Fifty years after the Vietnam War, Vietnamese Dubliners peer back into the past – as they understand it

In the basement of Sin É bar, Nghĩa Mai is doubled over with laughter.

He’s standing in the back of a tiny room separated from the bar’s toilets by a dark curtain, behind three rows of folding chairs. 

On the stage, Rob Nother is riffing. His hair is styled in a mullet, he’s wearing a baggy black t-shirt and blue jeans. Nother is pretending to be Mai. He’s doing Mai’s whole bit. 

It’s a little awkward. He’s a White guy trying on a Vietnamese accent, but Mai can’t stop laughing.

It’s a roast of Nghĩa Mai. Everyone in the audience is a fellow comic who knows him. He’s the host. .

Lauren O’Neill, who went up after Nother, mentioned how Mai would sometimes send him these long articles he’d written out of nowhere. 

Stuff about Ho Chi Minh City, she said. That’s where Mai grew up. 

Just recently, Mai had travelled back and had been thinking, he said, a week earlier, sitting at the Music Café, gazing down at a cup of espresso. 

Mai had discovered a letter dated 1999 on his parents’ bookshelf in March, he says.  

It was a vignette of his grandfather’s life, fragments of its never-ending struggles and longings for peace and stability. He even named his kids in a way that immortalises his hope for stability. 

“[He] gave them individual names that when joined together, it’s read as a slogan which roughly translated to ‘May Peace Be Achieved,’” wrote Mai in one of his articles.

Mai, who’s 29, never met his grandpa. He died just a few months after the fall of Saigon, which marked the end of the Vietnam War on 30 April 1975.

“50 years. That’s a long time,” wrote Mai, in his article inspired by the letter he found in his parents’ home.

That the discovery of the letter in March was so close to the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, he says, made him reflect again on the distance between him and the past, the one he’s been trying to close.

For Mai, reading about his grandpa and the Vietnamese struggle for anti-colonial liberation and peace is an inspiration to get stoic about life’s perilous nature – and to keep going, he says. 

“I realise life is funny like that,” he wrote.

For other Vietnamese Dubliners, life is an inherited ache to leave Vietnam and half-remembered stories and unprocessed feelings embodied in what their grandparents said about the past or, more importantly, didn’t.

Foreign familiarities 

Mai’s grandpa, on account of France’s colonial grip over Vietnam from 1859 to 1954, spoke good French. 

He also mastered classical Chinese, the tongue of the other interferers, “to read land deeds and family records”, showed the letter Mai recently found, he says.

“He became part of the first batch of Vietnamese boys to receive a full-fledged Western education à la française,” wrote Mai in his blog.

Mai says he wondered if that’s why he felt this tug towards the language, and decided to learn it.

“Every time I watch an old French film and I see French people having coffee and eating baguettes, I get homesick,” Mai wrote.

In another post, he’d written how the French language, despite its downfall after the reunification of Vietnam, still snuck up on Vietnamese people everywhere.

“One time, my mum shouted at me, ‘Get your feet off the đi-văng (divan, couch)!’ Later, I realised a lot of these words were French in origin.”

Trà My Nguyễn Hoàng learned to speak English before she could read or write in Vietnamese, she said, recently, sitting outside Two Pups Café in the Liberties. 

Her understanding of war-torn Vietnam and post-war economic crunch is dotted with some of the small joys of her parents’ world that arrived from the West. 

In 1992, four years before she was born, local shopkeepers in Hanoi started stocking Coca-Cola again, her dad told her, she says. “So, I’ll always remember that.” 

Years before that, her mother had her first bite of chocolate when a relative in the United States posted some over, Nguyễn Hoàng says. “It was included in a box of, like, a care package.”

Her mum’s grandpa thought the chocolate looked gross because of its colour, she says, but said about some fabric that came in the same package: ‘I can get a suit tailored for myself for when I die.’”

Ugly truths 

The United States' interference in Vietnam was part of the global Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, in which Washington aimed to “contain” the spread of communism. 

In Vietnam, the US was propping up a government in South Vietnam, while China and the USSR supported communist North Vietnam.

It killed more than 3 million people, half of them civilians, and over 58,000 of them American troops. It poisoned millions more by spraying herbicides, like Agent Orange, over the region as a way to clear out forests, greens and food crops to win the upper hand in battle. 

“And their offspring are still being affected 60 years later,” says a recent study by American researchers published in the Journal of Soil Science.

Says Nguyễn Hoàng, the woman working in the Liberties: “When soldiers returned home, they had a kid, the first kid is disabled, and they keep thinking, ‘Maybe it’s just this one kid’, and so they keep having children, they didn’t realise what they’d brought home.”

There are still swaths of land in her country of birth that just can’t bear fruit, she says. 

Gotta move on to be who I am 

From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, half a million Vietnamese were swallowed by the sea as they tried to leave the country by boat. 

“Those rescued at sea were brought to refugee camps in Southeast Asian countries, where they remained for months to years until resettlement,” according to the book How to Support the Neuropsychological Health of the Vietnamese Diaspora.

