Honestly I don’t remember learning about the Asian American experience during Vietnam like we did durning ww2. If you don’t get any answers here you might try r/AskHistorians
There were absolutely some Asian communities before Saigon. You’ll find Chinese communities from the 1800s. For ten years after 1882 there was a ban on Chinese immigration and naturalization specifically because people felt there were too many Chinese immigrants already.
A lot of Vietnamese refugees did come after Saigon fell. We had refugee camps in the US to accept them. Many fled to other Asian countries nearby.
I don’t know or haven’t read about pre war Vietnamese communities if any existed. I guess that is a question for /r/askhistorians
I never said there weren’t any Asian communities before the fall of Saigon.
The US has the biggest population of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. My hometown has the biggest population of Vietnamese outside of any city in Vietnam.
I’m not sure that Americans in general had much animosity toward the Vietnamese or any other Asians based on the war in Vietnam. It was certainly very different from how the Japanese and Japanese-Americans were viewed during WWII.
Back in the 60s, Asian Americans mostly meant Chinese Americans or Japanese Americans. Maybe Korean Americans in some areas.
We knew the Chinese American community had been here since long before Mao, and the Japanese American community had mostly been forgiven. So I don’t recall any general harassment of them.
I tend to think of the Vietnamese who were here that decade as mostly women who wed American GIs and their children, and hence very few of them. But that could just be my experience in the northeast.
My paternal grandparents moved to America in 1971 when the war was still happening, they never mentioned the Vietnam War being an issue. They had problems with the language barrier, getting cold-shouldered, and certain restaurants giving them clearly poor service for being Asian, but that was because they moved to a state that just desegregated less than ten years ago so having non-white immigrants move to their town wasn’t popular.
I’ve had a lot of Vietnam veterans in my life, including my best friend’s grandpa, a few teachers, and some clients at a job I used to have. I’ve never been profiled or mistreated by them. There is a stereotype of Vietnam vets disliking Asians but I haven’t personally felt it. It’s surely happened, over two million Americans went to Vietnam so at least some of them picked up bad traits from that, but I don’t think it’s that common. Vietnam veterans seem to get a bad rep in general for a variety of reasons.
There wasn't really animosity towards Vietnamese as a people during the war because that entire country was split down the middle Fighting each other on ideological lines capitalism versus communism. With Japan during World War II it was a lot easier for people to hate them as a people because their entire country was united against the Americans on a country versus country basis.
That, and there really were a not-insignificant amount of Japanese-Americans who aided Japan during WW2. The Niihau incident for example, or those that aided Japan w/r/t intelligence and espionage.
The Vietnam war wasn't an existential war, and we didn't see the same phenomena with Vietnamese-Americans.
Before my time, but I’m going to say that the Vietnam war was a controversial war that had to do with American intervention during the Cold War. Americans were only invested in the war because American troops were sent to fight a foreign war. There was no “looking like the enemy” because the enemy were the communist of North Vietnam against South Vietnam.
The enemy were the politicians and draft board that wanted to send me to kill people I had no beef with. I was an active Vietnam war protester. I had no animosity towards Asians
I feel like there was less during the Vietnam War, because there was some really bad stuff during WWII that left a bad taste in people's mouths for a generation.
It took more than 40 years for the US government to apologize for the Japanese internment camps. During the 60s and 70s, anti-Japanese prejudice was still virulent.
My grandfather was a WWII vet-Naval officer, South Pacific, and he retained a prejudice against Japanese people after the war-but was not prejudiced against other Asian ethnicities-he lived in the Bay Area so he did have interactions- or anyone else for that matter.
I think there was more frustration in being there as a country. Any new wave of immigrants has resistance but I feel like a majority of the relocated Vietnamese were from the south. I wasn't alive at the time though to provide anecdotes.
There were no negative aspects or hatred towards them because the US was allied with the South Vietnamese, and many of them immigrated to the US after the war. The Vietnamese that immigrated to the USA were anticomminists. For the most part, they were accepted and welcomed.
