The resettlement of over sixty thousand Southeast Asian refugees of the Vietnam War, including Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong, during an eighteen-month period from 1979 to 1980 is arguably the high-light of Canadian refugee and immigration history. This resettlement pro-gram, the largest single intake of refugees in Canada to date, was an unprecedented event in the wake of significant changes in immigration pol-icy laid out by the 1976 Immigration Act. These changes, such as provisions for a humanitarian “designated class,” which allowed the government to identify and expedite the resettlement of groups in need that do not fit neat-ly under the parameters of the Convention definition, and the private spon-sorship program, which made it possible for ordinary civilians or groups to sponsor refugees, were crucial instruments in Canada’s response to the Viet-namese “boat people” crisis. According to Molloy et al., the success of the
“Indochinese” resettlement program was the direct result of hard work, pol-itical will, and collaboration between the Canadian people and the
govern-ment. In recognition of their efforts, the UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award was bestowed on the “Canadian people” in 1986. This memory of Canadian humanitarianism permeates Canada’s understanding of itself as a haven of refuge, its image as an exceptional nation-state on the international stage.
Canada’s response to Southeast Asian refugees has become the gold standard in relation to subsequent refugee crises. For example, when the image of Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body drew attention to Syrians fleeing geopolitical vio-lence, Vietnamese refugees were recalled in the public sphere as a prime example of Canadian generosity, a moment in time when Canada stepped up to the challenge and showed the world that it was capable of ethical action and exerting national sovereignty through the granting of asylum.6
In the roughly three decades after the end of the Vietnam War, Canada accepted approximately two hundred thousand refugees from Southeast Asia for resettlement (Robinson). This history of successful humanitarian-ism is an important piece in the larger puzzle of Canadian nation-building, in a cultivated image of civility and peace-making. Dominant discourse tends to represent Canadian humanitarianism as an act of altruistic magna-nimity, eliding issues of complicity in creating the conditions of violence and displacement, more of which I will discuss below. Thus, it is not surprising that the Canadian government is eager to support some members of the Vietnamese Canadian community, which now number over 220,000, as they gather to commemorate the war and its legacies. Such memory projects reit-erate a narrative of humanitarianism that, while true on one level, also ob-scures the complexities of Canadian involvement in Vietnam and how refugees were perceived and received in a newly “multicultural” Canada.
Laura Madokoro, for example, reminds us that contemporary celebra-tions of Canadian generosity to refugees of the Vietnam War ignore “op-position to the resettlement efforts [at the time]—including from the National Citizens Coalition. . . . The historical narrative that is being pro-duced is one of pure, righteous generosity” (n.p.). The state’s investment in the work of Vietnamese diasporic commemoration is intimately tied to this production of a “pure, righteous generosity” central to Canadian (inter)tional identity. At the same time, part and parcel of commemoration as na-tionalist labor is the ensconcing of a very specific, dominant Vietnamese Canadian identity, one that is strictly anticommunist, within Canadian cul-ture, history, and politics. It is important to note here that this identity is not shared by all Vietnamese Canadians and that there is no “unified” Vietnam-ese Canadian community or identity. Yet the dominance of diasporic anti-communism, which stems from a history of war and migration, stifles divergent and dissenting identities, especially ones that may sympathize or desire reconciliation with the Vietnamese state. The work of commemora-tion is, at its core, a project of creating, defining, and demarcating the limits of identity and community.
“Strong, Proud, and Free”: The Fortieth Anniversary Commemoration
In Canada, the fortieth anniversary of what many Vietnamese in the dias-pora call “the Fall of Saigon” or “Black April” was an especially momentous occasion. Not only was it a significant historical milestone but, as briefly mentioned above, it also coincided with the inaugural “Journey to Freedom Day” and what was supposed to be the “breaking ground” of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism.7 The anniversary event began with a rally at the stretch of land between the Supreme Court of Canada and the Library and Archives Canada, the building site the then-government promised to Tribute to Liberty, a nonprofit organization behind the fund-raising for and construction of the memorial.8 The site had enormous symbolic significance, situated between the national institutions of justice and memory. In attend-ance, alongside Vietnamese Canadians, were Polish and Hungarian former refugees, Korean War veterans, and various government ministers. This coming together of those who had fought and fled communism was a stra-tegic display of Cold War solidarities—a shared history of loss and political commitment to anticommunism—that amplified the need for contemporary acts of memorialization. The official website of Tribute to Liberty states: “Me-morials are essential parts of our national landscape: they serve as important markers for events and people that make up the diverse fabric of our nation.
