''That's me — I lived that," college administrator Gigi Do said when she first saw the groundbreaking Smithsonian show Exit Saigon, Enter Little Saigon. Thousands of other Houstonians will soon feel the same.
The photo exhibit, which debuted in Washington, is now in the middle of a 12-city tour. It arrives in Houston Aug. 21. It's the first Smithsonian history exhibit ever to focus on the million Vietnamese refugees who poured into this country after Saigon's fall.
Do, a Vietnamese immigrant and director of foreign programs at Houston Community College, arranged for the show to come here. With the third biggest Vietnamese enclave in the country, Houston has witnessed firsthand the astounding transformation of more than 60,000 war survivors into American citizens in just a few decades.
Arriving from Asian refugee camps, the first wave of traumatized refugees — many from middle-class backgrounds, but most with no English — threw themselves into American culture.
Tenaciously, they insisted on saving many of their best traditions and skills at the same time.
Their adaptation has been so fast, so dramatic that many of their children don't grasp what it took to achieve it. This might be even more true for Houston's non-Asians, now used to Vietnamese immigrants who excel in the mainstream; it's sometimes easy to imagine this success came effortlessly.
"We are so busy trying to build our lives in the United States that we often forget to document our story," Do said.
The Smithsonian exhibit fills in some of the silence, offering photos, text and artifacts about Vietnamese-American's lives, especially since 1975. Tens of thousands more died at sea trying to get here.
For many of the first generation, the exhibit's images will jar strong memories. There are black and white shots of men scaling U.S. Embassy walls after Saigon's defeat. There are images of little girls queuing for rice at a refugee camp on the island of Guam.
And there are photos of the first overwhelming days at Fort Chaffee, Ark., where many Vietnamese who settled in Houston were first flown by the administration of President Gerald Ford.
HCC would play a pivotal role for many of those Houston arrivals, offering vocational training immediately after the first wave of refugees arrived. Restaurateur Kim Son was one of the first students.
The Midtown community college, located in Houston's original "Vietnamtown" will host the exhibit in a specially configured space.
Tributes to the many Vietnamese successes — astronaut Eugene Trinh, former Dallas Cowboys linebacker Dat Nguyen and shoe designer Taryn Rose — also appear in the show. While the first refugees sought jobs that demanded little English and rewarded grueling labor, their children have the skills and confidence to plunge into creative fields such as computer science and clothing design.
Among the exhibit's more surprising artifacts is a letter penned in the 1700s from Thomas Jefferson to a Vietnamese potentate. The Virginian wanted tips on growing rice. Items like this, viewers are reminded, show that America's contact with Vietnamese predated the 20th century war. The ongoing Vietnamese contributions to Houston show how fruitful this contact continues to be.
For more information please visit www.vietam.org.
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