“There was nothing left for us, so we had to take a chance”
Story #19
Dinh Q. Le, Vietnamese American artist who shared his early memories of Vietnam and his family’s migration to the U.S. to escape the war with Cambodia.
Interviewed & Written by Minh Anh Nguyen
Dinh Q. Le, 53, sitting in a quiet coffee shop in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where he now resides. He presents himself as a simple, pensive man but he also has a youthful smile. Photo by Minh Anh Nguyen.
HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM – “People don’t leave their home and abandon everything unless they’re desperate and there’s no other option,” Dinh Q. Le began reflecting, “and I think many people don’t realize that.” Le’s story is a testament to this.
Dinh Q. Le, 53, was born in Hà Tiên, Vietnam, near the Cambodian border. With the fall of Saigon and withdrawal of U.S. troops in 1975, the communist government took over Vietnam. As a young child, it was a scary period for Le.
Le’s father, a high school principal, was blacklisted because of his associations with the former regime. His mother sold gold and U.S. dollars. “If you did anything that the government considered ‘capitalist’, you were put on their blacklist,” said Le.
What finally cemented his family’s decision to escape Vietnam was the emerging war between Vietnam and Cambodia. In 1978, the Khmer Rouge invaded his hometown. They knew then that they had to find a way out.
“There was nothing left for us, so we had to take a chance,” said Le.
They spent about a year at a refugee camp in Songkhla, Thailand. Tirelessly waiting for their applications to be reviewed during this time, Le’s family didn’t know what was ahead. They knew that leaving Vietnam was the right choice, but because Le had no other experiences to compare to, he clinged onto his memories of Vietnam.
“I think I started romanticizing Vietnam, even before I got to America,” said Le, “and when I got to America, adapting to a new place was difficult as well, so a part of me definitely held onto only the good memories of Vietnam.”
Once arriving in the U.S., the possibility of going back and visiting Vietnam wasn’t an option. The U.S. government at that time had an embargo on Vietnam, so anybody who wanted to go to Vietnam had to do it clandestinely.
It wasn’t until 1994 that the U.S. lifted the embargo. By this time, Le had finished graduate school and began teaching in Boston, leading him to receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to visit Vietnam for the first time since his leaving. This visit would foreshadow his eventual full-time move back to Vietnam in 1997.
Le’s Exhibition: The photographs, some facing out and others turned inward, have been stitched together to form fragile-looking, rectangular structures. They allude to the mosquito netting under which people sleep, creating what Lê calls a “sleeping, dreaming memory of Vietnam.”
Courtesy of http://www.ricegallery.org/
Dinh Q. Le considers himself among the luckier people in that camp. Large-scale immigration from Vietnam to the U.S. after the war led to a U.S.-sponsored evacuation of an estimated 125,000 Vietnamese refugees. But it wasn’t until the U.N. General Assembly convened a meeting on “Refugees and Displaced Persons in South-East Asia” at Geneva in late 1979, that the U.S. was urged to accept more refugees.
“Today, I think governments are tired,” Le uttered with a sigh, “Even countries that the U.S. has waged war with, destabilized, or just overall responsible for the upheaval of, they are just so jaded now that I think it’s much more difficult to immigrate.”
But Le empathetically pleaded that people need to understand there is always urgency to protect asylum seekers. For him, at the time, he wanted a safe place and a chance to live a normal life and have opportunities, “so I can become who I am today,” said Le.
Le considers himself both Vietnamese and American, and this is evident through more than just his dual-citizenship. It is evident through his accomplishments as a world-renowned Vietnamese-American artist, and his artworks that explore identity with a continuing sense of curiosity and reflection.
To know more about Lê’s Art: Crossing the Farther Shore Exhibition
Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê is known for his work in photography, video, and installation. He often splices, interweaves, and distorts photographs to explore his own relationship to Vietnam’s complicated cultural and political history.
In Crossing the Farther Shore, Lê incorporates photographs taken in Vietnam during the 1940s-1980s, with the majority dating to the pre-Vietnam War era before 1975.
Courtesy of ricegallery.org
Minh Anh wrote this article on March 11, 2021 and submitted to Migration Tales.
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