{"id":40892,"date":"2016-04-26T11:35:08","date_gmt":"2016-04-26T15:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/?p=40892"},"modified":"2019-08-07T15:56:51","modified_gmt":"2019-08-07T19:56:51","slug":"vietnam-vista","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/2016\/04\/26\/vietnam-vista\/","title":{"rendered":"Vietnam vista"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mai<\/a>

Mai Nguyen, director of the Asian and Native American Center, worked with ThinkTV to create two documentaries on local Vietnamese-Americans.<\/p><\/div>\n

The lives of second-generation Vietnamese-Americans forced to navigate two cultures in the wake of their parents\u2019 turbulent journey from their war-torn homeland will be the focus of a PBS documentary, thanks in part to the head of Wright State University\u2019s Asian cultural center.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween Two Worlds: The Next Generation\u201d is scheduled to air on ThinkTV <\/sup>in June. Mai Nguyen, founding director of Wright State\u2019s Asian and Native American Center, helped develop and was featured in Part I<\/a>, \u201cBetween Two Worlds,\u201d which aired in April 2015.<\/p>\n

In that film, Dayton-area Vietnamese immigrants described what it was like to make the painful decision to leave their homes in Vietnam, survive the rigors and dangers of the journey and overcome the challenges of making a new life in a strange land. An estimated 2 million people fled Vietnam between 1975 and 1995.<\/p>\n

Part II examines the lives of seven second-generation Vietnamese-Americans as they were buffeted by two cultures and struggled to fit in to U.S. culture at a time when America wanted to forget about the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The second generation ranges in age from the teens to the 40s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest fear of the first generation is that their kids will lose the mother tongue; they will lose knowledge of the Vietnamese heritage, the culture,\u201d said Nguyen. \u201cThe kids grow up here in the mainstream, but when they return home from school they\u2019re still Vietnamese. So there\u2019s a conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many parents are conservative, want their children to be 100 percent Vietnamese and work to keep that heritage alive.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey do that by speaking Vietnamese at home,\u201d she said. \u201cIt helps when the parents do not speak English.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nguyen said first-generation Vietnamese-Americans have worked extremely hard to build successful lives in America and that their children also work hard.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe parents want them to have the best of what the parents could not have,\u201d she said. \u201cTheir children didn\u2019t experience the hardship, the ordeal when the parents escaped the country, but all of them understand that their parents struggled. The second generation has the luxury of inheriting the parents being here so they were able to choose the profession and what they wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nguyen grew up in Saigon and was raised in a middle-class family. Her father worked for South Vietnam\u2019s Department of Interior and her mother was a well-known broadcast journalist and newspaper editor.<\/p>\n

Nguyen was largely shielded from the fighting between North and South Vietnam, but many of her friends were affected. Trips by them into the countryside sometimes resulted in them being ambushed, robbed and stripped of identification papers by the Communists. Her friends\u2019 loyalty would then come under suspicion by South Vietnamese officials.<\/p>\n

Nguyen arrived in the United States in 1974 to attend Syracuse University, where she would go on to get her bachelor\u2019s degree in English. She watched the fall of South Vietnam from her dorm room at Syracuse, hanging on every word from \u201cCBS Evening News\u201d anchor Walter Cronkite.<\/p>\n

In 1982, Nguyen moved from New York to Ohio after her husband got a job teaching economics at Wright State. She earned master\u2019s degrees in industrial management counseling and student personnel in higher education at Wright State.<\/p>\n

In 1986, she began working at Wright State as a research assistant in Academic Affairs and in 1997 became the founding director of the Asian and Native American Center<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nguyen came up with the idea for the documentary film to educate the public about Asian-Americans and their history. She was supported by Kimberly Barrett, Wright State\u2019s vice president for multicultural affairs and community engagement.<\/p>\n

So Nguyen approached ThinkTV<\/sup> and worked with producer Richard Wonderling as well as Kitty Lensman and Gary Greenberg.<\/p>\n

The immigrants were identified by Nguyen. Those interviewed ranged from government workers airlifted out of Vietnam to poor farmers who took their chances on leaky boats. One became a pediatric surgeon. One owns an engineering company. Others became business and property owners.<\/p>\n

Wonderling said the original Vietnamese immigrants were special.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen they sat down for their interviews, you could see in their eyes the pain, the pride and the determination that they\u2019ve carried for 40 years,\u201d he said. \u201cWould these children, born and raised in America, have the same passion for Vietnam? In a melting pot, new combinations are created, but some things are lost. That\u2019s the dynamic story arc that connects these two generations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nguyen said some of the second-generation Vietnamese students she sees at Wright State say they know nothing about the Vietnam War because their parents don\u2019t talk about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are families who want the past to stay in the past,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd there are families who want to tell the story to their children, so they tell it explicitly. They will tell their children: \u2018We came here. We almost lost our lives.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Nguyen said many members of the second generation have no animosity toward Vietnam\u2019s Communist government and have visited Vietnam to connect with relatives and see things for themselves. Some have even moved to Vietnam to teach English or to take engineering or computer science jobs.<\/p>\n

ThinkTV<\/sup> (WPTD channel 16 in Dayton and WPTO channel 14 in Oxford) is a service of Public Media Connect, a regional public media partnership with CET in Cincinnati.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mai Nguyen, director of the Asian and Native American Center, helps create PBS documentary on local second-generation Vietnamese-Americans. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":40894,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2037,725,2046,715,4297,2024,4301],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-scene","category-home-news-sidebar","category-international-students","category-news","category-people-of-wright-state","category-staff","category-staff-profile"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40892"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40897,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40892\/revisions\/40897"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}