50 Years Since the Fall of Saigon Symposium

Listed in alphabetical order by first name. 

Blue Rachapradit

Blue Rachapradit is a Thai interdisciplinary artist. Born and raised in Thailand, complicated relationship with her motherland drives her to explore the themes of home, the body, femininity, and how oppression translates into the private sphere. She graduated from Minerva Schools at KGI, majoring in Arts & Humanities and minoring in Cognitive Science. Her art practice explores art as a medium for feminist protest and celebration. While her works are diverse in form, her projects are linked by a thematic focus on the personal as the political, and a research-based approach, using her study of historiography, philosophy, feminist studies, and psychology to inform her practice. You can find her works at www.blue-naga.com.

Choua Lee

Choua Lee began teaching academic year classes in Hmong language in the fall of 2007, offering three levels of instruction. She has also coordinated and taught intensive Hmong classes for the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) Besides teaching, Choua enjoys helping her colleagues find ways to incorporate technology in their teaching, recently focusing on the use of A National Virtual Language Lab (ANVILL) through the University of Oregon’s Center for Applied Second Language Studies. She also commits significant effort and time to developing instructional materials for Hmong that are based on the communicative approach to language teaching.

She is an experienced ESL teacher for adult learners in the Madison area and serves as a Hmong language translator with clinics, hospitals, mental health institutions, and other health care In her spare time, Choua likes to read, sing, and practice Hmong folk songs. Her passion in teaching has been recognized and appreciated by her students over the years, and she was honored with the Dr. Brenda Pfaehler Award of Excellence in 2010 and again in 2013.

Chundou Her

My hope and dream is to change the way we think about schools. To do this, I want to uplift youth voice as the tool and vehicle by which we bring about community change, empowering youth with the skills necessary to organize and do something. Through this work, the goal is to develop strategies, patterns, and pedagogy that can be incorporated into the classroom which works towards a liberation-based education versus conformity-based education. I want to engage students in story collection, story telling, and decolonizing our ideas of “stories” to better encompass our growing, diverse world and better reflect the worlds of our youth.

Eng Wong

E. Wong is a former refugee. He was born in a forced labor camp in Cambodia, where everyone was fed only a bowl of rice porridge a day. His grandfather, two uncles, aunt and cousin died along with approximately 2 million others during the civil war and the years that followed under the cruel regime. His family escaped to America in 1980 when he was 4 years old. His parents did not speak English and worked long hours doing whatever odd jobs they could find. His family struggled on food stamps and public assistance while trying to avoid gang violence in the 80s and 90s in the poor neighborhoods of South Philly and the Bronx. He managed to get a college education and despite making a better life for himself, he is still haunted by his past. He creates art to help process his identity, experiences and memories, and hopes it helps others to process their own.

For more of Eng’s work, see his Instagram page here.

Evyn Le Espiritu Gandhi

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar).  Her interdisciplinary research engages critical refugee studies, comparative ethnic studies, and transpacific studies. Dr. Gandhi’s first book, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (2022), is published open access by the University of California Press. It examines Vietnamese refugee resettlement in Guam and Israel-Palestine as a means to trace two forms of critical geography: first, archipelagos of empire — how the Vietnam War is linked to US military build-up in Guam and unwavering support of Israel; and second, corresponding archipelagos of resistance — how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected via the Vietnamese refugee figure. This project analyzes what she calls the “refugee settler condition”: the vexed positionality of refugee subjects whose very condition of political legibility via citizenship is predicated upon the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. Dr. Gandhi is the co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (2023). She is currently working on a second book project which revisits Gramsci’s “southern question” by constellating the southern spaces of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South during the Cold War and its afterlives.  You can check out Dr. Gandhi’s films on Vimeo.  She also hosts a podcast, Distorted Footprints, through her Critical Refugee Studies class. During the 2024-25 year, Dr. Gandhi serves as an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She is the lead curator of a public history exhibit, “Remembering Saigon: Journeys through and from Guam,” which is on view at UC Irvine’s Orange County & Southeast Asian Archive Center through May 2025.

