CHAPTER III

FLIGHT AND PLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX PEOPLE

VIET REFUGEE CULTURE EXISTENTIALLY

by Hugh M. Lewis

This is a story of the plight and flight of the phoenix people, whom I have so nicknames, because like the phoenix who "appears only in times of peace and prosperity and hides when there is trouble" these people were guided by a "phoenix" spirit to flee their troubled homeland to search for peace, freedom and prosperity abroad. Freedom and its elusive pursuit, is the key metaphor of the phoenix spirit. The present predicament of the plight and flight of the phoenix people represents the last flight of the fairy spirit from Vietnam. Deeply embedded in the sui generis mercurial ethos of indigenous Southeast Asia, embodied in the Ao Dai, expressed in the soulful, plaintive song of its forlorn refugee youth, it was a romantic creature, the Vietnamese femme fatale, feline and fearful spirit of the forest whose touch could be both creative and dangerous, infecting the buffalo boys who lackadaisically, sleepily demure the responsibility of adulthood. 

It was as well a nature loving creature, a nurturing mother, loving wife and faithful daughter, the soulful source of fertility and creativity, always seeking greener pastures and brighter horizons, before being ground down to milled rice beneath the hard mill-stone of the Communist economic imperative. This fairy spirit is now undergoing active repression and reeducation in Vietnam, systematically rooted out, permanently disappearing, its wounded and tattered remnants, flotsam and jetsam scattered forever upon the high seas, floating to far off places, vowing to return to Vietnam someday. Under the watchful eyes of Uncle Ho, it will not flourish and must eventually perish. Its echoes and reflections, faint and distant though they are, survive existentially in many ethnic little Saigons scattered over the globe. First and foremost a free spirit, one more prevalent in the used to be, it is now upon the verge of extinction and petrification as an archaic, vestigial anachronism on the edge of existence. "We are the foam floating on the vast ocean. We are the dust wandering in endless space. Our cares are lost in the howling wind." ("One of Many Things" America Oct. 7, 1978)

Now, the phoenix people are technically labeled as refugees, though, like any sticker growing old, its newness is beginning to rub off. Refugee is defined: "1. One who flees to a shelter or place of safety. 2. One who in times of war, political or religious persecution, etc. flees to a foreign power or country…." (Webster’s Dict. 1983) By 1980, there were at least 388, 802 IndoChinese refugees re-settled in the United States, with at least 300,000 more awaiting resettlement in oversea refugee camps. This number doesn’t take into account the many refugee infants born since coming here—the birth rates are very high. This is out of some "16 million refugees adrift in the stormy seas of world politics." (Newland 1981:1)

The Eighties has become the Decade of Refugees. It seems the basic existential dilemma of refugee identity worldwide is to "cease being refugees within a reasonable time." The basic common identity of the refugee is one of homelessness. Many refugees remain uprooted and permanent exiles for generations, betwixt and between any home of any national power structure. Modern refugees are common citizens of the Fifth World who do not even possess a common, comprehensive definition of their own ascriptive label of refugee. The fifth world is a world without homeland, existing in the twilight zone of the marginal interstices of modern civilization—members of the fifth world, Amerindians and South African Blacks, at least have their own reservations and apartheid. The most the refugees have had were temporary encampments, and eventually, if they got to the U.S., generous federal support.

Understanding the significance of the meaning of refugee is understanding of the labeling process itself. Refugee is an ascriptive grouping, Vietnamese is a reference grouping, Little Saigon is a cultural grouping, and ethnic Vietnamese identity is an existential grouping. The phoenix people today have been struggling with all these confusing labels to fashion for themselves a new identity, and with it a new sense of belonging, of home that combines many of the elements they lost with many of the adaptations and wealth they have gained.

An ethnic group is any subdivision of mankind as distinguished "by customs, characteristics, language, etc." The Vietnamese in the United States now constitute a large and rapidly growing ethnic minority group, even though they are only "fresh off the boat" and have been here only a little more than a decade. Now the ethnicity of the Vietnamese, as a process of defining an emergent ethnic identity as a distinctive minority, and of creating an existence which is meaningful, is still a new phenomenon of existential emergence. There is a sense of immediacy about this process, as if tomorrow won’t come soon enough and yesterday wasn’t long enough. And yet this immediacy is forever tied to the past and forever looking frantically future ward. It is endowed both with a living memory of the old country as well as a new sense of purpose projected into the future, of making it for one’s children. There is a forward direction momentum of existential emergency, which for so many reasons carried them across vast ocean expanses, and propels them onward in their struggles for survival and newfound success. In the on-going struggle for survival, many are not even allowed to play the game of living, much less to play it fairly, and many more are cast aside in defeat and hopeless desperation. The new ethnic heritage created by the Vietnamese here, the pride of many who have become lucky and successful, has not been achieved without severe cost to many people’s lives.

