Content warning: mentions of anti-Blackness, police murders, and violent war tactics.
Some days Minh Pham* gets so fed up that she takes me on a tour of her father’s Facebook. My longtime best friend will FaceTime me in a fury, appalled by the latest link her father has shared. Scrolling through his feed with her is like wading through a flood of the most potent misinformation. Minh shows me a meme of President Obama and Hillary Clinton edited behind bars with the caption “Bunch of crooks and traitors” emblazoned above them. A few links down we find fake satellite images, supposedly showing China secretly burning bodies to cover up coronavirus deaths. Each post is like a glimpse into an alternate universe—a universe that is increasingly exasperating to Minh.
Minh’s father is a Vietnamese American Trump supporter, and he is not alone. Vietnamese Americans, in greater proportions than any other Asian American ethnic group, rally around Trump. In a September survey done by Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote), Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Data (AAPI Data), and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, 48% of Vietnamese Americans reported their plans to cast their ballot for Trump this fall, compared to 36% for Biden. No other Asian ethnicity displayed this trend.
I came across this pattern of political support in mid-July while interviewing Asian Americans for a podcast I host called “New Narratives.” The podcast explores the nuances of Asian America by highlighting community issues and experiences. I interviewed Minh about her dad for an episode focused on anti-Blackness in Asian American communities. In our conversation, Minh pointed me towards Việt Solidarity and Action Network, a progressive Vietnamese American Facebook group dedicated to unpacking, among other things, the widespread pro-Trump stances and anti-Blackness of the Vietnamese American community.
Most Vietnamese Americans are relatively new to this country. Many are second-generation families who arrived in the U.S. following one of two major historical events: the 1965 repeal of the 1924 Immigration Act, which had barred Asian immigrants for half a century, and the end of the war in Vietnam in 1975.
Many Vietnamese Americans share the experience of being refugees from war. Today, compared to East Asian Americans, they have lower college-education rates and are more often low-income. Despite this, a majority of the Vietnamese American community does not support Joe Biden, the candidate who is trying to expand college access and increase the minimum wage. Instead, their candidate of choice is frequently Donald Trump—champion spewer of anti-immigrant and anti-Asian vitriol.
To understand why this is the case, we have to travel back in history to 1950 when the U.S. first began meddling in Vietnam. At the time, the U.S. was in the throes of the Red Scare and Vietnam was partitioned into two regions: the North, controlled by communists, and the South, controlled by corrupt anti-communist autocrats.
Gradually, the U.S. began to send “advisors”—military personnel and troops that assisted the South Vietnamese army—to Vietnam to stop the spread of communism, which they saw as a threat that, if left unchecked, could consume all of Southeast Asia. By the end of 1963, there were 16,000 “advisors” in Vietnam, including soldiers who were already fighting on the ground and engaging in chemical warfare with Agent Orange. The U.S. war in Vietnam began in earnest in 1965 with escalation on President Johnson’s orders. The catalyst was an alleged attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, an event which has since been deemed untrue or, at the very least, exaggerated.
Due to the brutal violence and enormous loss of life for both soldiers and civilians, Americans and Vietnamese alike regard the war in Vietnam as a crime against humanity. The U.S. government was exceedingly deceptive throughout the war. They promised Americans the war was almost over while covertly orchestrating atrocities in Southeast Asia. As part of a CIA operation, bombs were dropped in Vietnam and Laos. The U.S. wanted to destroy foliage to improve visibility, so they doused North Vietnam with 20 million gallons of Agent Orange, a chemical they knew to be highly toxic. Today, children in Vietnam are still born with birth defects caused by exposure to this chemical.
The U.S. approach to the Vietnam War is best characterized by its policy to fight a “war of attrition.” Rather than trying to simply claim territory, the U.S. aimed to kill as many of the “enemy” as possible, including civilians. By the end of the war, the U.S. had fired 26 times as much ammunition as was fired in World War II, and had dropped the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnam.
Over the span of the war, 2 million Vietnamese people were killed, 5.3 million were injured, and another 11 million became refugees. The war finally ended when Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to communist forces in 1975, and U.S. troops were airlifted out, leaving the Vietnamese to clean up the devastation.
Refugees fled Vietnam in droves after the fall of Saigon. It was too dangerous for those who had allied themselves with the U.S. to remain behind. The journey to America was extremely treacherous; in the days following the fall of Saigon, hundreds of asylum seekers crammed onto fishing boats, bracing themselves against the tumult of the South China Sea.
One refugee, Dr. Tuan Tran, described his escape from Vietnam in an interview with CBC conducted 41 years ago. He left covertly with his children, for fear that he would be apprehended by the secret police. His wife remained in Vietnam to provide an alibi for them. They traveled by bus, cargo truck, and taxi to a Chinese safe house where they hid for days until their final ride to the Americas arrived: a fishing boat.
