![]() (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. 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. 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. Participants at the Capitol’s armed takeover have only begun to be identified, but media outlets captured what appear to be Vietnamese Americans holding up the South Vietnamese flag."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. Hours before the Capitol insurrection, he urged supporters to “ fight like hell” to defend his administration.Ī handful of Vietnamese Americans heeded that call, participating in local “stop the steal” rallies in California. Last year, he tweeted for his followers to “ liberate” the country by force from COVID-19 lockdowns. I have also observed how Trump employs old anti-communist tactics that appeal to some conservatives in this community. I have interviewed Vietnamese American soldiers who fear American freedom is failing and fervently believe in the United States’ activity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.įor them, flying the South Vietnam flag is a show of nationalism – a militarized patriotism that is simultaneously South Vietnamese and American. The flag reflects community solidarity, but it also has a more fraught symbolic meaning.Īs I wrote in my 2018 book “ Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory,” some Vietnamese Americans view their fallen homeland as an extension of the American push for freedom and democracy worldwide. Richard Koci Hernandez/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images Today, they invoke the ongoing cultural value of this “fallen” regime by flying the South Vietnam flag at Lunar New Year parades and musical concerts.Ī vigil in San Jose, California, on April 29, 1995, marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Many Vietnamese refugees sought asylum in the United States. The war killed nearly 50,000 American troops and displaced about half a million people. ![]() The fall of Saigon was the turning point of the Vietnam War, which caused over 1 million North Vietnamese deaths, military and civilian, and a quarter-million South Vietnamese casualties. Crashing through the gates of the main palace, they seized the building and raised the flag of the revolutionary northern government. In 1975, opposition forces overtook the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon. American ground troops formally joined the war to defend the south in 1965. helped establish and back South Vietnam, a pro-Western democratic republic that fought communist North Vietnam. A nationalist flagĪfter Vietnam gained independence from French colonial rule in 1954, the country split into two, sparking a civil war. The South Vietnamese flag recalls Vietnam’s own “failed” democracy – and the people’s struggle to save their nation.
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