Despite the Vietnam War becoming one of the most documented and publicized conflicts in recent history, nuanced discussion and intersectional historical data of the Vietnamese diaspora remains limited. Invisibility and erasure of this community has contributed to reductive and racist perspectives on the war and ongoing intergenerational trauma. Current archives prioritize American viewpoints while minimizing and often dehumanizing Vietnamese perspectives. Historical archives on this conflict need to include more Vietnamese diasporic voices, not only to gain accuracy and insight into the past, but to also allow people of Vietnamese descent to process and heal generations of trauma caused by continuous imperialist occupation and civil war. The complex tasks of remembrance, decolonization, and possible Vietnamese reunification will become even more challenging once first-hand experiences are no longer available and survivors of The Vietnam War pass away.
The primary research question for this project explores how storytelling and oral history can decolonize, deconstruct and challenge typical archetypes, narratives and taxonomy related to Vietnamese refugees found in historical archives and current media resources. Secondly, this research work strives to understand how future generations of the Vietnamese community can move towards understanding multiple political and social perspectives of conflict through oral histories. Thirdly, the latter part of this project explores how time and relationship building influences research and design, with a focus on the Vietnamese diaspora in the Greater Toronto Area.