Dr. Tran described his first impression of the boat, saying, “If I knew this [before], I wouldn’t dare to venture like this at all.” The boat was 18 meters long with 200 people inside. The waves of the South China Sea had beaten menacingly against the hull until the third day of the journey, when they finally spilled over onto the deck, threatening the lives of everyone aboard. By the time the Tran family was able to reach Canada, they had narrowly escaped Thai pirate attacks and endured dismal conditions at Pulau Bidong, an infamous Malaysian refugee camp.
Over half a million people died in the process of fleeing to the U.S., many during the treacherous transoceanic voyage. But others were unable to even begin the journey. Nam Anh, a young Minneapolis-based activist who is originally from Ho Chi Minh City, knows her father tried to escape in a boat but was captured. I interviewed Nam Anh Nguyen for my podcast in July. She told me her father’s experiences during the war were traumatic. Not only was her grandfather killed, but after the end of the war, her father was put in a communist-run “re-education camp,” which was essentially a prison camp. Like many other South Vietnamese people who allied with the Americans, he was forced to perform grueling labor with meager rations.
Although there was a flood of Vietnamese refugees following the war, it’s important to note that not all Vietnamese people wanted to escape. Many stayed by choice and for good reason: Vietnam was where their land, family, language, and culture were—it was their home. Nonetheless, the aftermath of the war in Vietnam was painful and traumatic for both those who fled to the U.S. and those who remained.
Minh thinks her father’s current political beliefs are connected to his experience as a refugee. In his early twenties, Minh’s father came to the U.S. after his own father was released from a prison camp and could join him. Due to his experiences in Vietnam during and after the war, her father still holds a deep disdain for communism—both abroad and exemplified by some American politicians who he perceives as “communist.” When Minh graduated from high school, she was chosen to carry the Vietnamese flag to the stage at the beginning of the ceremony. She wanted to represent the country her family had come from and the arduous journey they had undertaken for her to graduate high school in America. Her father, however, was not pleased. He told her, “You shouldn’t be carrying that flag, that’s the communist flag.”
Moments like that help Minh see the tie between her father’s support for Trump and his stance on communism. She said that he always tells her, “Minh, you don’t understand. You didn’t grow up like I did. Trump is what is saving our country from becoming a communist country.”
Minh’s father grew up poor in Vietnam in the throes of the U.S. war. She believes that his fear of war and hatred for communism drives him to support politicians that ridicule communists, promise to build impermeable borders, and create a strong military to protect Americans. Minh told me, “I don’t even know if he could say an actual policy Trump has implemented that benefits us, except that Trump hates communism and China. But that’s enough for my dad.”
Moreover, Minh has noticed a change in her father since he became an avid Trump supporter. “Trump has definitely helped him feel more American,” she said. Pre-Trump, her father would re-share anti-communist news on Facebook disparaging Vietnam, which Minh thinks helped him feel better about abandoning his communist home country for “democratic” America. However, since Trump’s ascent to the presidency, Minh’s father finally feels seen in America. While he used to criticize Vietnam on Facebook in order to justify his immigration to the U.S., he now posts about Trump’s vision for America. Trump legitimizes the prejudice and resentment Minh’s father holds against communists and, subsequently, China. Ultimately, Trump makes her father feel like someone in political power is finally listening to him and reflecting his beliefs.
Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric doesn’t shake her father’s devotion. In 2018, Trump started to deport Vietnamese refugees who had previously been protected. Minh thought that, surely, her father would see this move as a betrayal. But to her dismay, her father supported the deportations. He saw himself as different from those refugees. “He said, ‘I’m a citizen. They can’t deport me. I work hard, unlike other Vietnamese people,’” Minh told me.
Minh tells me that much of the information her father consumes is from a pro-Trump, anti-comminist podcast that is in Vietnamese, so she is unsure of the name. He spends much of the day at work listening to episodes full of misinformation. Sometimes he shares snippets of the podcast with her, hoping she’ll agree. Minh remembers arguing with him over the summer about whether or not Democrats and China are teaming up to blame the COVID-19 pandemic on Trump. At this point, Minh believes he’s too ingrained in his beliefs to change. “If [he] spends eight hours a day listening to this stuff, I don’t know how to spend an hour telling him that what he’s listening to is not true or is misleading,” Minh said.