Traditional ethnography deals with groupings of people locked in the eternal ethnographic Present. In other words, ethnography has been inevitably an existential process, in which existential emic ethnographer and existential etic ethnographer merge and become inseparable in the dialectic of frame elicitation and frame reevaluation, bridging the gaps, however momentarily, between etic and emic, subject and object, self and other, participant and observer, in a creative synthesis, an existential synergism. Thus traditional ethnography is supposed to be concerned with existential survivals and survivors and in cultural processes of survival. The process of doing ethnography is one of making existential choice, and many subsequent choices, and through them forming commitments, or not, either way, life emerges and proceeds, and makes choices for us. The plight of the people to be comprehended must become one’s own plight, however vicariously and unrealistically, their existential dilemmas and decisions, one’s own through the process of mutual commitment.

Ethnicity is the mythology of the existential reality that one attempts to ethnographically recreate. In a sense it is the product of the process of existentiality, for it involves people reevaluating symbolically themselves in relationship to others, and the emergence of common, reciprocal, shared value systems of identity. But this process occurs independently of ethnography itself, and results in ethnic groupings among people who presume no ethnographic pretensions whatsoever.

Ethnicity, or "ethnic classification or affiliation" has been defined as "the symbols of cultural boundary" and "ethnic identity systems" as "selective, self-conscious formulations that they create" from these symbols. Frederick Barth employed the notion of "ethnic boundaries" by which ethnic groups are defined by a distinctive social identity, mechanism and forms of canalizing: social behavior, and community of cultural values. The notion of boundary, ethnic or cultural, has been criticized for reification. "That is to say, classes do not have some permanent reality. Rather, they are formed, they consolidate themselves, they disintegrate or dis-aggregate and they are re-formed. It is a process of constant movement, and the greatest barrier to understanding their action is reification…." (Wallerstein 1979) Convergence is the central theme for comprehending the emerging existential reality of sub-groupings. It is convergence of common symbolic elements at a certain time and place, within a particular context, with a wide variety of actors who have a common and collective need for survival and success—who find themselves on the same boat for the duration of the voyage. Ethnicity has been conceived as an emblem of identity and as a "vessel" of meaning, primarily political in function, which people adopt, wear, or use to their own advantage, and then discard when and where inappropriate—boundaries become more fluid and problematical to circumstances and contexts.

As symbols of people-hood ethnicity is existential in its preeminently emergent character. It is an immediate sense of nowness in relation to social identity, involving distinctive feelings of being, address, behavior, speech, expression, ideology, affiliation, or whatever, involving any or all of these things in some characteristic "ethos" or combination. It is always future directed and past oriented, determined by its choices of possibilities and potentialities defined by past experiences, traditional forms, expressions. Thus the ethnicity of being and becoming always involves the forward projection of a backward reflection—a memory of past becoming. The all-important metaphors in ethnicity are the sense of purpose and expectation providing meaning and reason for ethnicity.

It is a group of people poised upon the brink of possible tomorrows with a head full of yesterdays in the today, prepared to take the existential leap of faith across the abyss of meaning. Ethnic purpose provides their group existence with a sense of reality, of immediate credibility. The sense of expectation underlies and reinforces the sense of purpose. The convergence of common social expectations that the high hopes of today will become tomorrow's baser realities gives force to shared purpose. Expectation is some future found reward, the purpose for doing this and that in such and such a manner. Without some sense of common expectation, ethnicity would be an empty vessel, without some sense of shared purpose, it would be meaning without an emblem, content spilled from the vessel.

An existential grouping cannot exist in isolation from the broader stream of human reality. Indeed ethnicity is a means of defining attachment and relative distance to this broader supra-cultural stream of human civilization. Refugee Vietnamese ethnoculture is a survival culture. It is usually make-shift, improvised, jerry-rigged patchwork from the exigencies of group survival from a lost cultural heritage, a counterfeit version of the original nonetheless valuable in terms of its existential relevancy and immediate significance. The common need for survival implies that existential groupings are largely defined by relative powerlessness and purposes of power within a larger social framework, under the press of profound structural changes largely beyond their meager means to control. A stress of dramatic and traumatic, always tragic, change felt by all the members, even those most successful at survival.

