SECTION 3:ii

THE LONG, DARK PASSAGE TO FREEDOM

by Hugh M. Lewis

Whether refugee or otherwise, the whole migration experience can be looked upon as a transformation process, what Van Gennep referred to as a rite of passage. It was a transition period marked by three successive phases—separation, liminal and aggregation—and usually involving some more-or-less fixed change in structural relationships of status or power. The passage of the migration experience is marked by the three phases of emigration, leaving one country, migration, moving between countries, and immigration, entering another country, each corresponding to the characteristic phase of the rite of passage, separation, liminality and aggregation, respectively. In addition each phase can be broken down into three sub-phases marked as well by separation, margin and aggregation, with the last of the preceding sub-phase overlapping with the beginning of the next phase.

1-1, 1-2, 1-3     1=separation

2-1-, 2-2-, 2-3     2=liminality

3-1, 3-2, 3-3     3-aggregation

The periods of overlap will be the most intense and ambivalent, involving simultaneously feelings of separation and aggregation. The overall effect is a blurring of the sub-phases to produce an overall separation and liminality.

If anything distinguishes the First Wave refugees from the subsequent waves of boat people, it is perhaps an infectious sense of urgency to flee from something larger than life and even death, something desperate and insane. After almost thirty years in a perpetual emergency state of mobilization for war, the phoenix people learned their lessons well. A residuum of the insanity of war, survival in an insane social setting explains the readiness with which so many took to the open seas in shallow draft boats, leaving behind so much, families, friends, people, possessions, country, at such great and unknown risks—of life itself for whole families. The existential dilemmas confronting these people to make such a desperate decision must have been enormous.

A set of common denominators comes through in relation to the homeland of the phoenix people. Many had positively valued relationship with the former South Vietnamese Society, for a variety of reasons. All have a negative attitude towards the new Communist Vietnamese Society. With the change of social structure many of the phoenix people became downwardly mobile losing many of their former social prerogatives, status, power and privileges. They also suffered deep meaning loss, a profound existential anomie—"lack of purpose, identity, or ethical values in a person or in a society; disorganization, rootlessness, etc." to be found at the root of mental disturbances and social disorders. But there can also be a delight in disorder, a perverse sense of order fostered in a state of chaos, an obsession with desperation, a compulsion with deprivation—human being’s are extremely adaptable creatures.

An act of collective desperation, the quest was made at tremendous sacrifice, overcoming normally insurmountable obstacles, in the hope of meaningful, existential salvation which can be summarized in one metaphor Freedom. "The risks are terrible; probably half of those who left in small boats have been drowned. Nevertheless, for thousands of Vietnamese, the prospect of death at sea is less terrible than the prospect of life under communism."

"Every kind of vessel, ranging from small fishing boats to large cargo vessels, was used to ferry the refugees away from Vietnam. For many, the journey by sea was the beginning of a new nightmare. (Perrin 1980:141-2) Many planned and attempted unsuccessfully escape for years. Many had not even thought of leaving until the opportunity suddenly presented itself. Many were captured and imprisoned. Some left with their whole family on board airplanes with legitimate passports to freedom. Many bribes and extortion payments in hard currency were made without guarantees and at high risks. The common denominator among all emigrants was the availability of the opportunity for leaving, and a final existential decision to do so. 

This choice was the first line of departure for the separation phase. Almost all refugees site fear of the VC persecution. Then there was the first liminal sub-phase of secret nighttime rendezvous, sleepless nights and nocturnal watches, hungry days in hiding, anticipation of capture, victimization, exposure. They are then refugees in their own country, strangers among their own countrymen, and the normal routines of everyday life suddenly proceed without them. Passing through the security networks, transferring onto larger, more seaworthy vessels, and making it out to the open sea, is the critical point of no return, at which the lonely individual looks back to the receding coast line, with mixed feelings of sadness of loss and happiness of successful escape, of separation from home ties, turning their backs upon Vietnam forever, entering a vast unknown sea, perhaps forever. Then the only comfort, and discomfort, are those on the same boat.

