In dialogue with new critical scholarship on immigration, refugee, war, and memory studies as well as drawing from the methodologies of cultural studies and ethnography, this dissertation examines "anticommunism" as a set of cultural discourses and practices that shape the past, present, and future of Vietnamese diasporic communities by exploring when, where, and for what purposes South Vietnam emerges in refugee memories. That anticommunism continues to be an important paradigm for Vietnamese diasporic identity and community formations more than thirty years after the official end of the war and despite increased transnational relations between Vietnam and its diaspora suggests the need to theorize the multiplicity of meanings that it has amassed through the years. Through ethnographic interviews, participation in and observation of Vietnamese American community events in San Diego and analysis of its cultural productions, I examine how the refugee (or first) generation apprehend and deploy anticommunism in community spaces and in their private lives in order to engage with conversations about how memory, history and silence intersect and reveal hidden dynamics of institutional power and violence. How can acts of collective remembrance and the burdened silences of the first generation regarding the Vietnam-American war and post-war traumas work as alternatives to state sanctioned narratives (in Vietnam and the US) that erase a or disavow South Vietnamese perspectives? Can we read differently the public face of anticommunist politics that has authorized community censorship and violence in the past thirty years? This dissertation takes apart what has been academically and generally dismissed as conservative exile politics and looks to everyday community meaning-making practices as a legitimate and important site of knowledge. Thinking of Vietnamese American anticommunism as a cultural praxis--a mode for engaging in memory and meaning -making practices--it becomes possible to discuss the complexity of post-war grappling with death, loss, exile, and survival for those on the ground

Vietnamese immigration to the United States is a relatively recent occurrence when considered within the scope of Asian immigration. Vietnamese immigration to the United States occurred in the latter half of the 20th century and continues steadily today. A vast majority of Vietnamese Americans arrived as refugees, thus their departure from Vietnam was marked with political turbulence, and their arrival in America was highly scrutinized in the news media and academic scholarship. Before 1975, Vietnamese living in the United States were students, professionals, and war brides. In the 1950s, their numbers were in the low hundreds. However, in the 1960s until 1974, the population of Vietnamese Americans swelled to about 15,000. It was during those war years that the small population of Vietnamese Americans participated in the antiwar movement in American colleges and universities. This group remains an understudied population in Vietnamese American history.

The lunar new year is arguably the most important holiday for Vietnamese, whether in the homeland or overseas. Known as Tê´ t Nguyên Dán, or simply Tê´ t for short, the holiday can be divided into three periods: Tê´ t Niên (before New Year’s Eve), Giao Thù’a (New Year’s Eve), and Tân Niên (the New Year). The customs and traditions associated with Tê´ t have changed for Vietnamese Americans, as with other cultural forms that have endured international migration.

Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Vietnamese Americans have utilized their refugee status as a form of political and cultural thread stitching together a sense of identity and community out of displacement and loss. Among those classified as anti-Communist ethnic minorities by social scientists, Vietnamese in the United States are often compared to Cuban Americans who have been able to collectively align with the Republican Party to leverage representation and power in mainstream politics. With South Vietnam’s collapse and the exodus of Vietnamese refugees from the homeland after the Communist takeover, overseas communities that formed in the wake of the war have been staunchly anti-Communist and vigilantly opposed to the new unified Vietnam under a socialist regime. Given the outcome of the Vietnam War, anticommunism has been the dominant community politics for Vietnamese Americans. This political ideology has often erupted in violence and controversy in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Vietnamese American anticommunism cannot be simply absorbed under the broader umbrella of Cold War McCarthyism that pervaded much of American politics in the 1950s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1989. This form of ethnic politics should be understood as a particular minority discourse fraught with tension and irresolution. Vietnamese American anticommunism ideologically opposes socialism in general, but must be historicized as a discourse emerging from the North Vietnam/South Vietnam civil strife, the evacuation of the South’s urban elites in 1975, the exodus of the boat people from the late 1970s to mid- 1980s, and the reeducation camp experiences of men and women from the former South Vietnam. These particular historical events frame and help to reinvigorate anticommunism as a social movement in the United States.

South Coast Repertory’s world premiere of Vietgone by playwright Qui Nguyen is a highly anticipated event for us, as we’ve had the unique experience of watching this play’s metamorphosis since its inception. Qui, who hails from Brooklyn, NY, originally had tossed around the idea of writing a script about Vietnamese gangsters in Little Saigon. However, during his residency in the summer of 2013, SCR staff invited the three of us to meet with Qui and share the work we were doing in the local Vietnamese community.