1975: Trauma and Transformation

“It is a beautiful country depending on where you look,” writes Ocean Vuong in his semi-autobiographical novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. “Depending on where you look you might see the woman waiting on the shoulder of the dirt road, an infant girl wrapped in a sky-blue shawl in her arms.”¹

Vuong’s writing compels us to look again. “A woman, not yet thirty, clutches her daughter on the shoulder of a dirt road in a beautiful country where two men, M-16s in their hands, step up to her. She is at a checkpoint, a gate made of concertina and weaponized permission.”²

Before he became a critically acclaimed novelist, and before that an award-winning poet for his 2016 collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong was born on a Vietnamese rice farm. The violence of the Vietnam War compelled his family to flee their home and their country as refugees.³

The family arrived in the United States when Vuong was two. His mother, grandmother, and an aunt raised him in a working-class neighborhood of Hartford. He attended public schools in the nearby town of Glastonbury, which were known to be among the best, if not the best, schools in Hartford County. In a March 2016 issue of the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s largest daily newspaper, an introduction to a photo gallery about life in the 1970s waxes nostalgic: “The good ol’ days in Glastonbury. . . . Do you remember some of these places?”⁴

This is what Ocean Vuong remembers: “We literally erased ourselves to go to school [there]. . . . And there was shame with that, too, because I didn’t know how to make use of it.” Everyone had said it was a great school, but Vuong was less sure. “I don’t know if it’s that great. I feel like I’m judged before I step into any room.”⁵

This is what Vuong’s poetry and prose remind us: What is good—as in those “good ol’ days”—depends on who is telling the story.

1975 marks a tumultuous year in Asian American history. It was the beginning of many journeys of Vietnamese, Hmong, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees to the United States. At the heart of the refugee’s journey is the flight from persecution and violence in order to survive. The 1951 Refugee Convention, a United Nations multilateral treaty, defines a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”⁶

Southeast Asian refugees fled from the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Cambodian civil war and genocide, and the “Secret War” in Laos. They feared or experienced persecution because they had opposed communism and had allied with US-backed forces and governments. In short, they were here because Americans were there.

The Southeast Asian refugees who arrived in the United States had survived unspeakable terror. And they continued to encounter violence as they struggled to resettle and to breathe new life into their families and communities. Yet, just as American wars and policies have indelibly impacted Vietnamese, Laotian, Hmong, and Cambodian peoples and their homelands, so too have Southeast Asian refugees, their descendants, and immigrant generations transformed the US landscape with their labor and ingenuity, and their community organizing and creativity.

The massive influx of Southeast Asian refugees in the United States beginning in 1975 also dramatically changed US refugee policy from an ad hoc approach to a more intentional one through the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act. In recent times, refugees from Myanmar and Bhutan have been the largest groups of refugees in the United States.⁷ Many of them have been employed as essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

SECRETS AND WARS

Of the estimated two million people who fled Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, more than one million had been admitted to the US by 1992, constituting the largest refugee resettlement in American history.⁸ Yet, while some of the experiences of their exodus and resettlement are well documented, ignorance of Southeast Asian American histories persists. In the 2020 documentary film The Donut King, about the predominance of Cambodian refugees in California’s donut store industry, Susan Wahid of Rose Donuts & Café in San Clemente observes, “You would think by now most people would know about Cambodia, would know about the genocide, and would know about all the killing.”⁹ Yet, many of her customers don’t even know where Cambodia is located.

This invisibility is partly the result of the ways that Vietnam and 1975 are popularly understood and remembered in the United States. 1975 marks the fall of Saigon, the year of America’s loss of the Vietnam War to the country’s communists. The defeat rattled American confidence. US involvement in the Vietnam War began with youthful optimism and an inspirational vision of service, embodied in President John F. Kennedy’s iconic statement in his 1961 inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”¹⁰ But as the war continued, it became an increasingly demoralizing war for the American soldiers who were being drafted into military service. In US history, another prominent theme is the bitter divisiveness on the home front, which included a robust antiwar movement. American critics noted the enormity of the social and economic cost. So many American lives were lost. Billions of dollars of funding for the Vietnam War could have been invested in the United States.

This plethora of controversial issues contributes to a US-centric history that has reduced Vietnam to a story about war and a consequence of the failed US strategy to contain the spread of communism after the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949. This narrative erases the meanings and memories of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as homelands, the beauty of their landscapes, and the diversity and humanity of their peoples. Another troubling outcome is the marginalization of Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong refugees in US history. Their histories have been rendered invisible in large part because even though US military actions in Cambodia and Laos were part of the Vietnam War, they were covert.