Now began the migration phase, the long dark passage to freedom. This was the liminal phase of being "betwixt and between" the two worlds they are leaving and entering—of interminable days and nights afloat, and interminable stays in refugee camps. The normal rules of living were temporarily suspended, communitas and anti-structure prevail. (Turner 1974) Normal class distinctions disappeared, an equality of death, sameness of plight, a sense of community, of being on the same boat, reign supreme. No new social order or structure has yet supervened. Having thus forsaken their homeland, they are true refugees who have no longer a home, at the mercy of many elements and many people. Some are fortunate and many are not. Feelings of homelessness, regret, remorse, hopelessness, loneliness, anticipation and expectation, are overwhelming. Migration by boat is not a new experience in the history of humankind—it is the ethnic history of the United States;

Without adequate food or drink, frequently without fuel for the engine, these little craft filled with people to overcrowding braved exposure to storms and rough seas. Navigation was by intuition or common sense if by anything at all, following freighters or distant glowing upon the nighttime horizon. "They understood the danger they would face at sea and they accepted the risks willingly and courageously. Thousands of people died from hunger and thirst on the ocean, and hundreds of boats sank, along with their human cargo." (Montero 1979:xix) 

If they made land, chances were good that they then, at the end of their voyage, would be victimized by pirates who commonly robbed and raped and left the survivors hopelessly adrift again. They might sight many ships before one might take mercy and rescue them, fearful of interminably compromising their own itinerary. "In the slow-elapsing crossing, the boat became a circumscribed universe of its own, with its own harsh little way of life determined by the absence. Down to mid-century the vessels were pitifully small; three hundred tons was a good size. Yet into these tiny craft were crammed anywhere from four hundred to a thousand passengers." (Handlin 1951:49)

"For those who survived the boat journeys—and thousands didn’t—the major problem was finding somewhere to land." Landing primarily in Malaysia, Thailand or Indonesia, these boats sometimes made it as far as Java, Japan or Australia. The exodus peaked by 1979, flooding the refugee camps. Malaysia, the most inundated, threatened harsh measures. "We cannot find the logic of those countries who claim these people to be refugees and yet will categorize….There is no pint in calling them refugees and treating them as normal immigrants." (Home Minister of Malaysia)

Entering a refugee camp marked the beginning of the middle, liminal phase of the Migration passage. All of the Phoenix People were refugees in that they all faced inevitable internment of some form, whether in prison, reeducation camps or "New Economic Zones" if they remained, or in resettlement or refugee camps if they took flight. This phase was most marked by communitas—"I never forget it, with its joys and sorrows, its hopes and expectations, frustrations, its friendships and warm atmosphere. We were deprived of everything materially but spiritually we were happy, living among our fellow countrymen."—and by anti-structure—"The social life on the island was confused, because many people had no family….Because of these troubles, there were many behavioral problems on the island. Thievery was rife, and many young girls sold their bodies for money to spend….Many were forced into prostitution by the hoodlums who roamed the island." Furthermore, internment was quite indefinite—adding to the sense of despair—from several months to several years. Diseases were prevalent in overcrowded, substandard conditions. "Because of the lack of food, the hot climate, and especially the combination of rain an the sun that poured down on us, many of the refugees suffered from diseases, --skin trouble, diarrhea, influenza, particularly…." Confusion and communitas go hand-in-hand to create a tremendous emotional state of ambivalence, especially at the second critical "point of departure" from the camps. The camp experience remains as an enduring and unforgettable legacy of the migration experience—"we had much trouble and suffering... it was a hard winter that I just passed." The dehumanization it inevitably entailed has remained a permanent mark upon the "refugee" escutcheon.

From the moment of receiving news of departure from the refugee camp, the refugee enters the immigration phase of the long passage, of reaggregation in a new homeland, emerging with a new, permanently transformed identity, status and structural interrelationships. No longer traditional Vietnamese, they become foreign immigrants, ethnic Vietnamese. "The farewell moment at the jetty was always dramatically sad for people who were leaving the last intact Vietnamese community they would ever live in. A few more days….they would no longer be completely Vietnamese." Re-settlement is not an easy transition, itself marked by ambivalence, culture shock, radical frame reevaluation of basic values which are no longer congruent with new life-ways. A delayed separation anxiety and stress from the migration experience gradually overshadows their new existence as they settle in. The life ahead of them remains enormously overwhelming, as the past washes back upon them as well. New and old experiences of stressful life events intermix and overflow.

