by Anthony Trung Quang Le | April 2025

This article was originally published in the Aqua Plums Substack. Subscribe to get new blogs sent to your email.

April 30th is a painful date for us, Vietnamese Americans, but also a chance to heal. It marks the end of a civil war, the reunification of Vietnam and a mass migration that impacted my family directly.

I grieve with you if you had to leave Vietnam. My mother, father and two sisters had to leave. I commend your bravery for making life-altering decisions despite the fear of an uncertain future. You did the best you could. You should be proud of yourself and your resilience for surviving so much pain.

As a second generation Vietnamese American, I’ve seen how the pain of displacement goes unprocessed in my own family. The pain feels unfair because of how hard it is to make it in America. The pain is a lingering scar of leaving your country. Pain becomes shame, making it harder to talk about, so we don’t talk about it at all. My parents didn’t talk about their refugee experience while I was growing up. I didn’t know how to ask them either, and my fear labeled this questioning as too nosey. But how do we know who we are if we don’t know where we came from? This hole left me feeling so far from my Vietnamese heritage growing up.

This is generational trauma. Not talking about the past makes us suffer alone, and without healing, the pain can change how you treat yourself and how you treat others. Generational trauma affected my low self-esteem, emotional numbness and a fear to explore my Vietnamese heritage because I didn’t feel Viet enough.

Unprocessed trauma can calcify into hate, and I’ve sadly seen our community direct this hate unfairly towards other immigrants. Donald Trump clearly harnesses this hate and fear of immigrants to gain support from Vietnamese Americans. However, in a CNN report by MJ Lee at Virginia’s Eden Center, Vietnamese Americans who voted for Republicans and Democrats had a shared support for Trump’s hard stance on immigration. Knowing our history of displacement, it’s hard for me to watch other Vietnamese people identify more with rich politicians than immigrants who are fleeing their own traumatic situations.

Mahmoud Khalil and Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia should be a litmus test for how you feel about immigration. The Trump administration is enforcing a hard stance on immigration right now by abducting legal residents like Mahmoud, cancelling student visas and illegally moving people like Kilmar to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists without a trial. ICE is detaining legal residents during scheduled citizenship interviews. ICE is detaining Vietnamese people who have lived in the US for over 30 years. Immigration is Trump’s most popular and hate-fueled issue, and even a recent poll shows that support of Trump’s immigration policies are declining.

This is our chance to let go of this hate and to stop the unnecessary cycle of violence. Ta-Nehisi Coates has spoken about how some Jewish people’s shame about the Holocaust has led to the prideful hate motivating Zionism. You may think that Vietnamese Americans aren’t inflicting violence, but before the election, I heard about MAGA supporters at the Eden Center threatening to beat up people who weren’t on their side. Hurt people hurt people, but it can stop.

This is our chance to heal our immigration wounds, and therapy can help us turn towards love. Therapy helped me turn towards self-love and in turn allowed me to love others selflessly. I was afraid to start therapy for so long. In America, Asians are the least likely group to seek mental health services compared to white, Black, Hispanic and mixed-race people. You’re worried about not having anything to say or you’re afraid to share your feelings because that’s discouraged in this society or you’re worried that the therapist won’t understand you unless they have lived your life (but it’s possible). Being brave is acting while still feeling fear. You have survived so much. You can survive this too.

I’ve been in therapy for over a year and a half. My therapist is a bipoc woman who specializes in narrative therapy especially for immigrant families (and isn’t Vietnamese). I do a virtual therapy session once a month, and I’m terrified that my therapist recently suggested that I may be ready to graduate.

Therapy helped me come out as Queer to my family. In a mutual sharing of vulnerability, I was able to finally ask my family about their history by first sharing about my Queer journey. The artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen makes films with vulnerable populations and when asked how he approaches these collaborations with reciprocity and the aim of mutual benefit, he said that he tells his story first to build trust.

Therapy helped me find a community of Vietnamese people that accepts me because I am better able to deal with Viet imposter syndrome and therefore finally accept that I am Vietnamese no matter what.

As I mention at every Vagabond event, a core value of the collective is to accept all the ways to be Vietnamese with love and curiosity.

I’ve had to set difficult personal boundaries with other Viet people who thought they were more Viet than others, and I really don’t need any validation or anything at all from people like that.

One of the most important lessons I learned is that what happened to me in my life and all of the joy and pain within that made me who I am. We can’t change what has happened to us, and our resilience has made us who we are.

I’ve lived with such shame of the past throughout my life, feeling inadequate for not doing this or fulfilling what I thought I should be doing according to expected roles placed upon me (but really self-imposed) from my family or society. It’s normal to have those feelings, but like any feeling, we can notice it and let go.

I hope we can take the time to remember what April 30th means to us and our families. There’s strength in our resilience and so much more joy in our collective healing if we want it.