I was born in Vietnam, a small country in Asia. My family was ordinary and similar to the two millions of Vietnamese refugees, who have fled the country after the Vietnam War. My country is known for its rice fields, its beef noodle soup called “Pho,” the civil war between North and South, but Vietnam has four thousand years of History. It has always been a small country colonized by larger nations, such as France, or China. Yet, the inhabitants have fought to keep their territory. Thus, my family has inherit the courage and determination of our ancestors, and during the Vietnam War, these notions were as strong as ever. Indeed, my father was captured and imprisoned in the so-called “Reeducation Camp” for eight years long. So, my mother has to work to feed her four children (I wasn’t born at that time yet), and her mother-in-law. It was only after my father was released that they managed to escape the Communist regime by boat, and their faith was just as any other “Boat People” lost in the Pacific Ocean. My parents and sibling have been separated into three countries, France, Switzerland, and Vietnam. In fact, my mother stayed in Vietnam with me at that time, as “back up”, in case my father and siblings couldn’t reach a safe place. Then, my father sponsored his wife and youngest …show more content…
Therefore, they have a lot of prejudices towards the Northern Vietnamese, who are mostly Communist. However, not all Vietnamese from the North are Communist. Some of them are Catholic, hence anti-communist (they fled oppression from the North into the South in 1957). When I was younger, I did not understand this difference. So, I also had a strong prejudice towards Northern people until I befriended with several Catholic Northern people. One would think that people from different ethnicities discriminate each other the most, but, in fact, people from the same ethnicity can have a lots of prejudices and
Stories from the Civil War often are told from a man's perspective and rarely from a woman's point of view. In 1902, Susie King Taylor wrote her memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S. C. Volunteers, to explain her role in the war as a wife to a soldier, the regiments' laundress, a teacher, and a nurse. Taylor is famously known for being the first black nurse during the Civil War, but her memoir gives historians a closer look at her life and multiple roles during the war. In 1848, Taylor was born into slavery in Savannah, Georgia.
Daily Life in The Concentration Camps “… the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jews.” – Adolf Hitler. It was a very sad time in Germany, it all started when Adolf Hitler got elected. His plan was to wipe out the Jews from all of existence, and he ended up killing 11 million people. The first part of his plan was to open up a few camps, and he ended up with 20,000 concentration camps, some of the main camps are Aushwits-Burkina, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Theresienstat, and Buchenwald.
The Tears of War The author Tim O’Brien, creates a novel that talks about many true and unreal war stories to display how much the Vietnam War has physically and emotionally affected each soldier. This book was written by the point of view of a veteran who has experienced the grief and pain these men were put through because they forced to fight in a war that they may or may not have believed in. O’Brien’s purpose for writing this novel is to let people who were not in the war try to understand and experience the feelings and thoughts of the men as they read each story in this novel.
President Lyndon Johnson declared a campaign to win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, and the United States decisively lost that battle. At the beginning of Truong’s book he shares what ideas are going through his heart and mind, “I would have been willing to accept almost amy regime that could achieve real independence and that had the welfare of the people at heart. I was quite prepared to give Ho’s Northern government the benefit of the doubt on this score”(36). This quote illustrates the minds of a Vietnamese population desperate for independence in any form. They had been subjected to outside imperial forces for hundreds of years prior and were poised to accept any leader willing to help them to independence.
The Vietnam War was a long battle of seventeen long years. There were many causes leading up to this traumatic event. The U.S. got involved because of the spread of communism throughout Asia. The novel, The Things They Carried is about how morality can change both how a soldier thinks and feels. In Tim O’Brien’s historical fiction novel, The Things They Carried, both the physical and geographical surroundings shape the psychological traits of the characters during the following events: Mary Anne’s disappearance, the death of Curt Lemon and Mitchell Sander’s unbelievable story.
The end of the “Vietnam War” left many tortured souls in search of heaven. Due to differences in views of governing and authority people began to flee out of fear of the new Communist Government. The book “I love Yous are for White People” by Lac Su is a memoir of the events he faced with his family trying to create anew life for of a psychologist with similar and his crushed “American Dream”. A child of second generation migrating into a new environment has difficulty adapting to the ways of society.
