has always been informed by its role in Vietnam and its so-called role as 'saviors' to us as refugees," she said. The controversy around the flag's alignment with right-wing causes, Vo Dang said, gives Vietnamese Americans an opportunity to interrogate the accepted narrative about their past. One way to move forward is to recognize the dangers of hypernationalist thinking. The flag, however, "reflects the past and also present and future concerns" for the community, he said. The younger generation is strongly progressive, he said, but ethnic media tend to amplify conservative voices. "Most Vietnamese Americans are actually independent, but Republicans are most visible," he said. It has allowed people to reminisce about their former lives, Vo Dang said, while giving them the strength to forge new paths in their adopted home.ĭeepening chasms within Vietnamese American community - along class, age and ideological lines - mirror those in American society at large, said Long Bui, a historian and author of "Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory."
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Today, the flag is a permanent, sacred fixture at important cultural events, including Lunar New Year, or Tết, festivals, serving as a totem of solidarity and rebirth.
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Supporters of President Donald Trump gather in front of the U.S. More than 20 states have adopted resolutions to do so. In the 1990s, Vietnamese American leaders began lobbying local elected officials to recognize the defunct banner as the "Heritage and Freedom Flag" to represent the displaced overseas community. In Vietnam, the North's red flag replaced their yellow one. "On the one hand, it's a political symbol," she said, noting that the banner's meaning has shifted over the years depending on "whose voice is loudest." "But on the other, there is this very affective and sentimental personal attachment that many in the refugee community have toward it."Īfter communist North Vietnam defeated the U.S.-backed South in 1975, scores of South Vietnamese refugees resettled in America. (The emblem has even been spotted in Australia at a "Stop the Steal" rally, a far-right campaign that falsely alleges widespread voter fraud against Trump.)
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(Vietnamese Americans were the only Asian group to favor Trump over President-elect Joe Biden in November.)īut the flag's growing visibility on the far right "opens up a bigger can of worms" for the diaspora, said Thuy Vo Dang, an ethnic studies professor and curator for the Southeast Asian Archive at the University of California, Irvine. The same sentiments buoyed the group's long-standing loyalty to the Republican Party.
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For decades, people have used it to express hatred for a communist regime that banished them from their country. Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Imagesįor Vietnamese Americans, the Yellow Flag represents many, often clashing, aspects of the refugee experience.
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White supremacy is not something you can be free under." President Donald Trump's supporters gather outside the U.S. "It's about us being free, and Trump is not someone you can be free under. "The ideas of authoritarianism, of overturning the people's will, are not the principles that this flag stands for," said Tung Nguyen, president of the Progressive Vietnamese American Organization, or PIVOT. I had lived through Communism and I know the tyranny and the pain it had inflicted on many families." (She declined to comment.)īut to community advocates who saw the South Vietnamese flag, or the Yellow Flag, as a symbol of democracy and unity, its presence at a riot was both alarming and infuriating. "It's a reminder of my roots and heritage. "This flag to me is an anti-Communist flag," Michelle Le, a Seattle-based real estate broker who flew the banner at the rally, wrote in a Facebook post, which has been deleted.