- [sarah] Major funding for this program was provided by... (upbeat music plays) - Welcome to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, a Philadelphia story.

I'm your host, Rob Buscher.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up a demographic that encompasses over 40 unique countries and cultures of origin.

Everything East of Istanbul and West of California.

As a mixed race, Japanese American, I grew up learning about the history of my community through the stories of our elders.

Unfortunately, because this history is missing for most school curriculums, I knew very little about other AAPI communities until I became an ethnic study scholar.

In this series, we will share the local history of Asian American and Pacific Islanders through conversation with some of Philadelphia's most prominent Asian-American community members.

Together, we will explore the unique experiences of being AAPI in Philadelphia.

On today's episode, we are discussing the similarities and differences between the Japanese American resettlement to greater Philadelphia during the post world War II era and the Southeast Asian refugee crisis that developed after the US withdrawal from Vietnam.

I'm joined by panelist, Jim Kawano, Board Member at Japanese American Citizens League Philadelphia Chapter, Thoai Nguyen, CEO of South East Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition, and Rorng Sorn, Former Executive Director of the Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia, and current Director of Immigrant Refugee Affairs and Language Access Services at the city of Philadelphia's Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disability Services.

Thank you all for joining us.

Jim, can you start us off by talking a little bit about the history of Japanese American Incarceration during world War II and specifically how that brought your family to this region?

- In February of 1942, about two months after the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor, president of the United States issued an executive order that authorized the military to round up and incarcerate all people of Japanese descent who lived on the west coast of the United States.

At that time, my mother was living with her family and attending high school.

My father was a pharmacy student at Southern Cal.

So as a result of this executive order, each of them had to whittle down their possessions to what they could carry.

My mother's father had to sell everything in his drug store, presumably getting about pennies on the dollar for that.

And then within a matter of few months, they had to get on a train and go to a concentration camp in Poston.

Well, it's called Poston in Arizona along the Colorado river.

And my father first went to an assembly center.

They called it an assembly center.

Basically, it was the Santa Anita racetrack, and lived in the stables until he could be transported to Wyoming to a concentration camp there that's referred to as Heart Mountain.

About the same time that they arrived in these concentration camps, there was an organization called the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, I believe that's what it was called.

And this was led by the American Friends Services Committee which is based here in the Philadelphia area.

And they were active in finding universities around the country who would accept students out of the camps.

So my father was able to gain acceptance to Drake University in Iowa to finish up his studies, he just had one more semester to go.

And my mother graduated high school in the camp and then came to Philadelphia to attend Temple University.

And so later on after my father graduated from Drake, he circuitously made way to Philadelphia as well.

- Great.

Well, thank you for that brief summary.

And I know we're gonna return to some of those other details of the resettlement a little bit later in the conversation, but at this point I'd like to bring Thoai in.

Thoai, can you give us a little bit of a background on the US military intervention in Vietnam and how this subsequent withdrawal to the refugee crisis?

- Thanks, Rob.

You used the word intervention and I would like to introduce something else.

I'm not sure what the US would've intervened (Thoai laughs) in Southeast Asia.

I really do think that it's a US involvement in Vietnam and at large Southeast Asia what had been called Indochina were more of the same century old imperialistic desires, not just the United States, but obviously European Western powers.

So I think the US just basically took over the role of what France had been doing and what the British had been doing, what China had been doing in Vietnam as invaders for 2,000 years.

And that's just to mention a few of the imperialists or colonialists in Vietnam.

I think what our country and other south Vietnamese who were aligned with US and French forces were disinformed on was that it was a fight against communism, that it was to stop the domino effect of communism taking over Southeast Asia.

And really that was just a way for the US to disinform and build a case so that they can be there and test out military equipment and just weapons that was untested.

So the military-industrial complex had a huge stake in Southeast Asia in general and tested weapons and Agent Orange was a legacy of this.

And also in doing this, they had to kind of disinform Vietnamese living in Vietnam that there had been this threat of socialism or communism coming into the country and therefore you need to align with us and stop the communist forces.

By April of 1975, it was when it was clear that the United States was not going to be able to hold Vietnam much longer as a colony.

A lot of the Vietnamese that were aligned with the United States had to be evacuated.

And my family was part of that.

My dad worked for the US government at that time in Vietnam and his choices were to stay and suffer the consequences of the communist coming into the country or leave with his family and he chose to do that.

So we were evacuated out of Vietnam in April of 1975.

- Thank you for sharing that context.

And we're gonna talk a little bit more deeply about your family's experiences here in your next question, but for now I'd like to bring Rorng in.

Rorng, you've personally experienced refugee resettlement as someone who fled the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your personal history both coming from Cambodia and resettling here in the Philadelphia region?