Although Cambodia’s head of state, Prince Sihanouk, tried to maintain the country’s neutrality by severing ties with the United States in 1965, his policies allowed Vietnamese communists to use border areas and the port of Sihanoukville as supply routes. The United States bombed eighty-three sites in Cambodia between 1965 and 1969. In 1969, the bombing escalated. A covert US Strategic Air Command tactical bombing campaign of suspected communist base camps and supply zones involved carpet-bombing by US B-52s. The purpose of carpet-bombing, also known as “saturation bombing,” is to inflict damage in every part of a targeted area just as a carpet covers every part of a floor. Although a 1970 coup put in place a Cambodian government that supported the United States, the bombing campaign continued until 1973, pushing Vietnamese communists deeper into Cambodia, and radicalizing more Cambodians against their government. An estimated 250,000 Cambodians lost their lives.¹¹ This destruction and devastation, combined with the withdrawal of US soldiers from South Vietnam, contributed to the fall of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, to communist forces, and the rise of the extremist government of the Khmer Rouge.¹²

The Khmer Rouge attempted to create a classless society made up of rural agricultural workers by destroying culture and traditions. The regime’s leaders called this idea “Year Zero” and put it into practice by shutting down schools and universities, evacuating people from cities and moving them to rural areas, separating children from their parents and placing them in labor camps, abolishing money, and banning music. Professionals and educated persons were considered enemies of the state. Religious and ethnic minorities were singled out for persecution. Under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, Cambodians endured forced labor, starvation, disease, and mass executions, after which the sites of these atrocities became popularly known as the “killing fields.” The Cambodian genocide led to the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million to 3 million people in a country that had a population of approximately 7 million in early 1975.¹³

The concealment of US military involvement in Laos is crystallized in the historical labels of the US “Secret War” in Laos and the US Central Intelligence Agency’s sponsorship of a “Secret Army” of forty thousand of the country’s Hmong hill tribesmen, a diasporic people and ethnic group. The “Secret War” and “Secret Army” were part of a broader US military effort to support the Royal Lao Government against the communist Pathet Lao army. The effort was an attempt to interdict traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a military supply route that ran from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam, sending weapons, ammunition, and other supplies from communist-led North Vietnam to supporters in South Vietnam.

Southeast Asian refugees in the United States grapple with knowing these histories all too well from direct experience. Their descendants learn from what has been shared through familial and community-based stories. Some resist the secrecy that has rendered this history unknown by conducting their own research and crafting distinctive histories through poetry and other art forms as well as scholarship. Poet Monica Sok’s 2020 debut collection of poetry, A Nail the Evening Hangs On, was inspired by her personal experience as a daughter of former Cambodian refugees, but also by the need to understand her collective history as part of a Cambodian diaspora. This is her hope:

The U.S. secretly bombed Cambodia during the war in Vietnam, and this escalated the Khmer Rouge into power. This is not a mystery to me. If my readers learn anything by reading my book, I hope they learn that the U.S. is also responsible for what happened in Cambodia.¹⁴

These efforts to defy covert US military involvement relate to a different, albeit related, kind of war. As writer and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen posits in his nonfiction book about Vietnam, Nothing Ever Dies: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”¹⁵

FLEEING TO SURVIVE

It ought to be essential for all Americans to learn about the journeys that Southeast Asian refugees undertook to get to the United States. Many of their narratives have been published, such as the story of a Cambodian refugee known by the pseudonym of Bun Thab.¹⁶ The Khmer Rouge had assigned him the task of writing down people’s life stories each month. If their stories differed from what they had said the previous month, Bun had to report the discrepancy and “that was enough to get them killed.”¹⁷ One night, fearing for his own life, Bun fled with two friends. He witnessed one of his friends get shot and butchered to death. Bun hid underwater in a river as a communist soldier jumped over his head.

