Ngoc-Tran Vu is preserving the legacies of South Vietnamese soldiers

What does the incoming generation owe to the outgoing? What burdens must the young carry on behalf of the old? If we refuse them, what happens to the historical record? Will we forget the past’s tragedies and horrors? Soberingly, who would we be without them?

Questions like these linger in the clearing where art joins with activism. They’re central to both 1975: A Vietnamese Diaspora Memorial, a public art project on the schedule for permanent installation in Boston’s Little Saigon Cultural District, and Ngoc-Tran Vu, the project’s director and lead artist. Vu grew up observing her father and his friends get together every April to visit the Dorchester Vietnam Veterans Memorial, built in 1986 and etched with the names of the 80 Dorchester men who perished in the Vietnam War.

Absent from the structure: the names of the South Vietnamese soldiers who likewise lost their lives in the conflict.

The glaring lack of acknowledgement of these soldiers’ contributions inspired Vu in 2023 to establish 1975: A Vietnamese Diaspora Commemoration Initiative, comprising two projects: the aforementioned memorial, as well as 1975: Oral Stories. The former is Vu’s effort at preserving the legacies of the South Vietnamese soldiers by way of their sacrifices, punctuating their effect on shaping communities in the Vietnamese diaspora, and highlighting their influence on the younger generations of Vietnamese, and those yet to come. It’s an enterprise years in the making, now in motion not a moment too soon.

“I would say it’s definitely overdue,” Vu tells JoySauce, “and this is something with a deep desire stemming from the community.” There’s urgency felt in that desire, too, given the recent 50th anniversary of Black April—the end of the Vietnam War—and what that means to those old enough to have lived through the fall of Saigon in 1975, and even fought in the war themselves. “A lot of our elders are getting older, or have passed on, my dad included,” Vu says. “He’s a veteran. He's close to 80. To create something that’s a long-term vision for our community, especially our elders, is critical, especially those who have made so many sacrifices, uprooted their lives, and continue to be a part of this effort.”

Vu recalls a town forum she and her team conducted at the end of March to speak with Dorchester residents about the project: their intentions and goals, and what they mean to accomplish through the construction of a new memorial. Her former elementary school teacher—who, is also Vietnamese and taught Vu in Dorchester’s 1990s Bilingual Education Program—came to the event to give testimony, like her father, he’s in his 80s and told her and the assembly that he wants to see the memorial realized and brought to life. “He really believes in this project,” Vu notes. “Because it's connected to all of our histories, it’s a true gift that we want to be able to build, so that all of our community members can be part of the effort and see the fruit of the labors."

Listening to Vu speak with such confidence and pride, and frankly an internal sense of responsibility to her culture and her history, one may feel compelled periodically to stop and remember that she’s a multimedia artist rather than an activist. Then again, maybe the reminder is unnecessary. It’s not as if art and activism don’t share a common history, after all, in which the two intertwine to become a singular joint enterprise: think of Keith Haring’s AIDS awareness work, or Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica.” There’s no reason Vu can’t be both an artist and an activist, though perhaps the more correct word would be “advocate.” For an endeavor on the scale of 1975: A Vietnamese Diaspora, the work required to get across the finish line goes beyond making the art itself; it encompasses bureaucratic processes, like securing permits, and navigating public opinion, a’la building community support.

“I definitely see my role as both,” Vu explains. “My background and my training have informed my lens of how I see the world, really, both as an artist and cultural organizer specifically.” It may not be possible to separate one side of  Vu from the other. She knew she wanted to be an artist starting at a young age, and as she grew up, she came to root her aesthetic interests in her sense of community; she also trained as a youth organizer in high school, and has spent her life since belonging to spaces where organization and advocacy both take prominence—especially regarding contemporary social justice.

“What does it mean to honor the past? How does that resonate? It's active in literally what's happening in our own community,” Vu says. “We have community members who are getting deported. We have ICE coming through. So what does that all mean? How do we build a home away from home, and protect our community members, so that we can continue to advocate and build for more?”

Our present times recently clanged against Vietnam’s history and the arduous work of mending the war’s far-reaching repercussions. President Donald Trump’s administration’s brash decision to freeze USAID’s foreign aid contracts put an abrupt halt to programs focused on abatement of toxic chemicals employed during the war; the U.S. Department of State paused mine-clearing operations around the world, including in Vietnam, where holdover UXO (unexploded ordnance) are responsible for an estimated 105,000 casualties since 1975, including more than 38,000 Vietnamese civilian deaths—literal remnants of the past. So the past isn’t really past at all, and though the war is long over, its violence remains, even in peacetime.

“It has such a ripple effect, whether people know it or not, on the legacy of this war,” Vu says. “At the time, it was the most documented war. Even now, I think it has an effect on what we see in the media, what we see in our lives, and even in the wars that are actively happening, too.” The threads of a conflict like the Vietnam War determine the futures of the people victimized by them, and meld, in Vu’s work as an artist and an organizer, into a lens through which art and culture become a means of fostering community spirit, and carving out spaces where dialogue can be had within community.

This is key to 1975: A Vietnamese Diaspora, which, from the start, Vu approached with inclusion and accessibility in mind. “We're talking about commemoration in terms of the legacy of the war, in a sense,” Vu explains. “But we're also shifting that narrative so the focus becomes the impact on families and communities.” Rather than an emphasis on military history, the project’s subject is personal, and communal history—the ways in which the war irrevocably altered the lives of its survivors, their descendants, and maybe even the places they came to call “home” after fleeing their birth countries.

Pull that idea back to its furthest natural distance: the fact of 1975: A Vietnamese Diaspora’s existence itself evidences how the war changed the world, not only because people fought and died on Vietnam’s soil, but because people who otherwise would have lived on it live instead in places like Dorchester. They are where they are, 50 years on, because of the war; they are our friends and schoolmates and neighbors because of the war, too. In that sense, the Vietnam War becomes a form of heritage, passed down from elder generations to younger generations, as from Vu’s father to Vu, who identifies as part of the 1.5 generation—born in Vietnam, forced to move to the United States in 1992 as a political refugee. “I still have a relationship with Vietnam,” Vu says. “A lot of my extended family lives there, so I try to go back and really build a relationship with them and the culture."

Filtering that existential span through art achieves several goals at once: acknowledging the survivors, witnesses, and children of the Vietnam War; and opening their collective experiences to a broader community comprising people from different backgrounds. “Fifty years later, there’s something about that,” Vu says, “continuing to advocate for recognition, advocating for our visibility, intertwining that with art and culture, so that it becomes accessible for everyone involved.” If the project’s focus is on Dorchester’s South Vietnamese population, and the heritage that the Vietnam War represents for them, then one of its overarching goals is to unite Dorchester writ large behind that heritage, an ideal to strive for even in better times, but of greater urgency now than ever on account of the political moment the United States is enduring.