Therefore this boycott led community is left in tatters. Bruce Dawe’s Homecoming concentrates on the trudges of the Vietnam war commenting on the
The Vietnam War in the late 1970s lead many of refugees including children attempting to attain better living condition relative to those in war-torn Vietnam. Escaping from a war torn nation and arriving to America meant getting accustomed to the much different western culture, while simultaneously facing the challenge of retaining your traditions. Le Thi Diem Thuy presents the story, “The Gangster We Are All Looking For,” to demonstrate her struggle as a migrant. Thuy discusses through her first- hand experiences the arduous struggle that was assimilating into American culture.
As the L.A. Times reports, “Until recently, the county’s most visible Asian cluster was Little Saigon, once-sleepy central distract transformed by Vietnam War refugees into a bustling shopping and dining destination.” By working together as a community, the Vietnamese managed to overcome their social barriers and achieve great successes in Orange County, which was an amazing feat for a refugee group that started out with nothing. Little Saigon is a reminder to the Vietnamese Americans, of a history and story of a people who lost their homes, families, and dignity and came in 1975 to get it all back. It was a place where successful people willingly scrubbed toilets, pumped gas, and washed dishes came to reclaim their lives. As Quach Nhut, now a prosperous pharmacist in Westminster, listened to the Fall of Saigon on the radio while he was in the refugee camp, said, “I thought Saigon was lost forever.”
Veterans experience atrocities that causes them to question how God could allow such cruelty to exist. Krebs predicament with his religion is common among those exposed to life without a sense of safety and assurance. Seeing the carnage war produces can scramble a man’s sense of reality and illusion. Everyone comes out of war a different person. Philip K. Paulson, a veteran of the Vietnam War, went into Vietnam a Lutheran, and became an atheist after one month in Vietnam.
This preparation Orr relates was pretty grueling and almost cost him his life during a rappelling incident. Bouncing back from this ordeal, Orr started his first assignment in the Republic of Panamá, where he worked with other volunteers at a school and met a teacher named Emilio, who he quickly bonded with. While in Panamá, the author traveled around other parts of Latin America. During this stay Orr, met with a representative from the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID) about working in Vietnam. From his time in the Air Force and time spent studying prior to Vietnam war, Orr’s anti-war Semitism grew and Orr decided he needed to see Vietnam for himself, seeing as they were recruiting prior service peace corps volunteers he had no problem being accepted.
“American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and our National Identity” is a book that takes us through 20 years of the War in Vietnam from about 1955 to 1975. The Vietnam War is the second longest war in US history encompassing 5 presidents which include Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. Appy’s book gives a unique American perspective on incredible, horrifying, and inspiring stories in Vietnam as well as American. Through Apps book readers learn about different communism containment methods that America used. Readers also learn about different methods of attack on Vietnam from an American standpoint and how the different failures of the US army and US politicians turned many heads into hard truths about the war.
Fowler’s description of Vietnam depicts different examples of his view of the country. He describes the beauty of “The gold of the rice-fields under the flat late sun ... the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south,” along with the darkness of the war: “in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes. ”(Greene, 1955, p.17). Fowler sees both the positive and the negative in the country of Vietnam and presents his knowledge of both.
In his memoir, Where the Wind Leads, Vinh Chung demonstrates the theme that times of despair and hardship will eventually pass, but it is the motivation to succeed which will make that time fruitful. While relaying the story of his family’s past, Chung gives an overall theme of success and prosperity which accompanies the distress and conflict brought about by the encompassing Vietnam War. As Chung stated, “[W]hat I do know is that the same pressure that can crush coal into dust can also turn carbon into diamond . . . Tough times produce tough people” (14). Though this theme of success can be grounded in one’s desire to prosper, Chung shows a deeper desire from which this success stems.
Unlike American, when Vietnamese people meet each other at the time during “Tet”, adults give away their red envelopes which symbolize luck and wealth to the young people. It is very common to see older people giving sealed red envelopes containing some lucky money to younger people. Before receiving the envelopes, younger people have to perform a certain greeting. After that, the older ones will return good advice and words of wisdom, encouraging the younger ones to keep up with the schoolwork, to live harmoniously with others, and obey their parents. Furthermore, at party in New Year’s holiday, American people eat black eye peas which means hope for the good income.