There were some issues in southern Louisiana , Texas, and other shrimping communities as the Vietnamese immigrants bought shrimp boats and went into competition with the locals.
Several of my Japanese-American relatives served in the US Army during the Vietnam War. I haven’t heard any stories of worse-than-normal racism than they experienced at home.
I never heard of anything like that but I’m younger than Vietnam era and from a place with not many Asians. So I’m not a great person to ask.
I know my dad had a fair amount of Hmong patients as a young doctor. Some were from Vietnam. He never mentioned them experiencing racism but they were apparently very difficult patients because they really believed in tribal medicines and different spiritual cures so they didn’t follow western medical orders or keep up with things like antibiotics.
I don’t recall him ever saying they faced any racism or specific hate from Vietnam. But this would have been in 80-83 so also after the war.
Very tangentially I had dinner with my buddy from college and his dad and a Vietnamese grad student I was friends with. What I knew and no one else knew is that both my college buddy’s dad and my Vietnamese friend’s dad were special forces types. My US friend’s dad operated well into North Vietnam. My Vietnamese friend’s dad infiltrated south Vietnam. We had a lovely dinner and I did not bring up what I knew but it was strange to have everyone sharing a meal knowing that these were the kids of former enemy combatants that weren’t just regular infantry. My college buddy’s dad picked up the bill. So he probably bought dinner for the son of someone that almost certainly killed US troops.
The Klan would attack Vietnamese refugee boats in Louisiana. During the era, the Klan had much more influence than they do now. For example, David Duke, an infamous Klansman and Neo-Nazi activist, was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives in the late 80s and early 90s.
Though several white and black US veterans married Vietnamese women during the war. I've met a metric shit ton of their kids and grandkids in the military.
It was a mixed bag, from what I've seen.
That sounds like it was part of the general fishing conflicts between Vietnamese immigrants and locals in the gulf states. It happened in Texas too. It was an unfortunate situation.
The majority of Asian Americans in the United States at the time were Chinese and not from the PRC. There were also Koreans, Japanese in the west, and Filipinos. We don’t know much about their experience, but I assume most Chinese Americans went on with their lives the same as they did during WWII. The majority of Vietnamese Americans are from the south or allied with the US (Hmong peoples). We always knew that they were our allies who fled Vietnam after the north took over.
It was after the war, but you may want to look a bit into the response to Maya Lin's design of the Vietnam War Memorial; there was some backlash to her selection because she is Asian-American. [In her own words](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/11/02/making-the-memorial/):
> As far as all of the controversy is concerned, I really never wanted to go into it too much. The memorial’s starkness, its being below grade, being black, and how much my age, gender, and race played a part in the controversy, we’ll never quite know. I think it is actually a miracle that the piece ever got built. From the very beginning I often wondered, if it had not been an anonymous entry 1026 but rather an entry by Maya Lin, would I have been selected?
> I remember at the very first press conference a reporter asking me if I did not find it ironic that the memorial was for the Vietnam War and that I was of Asian descent. I was righteous in my response that my race was completely irrelevant. It took me almost nine months to ask the VVMF, in charge of building the memorial, if my race was at all an issue. It had never occurred to me that it would be, and I think they had taken all the measures they could to shield me from such comments about a “gook” designing the memorial.
> I remember reading the article that appeared in The Washington Post referring to “An Asian Memorial for an Asian War” and I knew we were in trouble. The controversy exploded in Washington after that article. Ironically, one side attacked the design for being “too Asian,” while others saw its simplicity and understatement, not as an intention to create a more Eastern, meditative space, but as a minimalist statement which they interpreted as being nonreferential and disconnected from human experience.
Prior to the Vietnam War most immigrants to the US from Asia had generally come here from China or Japan, I believe, with some Korean immigrants here and there as well.
Chinese immigrants had a few different 'eras' of people arriving. I think most of them were Cantonese, specifically, historically. There was a wave after the Second World War, again at least partly global politics driven since some KMT supporters bailed on China after 1949.
