How second-gen Vietnamese Americans are healing from the Vietnam War

A war that lingers in silence 

On April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon. For those who lived in or supported the South, it was the fall of their beloved city, followed by a mass exodus of refugees and brutal reeducation camps. For those who lived in or supported the North, it was a long-awaited victory over imperialism and colonization, particularly American oppression.

Fifty years later, the anniversary still divides those with Vietnamese heritage. In Vietnam, the day is marked with national celebrations and parades. In the United States, it’s remembered as Black April, a period of mourning observed in Vietnamese enclaves like Orange County, California, Houston, Falls Church, Virginia, and Atlanta. These communities commemorate the overseas Vietnamese displaced by the war, often honoring the former South Vietnamese flag—which is yellow with three red stripes—via a flag ceremony and singing the old South Vietnam anthem.

For many second-generation children, the war has always loomed large, ever present, but rarely discussed. “People are being taken away to prisons,” says Uyen Le, a community organizer and chef-owner of Los Angeles-based restaurant Bé Ù, who was born in Vietnam and raised in the United States in the 1990s. “They’ve been killed. This is the environment in which people are desperate, and they’re getting on these boats. These people are generations of Vietnamese who have had to sacrifice to get out from under the grips of American imperialism.”

Kavi Vu (pictured right) taking Tet pictures in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Courtesy of Kavi Vu

But those who lived through the war rarely spoke of its trauma: the grief of separation, the loneliness of exile, the resentment of having to rebuild from nothing in a foreign land. “I imagine you hold a lot of anger, honestly, and then you end up all in a community somewhere in Southern California with shared grievances with newspapers pumping out articles every day that shape your perspective on something that is quite anti-communist in nature,” Le continues. “If you’re not sufficiently anti-communist, you’re probably living under a rock and you’ll get called out on it.”

“I didn’t have much exposure to stories of the war because my parents didn’t talk about it at all. What I know is actually kids in my classroom making fun of me because all they knew about Vietnam was war.”

Vu, like many second-generation Vietnamese Americans, grew up in that silence. “I didn’t have much exposure to stories of the war because my parents didn’t talk about it at all,” Vu adds. “What I know is actually kids in my classroom making fun of me because all they knew about Vietnam was war.”

Kevin Nguyen, author of "Mỹ Documents."

Amanda Nguyen

In this vacuum, schools taught American narratives steeped in white saviorism. Public discourse, even now, is often anchored in U.S. perspectives. "Earlier this year, Apple put out a documentary titled Vietnam: The War That Changed America, so we’re still reinforcing that perspective,” says Kevin Nguyen, author of the 2025 novel Mỹ Documents, a dystopian story in which Vietnamese Americans are detained by the U.S. government. “Even though the war is seen as a tragic mistake, the narratives around it here are still extremely U.S.-focused."

At home, that silence was replaced by nostalgia for a lost country. “In our Chinatown, Bellaire, the streets bear old Saigonese names and are lined with the former South Vietnamese flags,” says Dan Q. Dao, a 31-year-old writer and producer from Houston who now splits his time between New York and Saigon. “In community groups and summer camps, we sang the South Vietnamese anthem and karaoke’d to pre-war bolero music.” 

Much of this music and cultural nostalgia for a lost homeland was preserved through Vietnamese American variety shows like Paris by Night, reinforcing a media and cultural ecosystem in which the South Vietnamese experience is dominant in diaspora memory. “As a young person, you kind of see the hatred folks have for certain leadership in their homeland and it felt like a freaking mob mentality,” Le says. “It was completely challenging to try to discuss all of it in a way that didn’t create shouting matches with my dad.” 

Dan Q. Dao (pictured left) eating Vietnamese food in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Courtesy of Dan Q. Dao

As the child of a Vietnamese boat refugee, growing up in the suburbs of the greater metro Atlanta area, my understanding of South Vietnam for the longest time was that it represented freedom compared to the communist, and thus “authoritarian,” country of Vietnam. Ironically, the former South Vietnamese flag has been associated with the Republican Party, where it was seen brandished by Trump-supporting Vietnamese Americans at the January 6 Capitol riots in 2021. Seeing the flag at this event raised a lot of concerns and started me down a path of curiosity about my heritage and history. 

The trauma my parents carried, my mother’s childhood famine, my father’s escape as a boat refugee at 26, was framed through a freedom-versus-communism lens. However, many younger Vietnamese generations, growing up in the United States’ racial and political tumult, have started questioning this binary. 

“At school, we were fed American myths,” says Dao. “Our textbooks avoided any mention of the gratuitous atrocities American soldiers inflicted on innocent Vietnamese villagers. At home, the war existed more as an abstract force—not a real historical event. All we knew is that everyone had sacrificed everything to flee communism, and that it was our mandate to honor that sacrifice.” 

But what happens when the American dream no longer promises what it once did? What happens when we start asking what was left behind and why?