After some time had passed, he and his friend emerged. Holding hands, they started to walk again. They walked for two days with nothing to eat. Their discovery of a large turtle could have satiated their intense hunger. Yet, Bun related, “neither my friend nor I could bring ourselves to kill the turtle. Instead we prayed and promised the turtle, ‘If you bring us good luck and take us to Thailand, we will not kill you. We will let you go.’“¹⁸ They continued walking, carrying the turtle with them, until they reached Thailand, where an old man brought them to his house and his family gave them rice to eat. Bun recalled that he and his friend’s stomachs were full, but their hearts heavy from the memory of their friend who had been killed. And although Bun eventually resettled in the United States, his trauma persists: “I still have nightmares of that Khmer Rouge jumping over my head, and I wake up shivering with fear.”¹⁹

Bun Thab’s story is but one of many narratives about arduous and harrowing journeys. Other first-person accounts describe a myriad of traumatic experiences, including individuals leaving only with the clothes they were wearing and being unable to tell family and friends about their escapes, witnessing the deaths of family members en route, encountering pirates in the Gulf of Thailand who robbed and brutalized them. The refugees with American contacts and who had fled via airlifts were considered to be the lucky ones. But this mode of escape was also perilous. In 1975, the first flight of Operation Babylift—the mass evacuation of orphans from South Vietnam to the United States and other countries—crash-landed and many on board died. The refugees who fled via land and sea sometimes encountered unwelcoming authorities in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, which were the main countries of first asylum before their resettlement in the United States and other countries. Those refugees who were able to join these refugee camps further endured long and difficult waiting periods.²⁰

The wide range of these experiences is often conceptualized as three migration waves, each taking place within a specific political context and having a distinctive socioeconomic composition. Beginning in 1975, the first wave’s 130,000 refugees consisted of primarily South Vietnamese military personnel and their relatives. Many of them were well educated and spoke English. They had experience living in urban areas and had worked directly with Americans.

The second wave of refugees began arriving in 1978. It was a much larger group and socioeconomically more diverse than the first wave. Many were uneducated, poorer, and spoke little English. They hailed from rural areas. The Vietnamese refugees of this wave who fled by sea became popularly known as “boat people,” although critics decry this label because it simplifies them as pitiful and obscures their heroic will to live.²¹ The second wave was also more ethnically diverse. It included ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese, but also a large number of lowland Lao and highland Hmong. Many were Buddhists and animists, in contrast to the significant Catholic population of the first wave.

By the early 1990s, Southeast Asian refugee flows to the United States declined as formal refugee admissions programs, such as the Orderly Departure Program, ended. A third wave of Southeast Asians entered the United States primarily as immigrants utilizing the family reunification provisions of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. It also included thousands of Vietnamese Amerasians (children born of US servicemen and Vietnamese women) as well as political prisoners.

In the early twenty-first century, new immigration and new generations born in the United States have significantly contributed to Vietnamese American growth and diversity. According to the Pew Research Center, the Vietnamese American population grew by 78 percent between 2000 and 2019. In 2019, 2.2 million people in the United States claimed Vietnamese ancestry, making the Vietnamese one of the six national origin groups, alongside Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Japanese, that account for 85 percent of all Asian Americans in 2019.²² The Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian American populations also increased during this time. In 2019, the Cambodian American population numbered 339,000; Hmong Americans, 327,000; and Laotian Americans, 254,000.²³

The concept of migration waves enables us to organize and generalize a large number of Southeast Asian refugee and immigrant experiences in the United States. But waves continue to move and take on new shapes. Southeast Asian refugee flows continued into the twenty-first century with the resettlement of a new group of Hmong refugees in Minnesota in the early 2000s.²⁴ This is a living history.

One might think that this historical ebb and flow of Southeast Asian refugees would make an impression on the general American population and impart lessons about wars and understanding about suffering. Yet, this is not what has happened in the age of COVID-19. Rather, ignorance and hate persist in the form of racial scapegoating.

In 2020, a hate note was taped onto a Hmong American couple’s apartment door in Woodbury, Minnesota. It read: “We’re watching you fucking chinks take the Chinese virus back to china. We don’t want you hear infecting us with your disease!!!!!!!!!!” It was signed: “your friendly neighborhood.” Woodbury is a suburb of St. Paul, a short distance to the Twin Cities, which houses the largest Hmong American enclave in the United States.²⁵

The irony of the invisibility of Hmong Americans even in Minnesota is not lost on scholar Kong Pheng Pha, who writes and teaches about refugee migration with a focus on Hmong Americans. For Pha, it is but a reflection of the “larger and longer history of Hmong American structural eradication within U.S. history.”²⁶

AMERICAN HARDSHIPS

Refugee resettlement in the United States offered immediate refuge, but it also presented multiple challenges and crises. Refugees with less education struggled to learn a new language and make a living wage. Xang Mao Xiong arrived in the United States from Laos in 1978. In an oral history, he explained, “I did not even know the difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ when I first came, yet I was required to find a job to support my family.”²⁷ The English language was so different compared to the Hmong language, and adults struggled to learn what seemed to come easily to their children. Xiong continued:

One problem I have had in learning English is that after I learned what one word means, I got all confused when I found that another word had the same meaning. For example, good, nice, beautiful, perfect have similar meanings. In Hmong, different words have different meanings. American English is very hard for us adults to learn. It is easy for our children, but not for us.²⁸

In many refugee families, parent-child hierarchies flipped as children grasped the English language with more proficiency than their elders. They became the translators for all activities, the most important as well as mundane. For example, Genevieve Siri and her family arrived in the United States from Laos in 1976. Siri was only a first grader when she was called to interpret for a Lao family enrolling their child in school.²⁹

Furthermore, refuge in the United States could not erase the memories of wars and the suffering that accompanied them. Southeast Asian refugees experienced depression and anxiety.³⁰ In the mid-1980s, the Centers for Disease Control began receiving reports of sudden unexplained death syndrome, or SUDS, among Southeast Asian—mostly Laotian and Hmong—refugee men.³¹

And, while some Americans welcomed Southeast Asian refugees, others scorned them as non-whites and undeserving foreigners. Vietnamese refugee fishermen clashed with white fishermen in Seadrift, Texas, culminating in the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan in the fishing village in 1979.³² Racial tensions and violence also arose between Cambodian and Laotian refugees and Black, Latino, and white residents in poor urban areas, such as West Philadelphia. These racial hostilities partly stemmed from the way that Americans lumped Southeast Asian refugees with other Asian American groups who, in the 1960s and 1970s, were increasingly portrayed as successful immigrants and model minorities. In this context, the fact that Southeast Asian refugees in the United States received government and other public assistance was a source of resentment and misunderstanding.³³

Southeast Asian refugees encountered intense anti-Asian harassment and violence in cities and urban neighborhoods that were grossly unprepared for the sudden influx of refugees needing assistance. Robert P. Thayer’s 1990 report, titled Who Killed Heng Lim?, about the Southeast Asian population in Philadelphia, identified anti-Asian verbal and physical harassment as major problems. School-aged youth stated that racial epithets, such as “Chink,” “ching chong,” and “f**king Chinese,” were regular occurrences.³⁴ Forms of physical harassment included assault, the throwing of rocks and bottles, vandalism to cars and houses, and arson. One Hmong American woman described the anti-Asian violence as ubiquitous and deadly:

Everyone who can walk, between the ages of 6 and 85, has experienced it in some way. . . . I know old people who have been attacked and little children who have been attacked. . . . The situation is extremely bad. The level of hostility is very high. A lot of Hmong would agree. . . . That’s why a lot of Hmong left the city. They started to feel that, if they didn’t leave, then one day they could be killed.³⁵

Such fears were not unfounded. In South Philadelphia in 1990, Timothy Meitzler struck Heng Lim on the head with a long piece of wood after calling him a “f**king Chinese.”³⁶ Lim later died from the head injury. He had planned to become a doctor in Cambodia, but fled when the Khmer Rouge took power, making his way to a refugee camp in Thailand, where he stayed for two years before coming to the United States. The title of Thayer’s report was inspired by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s 1987 documentary film, Who Killed Vincent Chin?, about the 1982 murder of Chin, a Chinese American man, in Detroit. Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz brutally beat Chin to death with a baseball bat, blaming him for the increasing competition from Japan’s automobile industry in the United States, despite the fact that Chin was Chinese American. According to witnesses, Ebens allegedly said to Chin, “It’s because of you little m—f—s that we’re out of work.”³⁷

In the 1980s and early 1990s, anti-Southeast Asian violence took place across the United States. A 1993 issue of the CAAAV Voice, the newsletter of the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, reported that Southeast Asians were bearing the brunt of anti-Asian violence. The story highlighted intense campaigns of violence against Southeast Asians in the Boston area that included efforts to drive them out of Dorchester in 1983 and 1987; multiple cases of arson targeting Cambodians in Revere; the 1985 beating death of a Cambodian man, Bun Vong, on his way home to Lowell; and the 1987 drowning death of a teenage Cambodian boy, Vandy Phorng, after being pushed into a canal lock. The story also spotlighted two horrific cases of anti-Asian violence in 1989. Before they pistol-whipped and killed Chinese American student Jim Loo in Raleigh, North Carolina, Robert and Lloyd Piche told Loo and his Vietnamese friends, “We had enough of you gooks in Vietnam.” In Stockton, California, Patrick Edward Purdy, who had been obsessed with the Vietnam War, killed five children—four from Cambodia and one from Vietnam—in a shooting rampage at Cleveland Elementary School. According to the CAAAV Voice, “the non-acceptance of the American defeat in Vietnam plays a large part in the hostility towards Southeast Asians,” despite the fact that the Southeast Asian refugees in the United States had been American allies.³⁸