Kong Pheng Pha

Kong Pheng Pha’s research explores the histories of refugee migration, queer and anti-racist social movements/community organizing, and Asian American racial, gender, sexual, and queer formations, with particular attention on Hmong Americans. He is currently writing two books, the first is an academic monograph that explores the racial, gender, and queer dimensions of Hmong social and political life in the U.S. The second is a book of essays that contemplates what it means to be Hmong in a revolutionary America. His work has also been published/forthcoming in Hmong Studies Journal, Minnesota History, Amerasia, Journal of Asian American Studies, American Quarterly, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, AGITATE! Journal, and American Studies.

His community-based participatory action research and creative activity with Hmong American communities and college students have been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. Pha’s other public-facing work haven been published in Hmong Today, Twin Cities Daily Planet, Asian American Organizing Project, Reappropriate, Leader-Telegram, and Aperture Magazine.

Larry Ashmun

Larry Ashmun is a Senior Academic Librarian in the UW-Madison Libraries. His specialization is Southeast Asia, especially its mainland countries, and Thailand in particular. His most recent presentation was on the UW-Madison headquarted “Digital Asia Library (DAL) and Portal to Asian Internet Resources (PAIR) Initiative” at the International Conference (Asia-Pacific) Challenges and Opportunities for Library and Information professionals in Knowledge Management and the Digital Age, in Thailand, March 2003. He was awarded a Fulbright for Vietnam in 2003 and a Distinguished Prefix title in 2013. Please click here to visit the library’s Southeast Asia Guide.

Mai See Thao

Dr. Thao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Asian American Studies. Her research examines post-refugee experiences with chronic disease and how it illuminates the structural vulnerabilities that refugees continue to face as they age in their place of home/resettlement. She is interested in the afterlives of imperialism, its materialization as health disparities in the refugee body, and the refugee’s critique of life after empire. These kinds of inquiries have led her to think about the interconnections of violence and care, aging for refugees, and the intervention of public humanities.

Nam Kim

I am an anthropological archaeologist interested in sociopolitical complexity, early forms of cities, factors associated with significant cultural change, and the relationship between modern politics, cultural heritage, and the material record. I am  especially interested in the cultural contexts and social consequences of organized violence and warfare, as manifested in various cultural, spatial and temporal settings. Much of my recent research has been geographically focused on East and Southeast Asia, and since 2005 I have been conducting archaeological fieldwork in Vietnam at the Co Loa settlement in the Red River Delta. A heavily fortified site located near modern-day Hanoi, Co Loa is purportedly connected to Vietnamese legendary accounts and is thus viewed by many as integral to the genesis of Vietnamese civilization. Aside from its historical and national significance, the case of Co Loa is salient for archaeological theory as it constitutes one of the earliest cases for both state formation and urbanism in Southeast Asia.

Nhu Truong

Nhu Truong specializes in the study of authoritarian politics and social resistance in Southeast Asia. Her research maps the shifting parameters of repressiveness-responsiveness in authoritarian regimes and illuminates the contentious dynamics of people’s resistance. Her current book project, Authoritarian Expropriation: Reactive and Institutionalized Responsiveness in Vietnam, China, and Cambodia specifically examines the endemic dispossession of land from villagers and the perplexing nature of why these regimes differ in their arbitration of social conflict and citizen’s demand for social justice. Truong’s work tackles authoritarianism and social resistance through comparative ontological perspective, the lens of history, contextual knowledge, intensive fieldwork, archival research, careful conceptualization, and theory-building. Her focus on everyday societal perspectives and state-society conflicts is rooted in a long-standing commitment to Southeast Asia that values language acquisition and connections across disciplinary boundaries.

Truong has published in Democratization, Journal of East Asian Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, and with Cambridge University Press. Her research has been supported by various grants and fellowships, including the Senior Research Fellowship from the Center for Khmer Studies, the Rosenberg Institute Scholar Fellowship from Suffolk University, the Asia Workshops Alumni Professional Development Grant from the American Political Science Association (APSA), and the Southeast Asia Research Group Pre-Dissertation Fellowship.

With the aim of advancing wider scholarship and meaningful engagements with Southeast Asia, Truong has served as Program Chair of the APSA Southeast Asian Politics Group (2022-2024), Southeast Asia Council Member of the Association of Asian Studies (2024-2027), and Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2024-current). She also actively engages in public scholarship that places Southeast Asia and grassroots interests at the center of public discourse and policy dialogues as a Mansfield-Luce Asia Scholars Network Fellow and contributor to public outlets including New Mandala, Fulcrum (ISEAS), and Nikkei Asia, and the International Institute for Asian Studies Podcast (Leiden).

