April 30, 1975, is known around the world as the day North Vietnamese troops captured Saigon and the Vietnam War ended.
But in parts of Dorchester, the war never ended.
“I don’t think it’s done,” said 80-year-old Dam Hanh. “I still see two flags.”
The yellow flag with three red stripes — representing South Vietnam, the country that the Americans unsuccessfully fought to protect — is ubiquitous in Boston, and will be raised on City Hall Plaza Wednesday. The flag of the country that emerged from the war, the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam, includes a bright red field with one yellow star, and is rarely seen here.
“I hope the U.S. will help the South Vietnam again, and help the whole country,” Hanh said.
The local Vietnamese community still carries trauma of the war and fleeing home. Some elders have withheld stories of their journey to try to protect their children and grandchildren, while others don’t want that history to be lost.
At an event Saturday commemorating 50 years of the Vietnamese diaspora, hundreds of people celebrated the generation that built new lives in America and urged the community to remember their stories.
“It’s important for us to learn about that part of the history too, because the Vietnamese Communist history is completely different,” said Bryant Tran, who works for Saigon Broadcasting Television Network, a U.S.-based Vietnamese language broadcaster. “They are the winner. They can say whatever they want.”
Tran, 49, escaped Vietnam with his mother and two younger sisters in the late 1980s. He spent his teenage years in a refugee camp in Thailand until the Catholic Church sponsored them to come to Boston.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, more than 200,000 Vietnamese fled the country’s Communist government and arrived in the U.S. as refugees. Over the next 35 years, nearly 600,000 more people joined the diaspora.
Boston became home to the largest Vietnamese community in the Northeast, with more than 10,000 people settling in Fields Corner, also known as the Little Saigon Cultural District. But the number of Vietnamese residents in the neighborhood has declined in recent years due to rising housing costs.
Tommy Lam, 24, works with the 1975 project, which is attempting to build a monument to the Vietnamese community in Fields Corner. He said a 2019 trip back to his father’s rural homeland opened his eyes to how far his family has come.
“I was able to see the whole rice fields and really understand the root of where I am, and the privilege that I have to be born in America, given the opportunity and just kind of live that American dream,” Lam said. “My dad coming to America at 18 with the shirt on his back and nothing else, it’s crazy how much we’re able to grow.”
Saturday’s event at Boston College High School was a multigenerational affair, showcasing how much the war continues to affect Vietnamese families around Boston. Son Ca Lâm, a professor at the UMass Boston Asian America Studies program, pointed out the dozens of young volunteers who scampered to set up and staff the various exhibit areas around the high school.
”It is not just the older generation who are sort of commemorating the ... displacement and their fleeing from the homeland,“ Lâm said, ”but the younger generation is also trying to carry on the torch and honor those stories and that experience and remembering where we come from.”
For some members of the Vietnamese community, Saturday’s commemoration was an opportunity to connect with a time their families don’t like to talk about.
Kelly Tran, 22, is a senior at UMass Boston and one of the artists who installed an exhibition to amplify oral histories of the diaspora community. She said that growing up, she had not been exposed to much of her Vietnamese history.
“A lot of my family members are very secretive or reluctant to tell the full story to me and my siblings,” she said.
Tran knows both of her grandparents fought in the war, and were imprisoned for years in brutal Viet Cong “re-education camps.” Tran said her coursework in the Asian American Studies program has given her further insight to her Vietnamese heritage.
Other participants said it is important to also highlight how Vietnamese have found success and community in a new country.
D.H. Vu, a professor at Tufts School of Medicine, said refugees and their descendants “know intimately that at any moment, everything can be taken away.
”And yet, if we stay open — to those we meet, even strangers, to the knowledge that finds us — a reversal of fortune is always possible,“ Vu said.
Tommy Nguyen, 73, who served in the South Vietnamese army, said he sees a simple bright side to the story.
“This America, this freedom,” he said. “The opportunity for people, they have the chance to go up, not go down.”