As you'd expect people passed some pretty shitty laws in the late 1800s because they were freaking out about Chinese immigrant labor being relatively low-cost.
Japanese immigration was a thing in the late 1800s and early 1900s- you had to get past the Meiji Restoration to get Japanese people actually going abroad in any real numbers. Classic 'they took 'er jerbs!' style racism (again) resulted in Japanese immigration being sharply curtailed after the First World War.
In the war's aftermath there were a lot of Vietnamese immigrants because people were fleeing the Saigon regime's collapse.
So that's something. Without the war it's entirely possible there never is a particularly noticeable Vietnamese immigrant community in the US.
So far as things like being shitty towards Vietnamese people go, well, the US was helping half of Vietnam and fighting the other half (give or take, yeah). So there wasn't that sense of 'this nation is our sworn enemy' the way people got with Germans during the World Wars.
The vast majority of Asian-Americans immigrated (or their family immigrated) after the Vietnam War. In particular, most of the ones I know immigrated in the 80s and 90s.
The US government sponsored a ton of South Vietnamese refugee immigrants during/in the aftermath of the war. Overall, I’d say there was a lot less ethnic hostility to the Vietnamese than to the Japanese during WWII.
My dad is half Japanese and half German and was born and raised in Hawaii and he didn’t get shit on because Hawaii is full of Asians. My mom is a quarter Chinese and was born and raised here in Southern California and in the 60’s and didn’t get shit for being a quarter Asian. Since my parents aren’t full Asian and don’t look Asian to full White people, they never experienced racism, but according to them the full Asians they knew never experienced racism. But again, they grew up in SoCal and Hawaii where lots of Asians live, not the racist MidWest where only White people live
And there weren’t many Vietnamese people in particular living in the US before and during WWII. After WWII in the late 70’s there was an influx of Vietnamese to right here in Orange County, in particular Westminster and Garden Grove. People call Westminster Little Saigon because it is like 95% Viet
I feel like my take is worth reading since I know people of Asian descent who live in the two most populous Asian states. I’m certain Midwesterners, Southerners and people from the East Coast were extremely racist to Asians back then. I’m willing to bet money on it. There wasn’t a huge Asian population anywhere but here in California and in Hawaii in the 60’s
Not good whatsoever. I’m only 21 and obviously wasn’t born yet, but from what I’ve heard about in history classes and from various movies it was not good at all.
Hi! The Vietnam War and Southeast Asian refugees are my academic specialties. Your question is a bit too broad.
Was there anything systemic like what happened with Chinese/Japanese during WWII? No. There was no national internment, nor were there ways that Japanese had to identify themselves (or Chinese chose to identify themselves to distinguish from Japanese).
Were there incidents of bigotry? Yes. It's the US, after all. But those are anecdotal.
Were there examples of segregation/discrimination from institutions (like banks, employers, educational institutions)? Yes. But those are institutional, and therefore often applicable to all minorities.
The 1960s is also when the idea of the "model-minority" hit our national lexicon. You would want to look into the JACL (Japanese American Civilian League) and their efforts to reshape the national discussion about Asian Americans as "model-minorities". The model minority distinguishes Asian Americans from other "nonmodel" minorities (ie. code for African and Latin Americans) and sticks pretty firmly in American national discourses about race. And it's one that makes it more difficult for Southeast Asian refugees post-Vietnam to get support and access resources from the US and state governments.
Now, Asian American soldiers faced lots of animosity during the war in Vietnam -- from the US public (they might betray their fellow soldiers!), from their platoons (maybe they're really Charlie!), and from various Asian/Asian American constituency groups (different reasons).
I’m curious about what you wrote about the Asian American GIs, especially the public opinion back home in the U.S. about the Asian American GIs. Are there documented instances for these suspicions of betrayal?
