Interview with Genarao Kỳ Lý Smith on “The Land Baron’s Sun”

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Biography, Interviews, Media Archive on 2017-03-19 01:47Z by Steven

Interview with Genarao Kỳ Lý Smith on “The Land Baron’s Sun”

Interminable Rambling
2015-12-10

Matthew Teutsch, Instructor
Department of English
Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama

Last post, I wrote about Genarao Kỳ Lý Smith’s The Land Baron’s Sun. Today, I am sharing a recent interview I conducted with Smith. In the video above, Smith talks more about his grandfather and reads two poems from The Land Baron’s Sun.

In the acknowledgements of The Land Baron’s Sun, you write about Darrell Bourque telling you that your grandfather’s “story needs to be heard” because it is an important story to everyone. What makes Lý Loc’s story so significant?

Lý Loc came from a privileged life: inherited land from his father who was only known as the land baron (to this day, my mother does not know his name), had seven wives, twenty-seven children, seven houses (1 per wife), mistresses to go with each wife; he was a major commander for the South Vietnamese Army.  When the Fall of Saigon occurred, he lost everything to the point of writing my mother a few years later asking for money, food, medicine, and clothes.  It is a tragic story that needs to be told.  The idea of someone who had it all to living as a pauper is and has always been an intriguing story.  Also, had I not known about his seven wives or his privileged lifestyle, his story would have died with my mother.  The goal therefore was to resurrect his life, the lives of his wives and their children.  The purpose of writing the book was to leave his legacy.  I simply did not want him to die…

Read the entire interview here.

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Fatherless and Abandoned, Vietnamese-Americans Search for Their Families

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2016-12-26 21:17Z by Steven

Fatherless and Abandoned, Vietnamese-Americans Search for Their Families

Voice of America
Learning English
2016-12-21

Hai Do
VOANews.com

Moki, Tan and Jannies were babies at the close of the American war in Vietnam in the 1970s. Their mothers were Vietnamese. Their fathers were American soldiers. In one way or another, they were all abandoned.

Now, the search for their birth families has brought them together. Here are their stories…

Read the entire article here.

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Afro-Vietnamese Orphans Tell Their Stories in ‘Indochina: Traces of a Mother’

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Media Archive, Videos on 2014-01-12 02:58Z by Steven

Afro-Vietnamese Orphans Tell Their Stories in ‘Indochina: Traces of a Mother’

Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University, Bloomington
2012-04-25

A new(er) documentary film by Idrissou Mora-Kpai follows the stories of Afro-Vietnamese orphans born of Vietnamese mothers and West African fathers – tirailleurs sénégalais – brought by the French to fight la sale guerre, mostly in today’s Viet Nam. The synopsis:

Through the story of Christophe, a 58-year-old Afro-Vietnamese man, the film reveals the little known history of African colonial soldiers enlisted to fight for the French in Indochina. Christophe was one of seven Afro-Vietnamese orphans adopted by one of those soldiers when he returned to Benin after the war. The film explores the long lasting impact of bringing together two populations who previously had no ties and sheds light on a frequent practice within colonial history, that of using one colonized people to repress the independence claims of another colonized people.

Told in Vietnam and Benin, the film gives space for the grown Afro-Vietnamese orphans to tell their stories, but also to explore the contradictions of the colonial order…

Read the entire article here.

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Vietnam Legacy: Finding G.I. Fathers, and Children Left Behind

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-09-16 20:57Z by Steven

Vietnam Legacy: Finding G.I. Fathers, and Children Left Behind

The New York Times
2013-09-16

James Dao, Military and Veterans Affairs Reporter

SALTILLO, Miss. — Soon after he departed Vietnam in 1970, Specialist James Copeland received a letter from his Vietnamese girlfriend. She was pregnant, she wrote, and he was the father.

He re-enlisted, hoping to be sent back. But the Army was drawing down and kept him stateside. By the time Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975, he had lost touch with the woman. He got a job at a plastics factory in northern Mississippi and raised a family. But a hard question lingered: did she really have his child?

“A lot of things we did in Vietnam I could put out of my mind,” said Mr. Copeland, 67. “But I couldn’t put that out.”

In 2011, Mr. Copeland decided to find the answer, acknowledging what many other veterans have denied, kept secret or tried to forget: that they left children behind in Vietnam…

Read the entire article here.

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