Vietnam Wars : Movement Against Communism and Socialist Republic of Vietnam in Vietnamese American Communities

From the time when the American evacuation of Vietnam began in April 1975, at the end of Vietnam War, about one hundred thirty thousand Vietnamese refugees fled their country. The flows of people did not stop there. As the situation in former Indochina worsened, more and more people left. Many of them resettled in the United States, from which they have been opposing the Government of the Social Republic of Vietnam (SRV). The purpose of this paper is to explain their attitudes towards the SRV, describe how those attitudes were formed, and discuss what they imply. There were no existing indigenous ethnic communities that Vietnamese refugees could rely on after they arrived in the U.S., so once they had settled on the U.S. soil, they built several communities across the U.S. from scratch. The existence of Vietnamese communities recreated Vietnamese identities in America, with a strong tendency towards anti-communism, because the Communists had occupied their homeland. The Vietnamese in America perceived themselves as exiles, or expatriates. Some of them claimed that they wanted to go back to their country and fight back against the regime. That sort of idea was not simply expressed in on their community papers. Rather some anticommunist and anti-SRV groups that insisted on overthrowing the Communist government in Vietnam and building a new democratic nation were formed in the 1980s. But the force of this movement has waned and different kind of groups that try to promote Vietnamese political activism in America have been formed, with the purpose of stablilizing their status as an ethnic minority in the U.S. Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans in the U.S. have reconstructed their ethnic identities through remembering their own history. Their political activities suggest that the Vietnam War was not simply a war between Vietnam and the U.S