Existential ethnography has no pat formulas, easy recipes, or quick solutions for methodology. Human relationship lies at the heart of ethnographic techniques and thus it is more an art of description whose existential ethical choices lie closer to aesthetic processes of evaluation and creativity than to a science of observation and operationalization in which facts are supposed to be hard, finite data bits. A slum is only a slum to those who see it from the outside looking in—to the many of those on the inside of the slum looking out, though it is still a slum, it is also home. If nothing else, this is the lesson to be learned from ethnographic existentiality.

The dynamics of refugee movements are notably different from other, more normal forms of international migration, which are viewed as less traumatic, and often of a different social cross-section. The whole problem of categorizing the Vietnamese refugee experience needs to be fit within a global framework of international migration. World-wide international migration from under-developed Third World peripheral regions to developed First World core regions resembles and to some extent recapitulates its domestic analogy of rural-urban migration from underdeveloped peripheral areas into developing core areas, focal regions of national interest and economic investment. (Wallerstein 1979; Vining April 1985) The main motivation for both movements are economic—most migrants are younger, more educated, willing to take risks for economic advantage, often sending money to families at home. Mass media stimulates migration, transportation facilitates the movement, and there is a tendency to follow previous migrants "whom they know and who help them to find jobs." Refugees are apparently at least exceptions to these rules.

Kunz (1973) distinguishes between acute refugees, who hastily leave their homeland without prior preparation and who suffer sudden shock, and anticipatory refugees who have a modicum of preparation, often through education and familiarization with the foster country. Montero (1979) views the Vietnamese refugees ad forming a third in between class, merging elements of both acute and anticipatory classes. As all American model of "Spontaneous International Migration" (SIM) has been offered (Montero, 1978b, 1979) divided into three phases and sub-phases—1) "The Homeland phase; 1a, "Temporary Camps" and 1b, Private Sponsorship; 2) "Ethnic Enclaves," "providing ethnic group solidarity and continuity unavailable in the larger host society," but also fostering a "sojourner orientation" in which most want to return to their native country, and in the long run may "impede or delay socio-economic adaptation;" 3) "Complete socioeconomic adaptation and assimilation into the larger American society" purporting to differentiate between the migration experiences of the Vietnamese from other Asian immigrant groups, notably the Japanese, Chinese, Philippines, Koreans, Indians, as well as from other refugee groups entering the United States, namely Jewish, Hungarian, and Cuban. SIM was a relatively early model conceived in an unstudied, premature optimism reflecting the desires of official policy:

Kelly (1977) argued that the Vietnamese were originally refugees who differed from most immigrants in that "when they left their country most believed their departure was temporary; they were not consciously choosing to become part of another society or culture." (Kelly 1977:2) These refugees all lived with the illusion of returning some day to Vietnam (An illusion that many Vietnamese refugees still live with.) But according to Kelly, during their occupation in the relocating camps, their disillusionment turned upon the realization that "they had left Vietnam for good and that their future lives would be shaped by American society." (Kelly 1977:3) Her work purportedly documents the transition of Vietnamese identity from self-styled refugees to self-pronounced immigrants. Motivations underlying economic immigration of people who are supposed to seek permanent accommodations and roots in a new homeland, are supposed to be different from motivations of refugees, but many immigrants only seek temporary employment in order to carry back success to their lives and families back home. 

Economic criteria distinguishing immigrants from refugees are not irrelevant, but at best spurious. People seeking salvation from poverty are no less refugees than those seeking to immigrate to "freedom" from political persecution or religious repression. Motivations underlying migration are usually a mixed bag of socio-political, socio-economic, and socio-religious factors, as well as many personal, existential reasons.

The plight of the Phoenix people can be intercepted as a continuation of a domestic process of rural-urban migration begun well before in the French colonial era and enormously accelerated by American policies in Vietnam, involving a combination of economic, political and religious factors.

And so on it goes. "Five million piasters, ten thousand students, I need money, I need whiskey, who will buy from me?….For sale, all my land, For sale, all my love, For sale, my friends, For sale, my kind wife; For an extra million, I’ll sell myself." ("Auction" Pham The My) 

In short the world-wide context in which to frame any modern migration experience, refugee or otherwise, is one of attempting to bridge an immense gulf between underdeveloped tropical slums and overdeveloped super-cities caught in the dialectics of modernization and urban acculturation (urbanization). The whole world has been witnessing the mass exodus of the majority of the world's exploding population from tribal or folk rural settings, with the disintegration and destruction of their traditional cultures, to the slum margins of the core regions, in a liminal status of chronic poverty, malnutrition and disease, really nowhere at all, under the capitalist imperative "develop or perish." This migration experience worldwide is the major traumatic experience of modern humankind.