- Thank, Rob.

So a little bit of background about my journey as a refugee and settling in south Philadelphia in particular.

So I was born in 1968, right around the US bombing of Cambodias that destabilized the country and created a civil war and also gave Khmer the power to take over Cambodia.

So I was around 8 at the time that Khmer took over.

So my family were taken to different places, separated, put in labor camps, working without much food or clean water.

So I had no chance to go to schools.

We were really in a mass prison without a wall.

My sister and I was old enough, we were separated and we were put in children camps and we survived by really find anything that crawling or something that we can eat to survive along those years.

In 1978, when the Viet Cong or the north Vietnamese troop invaded Cambodias and the war started again between Khmer Rouge and Viet Congs that's when many Cambodian were able to move from one place to another looking for family or escape, actually.

So my family were already forced to move from our own village in Kampong province to Battambang.

And then when the war start again, many of us were escaping to Thailand, actually.

So it took us months.

experienced so many horrific events along our journeys.

We were caught in the battles, we were walking through jungles and forests without water and foods, many people die along the way and we were not able to reach Thailand, because we were stuck along the border and we were not accepted into Thailand.

So we were living along the borders with no food, no clean water, no medical kits.

Many of us were already wounded, starving and also very ill.

So I would say half of us along the border died of starvation and illness or infectious disease or untreated wounds.

So by the time we were taken to refugee camps we were physically, emotionally, mentally, completely weak and it took us a while when we got to the refugee camp people continued to die at least a hundred or more a day, because I witnessed my first pain of seeing a body being thrown into buses taken away.

That was some of the really traumatic memory that I still endure and trigger often when I see something horrific happening.

So luckily we were taken to the refugee camps, we were provided with food and shelters and education.

That's the first time I was able to go to school when I was 11 years old.

Learning to read and recognize and then from there I learned to become a certified nurse.

My family and I were living in a camp for eight years from one camp to another before we were picked and passed the US immigration process and be able to settle in Philadelphia.

The first experience, the resettlement process itself was also challenging for a lot of refugee.

For family who never had any formal education, or learn how to speak or even read or write English, so it was hard.

My parent in particular really experienced such a difficult time to adjust to this country.

They experienced culture shock, being discriminated, we were put in crowded apartments.

Just navigating through the system, through the city and be able to go to school and find works it was a challenging for us, but after years to come, myself and my sibling were able to learn English, be able to assimilate and be able to support my parents.

And until today for me and my older sibling we had a sandwich generations that help support our parents and our younger generation to adjust and to navigate and to make a better living and also not just to assimilate, but to really bring more visibility, bring more awareness of the immigrant and refugee experience and be able to really share the struggle and the challenges we have.

For me working in organizations like the Cambodian Association and now with my new role, that help really address those barrier and challenges that impact the immigrant refugee in the city of Philadelphia.

- Well, thank you for sharing those deeply personal stories, Rorng.

And we're gonna come back to you a little bit later in our conversation, but before we do, I wanted to bring Jim back in to talk a little bit more about some of the reactions from the more established Asian American communities to what was happening in Vietnam.

And Jim, I know that you were active in Yellow Seeds and doing some pan Asian American organizing in your youth.

So I was just curious if you could kind of give us that perspective as a Japanese American?

- There were a lot of mixed perspectives about what was going on in Southeast Asia at the time.

For the youth movement we did a story elucidated to see this as kind of a manifestation of US imperialism and were against the war and for bringing our troops back.

However, some of our parents were part of that military-industrial complex that you talked about.

As Thoai had said, many of the at least the initial refugees were part of the government or military in Vietnam and this was concerning to a lot of youth in terms of where their view points would be in terms of whether the United States should have been in Vietnam or not or whether people should be allowed to determine for themselves what was going on without foreign interference.

And then there was also, I think, a disconnect in terms of generations.

The refugees that came in from Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos were very much like our grandparents in terms of coming to the United States not knowing the language, having no skills, often having really no money either.

And so it was a little difficult to relate to that situation as youth.

And then I think there is a difference in terms of the folks that were coming in from Southeast Asia were really about focusing on survival and safety and stability.

Whereas that was kind of different for, I think, most Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans who had come to the United States before then.

- Looking back at the refugee resettlement locally, Thoai, your family also resettled as part of this time period and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about some of the challenges that your community faced and your family faced at that time period?

- We were air airlifted from Vietnam in April of 1975.

And then we were brought first by a USS carrier then transferred over to a large shipping boat and then went to Guam.

We were there for several months then flown to Hawaii and then flown to Pennsylvania at Fort Indiantown Gap, the resettlement center in Pennsylvania.

