VNExpress-June 1
Nguyen Thi Lien Hang, the first director of Vietnamese Studies at Columbia University in the U.S., wishes she can build bridges between the diaspora and Vietnam. Hang left Saigon just before Reunification in 1975 as a five-month-old child. Her father, like many others working for South Vietnam government, decided his family with nine kids had to leave when the Northern Vietnamese army entered the city. After transiting through several refugee camps in Guam and Hawaii, the family finally settled down in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Growing up in a new land, Hang regularly heard her parents, aunts and uncles speak worriedly about family members who stayed back in Vietnam because they lost contact after the war. From those stories she gradually understood that her family had been forced into a situation of fighting for opposing sides during the war. There was also a lot of hatred for Vietnamese in Philadelphia because they reminded Americans of “everything they lost.” People around Hang always asked: How could America lose that war? But she never found satisfactory answers to those questions as a Vietnamese-American. For that reason, she felt an urgent need to explore documents about the conflict and about Vietnam. The initial questions were how North Vietnam won, how the Communist forces were able to defeat the U.S. and South Vietnam. At college and graduate school, Hang focused on researching Vietnam during the Cold War, which was “a very dark period” in the history between the two countries. “I want to dedicate my life to building stronger bridges between my various communities in the U.S. and in Vietnam.” With that motivation, Hang, a Dorothy Borg Associate Professor of History of the U.S and East Asia at Columbia University, sought to set up a Vietnamese studies program at the university. Read more at: https://e.vnexpress.net/news/news/from-war-refugee-to-founding-vietnamese-studies-a-woman-s-journey-of-reconciliation-4468700.html