This preeminent migration experience needs to be structurally understood in general theoretical framework of mobility and "mobilization of resources, human and non-human, both spatially and socially." Overall patternings of such mobilization are determined by differentials of power structure. All forms of movement, from peripatetic circumambulations, transhumance, pastoral foraging, slave trading, pilgrimages, imperial conquests, crusades, manifest destiny, to the Big Apple, whether complex or simple, by foot, air, land, or sea, or in a rocket-ship, unidirectional or circular, diffuse or channeled, as well as social demographic patterns of mobility, fit within this framework. Networks and patternings of reciprocity, exchange, trade, tribute, taxation are structurally determined by these differential power relations, as well as patternings of cultural diffusion, linguistic diffusion and of culture-change and language-change. 

We can refer to passage states of migration, mobilization experiences, and to passing between group boundaries. In this sense it makes sense to refer to symbolically mediated passage-ways or channels of thresholds of crossing in terms of symbolic boundary identification between groups. Through passing, by intermarriage, miscegenation between group boundaries, or hypergamy, a person may change his/her status, symbolic identity, language affiliation, role, appearance, and relationships in order to garner access to resources or acquire more relative power. Boundaries, between classes, castes, "races," nations, ethnic groups, cultures are never absolutely impassable and rarely fixed.

The labeling process, and the stereotypes it creates, is essential to the definition of symbolic boundary identification between groups. Group relations characterized by strong dominant power differentials make crossing boundaries difficult. Group boundaries are reinforced and have a self-fulfilling character (Barth 1969:30) by the labeling process (Lippman 1930) selective perception, categorization, stereotyping, in-group out-group prejudices. (Erhlich 1973; Goffman 1964; Barth 1969; Eidheim 1969; Glassner 1979; Brigham 1973) The labeling process can perpetuate group boundary identification despite "a flow of personnel across them and despite campaigns to demonstrate their inaccuracy or unfairness" (Barth 1969; Erhlich 1973)

Symbolism can serve as social distancing mechanisms to reinforce group boundary identification. Social visibility is an important relative mechanism or creating social distance—body decoration, costumes, sumptuary symbols, religious icons, etc. Language acquisition is an important social distancing mechanism—secret codes, passwords, argot, jargon, professionalese, pig-latin or pidgin, class based pronunciation or dialectical variation. We are inclined to argue along the lines of language equals culture whenever we have to deal with a group that speaks a different language, particularly if that group is in competition with us.

Bilingualism often reflects the intermediate state of transition, of passage between two groups. This phenomenon is observable among the phoenix people. Learning the American language is the most important prerequisite to adaptive survival, success and eventual assimilation into the American mainstream. Without competence in English the immigrant has little opportunity to find a viable socio-economic role. The formation of ethnic enclaves provides an alternative to the often insurmountable language barrier for the under educated of the first generation. I have met women who have been in the United States from the beginning of the First Wave and still did not know a word of English. All their interactions with their host society being mediated by more competent English speaking Vietnamese. The changes over a decade can be evinced within one household. The elders may not need to know a word of English, the parents struggle with correct pronunciation, grammar and dread every telephone call or business contact, and the youngest children under ten speak primarily only English and are rapidly forgetting even superfluous Vietnamese, much to the dismay of their Mothers who struggle to teach them Vietnamese at home.

Language, symbolism, subtle cues, behavioral customs and costumes, ideology, technical knowledge skills, all help to define and maintain group boundaries and identity. Sharing these things confers upon its constituency a common cultural identity. Culture itself is a form of group boundary-identification process that provides a sense a belonging, order, unity, security to those who share in it. Boundaries are rarely permanent except in relative social or spatial isolation—distance. They are rarely impassable except when a prison wall, or iron curtain, and are usually semi-permeable. Power differentials provide the basic structural gradient for crossing—symbols mediate the passage.

Regional variations between North and South Vietnam, in dialect, customs, even in personality stereotypes have been emphasized. The recent conflict between North and South has a long history of precedence that bespeaks a continuity of structural power relations along a North and South axis. Conflict can be seen as a developing situation of complexity in which the power domain of the South challenged the traditional authority of the North. North and South have long existed in a heartlands/hinterlands relationship, with the south traditionally representing a frontier hinterland region to be dominated by the Northern heartland of Vietnamese civilization. Power domain of the patriarchal North over the bourgeoisie South tended to persist in time despite the actual context in power between the two resource-rich complex societies. In a sense the flight of the phoenix people can be viewed as a continuation of March South, The ever receding frontier of the Southern Barbarians did not end with the South China Sea.