history lessons.

[t_feezy]

So yesterday the youth interns led a workshop that they created about Vietnamese history during our weekly YLO meeting, focusing mostly on the Imperialist history of Vietnam from French colonization until the end of the Vietnam war. I really both like and dread this workshop for the exact same reason: that it relates so closely to the lives of the

Comments

[vietnamita99]

Thanks for sharing all this, T. I think you're an incredible teacher.

I think what changed things for me was going back to Vietnam when I was 19 and meeting family in the North. No one ever told me that my mom's uncles fought with the North Vietnamese/NLF side. It's more common than you might think.

I realized that being Vietnamese and loving my family didn't necessarily mean I had to embrace anti-Communism and that version of history. The thing is, my family in the North didn't think it was a big deal that other family members fought with the U.S. They understood that a lot of it is circumstantial, where you were living at the time, how old you were and what the draft age was.

I also think another important thing to bring up is how in all nationalist struggles, there's a group of people who are paid to fight for the colonizer. Often they're just ordinary folks trying to get a paycheck to take care of their family. Sometimes it's the poorest of the poor, like when they have indigenous Guatemalans drafted to the army who end up doing the evilest scorch and burn tactics in other indigenous villages.

With the draft, most young men didn't have a choice. If they were between 17 and 25, they HAD to serve in the military. If they were lucky and college educated, they might get to be lieutenants or generals.

In addition to looking at Chinese and Japanese imperial ambitions is an important part of the picture, we should also examine Vietnam's own conquest/extermination of the Cham people. We're both the oppressors and the oppressed.