In Canada, over 8 million people trace their roots to countries that suffered under Communism. Since the beginning of the first Communist regime in 1917, immigrants from Communist countries have flocked to Canada in search of freedom and safety” (“Why a Memorial?”). The symbolic power of the proposed memorial was meant to exalt Canada as a “land of refuge,” in which asylum facilitated refugee solidarity, creating the opportunity for vic-tims to live together freely and unite against communism. On April 30, 2015, these human legacies of the Cold War gathered to remember communist atrocities and celebrate Canada’s role as a welcoming country that provided shelter for those who suffered through such atrocities. In doing so, this group of actors resurrected Cold War memories in the present, (re)creating a Man-ichean world of refugee producers versus refugee havens.9
The chair of Tribute to Liberty, Ludwik Klimkowsk, in his official ad-dress told the crowd that their “journey was almost complete,” because they were about to gain recognition and belonging in Canada through the memo-rial. For him, the memorial represents a national “home” for refugees, a place where they can educate the Canadian public about the oppressions and losses they experienced at the hand of communist regimes. Senator Ngo Thanh Hai, a Conservative Party politician behind the genesis of Bill S-219, pressed upon the audience that “freedom is not free,” that it comes with a very heavy price, and that the next generation needs to remember this crucial
history lesson.10 The Canadian government officials who spoke, including former immigration minister Jason Kenny, made it clear that it was the Con-servative Party who ushered Bill S-219 through Parliament, and it was going to be the Conservatives who would see the building of the memorial through to completion. Describing the crowd as “strong, proud, and free,” Kenny made sure that these former refugees understood that Canada, and the Con-servative government in particular, created the conditions for this gathering of free citizens. The rally had a strong memory imperative, with each major speaker inciting the crowd to keep various memories—of communist cru-elty, of generational refugee suffering, of Canadian kindness, of the Conserv-ative Party’s commitment—alive, and toward different but overlapping political ends.
Vietnamese refugees did not fail to pick up on Kenny’s point about Can-ada’s humanitarian efforts. In the early afternoon, the Vietnamese contin-gent marched from the rally site to Parliament Hill with a leading banner that read, “Thank You Canada from Vietnamese Canadian Community.”
Individual participants held similar placards with “40 Years Thank You Can-ada Merci” and “Thank You CanCan-ada: We Support the Canadian Govern-ment’s Journey to Freedom Act” written on them.11 These expressions of gratitude emphasize Canada as a refugee savior, rescuing Vietnamese refu-gees from the ravages of war and the dangers of communism. In the Amer-ican context, both Yến Lê Espiritu and Mimi Thi Nguyen have discussed how grateful Vietnamese refugees abet revisionist and nationalist accounts of the Vietnam War, while providing alibis for contemporary war-making in the name of liberation and rescue. For Espiritu, narratives of gratitude espoused by “good” refugees are utilized to turn the war into a morally
“good” war and to offer evidence of the need for future American military intervention in foreign conflicts (“The ‘We-Win-Even-if-We-Lose’ Syn-drome’”; Body Counts). Nguyen calls the “rescue” of refugees that are pro-duced from such interventions the “gift of freedom,” whereby refugees become indebted to the United States through both war and refuge (Gift of Freedom).
While these arguments cannot be mapped neatly onto the Canadian con-text because of different historical relationships to the Vietnam War, the ideological function of refugee gratitude that Espiritu and Nguyen outline is instructive to thinking about the “value” that anticommunist Vietnamese refugees have to projects of Canadian nation-building, a point that I will re-turn to later in the chapter. It is clear that expressions of refugee gratitude benefit the nation; it is also clear that gratitude allows Vietnamese refugees to have a “voice” at Parliament Hill, the literal and symbolic site of Canadian politics. It is with such expressions of gratitude that former Vietnamese refu-gees were able to articulate anticommunism through the language of human rights. As an expected and easily digestible discourse, gratitude opens up
certain possibilities even as it constrains refugees to buttressing nationalist projects. That is to say, while gratitude affectively and politically limits refu-gee expression, it can, as a public platform, make other concerns such as memories of migration and critiques of homeland politics recognizable to the national mainstream. At Parliament Hill, gratitude for Canadian humani-tarianism comingled with grievances about Vietnam’s human rights record.
Gratitude and calls for human rights reverberated throughout as speakers recalled the pain of losing one’s country, asserted the presence of Vietnamese people in Canada, and urged others to remember their perilous journeys to freedom. Like the rally that preceded it, the ceremony at Parliament Hill sought to establish and share memory, not only within the Vietnamese Can-adian community but also importantly in Canada’s national imagination.