Steve J. Stern notes the intimate association between memory and human rights, arguing that memory is a cultural code word, a “language of experi-ence and continuing struggle” (126) in the push for justice after state vio-lence. For him, memory provides important moral lessons about the Figure 4.1 Vietnamese Canadians attending the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the “Fall of Saigon” on April 30, 2015, Ottawa, Canada. (Photo credit: Vinh Nguyen)
inviolability of human rights, where past violations are recalled so a more democratic future becomes possible. Following Stern, I suggest that the framework of human rights can enable, for those who have been violently displaced, who must seek protection outside their homelands, a structure for the process of remembering. If memory can fortify human rights, then human rights can provide an established mechanism, a sanctioned language for the recollection of difficult memories. It allows for what we might call a refugee memory of persecution that makes sense of past trauma, present existence, and future formations. To wit, the discourse of human rights has the potential to make a past experience of asylum seeking legible in the pres-ent as a way of affecting what is yet to come—it gives political narrative to individual and collective memory. For those gathered in Ottawa on April 30, 2015, this narrative was situated both in and beyond Canadian borders, moving between past and present, between Vietnam, Canada, and various global passages. Remembering, in this context, means summoning a lost country from the past (South Vietnam), producing a country in the present (Canada), and attempting to shape a country for the future (Vietnam). Viet Thanh Nguyen reminds us that refugee memories refuse “the progressive notion of time that belongs to the nation”; they are, instead, sites where the
“imagination of the past, present, and future countries can occur simultan-eously” (934). These real and symbolic “countries” scramble the discreteness of times and geographies, making possible a more transnational and tempo-rally porous understanding of affiliation, activism, and justice.
The commemoration event in Ottawa illuminates how Vietnamese refu-gees continue to search for a “country” of refuge, how they continually seek asylum, which is revealed to be an ongoing process intimately tied to the unfinished fate of the homeland. While many Vietnamese refugees have found material refuge in Canada—and they show incredible gratitude for such a gift—their search for asylum continues because their homeland is without freedom. As Nguyễn Văn Phát, a representative from the Veterans Association, emphatically reminded the crowd, Vietnam is still not free, and its people do not enjoy the rights that those in the diaspora possess. The chair of the Commemoration Organizing Committee went further to state that the Vietnamese diaspora has a crucial role to play in promoting human rights in Vietnam, that they must actively petition the Canadian government to pressure Vietnam to enact free speech, release political prisoners, and move toward democracy. Such protests from the community suggest that asylum for refugees—understood as the movement toward rights—is incom-plete if Vietnam is still without human rights. The reach and significance of asylum, then, expand to encompass those who left as well as those who stayed behind, refugees of the past and citizens of the present. In this way, it is not just refugees undertaking perilous boat journeys but also Vietnam and the Vietnamese people who require refuge from the lack of human rights.
The commemoration event was, in many ways, a political performance that revised the meaning of refuge, enacting the process of asylum seeking in the present moment. The invocation of human rights at the commemora-tion funccommemora-tions as a refugee claim, a call for freedom from oppression and persecution not just for individual refugees but for a whole nation. This link-ing of refugee experience to contemporary concerns over human rights ac-tually constructs the “journey to freedom” as one that has yet to reach a final point of arrival. Such an understanding of refuge keeps a past of migration pertinent to the present, where the struggle for freedom is anything but over.
According to Human Rights Watch, the situation is dire in Vietnam:
Basic rights, including freedom of speech, opinion, press, associa-tion, and religion, are restricted. Rights activists and bloggers face harassment, intimidation, physical assault, and imprisonment.
Farmers continue to lose land to development projects without ad-equate compensation, and workers are not allowed to form in-dependent unions. The police use torture and beatings to extract confessions. The criminal justice system lacks independence. State-run drug rehabilitation centers exploit detainees as laborers making goods for local markets and export. (“Vietnam”)
Forty years after the end of the Vietnam War, the past is not past, because the problem of rights has not been resolved. As a result, the question of Viet-namese refugees acquires contemporary immediacy—the past, and a mem-ory of persecution, remains relevant to the presence of Vietnamese people in diaspora and their anticommunist political agendas. Even though many Vietnamese refugees are now free citizens of Canada and other nations, “ref-uge” for them and their communist homeland must be understood as open-ended and forthcoming. Thus, while the display of gratitude might suggest that the gift of refuge has been received, that the search for home and free-dom is complete, the anticommunist pronouncements reveal how refuge remains in progress, how it functions as a political project that requires re-newed acts of claiming rights.
Seen in this way, the trenchant anticommunism of the Vietnamese Can-adian community is not so much an outdated politics of melancholic, first-generation immigrants but an embodied politics that attempts to negotiate the complexities of exile and asylum. Scholars such as Thuy Vo Dang (“Cultural Work”) and Lan Duong and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud (“Vietnamese American Art”) have pointed out how Vietnamese diasporic anticommunism can func-tion as a discourse of community building, even while it problematically po-lices cultural identity. In her study of the Vietnamese American community in San Diego, Vo Dang writes, “Anticommunism becomes the vehicle for sus-taining an identity and community in the present and serves as pedagogical
tool for the younger generations of Vietnamese Americans” (69). In perform-ing this work, anticommunist discourse relies on charges against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam of human rights infractions. It paints the Vietnamese regime as “backward” and devoid of human rights, not in line with other states in a modern, democratic international community. Such a government does not, in this depiction, have political legitimacy, and its country cannot be a viable place of habitation. This logic explains the need for flight and the im-portance of refuge; it gives reason for the diaspora. Through statements about the value of human rights and what happens when they are absent, a Vietnam-ese diasporic community is able to take shape. Refugee collective identity gains definition in relation to the presence or absence of human rights.
This community formation has its foundations in loss—and indeed, the commemoration event in Ottawa can be viewed as an important opportunity for members of the community to voice and highlight their difficult migra-tion and the painful losses they have experienced. Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương rightly points out that loss is the dominant mode of expression in Vietnam-ese exilic communities. The appearance of human rights complaints along-side articulations of loss, however, speaks to the way these communities use loss to register criticism and grievance and, in the process, create a sense of communal purpose. Accordingly, loss acquires an edge of political critique when it is expressed alongside human rights; it is a form of mourning that calls for justice in the present, where the mode of expression is protest through loss. Although the remembrance of loss is not easily separable from calls for human rights, it is important to recognize that they are not the same.
Loss, I suggest, is oriented toward victims and survivors while human rights discourse points a finger at a perpetrator—it puts pressure on the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to follow Western, putatively universal guidelines of moral conduct. Human rights discourse names a problem that requires en-gagement and address in the present; it complicates the view that Vietnamese diasporic communities are melancholic and backward looking. Instead, the compulsion to effect geopolitical change and to influence homeland politics through the diaspora emphasizes the political agency of those who have been exiled from home, who, at one point in time, fell outside the primary cat-egory of social and political organization. Not only is the past given meaning through a present appeal to human rights but refugees also become political actors who skillfully utilize the language of rights to make political demands.