worldwide (Robinson, 1998, p. 127). The closure of the last Vietnamese refugee camp in Hong Kong in 2000 put an end to, after a quarter of a century, ‘one of the longest-running migration and refugee resettlement programs in the modern era’ (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, 2005). The main countries of resettlement were the United States of America, Australia, Canada, and France, with Vietnamese communities established in countries as diverse as Norway and Israel.

The Vietnamese community in Australia

In Australia, the Vietnamese community grew from 1,000 people in 1975 to 277,400 in 2016 or 1.2% of the Australian population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017). The Vietnamese community is the largest refugee community in Australia. There were three major waves of arrivals: the first was a small group of 539 well-educated Vietnamese who were admitted in 1975–1976 (McMurray, 1999, p. 1); the second consisted mostly of ethnic Chinese escaping from Vietnam after the closure of private businesses in 1978 and the border war between China and Vietnam with arrivals peaking at 12,915 in 1979–1980 (Thomas, 1997, p. 275); and the third was a mixed group of small traders, rural and urban workers, and the unemployed, with numbers peaking at 13,248 in 1990–1991 (Viviani, 1996, p. 104). Vietnamese refugees formed the ‘first and most difficult test case’ of the abolition of the White Australia policy (Viviani, 1996, p. 1), with a high profile in the media and public discourse (Thomas, 1997, p. 275). While few were admitted in the immediate postwar years, Australia, under the leadership of Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, responded to international pressure and reacted generously to the Indochinese refugee crisis of 1978–1979 by accepting the highest number of refugees per head of population of all nations (Mackie, 1997, p. 28). A total of 150,000 Vietnamese had resettled in Australia by 1996 (McMurray, 1999, p. 3). Migration from Vietnam since the mid-1990s has largely been under the Family Reunion Program. While the Vietnamese have in the main resettled successfully in Australia, the community remains polarized between high rates of education and achievement on the one hand, and over-representation in low-skilled employment and in prison on the other hand. The educational attendance rate of Vietnamese aged 20–24, for example, is nearly twice the national average at 48.2% (Hugo et al., 2011, p. 144); however, the Vietnamese imprisonment rate is a third higher than the national average at 397.3 prisoners per 100,000 adult population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018). The lives of first generation Vietnamese have been shaped by their first-hand experience of war, trauma, and forced migration (Nguyen, 2005, 2009, 2016). They had to rebuild lives in a vastly different country and culture while mourning lost homes and homeland. The Vietnamese community in Australia is now at a crucial juncture: it is in the process of transitioning from a refugee community with widespread exposure to trauma to a second generation community.

The second generation

Until recently, second generation Vietnamese in Australia were too young to be the subject of research. In 1996, 92% of second generation Vietnamese were aged 0–14 years with nearly half aged 0–4 years (Khoo, McDonald, Giorgas and Birrell, 2002, p. 11). Second generation Vietnamese are now in higher education or the workforce, with the majority aged 24–38 years.

The relationship between second generation Vietnamese and their parents, and the second generation’s perceptions of the first generation’s history and culture are complicated by refugee histories and the trauma experienced by many members of the first generation. Histories of the Vietnamese diaspora, like those of post-Holocaust generations, are often fragmented and incomplete (Nguyen, 2009, p. 5). The reverberations for the secon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• Introduction: Asian diaspora and development
• Part I Development potential of Asian diasporas
• Part II Diaspora, homeland, and development
• Part III Gender, generation and identities
• Part IV Soft power, mobilization and development
• Part V Media, culture and representations
• Index