In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates (Video)
- [Music]
- Hello, thank you so much for being interested in my work and in my book.
- My name is professor Jana Lipman.
- I teach US history here at Tulane and I'm really excited because I just published
- my new book, In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates.
- And this is a project I've been working on for about a decade.
- And it tells the story of Vietnamese refugees as they left
- Vietnam and their experiences in camps in Guam, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.
- And it really is meant to have us think about why does it matter where refugees land.
- Does it matter if they land in the Philippines versus Hong Kong? Does it matter when they
- land, 1975 verses 1989, and what does this mean for the present?
- And I began thinking about this topic a long time ago now
- because I came across two really different images.
- I'll just show them to you quickly.
- Amazing... technology.
- So this is my new book to show you there, In Camps.
- But the image I wanted to talk about is this one.
- I found this image in the archives, now many years ago,
- and at first it's not clear what's going on here.
- This is a group of Vietnamese men, who had left Vietnam in 1975.
- And before coming to the United States they were all sent to Guam.
- The vast majority of Vietnamese men came to the United States and resettled.
- And we have large numbers of Vietnamese in the United States today,
- many of whom went through Guam in 1975.
- But a small number of Vietnamese
- did not want to come to the United States.
- Instead they wanted to go back to Vietnam.
- And to me this was really curious.
- I wanted to know what was going on.
- Why do they want to go back to Vietnam?
- What was happening?
- And here we can see them protesting.
- The image says: 36 hours hunger strike sit-in quiet hair shaving off.
- They were protesting on hunger strike to go back to Vietnam.
- And they do go back eventually in October of 1975
- and very tragically they're put in reeducation camps in Vietnam
- sometimes for years on end.
- Flash forward about 15 years later in 1990
- and I came across images like this one as I was trying to do my research.
- This is again a Vietnamese in a refugee camp
- and like in Guam they're protesting. So again they're protesting in the refugee camp.
- And I wanted to know why. Why are they protesting?
- And they are protesting because the
- Hong Kong government wanted to send them back to Vietnam.
- These Vietnamese did not want to go back to Vietnam.
- They did not want to be repatriated.
- Instead they wanted to come to the United States, or Australia, or Canada.
- And yet the images, to me, raise lots of questions.
- What is going on in these camps?
- Here we have people who are protesting.
- They're not passive, they are not apolitical,
- rather they're engaging in political action.
- Secondly, the things that really changed.
- In the first image you had individuals who wanted to go back to Vietnam,
- while in the second image in 1990, you had people who defiantly did not want to go back.
- What had changed changed over time?
- And these are the questions that animated my book,
- and that led me to conduct research in
- Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, England, and southern California in Orange County.
- I was able to go through all sorts of archives, records from refugee camps,
- I toured many places that were firmly refugee camps.
- From sort of abandoned buildings to places that
- are currently parts of the Hong Kong police force, where they still do trainings.
- And in the end my book has, I would say, two, maybe three main arguments.
- First, I argue that refugee status is not fixed.
- It changes over time.
- So if someone shows up in 1975, they were automatically a refugee.
- Well if someone was able to land in the same spot 10 years later or 15 years later in 1990,
- they were no longer necessarily a refugee.
- This really matters when we think about our refugee policy today.
- Secondly, where someone ends up mattered a lot.
- I think when we think about refugees,
- most people think about where are people fleeing from.
- In my case, in Vietnam, where are they going to-
- the United States, Canada, Germany.
- Where we haven't spent as much time looking as the camps in between,
- the places in between, where these men and women go before they either get
- resettled or repatriated.
- In my work I really argue that it made a huge difference.
- That the politics of Hong Kong or the politics of the Philippines mattered a great deal.
- For example, the Philippines as a Catholic country under Ferdinand Marcos,
- who was a US backed authoritarian leader,
- wanted to help the United States and be seen as a useful partner.
- Hong Kong, a British colony, did not feel that compulsion.
- So it had a much harsher policy vis-à-vis the Vietnamese.
- So where someone's boat ended up or where someone got to, made a huge difference and
- if they were able to be a refugee or not.
- And I think these local politics matter a great deal
- because they mattered at the international level as well as at the local level.
- Finally, activism.
- I'm very proud of the fact- I don't think I used the word "plight of the refugee"
- anywhere in the book, at least I hope not.
- But in a lot of the literature on refugees,
- refugees are seen as passive, apolitical, abject, unable to shape their futures,
- just grateful and thankful for having been saved.
- And in my research I show that this really is not generally the case.
- People leave countries for political reasons and then in the camps
- they engage in active political protest.
- Some of the times this was radical.
- Whether it's getting your head shaved and being on a hunger strike
- to sometimes engaging in acts of violence,
- other times it was less radical but still useful and assertive,
- creating networks in Vietnamese diaspora communities whether in
- United States, or in England, or Australia.
- Other times writing letters to policy makers,
- and actively lobbying governments are using allies in host countries to lobby
- governments for better policies.
- And so I argue and look at the ways in which the individuals
- in the camps were actively involved in these types of protests and events to improve their
- status and to get what they wanted, whether it was repatriation in 1975
- or mostly afterwards, better conditions in the camps
- and easier access and refugee status in an English speaking country.
- I think my book has lots to tell us about refugee politics today.
- Both the ways in which governments have acted to keep people out,
- the ways in which governments have turned to camps to deter people,
- and the ways in which people in the camps and their advocates continue
- to advocate for better sort of asylum status, for more fairness, for more justice,
- and for more humanity for refugees throughout the world.
- So thank you very much and my book is called In Camps.
- [Music]