Truong was selected as Southeast Asia Research Group Fellow, a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia in the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Council on Southeast Asian Studies at Yale University, and a New Faces in China Studies Fellow. Truong received her PhD in Political Science specializing in comparative politics with an area focus on Southeast Asia and East Asia from McGill University. Before pursuing her doctoral studies, she completed an MPA in International Policy and Management at NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, an MA in Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in International Studies, with a minor in Asian Studies at Kenyon College.

Saengmany Ratsabout

Sophea Kai

I am Bhikkhu Kai Sophea, a Theravada Buddhist monk. I was born and ordained as a novice in Cambodia in the aftermath of the civil war, shaped by the Cold War and Vietnam War. My journey has taken me across various countries in Southeast Asia, where I have lived and pursued my education. In the United States, I work closely with Cambodian monastic and diasporic communities both nationwide and beyond. With this background, my research interests focus on the revival of religious and traditional beliefs. Rather than examining the influence of national political structures and the impact of the Cold War on religious practices and institutions, I aim to explore how Buddhist ethics and traditional norms, viewed from a grassroots perspective, have shaped social structures and resettlement abroad during unprecedented times.

Xiong Her

Yến Lê Espiritu

Originally from Việt Nam, Yến Lê Espiritu is Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Espiritu has served as Department Chair, President of the Association of Asian American Studies, and Vice President of the Pacific Sociological Association. She also has extensive experience working with refugee and immigrant communities in San Diego. An award-winning author and a recipient of multiple grants, Espiritu has published extensively on Asian American communities, critical immigration and refugee studies, and U.S. colonialism and wars in Asia. A founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC), Espiritu is the co-author of Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (University of California Press, 2022), written collaboratively by CRSC members.  Espiritu is the recipient of several UCSD teaching awards: the Eleanor Roosevelt College’s Outstanding Faculty Award; the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award; and the Chancellor’s Associates Faculty Excellence Awards for Excellence in Graduate Teaching; and the inaugural recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Mentorship Award.

PARTNERS

Wisconsin Historical Society

SPONSORS

Center for Southeast Asian Studies, UW-Madison

Asian American Studies Program, UW-Madison

Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UW-Madison

Critical Refugee Studies Collective

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction World Language Programs

World Beyond War

Information forthcoming.

• Framing Histories

Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees by Yen Le Espiritu, 2014. University of California Press. 264 pages.

Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women edited by Chia Youyee Vang, Faith Nibbs, and Ma Vang 2016. University of Minnesota Press. 368 pages.

Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies by Yen Le Espiritu, Lan Duong, Ma Vang, Victor Bascara, Khatharya Um, Lila Sharif, and Nigel Hatton, 2022. University of California Press. 202 pages.

Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850-1960 by Mai Na M. Lee, 2015. University of Wisconsin Press. 430 pages.

Fly Until You Die: An Oral History of Hmong Pilots in the Vietnam War by Chia Youyee Vang, 2019. Oxford University Press. 232 pages.

Handbook of Asian American Studies edited by Cindy I-Fen Cheng, 2019. Routledge. 384 pages.

History on the Run: Secret, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies by Ma Vang, 2021. Duke University Press. 272 pages.

Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora by Chia Youyee Vang, 2010. University of Illinois Press. 200 pages.

Hmong in Wisconsin by Mai Zong Vue, 2020. Wisconsin Historical Society Press. 112 pages.

Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora, Illustrated Edition by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, 2009. Praeger. 228 pages.

Southeast Asian Migration: People on the Move in Search of Work, Marriage, and Refuge edited by Khartharya Um and Sofia Gaspar, 2015. Liverpool University Press. 256 pages.

Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National identity in the Aftermath of Genocide by Boreth Ly, 2019. University of Hawaii Press. 206 pages.

• Memory and Narrative, Memoirs and Novels

The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui, 2017. Abrams Comicarts. 336 pages.

The Bride Price: A Hmong Wedding Story by Mai Neng Moua, 2017. Minnesota Historical Society Press. 240 pages.