The poverty and violence of tough American neighborhoods and the helplessness of their parents and other elders pushed a number of Southeast Asian youths in the United States toward gangs for protection and a different kind of kinship. Some of these youths who are now adults have been deported or face deportation to their Southeast Asian nations of birth, even though they have completed their US prison sentences. According to the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, two thousand Southeast Asian Americans have been deported from the United States since 1998. Roughly fifteen thousand currently live with a final order of removal, and about 80 percent of those removal orders are based on past convictions.³⁹ Most of these cases involve Southeast Asian Americans who came to the US as infants and toddlers, fleeing Southeast Asia as refugees with their families. Their deportations surged after 1996, when Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which enable the deportation of non-citizens for certain crimes, even if they were committed before the passage of the law.

Many of the Southeast Asian Americans who have been deported or are facing deportation are legal permanent residents. They face deportation for minor, nonviolent crimes, as in the case of Saroun Khan. He was about four years old when he and his parents arrived in Philadelphia in 1984. His parents did not speak any English. Khan felt as though he and his brother had to fend for themselves while in poverty. Khan’s crime was to take an unlocked car for a joyride, an offense for which he had served time in prison. Yet, under immigration law, it is considered an “aggravated felony” and subject to deportation. In 2020, federal immigration agents arrested and detained him, putting him on track for deportation to a country that he hardly remembers.⁴⁰ Thus, violence persists for Southeast Asian Americans in the United States: as a young Southeast Asian person coming of age in Philadelphia in the 1980s, Khan had been bullied and robbed; now violence comes in the form of more recent government policies that engender fear.

Finally, the 1996 laws severely restrict the ability of immigration laws to consider Khan’s individual circumstances before ordering deportation, further concealing the reasons why Khan and other Southeast Asian refugees are here in the United States and erasing what they have endured. What then of his and his family’s history of fleeing war and genocide to survive, the histories of so many Southeast Asian refugees in the United States?

TRANSFORMATIONS

Just as US wars and policies indelibly impacted Vietnamese, Laotian, Hmong, and Cambodian peoples and their homelands, so too have Southeast Asian refugees, their descendants, and immigrant generations transformed the United States with their memories, their labor and their ingenuity, and the revitalization of their cultures. They have changed the contemporary American experience of the United States through their contributions to industry, government, and the arts.

One of the most recognizable ways that Southeast Asian Americans have shaped the landscape is through the building of ethnic enclaves. In 1988, California governor George Deukmejian officially designated the area in Orange County bordered by Westminster Boulevard, Bolsa Avenue, Magnolia Street, and Euclid Street as “Little Saigon.” The sight and sound of the Vietnamese language and the smell of Vietnamese cuisine have contributed to making it a tourist destination. Yet, for Vietnamese refugees, who had left their homeland involuntarily and for whom there is often no return, these places have a deeper social and spiritual meaning. One of the ways that Little Saigon communicates a distinctive identity and presence reminiscent of Vietnam is through its architecture. Temples and other structures are built according to the principles of phong thuy, a Vietnamese form of feng shui. Familiar architectural forms such as arches and curved roofs, artifacts like Buddhist statues, and landscaping with plants and trees from Vietnam remind refugees and immigrants of the places they left behind.⁴¹

By creating a new place-based identity that forges connections between Vietnamese Americans and their ancestors, Little Saigon can be equally powerful for those who were born in the United States and those who were born in Vietnam but have little memory of their native country. Sometimes these connections are conceptualized in spiritual terms, for example, when this multigenerational community encourages those Vietnamese Americans living outside of Little Saigon to make a pilgrimage to the place, perhaps to attend the Tet festival and celebrate the Vietnamese Lunar New Year.

Some ethnic enclaves are not as architecturally visible, but still thrive. Silicon Valley offered Vietnamese refugees and immigrants a booming tech industry for manufacturing jobs and socioeconomic opportunity in engineering, while the businesses in San Jose’s Little Saigon fulfilled cravings of home. Writer Beth Nguyen emphasizes that “if there’s one thing that refugees and immigrants will never give up, it’s their food culture.”⁴² Restaurants and groceries offering banh mi, pho, banh xeo, com tam, cafe sua da, produce, and snacks reminded them of the taste of home.

Music and video stores, fabric and clothing stores, and import shops served a similar purpose.