Similar to Minh, Nam Anh told me that fake news has skewed the political beliefs of her father and some extended family members living in Vietnam, all of whom are Trump supporters. This has strained her relationship with her father considerably. Nam Anh explained the last time she tried to confront him about Trump, saying, “He was sending fake news to our family group chat. It got heated, and he left the group chat.” She hopes that one day she’ll be able to have a conversation with him, but, for now, there is still too much tension.
Unlike Nam Anh, Minh told me she’s never felt able to approach her father about his political beliefs. Their relationship is tenuous, partly because Minh feels like his beliefs directly harm her. “A lot of things Trump does can directly impact me and my mom and my sisters. It’s horrible. Especially being women and being poor. Like, what has Trump done to actually help us?”
Minh’s sisters and half-sisters have all tried talking to their father, but it always ends in a stalemate. “You have six kids who all try to talk about it with you, but you just think you’re so right and [you] can never change,” she said, her exasperation clear. Minh believes confronting him isn’t worth it. She feels like the conversation would damage their relationship beyond repair, putting unnecessary strain on her mother and sisters. She recently unfriended him on Facebook to avoid the deluge of fake news reposts, hoping to avoid future arguments with him.
Divisive clashes with Trump-supporting family members took on a new urgency this summer, following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, and too many other Black Americans. Both Minh and Nam Anh see anti-Blackness in Vietnamese and Vietnamese American communities as connected to their support for Trump. Shortly after protests in Minneapolis began, Minh remembers her father sending her a fake video of protesters setting a woman on fire. “He was like, ‘You see, this is what protesting does!’” Minh said.
She thinks that Trump—with the swirling cloud of misinformation and hate speech that he spews—reinforces and legitimizes her father’s racist beliefs because they’re coming from the president’s mouth. By perpetuating anti-Blackness, Minh’s father is placing himself on a hierarchy above Black people. Minh believes he does this for the same reason he thinks of himself as superior to other immigrants, even other Vietnamese refugees. “It’s something he does in order to feel like [he] belongs in America.”
The irony is not lost on me. America, forever the “freedom crusader,” rushed into Southeast Asia, guns blazing, to fight democracy’s greatest foe: communism. The resultant war created a refugee crisis spanning all of Southeast Asia. Vietnamese people, along with Hmong, Lao, Cambodian people, and others, were forced to leave their homes because of the war. The trauma this caused resulted in many Vietnamese being staunchly anti-communist. And who, today, is our anti-communist crusader? None other than the man prompting scholars to ask whether our democracy will die an explosive death.
Many young Vietnamese Americans are working hard to combat their community’s anti-Black and pro-Trump tendencies, but it’s difficult. People still have such visceral reactions to communism, even among more progressive Vietnamese Americans. Nam Anh witnessed one of these fiery debates in a progressive Vietnamese Facebook group she’s in. “The founder of the Black Lives Matter movement came out as a Marxist and there were so many heated arguments about it,” she said. “People were like, ‘Why can’t we just support Black people but still be anti-communist?’”
This issue becomes a nearly impossible balance to strike for young progressive Vietnamese Americans. They must combat their family’s political ideologies and anti-Blackness while also validating and honoring their experiences with war and trauma. In this situation, the path forward can’t be about cancel culture or abandoning people who hold beliefs you find despicable. Instead, political discussions become the ultimate exercise in patience and empathy.
I struggle with this as an Asian American woman. I see myself and my community as targets of Trump’s racist rhetoric, and I am sometimes embarrassed by those in the Asian American community who support him. It is so easy for me to condemn every Trump supporter because the ideologies Trump stands for are so problematic, if not inherently evil. It’s difficult to see his supporters as separate from those stances, especially when they often tend to embody and act upon them. But canceling all Trump supporters creates more division, whereas it is uniting empathy that this country needs. Vietnamese Americans have had to survive the brutality of American imperialism, which is not a unique experience in Asian American or American immigrant communities more broadly. Progressives frustrated by Black, Indigineous, and people of color (BIPOC) voters who are conservative-leaning must understand what they have endured. Hearing their struggles is the only way to grow together, away from fear and hate.
When we talk about voting blocs, we easily slip into a tendency of expecting people to hold certain political ideologies based on the way they are racialized. To be honest, there is a part of me that wants to believe today’s Republican Party is synonymous with white voters and that the Democratic Party is everyone else. Though Trump’s supporters are overwhelmingly white, the shock of Florida’s stubborn redness in the 2020 election, aided by Cuban American support, should be evidence enough that this is not the case. Politics are shaped by our life experiences, and some Trump supporters were brought to the movement through traumatic experiences I can barely fathom. They discovered Trump out of darkness. Perhaps Trump is comforting because they fear the past, they long for a sense of belonging, and sometimes, because they have swallowed the idea of the American Dream whole.
*Name changed for privacy.