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam by Andrew X. Pham, 2000. Picador. 352 pages.

The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars by Andrew X. Pham, 2009. Crown. 320 pages.

Koan Khmer: A Novel by Bunkong Tuon, 2024. Curbstone Books. 256 pages.

Kween by Vichet Chum, 2023. Quill Tree Books. 352 pages.

The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang, 2008.  Coffee House Press. 312 pages.

Ma and Me: A Memoir by Putsata Reang, 2022. MCD. 400 pages.

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen, 2020. RH Graphic. 229 pages.

The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, 2020. Algonquin Books. 352 pages.

My Vietnam, Your Vietnam: A Father Flees. A Daughter Returns. A Dual Memoir by Christina Vo and Nghia M. Vo. 2024. Three Rooms Press. 360 pages. 

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, 2019. Penguin. 368 pages.

Owner of a Lonely Heart: A Memoir by Beth Nguyen, 2023. Scribner. 256 pages.

Put It on Record: A Memoir-Archive by Sokunthary Svay, 2023. Willow Books. 160 pages.

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2017. Grove Press. 224 pages.

She Weeps Each Time You’re Born: A Novel by Quan Barry, 2016. Pantheon. 288 pages.

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon with Kim Green, 2024. Algonquin Books. 304 pages.

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner: A Memoir by Bich Minh Nguyen, 2008. Penguin. 272 pages.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015. Grove Press. 393 pages.

• Collections of Short Stories, Poetry, and Illustration

Afterparties: Stories by Anthony Veasna So, 2021. Ecco. 272 pages.

Apsara in New York by Sokunthary Svay, 2017. Aquarius Press/Willow Books. 60 pages.

Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by Hmong Americans edited by Mai Neng Moua, 2002. Minnesota Historical Society Press. 205 pages.

Gruel by Bunkong Tuon, 2015. NYQ Books. 130 pages.

How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology edited by the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, 2011. Heyday. 224 pages.

How to Pronounce Knife: Stories by Souvankham Thammavongsa, 2020. Little, Brown and Company. 192 pages.

Knowing Our Joy: Stories of Southeast Asian Diaspora Elders by Hannah Chea, Narrate Keys, Malina Koinphanya, Cody Kour, Clement Lee, Crystal Lee, Julie Lee, Diana Nguyen, Guong Nguyen, Julienne Phanmaha, Anida Phomsengoy, Justin Thao, Kimsean Selena Tieu, Shawn Williams, Wai Wong, and Seng Xiong, 2023. The Southeast Asian Diaspora Project.

A Map into the World by Kao Kalia Yang, 2019. Carolrhoda Books. 32 pages.

The Most Beautiful Thing by Kao Kalia Yang, 2020. Carolrhoda Books. 32 pages.

My Grandfather Turned into a Tiger … and Other Illusions by Pao Houa Her, Audrey Sands, Godfre Leung, Kong Pheng Pha, Mai Der Vang, Kao Kalia Yang, 2024. Aperture. 124 pages.

A Nail the Evening Hangs On by Monica Sok, 2020. Copper Canyon Press. 88 pages.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong 2016. Copper Canyon Press. 70 pages.

Nothing Follows by Lan Duong, 2023. Texas Tech University Press. 96 pages.

Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages edited by Frank Stewart, Sharon May, Christophe Macquet, Trent Walker, Phina So, and Rinith Taing, 2022. University of Hawai’i Press. 384 pages.

Simone by Viet Thanh Nguyen and illustrated by Minnie Phan, 2024. Minerva. 48 pages.

Staring Down the Tiger: Stories of Hmong American Women edited by Pa Der Vang, 2020. Minnesota Historical Society Press. 192 pages.

Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora edited by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud , Lan Duong, Mariam Lam, and Kathy Nguyen, 2014. University of Washington Press. 276 pages.

Water Puppets by Quan Barry, 2011. University of Pittsburgh Press. 88 pages.

Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition edited by Barbara Tran, Monique Truong, and Khoi Luu, 2023. Texas Tech University Press. 288 pages.

The Yellow Áo Dài by Thi Bui and illustrated by Minnie Phan, 2023. Feiwel & Friends. 40 pages.

Yellow Rain by Mai Der Vang, 2021. Graywolf Press. 224 pages.