Narratives About the Republic of Vietnam 

Author: Joseph Nguyễn
Grades: 10-11

Suggested Amount of Time: 55-70 Minutes
Area of Study: Social & Political Transformations in Twentieth Century Vietnam

Compelling Question

• How did French colonialism, political ideologies and geopolitics shape the internal divisions of Vietnam?

Lesson Questions

• How is the diversity of culture, society, and politics expressed in the Republic of Vietnam and how do those legacies influence the Vietnamese refugee community today?
• What are key aspects of culture, society, education, civic engagement, and life in the Republic of Vietnam that help us understand the Vietnamese refugee community today?

Lesson Objective

Students will critically analyze narratives about the Republic of Vietnam and its people portrayed through US and Vietnamese media, music, and film and evaluate how these narratives influence representation and identity-building in the Vietnamese American community in a graphic organizer.

Lesson Background

The phenomenon of continuity between Republican Vietnam and Vietnamese America is an absent theme in both the Vietnamese American and the Vietnam War scholarship. Vietnam America has largely emphasized memories of war and the trauma of the refugee journey as the root of Vietnamese American anticommunism. Despite a preoccupation with the Vietnamese past, the omission when it comes to the history of the anticommunist RVN is notable. A reliance on memories rather than historical documentation has prevented empirical exploration into the ways in which the South Vietnamese republic bears—politically, symbolically, institutionally—on the Vietnamese diaspora. This inability of the Vietnamese American scholarship to actually interrogate the structural legacies of the southern Republic is in part the fault of the historiography on the Vietnam War. For much of the period after the war, the American scholarship emphasized the communists’ conduct of war and American involvement in the conflict rather than the anticommunist republic that lost that war. Indeed, Republican Vietnam is all but absent. Because such a documented history did not exist, the scholarship relied primarily on memories, oral histories, and the documentation trauma to provide insight to the relationship that Vietnamese Americans have to their past.

Historical continuity, in a sense, poses a contradiction to the constitution of Vietnamese American identity. On the one hand, Vietnamese Americans often trace their family histories to the South Vietnamese past. Their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers were once military officers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam or had served in the Republican administration. Many families had lived through the destruction and death of war, are related to men who endured reeducation camps, and had left behind their homeland in hopes of a better life. On the other hand, Vietnamese American politics can be traced to the ideological work of the South Vietnamese republican state. Vietnamese Americans reuse the flag of the RVN, sing the Republican anthem at social and cultural ceremonies, deploy anticommunist terminologies that originated from the war, and publish oeuvres of pamphlets, books, and memoirs reminiscing on the anticommunist struggle, commemorating their fallen, and glorifying the Republican nation.

Sourced from: Nguyen, Y. T. 2021. When State Propaganda Becomes Social Knowledge: Legacies of the Southern Republic (Doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University).

This lesson contains content that may be sensitive for some students. Teachers should exercise discretion in evaluating whether the resources are suitable for their class and provide a content warning to their students at the beginning of the lesson.

Image Citation: (2023). Hopamviet.vn. https://hopamviet.vn/assets/images/sheets/sai-gon-1.jpg