The immigration phase itself never really ends, it blends into the beginning of a whole new passage that takes generations to complete and in a sense is really never complete. Milton Gordon (1964) framed this transition process assimilation with its own stages of transition. Whether its form is Anglo-Conformity or Melting Pot or Cultural Pluralism or Sub-cultures, it is always written in the dominant cultural idiom of American middle-class value culture, in reference to "mainstreaming" perceived out-groupings. As other studies of racial and cultural minorities have shown, intermarriage will be the final barrier to full scale assimilation of the Vietnamese into American Society. (Gordon 1964; Montero 1978b; 1979:62-3)

The distinctive feature of the American refugee re-settlement program was conceived within this assimilationist framework. Its sponsorship program had the effect of "shot-gunning" across "all of the 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico." Its official rationale was to minimize the destructive socio-economic impact of this anomalous group, and to minimize social visibility by a low profile in order to prevent discrimination and prejudicial backlash by the host society. America was still hung-over from the Vietnam conflict. "The refugees were an embarrassing reminder of a frustrating war which had divided this country and in which thousands of Americans had died." (Perrin 1980:151) America was in the midst of severe economic depression, "the worst since the 1930’s." 

Many Americans feared the refugees would take unfairly already scarce jobs, and increase the tax burden of welfare. Americans have long had a predilection for anti-Asian racism. The sponsorship program was conceived in the best of naïve intentions of accomplishing in a single year what normally took generations to achieve—full fledged socio-economic assimilation into core American Culture, avoiding ghettoization in ethnic enclaves that might prove intractable and self-perpetuating problems. The unreality of this program was to avoid the unavoidable. Both refugee and sponsor alike paid heavily for this largely unnecessary unreality. (Mathews 1982; Liu 1979) Though forcing a direct confrontation of basic attitudes and values that may otherwise have been avoided, it put the refugee through an unnecessary period of prolonged transition of helpless dependency and uncertainty. By and large the program was a way of the Federal government to side-step primary responsibility for bringing the refugees here in the first place, washing its hands of an existential dilemma, a "problem" for which there was no solution, delegating responsibility onto state, local and private interests. "Even six years later, they remain some Indo-Chinese who still do not understand that the objective of the sponsorship program is still independence." (Mathews 1982:134)

"The problem that the American government had hoped to avoid by scattering the refugees across the country began to materialize." (Perrin 1980:151) There occurred a widespread patterning of secondary migration to reaggregation and "regroupings of fragmented people, families and ethnic culture into growing "little Saigons." "Vietnamese across the country began to pack up and move to areas where they could enjoy the company of their own people. Families that had been split up got back together again. Entire villages regrouped themselves. Vietnamese associations were formed to provide social, recreational, and educational services." (Perrin 1980:150)

Many refugees today do not even remember the names of their first sponsor. Many others remember them with fondness and delight, and keep in touch on holidays. Though many found "refuge" by re-settling in the many little Saigons, many others value the first lessons they learned in coming here. "Too many people no good." Pick up any phone directory and thumb to the Nguyens and find you local Vietnamese family. The little Saigons are not tightly circumscribed ethnic enclaves as much as they are aggregations or "constellations" about some focal area, diffusing outward in ever-decreasing numbers, with patterns of "resettlement" often as not dictated by the cost of housing and living, the proximity of a Chinese grocery store, or the vicinity of freeways.

"The effect of the refugee’s resettlement can readily be seen in the development of an unplanned Asian commercial district…." Newer refugees had an advantage over their predecessors of the First Wave. They were able to "move into established communities where they can find familiar food, read Vietnamese newspapers, and mix with people whom they understand." They can also find work, a better deal, avoid getting ripped off, screens of opportunity, communitas and entertainment, as well as many material items unavailable elsewhere. Little Saigons are unavoidably necessary, providing an ethically oriented milieu unavailable in the mainstream of American cultural life. "The lake may be small and dirty, but it’s our own lake. I don’t want to live with Americans."

These ethnic communities must be viewed as an addition to and a complement of the American mainstream culture, rather than as just a substitute for American culture. They are a "home away from home" for those most in need of a home, the homeless refugees. They are survival cultural groupings both existential in their immediacy and ethnic in their aggregation of common, shared purposes and values. 

These purposes are not of a group as such, as some super-organic entity, except where its representatives articulate with the host society, but rather an existential synergism of common interest, collective interaction and mutual cooperation organizing itself. It is an existential elaboration of a shared value-culture with all the alleged spuriousness and genuineness of that distinction. In its focal orientation and elaboration, its ethnic synergism cannot even be remotely approximated in mainstream American cultural life. It is an alternative style of living which the double-identity of being and becoming a hyphenated Vietnamese American allows for, sharing the best and avoiding the worst of both worlds.