What began as a way to address communal longings would sometimes grow into stand-alone shops and even franchises. Lee’s Sandwiches established a permanent location in San Jose in the early 1980s. It served the Vietnamese sandwich, banh mi, known for its textural contrasts of the baguette (crisp on the outside and airy inside), aromas of cilantro and meat, and flavor bursts from cool pickled vegetables against the heat of jalapeño peppers. In 2001, founder Chieu Le and his eldest son, Minh, expanded Lee’s Sandwiches to offer Euro-style sandwiches alongside its banh mi options. It currently boasts over sixty locations across the United States.⁴³ And then there is the heartwarming comfort of pho with its foundation of long-simmered beef broth, rice noodles, meat, onions, herbs, and spices. Ph$$ Hóa, which opened in San Jose in the 1980s, has expanded across and outside of the United States, with multiple locations in Washington, Indiana, Texas, Florida, and British Columbia, as well as California.⁴⁴

It is not solely large concentrations of people and businesses that constitute a community. After Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest hurricanes in US history, devastated New Orleans in 2005, a relatively small Vietnamese American community in New Orleans’s Village de L’Est returned to the city and rebuilt their community in the aftermath. Some observers attributed their resilience to innate Vietnamese family values and hard work ethic. Yet Asian American studies scholars cautioned against such ahistorical analysis, warning that it perpetuated a “model minority” stereotype.⁴⁵ Village de L’Est was a place that Vietnamese Americans had forged out of relatively recent refugee displacement and resettlement. It was a place that they could re-inhabit and build anew.

Sometimes the impact of Southeast Asian Americans in the United States is not through a geographically bound community, but rather through entrepreneurship. Ted Ngoy fled with his wife by military plane as Cambodia fell to communist forces. In California, he worked multiple jobs as a church custodian and gas station attendant until, one day, he tasted a donut, which he savored. It had reminded him of a Cambodian treat, nom kong. This discovery led to work at a Winchell’s donut shop and eventually to Ngoy owning his own store. It sparked what would become Cambodian predominance in California’s donut industry, what might be called a “pink box” revolution.

Ngoy went on to buy dozens of donut stores that he then leased to other Cambodian refugee families. Even with limited English proficiency, Cambodian refugees could make a living from operating a donut shop. Communication with customers could be limited to basic elements, like prices and the names of different donut types and flavors such as chocolate frosted and cinnamon twist. Ngoy used pink boxes to package donuts because it cost less than the traditional white boxes used by Winchell’s and other donut shops. The pink box has since become the standard visual cue for a box of donuts in the United States.

Ngoy has received significant media attention regarding his donut empire, most recently in the documentary The Donut King. While the film features his refugee story and his family’s economic rise in the United States, it resists romanticizing the American Dream through entrepreneurship. The documentary reveals that at the heart of each successful Cambodian-owned donut shop is an incredible amount of labor—the long working hours, seven days a week—which is often performed by refugee parents and their children.⁴⁶

The resilience and innovation of Southeast Asian Americans can also be gleaned from their efforts in cultural preservation in music, language, and dance. In St. Paul, Minnesota, Hmong American adults gather to learn traditional funeral songs on the qeej, a reed pipe instrument, that dates back to 1100 BC. Music ensures the safe passage of those who die, so that their souls may return to their birthplace. According to student Be Vang, “The more you hear about it, the more it sounds like poetry. It’s very heartwarming when you understand it.”⁴⁷

Since Southeast Asian American history and culture are often not taught in school, enrichment programs provide cultural continuity and help instill ethnic pride in children. Maysee Yang Herr is one of the creators of Camp Phoojywg, a youth program in Wisconsin that promotes appreciation and understanding of the Hmong language and culture. While the program is offered to all children, Herr observes increased pride among the Hmong children participants: “They were not quite as afraid to speak Hmong as they were before. And that says a lot.”⁴⁸

An example of Cambodian American cultural preservation is the artistic and educational work of the Angkor Dance Troupe. Angkor was the capital city of the Khmer Empire, which flourished from the ninth to fifteenth centuries. Tim Thou and a group of Cambodian refugees in Lowell, Massachusetts, established the Angkor Dance Troupe in 1986. Its goals include teaching students how to explain the history and tell the stories of the Cambodian people through the power of facial and body language, musical composition, and lyrical speech. In 2021, the Angkor Dance Troupe offered three courses remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. One course geared toward young Cambodian Americans features Cambodian cultural history and its relation to present-day issues.⁴⁹