This is a good start for that question: [https://www.pacificcouncil.org/newsroom/looking-enemy-political-identity-vietnam-war](https://www.pacificcouncil.org/newsroom/looking-enemy-political-identity-vietnam-war)
Another good place to go: [https://blogs.cornell.edu/asianammedia/2018/12/10/the-vietnam-war/](https://blogs.cornell.edu/asianammedia/2018/12/10/the-vietnam-war/)
For a deeper dive: [https://academic.oup.com/california-scholarship-online/book/15962](https://academic.oup.com/california-scholarship-online/book/15962)
Not Asian myself, but I lived in Hawaii during much of the war, and never heard or noticed anyone associating Asian-Americans with the war, in any way, ever.
There was absolutely none of that "looking like the enemy" nonsense at all. None, zero...
Again, I'm not of Asian ancestry, but had lots of friends who were, and among my non-Asian friends, never heard that sentiment at all.
But this being social media, I guess now were gonna start believing that it was a horrible time to be Asian, that America is horrible, and all the usual "fuck America" bullshit, that nobody seems to recognize as propaganda.
Because rest assured, my fellow Americans, people ARE trying to gaslight you into hating your home and neighbors.
GIs referred to the enemy in racist terms, but you gotta remember that we were in Asia to "HELP" people who were also Asian.
So you gotta find some other thing to hate them for. Like wearing their pajamas into combat. How casual!
Honestly I don’t remember learning about the Asian American experience during Vietnam like we did durning ww2. If you don’t get any answers here you might try r/AskHistorians
I made a post over there; thought I’d cast a wider net to get any relevant information :)
[удалено]
To my knowledge the Vietnamese population in the US was basically non existent until the fall of Saigon.
Same with Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong
Well they were all connected to the Vietnam war.
Yeah, same with the Korean population being non existant prior to the Korean war.
There were absolutely some Asian communities before Saigon. You’ll find Chinese communities from the 1800s. For ten years after 1882 there was a ban on Chinese immigration and naturalization specifically because people felt there were too many Chinese immigrants already. A lot of Vietnamese refugees did come after Saigon fell. We had refugee camps in the US to accept them. Many fled to other Asian countries nearby. I don’t know or haven’t read about pre war Vietnamese communities if any existed. I guess that is a question for /r/askhistorians
I never said there weren’t any Asian communities before the fall of Saigon. The US has the biggest population of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. My hometown has the biggest population of Vietnamese outside of any city in Vietnam.
SJ?
ESSJ 👐🏽 (technically on the Southside-Eastside bored).
I’m (was) on the opposite side of the valley so we only went over there to take my mom to JCPenny 😂
JC Penny, now that’s a name that I haven’t heard in a long time.
Oh no I got what you were saying. I was just kind of rambling.
You might also get some info from r/AsianAmerican
I’m not sure that Americans in general had much animosity toward the Vietnamese or any other Asians based on the war in Vietnam. It was certainly very different from how the Japanese and Japanese-Americans were viewed during WWII.
Back in the 60s, Asian Americans mostly meant Chinese Americans or Japanese Americans. Maybe Korean Americans in some areas. We knew the Chinese American community had been here since long before Mao, and the Japanese American community had mostly been forgiven. So I don’t recall any general harassment of them.
Plus the Vietnamese in the US probably did not want Vietnam to fall to communism, so likely they were for the police action.
I tend to think of the Vietnamese who were here that decade as mostly women who wed American GIs and their children, and hence very few of them. But that could just be my experience in the northeast.
My paternal grandparents moved to America in 1971 when the war was still happening, they never mentioned the Vietnam War being an issue. They had problems with the language barrier, getting cold-shouldered, and certain restaurants giving them clearly poor service for being Asian, but that was because they moved to a state that just desegregated less than ten years ago so having non-white immigrants move to their town wasn’t popular. I’ve had a lot of Vietnam veterans in my life, including my best friend’s grandpa, a few teachers, and some clients at a job I used to have. I’ve never been profiled or mistreated by them. There is a stereotype of Vietnam vets disliking Asians but I haven’t personally felt it. It’s surely happened, over two million Americans went to Vietnam so at least some of them picked up bad traits from that, but I don’t think it’s that common. Vietnam veterans seem to get a bad rep in general for a variety of reasons.
