- Because of the war and the refugees coming over, I think the scars of the trauma are still here.

- Some of them are still fighting the war in their mind.

- A lot of the memories, experiences and traumas still follow my mom, still haunt her.

(gentle music) - For a lot of our veterans, the war is not done because of that emotional trauma of since '75, and especially in our veterans, the PTSD.

- For my dad, he doesn't speak too much about his time that he served in the war on the south side, but I can tell that he's been traumatized.

I can tell that there's PTSD, there's anxiety in there as well, and probably some depression.

- They put my dad in jail.

My mom had to take care of everything.

When he came home, he changed quite a bit, become a lot quieter, didn't share a whole lot.

- The PTSD that a lot of men, or, older men like my father felt, you know, and they coped with it through drinking.

You couldn't talk about it, it was like a ghost in the room.

- A lot of the memories, experiences and traumas still follow my mom, still haunt her to be honest.

She can't talk about much of it, but when she does, she remembers all the details as clear as day.

A very enduring and emotional aspect from the war that still follows her today, 50 years later, is actually her sense of patriotism towards Saigon.

A love and a longing for her birthplace, for her birth city, a form of nostalgia and attachment to Saigon, she was born and raised there.

And a lot of immigrants, you know, if you get homesick, you can always travel back to your country.

But for her, she occasionally, very occasionally she will lament to me that, you know, she misses Vietnam, she misses Saigon, and it's a country that she actually can never really visit or go home to, because it's a country that no longer exists.

- I think it's too painful.

And I also think because within the Vietnamese community, and general APIs, Asian American, Pacific Islander populations, we tend not to air out our 'dirty laundry.'

There's a stigma against pain, trauma, mental health.

So I think my parents fall within that range too, of not wanting to talk about it, because it brings up too much unpleasantries, and in their mind, nothing's going to be resolved anyway, so why bother talking about it?

- When I think of like intergenerational trauma, and I feel like the young generation is trying to open these conversations and have these dialogue, and like a lot of the elderly generation is just still very much like, no, it's this.

- It's a very fragile subject in my family, one that my grandmother, when she was alive, every time my dad and my uncles get drunk and talk about it, she would just tell them to shut up, basically.

The only time I really heard about it is when my dad was drunk, and my brother and my mom would talk about it, just little bits and pieces.

- To folks in my parents' generation, (crowd clamors) some of them are still fighting the war in their mind.

Every time I go back to Vietnam once a year to do medical missions, you know, a mom or a dad would be telling me, you know, "Be careful," right?

Communist government.

And so that sense of fear, that sense of trepidations.

- I actually remember, I was so fascinated about learning about Vietnam that after my freshman year of college, I actually received a fully funded scholarship to go study abroad in Vietnam for three months.

I bought my plane tickets, I received my student visa for the entire three months, and it must have been maybe two to three days before the trip, my mom just suddenly broke down, and begged me not to go.

And this is me at 18, 19 years old now, and so for her 30 to 40 years after the war.

And that's still her reaction to it, because, and you have to remember, her last memory of the war was leaving to escape persecution.

- There's this Vietnamese way of like, you should feel it and not talk about it.

And then the American way is like, let's talk about it, you know, it's therapy, it's like head on, you know?

And so there's also that cultural, you know, sort of dissonance that makes it difficult to heal.

- So if you're in your twenties, and you're wondering why your parents are the way there are, or your thirties, imagine being now, this world is in chaos, and you get exiled, and you get kicked out of the United States, and now you've gotta go start your life somewhere, all over, with nothing.

Right?

How would you manage that?

And so having that kind of empathy, sympathy for that first generation is vital to part of the healing.

- I think that still, the majority of, say like the American population don't know that the Vietnam War was a civil war.

You know, the South Vietnamese voice is so like, erased, even here.

That's why there's a lot of hurt, and I think that when we think of the healing that hasn't been done in the community, it comes from that erasure.

(gentle music) (gentle music fades)