The appellation little Saigon has an insider’s significance for ethnic Vietnamese, and a sense of exclusiveness normally unavailable to outside Americans. My first and most lasting impression of little Saigon was of suddenly stepping into a different cultural reality, tainted with the flavor and tonality of ethnic Vietnamese identity. Others previously unfamiliar with the Vietnamese express the same suddenness of a minor culture shock, and of being a "foreigner in a foreign country, their country."

"The Paris of the Orient," renamed Ho Chi Minh City, remains for the phoenix people Saigon, a living memory near and dear to their ethnic hearts, a memento of the good old days, of a golden past that for many never was, but still is. Crowded, dirty, teeming with life in its most basic forms, for many it was the modernization experience par excellence, epitomizing not only the life of South Vietnam, but its existential future. More than a super-organic nucleus, a capital core of a geo-political sphere, it was as well a state of society, a cultural sphere of living, a state of mind, and of existential being for the phoenix people. Its preciousness was its uniqueness, its irreplaceability and indispensability in the lives of its people. Now referred to as "An old whore with a hang-over," it was once, "just a sleepy Cambodian fishing village," taking root and growing in the colonial era as the "dirtiest, most over crowded slum on earth." It was the embodiment of the phoenix spirit, spreading its germ abroad through the medium of the phoenix people, implanted, rooting, resurrecting the good old days in the many little Saigons. 

If in the future they will prove a harness, carrot or a whip for generations of "assimilating" Vietnamese Americans, nevertheless for the first generation they are a necessary, vital sanctuary, linkage to the lost past, an existential harbor to seek comfort and solace from the stormy vicissitudes of a refugee existence.

These little Saigons provide an appropriate structure and milieu conducive to the development of ethnic Vietnameseness, within which the refugee can recreate and resurrect on a reduced scale suitable for limited numbers and resources, a life they had lost forever. They are fast growing existential sources of pride, accomplishment, purpose for ethnic being, and expectation for ethnic becoming, in their ethnic future. It is the "refugee’s" way of coming here and making it, of building a new home. Its happiness, and the success it breeds, is a relative thing.

More than a half-way house or a temporary way-station on the uphill road to assimilation, these little Saigons are mini-cities of a mini-state within a state, whose boundaries are more existential and symbolic, behavioral and cognitive, rather than geo-political borderlines—a nuclear conglomeration of symbols representing a state of being for those who share in its experience.

Not a rich merchant city state, or an industrial city state, or even an authoritative administrative city state, it is rather a Regal-ritual city state embodying its very symbolic function as the elaboration and totem of communal ethnic solidarity of village of the ethnic Vietnamese tribes. Self-created and self-sustaining from within rather than organized or maintained from without, it is the significant self rather than the significant other that defines the boundaries of this ethnicity and existentiality of this state of being.

Its boundaries are not "I dare you to cross this line" but rather a long series of existential passageways with many exits and entrances, determined by one’s relative frame of mind than by geopolitical map, it is rather "This is ours and I can share it with you if I so please." It is not merely a means to some other end of assimilation, more than just a spring-board for progressive passing through or sanctuary for helpless, hopeless refugees caught in a state of eternal "betwixt and between," but it exists as an end in itself, its existential functioning its own ethnic justification, providing community for those permanently displaced from their normal state of being. It provides a sense of past and future in an existential moment of the present. It is a state constituted by normal people caught in abnormal circumstances, and it represents the best possible compromise. Their new homeland might be in America, but their home will long remain Vietnamese.

In conclusion, the appropriate conceptual framework for comprehension of ethnic Vietnameseness is the Cultural Continuum of cultural symbolism and structural interrelationships between the extremes of supra-cultural context and cultural sub-groupings with Culture as a reified ethnological ideal ranging somewhere in the relative middle ground. Constellations of symbolism coalesce around some structural node of complex interrelationships, perpetuating themselves, changing, and eventually disintegrating. Individuals plug into these cultural spheres more-or-less and differentially, picking and choosing over time, moving from one structural setting to another whenever advantageous and possible. Shared cultural spheres overlap, coalesce into a grouping, or may come into conflict. 

People are real, taking up existential space—culture is a duration, a process of time expressed in the space that people create. Shared cultural characteristics endure through time, creating a common structural ethos. Culture is not out there except in as much as it exists in other people, it is more inside, within oneself, one’s identity and personality as it is defined in social interrelationship. It is impossible to see or know culture directly, to see our own faces without a mirror of reflection or a projected image, to operate upon our own brains to learn our minds. Culture is learned only through sharing with others. Cultural spheres constitute complex models delineating metaphorically and meaningfully complex interrelationships. Social identification and personal individuation form the interdependent dynamics.