We were in Indiantown Gap maybe several weeks before being brought into the city of Philadelphia.

We would meet other Vietnamese families when we went to school for English language learners, but outside of that they were resettled in different parts of town.

I don't think that Vietnamese refugees that were resettled like my family in April of 1975 certainly had traumas of having to leave families behind, losing the roots of your country and being displaced, but in no way a comparison to the trauma that Rorng shared with us earlier.

So I won't even go there.

I think trauma for my family, my dad was a very urban gentleman, college educated, spoke fluent French, fluent English, some Japanese.

So you would think that someone like that as refugee would be invaluable to the United States, especially when he was so loyal and worked for the US government in Vietnam during the war.

I think what he found here was a rude awakening of basically the US government kind of disavowing him of any sort of previous relationship.

So he ended up working as a security guard.

With all his years of experience and education he worked as a security guard for the John Wanamaker Building up at 13th in Chestnut.

And my mother went back and worked as a cook in the first Vietnamese restaurant opening up on Washington between 9th and 10th street back then.

But looking back hindsight being 2020, it's hard to think about the hardships and the traumas that my parents had to go through to get us here safely and trying to build a life for us to ensure a new future for us and the sacrifices that they had to make.

My dad, I think having gone from a very professional career to working as a security guard in the Wanamaker Building kind of broke his spirit and broke his absolute belief in the US government, 'cause throughout the whole time he was certain that the US government because of his involvement would take care of him and by extension his family, right?

That was not the case.

What he did not know was the racism that existed 100 years before he came and exists today.

That Asian Americans are considered perpetual foreigners.

We are the model minority, we are the minority of convenience.

And I think that he did not understand that and it took him many years to come to grips with that and to the point where he actually went back to Vietnam to live after living here for about 25, 30 years he decided that this was not the society for him.

And so he went back, but the rest of my family stayed here.

- Thanks for giving us some color to that, Thoai.

And we just have a few minutes left here.

So I wanted to pivot our conversation back towards the group with this final question.

We've talked a lot about different experiences related to both refugee resettlement and the internally displaced persons who were Japanese American post world War II.

Just thinking quickly in a few sentences, what are the similarities and differences that you all see between these experiences, if any?

And perhaps Rorng, we could start with you.

- Being a refugee just the experience are similar, just the duration might be different, right?

For Cambodians, Laotians, and many Vietnamese also came later and would start in refugee camp, because I know when I was in those refugee camp, I also shares with Vietnamese, with Laotian, with Hmongs in those refugee camp and then we will settle in the same area.

So the process was the same, the resettlement was the same, and we all probably given the same time of like, okay three months to adjust to the US.

For anyone older, 18 and older, need to find their jobs.

Any younger, the resettlement agency would help find school and get medical clears and so forth.

Overall, I think the similarity is there it's just that for Cambodian in particular, the target for execution for well educated and affluent people taking place and so those who survive are from rural and limited education and no wealth or anything that can rely on so continue to live in poverty.

- Oh, thanks for that.

And we'll go to Jim for your comments on this.

- I think that certainly, the Japanese American experience coming out of the concentration camps is very different, but it does echo again what Thoai was saying about being perpetual foreigners.

So the Japanese Americans had come here, many of those in the concentration camps were citizens who were born and raised in the United States and then they were displaced into the concentration camps and then had to start all over again.

So it's a different experience, but I think it was one that many of us were fortunate to come be here in the Philadelphia area, where there are services and there are organizations that can provide assistance and just general support.

- Thank you, Jim.

Any closing thoughts, Thoai?

- Yeah, I think the similarities between my experience and Rorng is obvious.

We come from an area that were largely dictated by imperialist desires from the West as well as China and Japan.

I think the big similarities to me is the displacement of culture and roots, right?

For by and large Japanese Americans are Americans.

And to you be uprooted and held as suspect citizens, as perpetual foreigners and displaced all over the country, and some Japanese Americans were even shipped out of the country, right?

So for me the similarities is that we know that as Asian Americans it's gonna take many generations before we are wholly accepted as Americans in this country.

Until then we will be the model minority, the minority of convenience, the perpetual foreigner.

One day, hopefully, my son will grow up and no one has to come and tell him how great his English is.

Wouldn't that be a great day?

- I certainly hope the same for all of our children.

Thanks again, to all of our panelists for joining us today.

And we look forward to having more of these conversations in the future.

I hope this discussion has been engaging and informative.

You can join the conversation too.

Just email us at talkback@whyy.org.

For W-H-Y-Y, I'm Rob Buscher.

Thank you.

(soft upbeat music) - [Sarah] Major funding for this program was provided by...