Returning to the motherland

Dao and Vu are part of a growing number of Người Mỹ gốc Việt, overseas Vietnamese Americans, who have returned to Vietnam—not as visitors, but as residents. “I’d been coming to Vietnam every summer since I was a kid,” says Dao. “But around 2018, I started going to Saigon on my own and finding a community through nightlife and the creative scene. The gravitational pull became too much to ignore.”

For many of these young expats, the COVID-19 pandemic became the final push to move. Dao moved to Saigon in 2022. Vu arrived in Saigon in 2023, after feeling adrift following a decade of freelancing. 

Albert Pham, a 24-year-old English teacher from Lawrenceville, Georgia with family from both the North and South, made the move last year. His parents’ reactions were ones of concern over how practical his decision was. “Their initial reaction was, ‘Well, what are you gonna do?’” Pham says. “‘You have a job here (in America). What are you gonna do when you get there? How are you going to survive?’ From my parents’ perspective, I’m just an American kid.”

Albert Pham in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Courtesy of Albert Pham

There’s no singular story among these young expats. Some are chasing creative inspiration, others are searching for meaning, but many speak of a spiritual or emotional reconnection to their heritage and finding a new home in their parents’ birthplace. “Vietnam is not a place you live,” Vu recalls her father telling her. “You can visit for a couple of months, but come home after.” Still, she adds, “This connection to the culture and the country pulls me closer to them in ways that years and years with them couldn’t do.”

Dao echoes the feeling, describing the chosen family and sense of belonging he’s found in Vietnam. “I’ve met so many diaspora Vietnamese kids from Germany, Holland, Australia, the UK, all living here and sharing similar, yet uniquely personal experiences,” he says.

Vietnam, reimagined

For those raised on cautionary tales about communism, moving to Vietnam can feel like stepping into contradiction and a betrayal of our parents’ sacrifices. But it’s not the same country our parents left. Today’s Vietnam is booming with youth-driven culture, tech startups, art collectives, and fusion cuisine. “I’m living in a very different Vietnam that has changed and progressed in many ways—in ideology, technology, fashion, food,” Vu says. “In a way my parents probably cannot fathom.”

“Being here, you see a nation that has moved forward in ways our diaspora sometimes hasn’t. It’s made me realize that our trauma narratives are just one part of the story. There’s also survival, adaptation, and joy.”

Living in Vietnam allows these second-generation Vietnamese Americans to reframe their identities not through the lens of inherited trauma or nostalgia, but through real, lived experience. “Being here, you see a nation that has moved forward in ways our diaspora sometimes hasn’t,” Dao adds. “It’s made me realize that our trauma narratives are just one part of the story. There’s also survival, adaptation, and joy.”

Through this new connection with the motherland, there’s an increasing pride in being Vietnamese among young Millennials and Gen Z-ers.

“It’s so beautiful to me that Vietnamese people have such pride for their country,” says Pham, who hopes to study Vietnamese studies and become a cultural ambassador. “As an American, I feel grateful…But I think about how much America has caused my people to lose. I didn’t grow up with the basic knowledge that all Vietnamese youth know, like recognizing flowers on the spot. If you grew up in the U.S., your parents can only put in so much of an effort because they got swept up in the way of life of America.”

That doesn’t mean Vietnam is perfect. Vietnam still has its own taboos and tensions, political speech can be limited, and conversations about the war remain sensitive. “I’m trying not to speak too much on war,” Vu tells me wryly. “Because, girl, I still live in Vietnam.”

At the same time, for those in the United States, there’s growing concern over rights being rolled back. “The project of the Trump presidency is to make the United States so inhospitable,” says Nguyen, who is also applying for a five-year Vietnamese visa. “If First Amendment rights continue to be stripped away, I could see myself living elsewhere. Vietnam might not protect free speech, but I also don’t see the country disappearing people for having stances that are critical of Israel.”

"Vietnam might not protect free speech, but I also don’t see the country disappearing people for having stances that are critical of Israel.”

Still, for many, especially 50 years after the war, the shift away from viewing Vietnam solely through a postwar trauma lens is liberating. Much of that has to do with reconnecting with the country, even if it’s taking a unique path like reverse migrating to a place our parents fled. “We’re unlearning the propaganda we grew up with—from both sides,” Pham says. “We’re forging our own opinions, our own relationships with the country.”

Fred Le in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam.

Courtesy of "The Empathizer"

In the 2024 documentary The Empathizer, comedian and filmmaker Fred Le explores this shift by tracing his mother’s refusal to return to Vietnam and following young diasporic Vietnamese choosing to move back. “There’s no right or wrong way to heal,” Fred Le says. “Some stay. Some go. But all of us are trying to make sense of a past that was never fully explained to us.”

Whether through film, food, or poetry, second-generation Vietnamese Americans are slowly unraveling a complex heritage. And in doing so, they’re offering something their parents never had the luxury of: emotional closure. “I hope every video and poem I make can be a bridge,” Vu says, who creates Instagram reels of her poetry readings. “Maybe it can soothe that longing for home we all feel.”