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Description
Scope/Content: On Monday, February 20, 2012, Tuan Nguyen was interviewed for the Vietnamese American Oral History Project for the University of California, Irvine. His wife, Linda Nguyen, was also present during the interview. Tuan Nguyen was born on June 2, 1958, in Da Nang, Vietnam; he is currently 53 years old. He and his family moved to Saigon in 1959 so he spent most of his childhood in Saigon. He went to seminary school when he was 10 years old, but he knew priesthood was not for him. Tuan actually remembers the intense bombing on April 30, 1975, when Saigon fell to the communists. His father was an officer of the Southern army, and he was put in jail from 1975 to 1987. Tuan expresses how he and his family had to pay for it because his father was in the Southern army fighting against the communists. He left Vietnam by boat in August 1981 for freedom and his safety, and his boat was rescued by Texaco, an oil platform, whose boat name was Hurricane Ashley. The oil platform brought them to Indonesia in September 1981. Then he went to the United States in 1982. Tuan remembers seeing the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California, and he even remembers his arrival in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He became a United States citizen in 1987. He married his wife Linda who was actually one of his neighbors back in Vietnam on May 9, 1992. They have three children, Rachel, Ashley, and Ben. Tuan Nguyen takes a look back on his life from his time in Vietnam to his present time here in the United States through this special interview. Scope/Content: “Vietnamese American Experience” examines Vietnamese American identities and communities through a sustained critique of United States imperialism and analysis of the wars in Southeast Asia, which spurned the mass migration of over 1 million Vietnamese to America since the 1970s. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarly research, literary works and visual media, this course equips students with a critical and transnational framework for engaging Vietnamese American experiences. We explore how Vietnamese Americans have been made subject to US racial formation before and after their arrival in the US. Most importantly, we seek to understand how they craft their own lives and meanings, their memories of the homeland, as well as their triumphs and struggles to build community. Toward this end, a major component of this course is an oral history project each student will complete with a Vietnamese American elder. Students are trained in oral history methodology and required to conduct and process (transcribe, translate, and index) one oral history interview to donate to the Vietnamese American Oral History Project, which is archived in the UCI Libraries Southeast Asian Archive. Scope/Content: Tuan Nguyen, Photographer Camille Garcia, February 20, 2012
Type
sound
Format
1 mp3 audio file; 1 pdf transcription English; 1 pdf field notes English; 1 time log English; 5 jpg image files
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