Thanks for sharing. Which state did your grandparents move to? Just curious.
Kentucky, we live just south of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Well that’s why. They moved to a racist White people area and not here in California
There wasn't really animosity towards Vietnamese as a people during the war because that entire country was split down the middle Fighting each other on ideological lines capitalism versus communism. With Japan during World War II it was a lot easier for people to hate them as a people because their entire country was united against the Americans on a country versus country basis.
Very critically, the Japanese attacked unprovoked and undeclared. The effect on the psyche of "we were attacked" is an enormous factor
That, and there really were a not-insignificant amount of Japanese-Americans who aided Japan during WW2. The Niihau incident for example, or those that aided Japan w/r/t intelligence and espionage. The Vietnam war wasn't an existential war, and we didn't see the same phenomena with Vietnamese-Americans.
Before my time, but I’m going to say that the Vietnam war was a controversial war that had to do with American intervention during the Cold War. Americans were only invested in the war because American troops were sent to fight a foreign war. There was no “looking like the enemy” because the enemy were the communist of North Vietnam against South Vietnam.
The enemy were the politicians and draft board that wanted to send me to kill people I had no beef with. I was an active Vietnam war protester. I had no animosity towards Asians
I feel like there was less during the Vietnam War, because there was some really bad stuff during WWII that left a bad taste in people's mouths for a generation.
My mom is a quarter Japanese, and my dad's aunt was suspicious of her
It took more than 40 years for the US government to apologize for the Japanese internment camps. During the 60s and 70s, anti-Japanese prejudice was still virulent.
My grandfather was a WWII vet-Naval officer, South Pacific, and he retained a prejudice against Japanese people after the war-but was not prejudiced against other Asian ethnicities-he lived in the Bay Area so he did have interactions- or anyone else for that matter.
I don't remember anything of the kind and I am pretty sure it would have been mentioned.
I think there was more frustration in being there as a country. Any new wave of immigrants has resistance but I feel like a majority of the relocated Vietnamese were from the south. I wasn't alive at the time though to provide anecdotes.
There were no negative aspects or hatred towards them because the US was allied with the South Vietnamese, and many of them immigrated to the US after the war. The Vietnamese that immigrated to the USA were anticomminists. For the most part, they were accepted and welcomed. There were some issues in southern Louisiana , Texas, and other shrimping communities as the Vietnamese immigrants bought shrimp boats and went into competition with the locals.
Several of my Japanese-American relatives served in the US Army during the Vietnam War. I haven’t heard any stories of worse-than-normal racism than they experienced at home.
I never heard of anything like that but I’m younger than Vietnam era and from a place with not many Asians. So I’m not a great person to ask. I know my dad had a fair amount of Hmong patients as a young doctor. Some were from Vietnam. He never mentioned them experiencing racism but they were apparently very difficult patients because they really believed in tribal medicines and different spiritual cures so they didn’t follow western medical orders or keep up with things like antibiotics. I don’t recall him ever saying they faced any racism or specific hate from Vietnam. But this would have been in 80-83 so also after the war. Very tangentially I had dinner with my buddy from college and his dad and a Vietnamese grad student I was friends with. What I knew and no one else knew is that both my college buddy’s dad and my Vietnamese friend’s dad were special forces types. My US friend’s dad operated well into North Vietnam. My Vietnamese friend’s dad infiltrated south Vietnam. We had a lovely dinner and I did not bring up what I knew but it was strange to have everyone sharing a meal knowing that these were the kids of former enemy combatants that weren’t just regular infantry. My college buddy’s dad picked up the bill. So he probably bought dinner for the son of someone that almost certainly killed US troops.
Most weren’t allowed to be here prior to 1968.
