They Call Us Viet Kieu

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For Anna Ngyuen, a second-generation British Vietnamese theatre producer, fear and unexplained inherited traumas are what she associated with Vietnam all her life. Her parents fled the war-torn country in 1975 in the mass exodus that followed the Vietnam war. They were resettled in London along with 20,000 other Vietnamese. It is this community and their traumas that her image of Vietnam has always been based on. Forty years later Anna returns to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to rediscover Vietnam for herself. Viet Kieu, she finds out, is what the local Vietnamese call people like her: ethnic Vietnamese, but born or living abroad. And she discovers that many of those who have returned to Vietnam are on a similar journey: to find out who they are. Foreign but not foreign, Vietnamese but not Vietnamese. And among the burgeoning creative community they are using art to make sense of their identity. Does the Vietnam her mother feared still exist? How Vietnamese is she? What are local Vietnamese like her doing? And what would the Vietnam Anna have been like if her parents had not left? (Photo: Members of the Communist Youth League parade in front of the mausoleum of late president Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi, 2015. Credit: Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP/Getty Images)