Southeast Asian American youth are leaders and organizers as well as students. Founded in 1988, the Lao Student Association at California State University, Fresno, aims to create a foundation where students can strengthen their knowledge through participation in various Lao cultural functions, such as an annual Lao Heritage Night. Students promote Lao culture through wearing traditional Lao clothing, dancing, and singing. But they also promote participation in American democracy by encouraging their social media followers to register to vote and by protesting against hate. In a May 15, 2021, Instagram post, they wrote: “We’re glad that we could do our part and take a step towards change. Together we can fight and prevail to end hate crimes and discrimination in the United States. #unityagainsthate.”⁵⁰

Southeast Asian American women have organized as well, integrating cultural enrichment programs with community advocacy. The Hmong American Women’s Association (HAWA) was founded in 1993 by a group of thirteen women in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.⁵¹ Its initial programs included health education and literacy development. Since the early 2000s, its services have included providing individuals proficient in speaking Hmong, Burmese, Karen, and Chin as advocates for domestic violence and sexual assault survivors, with the broader goal of ending gender-based violence within the Hmong community. The organization also touts a Southeast Asian–specific LGBTQ program. And, in 2020, Leana Yang became HAWA’s first openly Hmong queer-fem outreach and education director.

Education and leadership development are at the forefront of multiple Laotian American organizations. About 27 percent of Laotian Americans live with educational and financial disadvantages: 14 percent have attained a bachelor’s degree and 41 percent live in poverty.⁵² Thus, the Laotian American Society’s most important annual event is its Education Award Ceremony. Established in 2005 and based in Suwanee, Georgia, the organization recognizes the achievements of Laotian grade school children and provides scholarships to rising seniors at its award ceremony. It reappropriates military code names in its outreach initiatives, such as Operation Lunchbox, for K–12 students of the Laotian community in Georgia. As the organization’s website explains, “With school being out for the summer, many kids lose access to their school lunches. . . . We are making sure the kids are not left without a good meal.”⁵³

Leadership development has resulted in Southeast Asian Americans entering US government, including becoming elected officials. They include Mee Moua, who became the first Hmong American elected in a state legislature, serving in the Minnesota legislature from 2002 to 2010. Rady Mom also made history on November 4, 2014, by becoming the first Cambodian American to be elected to the state legislature in Massachusetts. Mom was born in Cambodia in 1970 and arrived with his family in the United States in 1982. He spoke no English, and credits his family’s example, decades of community involvement, education, and a positive mindset for his success. After his political victory, he emphasized how important it was for younger generations to think differently: “We’ve never been taught to think positively. I’m going to do that. Here’s proof: A man who didn’t speak a word of English and can do this.”⁵⁴

Rady Mom mentored Tina Maharath, who became the first Asian American woman elected to the Ohio Senate in November 2018. The daughter of Laotian refugees, Maharath gained a reputation for her advocacy for underserved, troubled youth, and for people who have experienced trauma. She volunteered for many organizations, including Legacies of War, an educational and advocacy organization working to raise awareness about the history of the Vietnam War–era bombing of Laos.⁵⁵ During Maharath’s political race, she acknowledged Rady Mom’s support: “Fortunately, I am not alone. One of my mentors is . . . Rady Mom (Massachusetts House of Representatives), who is also a former refugee.”⁵⁶

Finally, Southeast Asian Americans have transformed literary landscapes. In the 2002 groundbreaking anthology, Bamboo Among the Oaks, edited by Mai Neng Moua, first- and second-generation Hmong Americans share their perspectives on being Hmong in the United States. Moua created the anthology after noting the absence of Hmong stories in Asian American anthologies. Bamboo Among the Oaks was groundbreaking for multiple reasons, including the fact that Hmong culture is rooted in an oral tradition, and the Hmong had no written language until about fifty years before the anthology’s publication. In an interview for the New York Times, Moua further explained the anthology’s significance: “People who don’t have a written tradition don’t seem to exist.”⁵⁷

The desire for existence through narration also inspired the creation of Little Laos on the Prairie, an online storytelling publication. It emerged from the first annual Lao American Writers Summit in Minneapolis, held in 2010, when Danny Khotsombath and Chanida Phaengdara Potter were inspired to write about their experiences as Lao Americans raised in the American Midwest. Little Laos on the Prairie foregrounds the journeys of the people of the Laotian diaspora, who have been “layered beneath larger Asian nation narratives that are more commonplace to the public.”⁵⁸ It calls for “words and stories written by us, and for us. Included, as well, are those that want to listen and learn. But don’t interrupt us. It’s our turn. We’re getting Laod.”⁵⁹

Championing Vietnamese stories and passing them on to current and future generations drives the mission of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). Founded by artists and scholars Viet Thanh Nguyen and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud in 2007, DVAN resists racist stereotypes linked to colonialism and war, while also celebrating the joy and pride of creating art in today’s modern world. This emphasis on joy adds a distinctive dimension to Southeast Asian American histories, which are typically presented as traumatic stories.