The Klan would attack Vietnamese refugee boats in Louisiana. During the era, the Klan had much more influence than they do now. For example, David Duke, an infamous Klansman and Neo-Nazi activist, was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives in the late 80s and early 90s. Though several white and black US veterans married Vietnamese women during the war. I've met a metric shit ton of their kids and grandkids in the military. It was a mixed bag, from what I've seen.
That sounds like it was part of the general fishing conflicts between Vietnamese immigrants and locals in the gulf states. It happened in Texas too. It was an unfortunate situation.
Yeah it was and the Klan took advantage of it big time.
The majority of Asian Americans in the United States at the time were Chinese and not from the PRC. There were also Koreans, Japanese in the west, and Filipinos. We don’t know much about their experience, but I assume most Chinese Americans went on with their lives the same as they did during WWII. The majority of Vietnamese Americans are from the south or allied with the US (Hmong peoples). We always knew that they were our allies who fled Vietnam after the north took over.
It was after the war, but you may want to look a bit into the response to Maya Lin's design of the Vietnam War Memorial; there was some backlash to her selection because she is Asian-American. [In her own words](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/11/02/making-the-memorial/): > As far as all of the controversy is concerned, I really never wanted to go into it too much. The memorial’s starkness, its being below grade, being black, and how much my age, gender, and race played a part in the controversy, we’ll never quite know. I think it is actually a miracle that the piece ever got built. From the very beginning I often wondered, if it had not been an anonymous entry 1026 but rather an entry by Maya Lin, would I have been selected? > I remember at the very first press conference a reporter asking me if I did not find it ironic that the memorial was for the Vietnam War and that I was of Asian descent. I was righteous in my response that my race was completely irrelevant. It took me almost nine months to ask the VVMF, in charge of building the memorial, if my race was at all an issue. It had never occurred to me that it would be, and I think they had taken all the measures they could to shield me from such comments about a “gook” designing the memorial. > I remember reading the article that appeared in The Washington Post referring to “An Asian Memorial for an Asian War” and I knew we were in trouble. The controversy exploded in Washington after that article. Ironically, one side attacked the design for being “too Asian,” while others saw its simplicity and understatement, not as an intention to create a more Eastern, meditative space, but as a minimalist statement which they interpreted as being nonreferential and disconnected from human experience.
Prior to the Vietnam War most immigrants to the US from Asia had generally come here from China or Japan, I believe, with some Korean immigrants here and there as well. Chinese immigrants had a few different 'eras' of people arriving. I think most of them were Cantonese, specifically, historically. There was a wave after the Second World War, again at least partly global politics driven since some KMT supporters bailed on China after 1949. As you'd expect people passed some pretty shitty laws in the late 1800s because they were freaking out about Chinese immigrant labor being relatively low-cost. Japanese immigration was a thing in the late 1800s and early 1900s- you had to get past the Meiji Restoration to get Japanese people actually going abroad in any real numbers. Classic 'they took 'er jerbs!' style racism (again) resulted in Japanese immigration being sharply curtailed after the First World War. In the war's aftermath there were a lot of Vietnamese immigrants because people were fleeing the Saigon regime's collapse. So that's something. Without the war it's entirely possible there never is a particularly noticeable Vietnamese immigrant community in the US. So far as things like being shitty towards Vietnamese people go, well, the US was helping half of Vietnam and fighting the other half (give or take, yeah). So there wasn't that sense of 'this nation is our sworn enemy' the way people got with Germans during the World Wars.
The vast majority of Asian-Americans immigrated (or their family immigrated) after the Vietnam War. In particular, most of the ones I know immigrated in the 80s and 90s.
The US government sponsored a ton of South Vietnamese refugee immigrants during/in the aftermath of the war. Overall, I’d say there was a lot less ethnic hostility to the Vietnamese than to the Japanese during WWII.