In the following decades, many joined relatives in the United States through sponsorship programmes, it says. 

The sea-crossers became known as “boat people”. Some of them found safety in Ireland in 1979. 

Brigid Mai Khanh Leahy’s mum became one of the Vietnamese refugees in the United States where she met and married an Irish-American guy.

So, Khanh Leahy grew up in Orange County, California, and 11 years ago moved to Dublin. 

That the war underpins her whole existence is a thought that floods her mind, sometimes.

“My life was possible because of so much violence and destruction and upheaval, that’s kind of difficult to reconcile,” she said, recently on a video call. 

But it also makes her proud of her mum, who was imprisoned and tortured on the way out, she says. “I’m very proud of my Vietnamese heritage; we are very resilient people.”

Nguyễn Hoàng’s family moved from Vietnam to the Middle East when she was 12, she says. Her dad landed a job in the region for five years.

“It was always the idea that we have to leave this all behind,” she says.

Everyone’s still encouraged to leave and to build a life uncheckered by the past elsewhere, says Nguyễn Hoàng. 

Hàn Nguyễn, a student of art and social action at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) on Thomas Street, says growing up in Nha Trang, Vietnam, she watched wave after wave of emigration. 

“When I was young, I had a dream that all my classmates had left for America, and I was left behind,” she said, at a canteen in NCAD, last week.

The weight of war

Mai, the comic/historian, says Reunification Day, a public holiday on 30 April in Vietnam, is bittersweet for Vietnamese people everywhere, depending on where they stood when Saigon fell.

Nguyễn, the NCAD student, says her grandparents fought on different sides of the war. “It’s awkward,” she says, smiling.

One of her grandpas, who fought alongside Americans before the fall of Saigon, doesn’t talk about it much. 

“He’d only give me a little bit of information when he’s drunk,” said Nguyễn, laughing.

Peering at the past, how her grandpa and others like him were rendered invisible instead of heard and included, is what upsets her the most because excluding people doesn’t mean they cease to exist, she says.  

One time, Nguyễn had to take him to what used to be called Saigon, and is now Ho Chi Minh City, for a health check, Nguyễn says. 

He asked her to take him to places he used to frequent during the war in search of something familiar, and witnessed his grief that nothing was. 

“I remember him being so sad, he kept saying, ‘Oh it’s not the same, it’s not the same.’” 

Khanh Leahy, who’s also studied history, like Mai, says that in the United States, South Vietnamese people who fought alongside American soldiers aren’t included in the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C.

“It lists only American names; there’s a feeling that they’ve been forgotten about,” she said. 

Though they join American vets in commemorative events, Khanh Leahy says. 

Nguyễn, the NCAD student, says people who were on the losing side of the war should be listened to because they want to talk so badly. 

Recently, she says, two American guys travelled to South Vietnam to make a podcast about the Cambodian-Vietnamese war and not about the US-Vietnam War

“When they were interviewing people, all they could talk about was the Vietnam War because it was so overwhelming for them.”

One man's truth is another man's lie

Nguyễn says she’s lucky to have studied in a school in Vietnam that covered all kinds of perspectives and interpretations of the war, not just a binary narrative that most Vietnamese textbooks offer, she says.

Those varying perspectives of the war may view it as an inevitable civil conflict, a relic of American imperialism, or as a justifiable quest to curb communism. 

Nguyễn Hoàng, the woman in the Liberties, says her Vietnamese school books, which reflect the views of the ruling Communist Party, can reduce people and their struggles into statistics of the dead, maimed and poisoned.

When she was asked to curate a list of films to screen for the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, as part of the Irish Film Institute’s (IFI’s) East Asia Film Festival earlier this year, she chose three: We Will Meet Again, The Girl On the River, and In the Lane.

These cover the worlds of Vietnamese women, contours of their struggles, and their relationships amidst the war and in its aftermath, she says. 

She can’t stand Hollywood’s phoney male-centric account of the war, portrayed in Apocalypse Now or even Good Morning, Vietnam, says Nguyễn Hoàng.

The former was shot in the Philippines, anyway, she says. “And so a lot of people aren’t even Vietnamese in the film. You can hear it in the dialogue.”

She’s also sick of hearing about Americans’ guilt about what they did in Vietnam. And rolls her eyes at how Western left-wingers glamorise Vietnamese communism, untouched by what it meant to live it, she says. 

Nguyễn Hoàng is an Irish citizen now. She says the distance has also improved her relationship with her parents.

Though she feels a tug of grief thinking about Vietnam and how much she still doesn’t know about the past, said Nguyễn Hoàng. 

That’s why she travels back to grasp hold of her grandpa’s stories. That’s why she studied journalism, she says. 

Back in the basement of Sin É’s bar, Nghĩa Mai is saying goodbye to some of the stand-ups he’s befriended in the six years he’s lived in the city. 

He’s moving back to Vietnam. “It was always the plan,” said Mai, standing at the entrance of the bar’s basement.