Poet Monica Sok recalls how a school librarian chased her down the hall to give her the book First They Killed My Father, a memoir by Loung Ung about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. Sok characterizes the book as “survival literature” that helped her piece together her family’s history, as it did for many Cambodian Americans of the 1.5 (people who arrived in the US as children and adolescents) and second generation. Yet, worried that restricting Cambodians to a trauma narrative tokenizes them, she asks: “How do we reimagine Cambodian American literature to include themes such as urbanism or sex or humor?”

And Sok wonders, what would have happened if the librarian ran to her to give her a book about a Khmer girl who lived on the moon? Or about a queer Khmer boy living in Phnom Penh whose dream was to dance? In the article “The Cambodian American Writers Who Are Reimagining Cambodian Literature,” she along with Danny Thanh Nguyen, Angela So, Anthony Veasna So, and Sokunthary Svay discuss these questions, reminding us that there is no one way to be Cambodian.⁶⁰

Southeast Asian American joy is a source of creative inspiration for Alexandra Huynh, a second-generation Vietnamese American who was named National Youth Poet Laureate in May 2021. Although she was initially hesitant to write about her Vietnamese identity—thinking it would be a clichéd story of immigrant parents silencing their American-born children—she changed her mind: “I realized I was meeting so much internal dissonance because I told myself that I could only write that story, but there is a lot of joy that comes from being Vietnamese American.”⁶¹

REFUGEES IN THE AGE OF COVID-19

The massive and unexpected influx of Southeast Asian refugees beginning in 1975 changed US refugee policy. It transformed what was a largely ad hoc policy that had favored persons fleeing communist countries into a more intentional one, and it led to the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act. The Refugee Act adopted United Nations conventions and protocols that defined “refugee” as a person with a well-founded fear of persecution. It funded a new Office of US Coordinator for Refugee Affairs and an Office of Refugee Resettlement. The Refugee Act also raised the annual ceiling for refugees from 17,400 to 50,000 and created a process for reviewing and adjusting this ceiling.⁶²

After passage of the act in 1980, US refugee admissions exceeded 200,000, then declined to 159,000 the following year, and ranged between 40,000 and 130,000 over the next thirty-five years, with the exception of the two years after the 9/11 attacks. The ceiling declined significantly under President Donald Trump, who set it at 15,000—the lowest refugee ceiling in forty years—in 2020.⁶³ In May 2021, President Joe Biden revised the ceiling to 62,500.⁶⁴

In the twenty-first century, the numbers of refugees from Myanmar and Bhutan, fleeing political and social persecution and discrimination in their home countries, dramatically increased. They made up the two largest refugee groups arriving in the United States in 2011.

Many reside in the American South but also in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. In a 2014 report titled Invisible Newcomers, scholars Chia Youyee Vang and Monica Mong Trieu note that for these groups, limited English-language proficiency is a key socioeconomic barrier, among several others.⁶⁵

Iowa is home to some ten thousand Burmese refugees, and many do not speak English. As a result, the majority work in Iowa’s meatpacking plants, which pays higher than minimum wage without requiring English-language proficiency. In 2020, the community bore a disproportionate risk of contracting COVID-19 because, even though meatpacking plants had become hazardous workplaces for the transmission of the disease, President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to classify meat plants as essential infrastructure that must remain open.⁶⁶

In southeast Iowa’s Columbus Junction, a meatpacking town of 2,300, the ethnic Chin community has grown to become nearly 20 percent of the population. According to an Iowa Public Radio news story by Kate Payne, at least 221 workers at one meatpacking plant there had tested positive for COVID-19, and two had died. Payne interviewed Pastor Benjamin Sang Bawi of Carson Chin Baptist Church, who has essentially been the main resource for this refugee community. He related, “If they don’t go to work, how [will they] survive—that is a big question. . . . Of course, every family [is] concerned about that.”⁶⁷

1975 is a touchstone for memories of war and displacement in Southeast Asian American histories. But it can and should also serve as a touchstone for transformation, a reminder that Southeast Asian Americans and new waves of refugees have contributed to the US economy, government, culture, and public policy. And they continue to do so. We would do well to pay heed to their stories and their challenges, because the COVID-19 pandemic makes clear that their lives and livelihoods are inextricably linked to our own.