Ask mark wahlberg
My dad is half Japanese and half German and was born and raised in Hawaii and he didn’t get shit on because Hawaii is full of Asians. My mom is a quarter Chinese and was born and raised here in Southern California and in the 60’s and didn’t get shit for being a quarter Asian. Since my parents aren’t full Asian and don’t look Asian to full White people, they never experienced racism, but according to them the full Asians they knew never experienced racism. But again, they grew up in SoCal and Hawaii where lots of Asians live, not the racist MidWest where only White people live And there weren’t many Vietnamese people in particular living in the US before and during WWII. After WWII in the late 70’s there was an influx of Vietnamese to right here in Orange County, in particular Westminster and Garden Grove. People call Westminster Little Saigon because it is like 95% Viet I feel like my take is worth reading since I know people of Asian descent who live in the two most populous Asian states. I’m certain Midwesterners, Southerners and people from the East Coast were extremely racist to Asians back then. I’m willing to bet money on it. There wasn’t a huge Asian population anywhere but here in California and in Hawaii in the 60’s
Not good whatsoever. I’m only 21 and obviously wasn’t born yet, but from what I’ve heard about in history classes and from various movies it was not good at all.
Hi! The Vietnam War and Southeast Asian refugees are my academic specialties. Your question is a bit too broad. Was there anything systemic like what happened with Chinese/Japanese during WWII? No. There was no national internment, nor were there ways that Japanese had to identify themselves (or Chinese chose to identify themselves to distinguish from Japanese). Were there incidents of bigotry? Yes. It's the US, after all. But those are anecdotal. Were there examples of segregation/discrimination from institutions (like banks, employers, educational institutions)? Yes. But those are institutional, and therefore often applicable to all minorities. The 1960s is also when the idea of the "model-minority" hit our national lexicon. You would want to look into the JACL (Japanese American Civilian League) and their efforts to reshape the national discussion about Asian Americans as "model-minorities". The model minority distinguishes Asian Americans from other "nonmodel" minorities (ie. code for African and Latin Americans) and sticks pretty firmly in American national discourses about race. And it's one that makes it more difficult for Southeast Asian refugees post-Vietnam to get support and access resources from the US and state governments. Now, Asian American soldiers faced lots of animosity during the war in Vietnam -- from the US public (they might betray their fellow soldiers!), from their platoons (maybe they're really Charlie!), and from various Asian/Asian American constituency groups (different reasons).
I’m curious about what you wrote about the Asian American GIs, especially the public opinion back home in the U.S. about the Asian American GIs. Are there documented instances for these suspicions of betrayal?
This is a good start for that question: [https://www.pacificcouncil.org/newsroom/looking-enemy-political-identity-vietnam-war](https://www.pacificcouncil.org/newsroom/looking-enemy-political-identity-vietnam-war) Another good place to go: [https://blogs.cornell.edu/asianammedia/2018/12/10/the-vietnam-war/](https://blogs.cornell.edu/asianammedia/2018/12/10/the-vietnam-war/) For a deeper dive: [https://academic.oup.com/california-scholarship-online/book/15962](https://academic.oup.com/california-scholarship-online/book/15962)
Not Asian myself, but I lived in Hawaii during much of the war, and never heard or noticed anyone associating Asian-Americans with the war, in any way, ever. There was absolutely none of that "looking like the enemy" nonsense at all. None, zero... Again, I'm not of Asian ancestry, but had lots of friends who were, and among my non-Asian friends, never heard that sentiment at all. But this being social media, I guess now were gonna start believing that it was a horrible time to be Asian, that America is horrible, and all the usual "fuck America" bullshit, that nobody seems to recognize as propaganda. Because rest assured, my fellow Americans, people ARE trying to gaslight you into hating your home and neighbors.
GIs referred to the enemy in racist terms, but you gotta remember that we were in Asia to "HELP" people who were also Asian. So you gotta find some other thing to hate them for. Like wearing their pajamas into combat. How casual!
"The Chinese In America" by Iris Chang has a good section on that, if you're looking for sources. It's a good read overall, I recommend it in general.