99% Invisible - 461- Changing Stripes

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Rioters carried many familiar flags during the January 6th insurrection at the United States Capitol -- Confederate, MAGA, as well as some custom-made ones like a flag of Trump looking like Rambo. Except for onlookers who were already familiar with the design, it would have been easy to overlook one particular bright yellow flag with three red horizontal stripes across the center. This was the flag of South Vietnam.There were actually several confounding international flags present at the Capitol riot that day: the Canadian, Indian, South Korean flags, all were spotted somewhere in the mayhem. But what was peculiar about the Vietnamese flag being there was that it's not technically the flag of Vietnam but the Republic of Vietnam, a country that no longer exists. And what this flag stands for (or should stand for) remains a really contentious issue for the Vietnamese American community.Changing Stripes

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I'm sorry to do this, but I'm gonna take you back to January 6th, 2021. I can see at least half a dozen protesters scaling, literally climbing. A violent mob of Trump supporters attempted to overturn the 2020 election results with physical force. They broke into the Capitol, disrupted the Electoral college vote, and occupied the building for hours. Like most of you, I had my butt clenched that day, watching the insurrection unfold on television.

Producer Vivian Le. I also happen to be watching that news coverage with my mom. I see every general, I watch ABC, I watch CBS, I watched CNN, I watched Fox, every, every perspective. This is my mom by the way. Do you want to say hi to my boss, Romas? Vinnie. Roman.

Hi, Roman. It is Evian's mom. Hey mom. So that date during the insurrection, yes, we were both horrified, and yes, we were both worried about the state of democracy. But as my mom and I scanned the aerial shots of the riders marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, we also couldn't help but notice the dizzying amount of different types of flags there that day.

Aside from seeing the obvious choices like the US or MAGA flag, there were some that were just really hideous graphic designs, like the flag of Trump photoshopped as Rambo, or Kelvin from Kelvin and Hobbs peeing on Biden. Still with just seemingly, you know, not attract me. They don't attract me either, Muff. Then there were the flags that even for a person like me who spends a lot of time thinking about flags couldn't decode. Yeah, I don't understand what got to stand for some flag, you know, what is it for some for row boys, some for white super supremacy?

Yeah, super messy, but I don't know what to stand for because I'm not not on here. But flying from the balcony of the Capitol building along some of these inscrutable symbols was a flag that my mom instantly recognized. Actually, she more than just recognized it. Ha! That one! That's the one that we love, we cherish, our my life. It was such a simple design that most people probably didn't even notice it.

Bright yellow with three red horizontal stripes across the center. This was the flag of South Vietnam. This is the flag that she grew up with. It reminds her of some of the best years of her life. So when she saw it flying alongside banners that overtly signaled hate, racism and misogyny that day, it felt like it was telling the rest of the world that hate. This flag stands for all those things too. It feels shame because of people raising it at the wrong day, the wrong event.

The flag of South Vietnam and what it should stand for is a really contentious issue for the Vietnamese American community. And while seeing it raise it, the insurrection felt like the wrong way to use this flag for my mom, the right way to use it was I'd love to make a thing about this one a little bit. Because it's a little bit serious. You know? So I have to think something that I... Just say...

If I were to ask you to draw the Vietnamese flag and that's all I specified, which one would you draw? That's a good one. I don't know if I can do that. I guess, you know, like any academic, right? I would say, like, give me more information. This is Tuan Huang. He's a historian and associate professor at Pepperdine University

who did not fall for my got to journalism. A lot like myself, he didn't think to explore the history of the flag until fairly recently. I mean, I did not plan it all to look into the history of the Savviness flag. And then like January 6th happened and then boom, he's just like, oh my god, I need to look into this. There were actually several confounding international flags present at the Capitol riot that day. The Canadian, Indian and South Korean flags were all spotted somewhere in the mayhem. But what was peculiar about the Vietnamese flag being there is that it's not technically the flag of Vietnam. It's the flag of the Republic of Vietnam, a country that no longer exists.

The Republic of Vietnam, or more commonly known as South Vietnam, was in a way a reaction to a reaction to colonialism, because the country has spent over a thousand years being ruled by outside forces. Colonialism was massively important in the history of Vietnam. Vietnam spent much of its early history ruled by China, and then in the mid-1800s Vietnam came under the control of outside powers again, this time France. We spent a lot of time dragging British colonialism on the show, but today we're coming for the French. For decades, France exploited Vietnam's natural resources, made the poor more poor, and suppressed Vietnamese identity,

even banning the word Vietnam from the region because it was associated with self-determination. The Vietnamese, right, they hated it. They did not want to be ruled by French in this case. Another big consequence of colonialism was that it led different Vietnamese people into two clashing political ideologies. Some groups were leaning towards reform. Some groups were leaning towards more radical

ideology like communism. There were those who believed that, yes, colonialism is bad, but also wanted to stay closely aligned with the United States. But leaders like Ho Chi Minh in the North believed that there would be no flourishing under any form of imperialism. Vietnam needed to be a completely independent

and communist state. Ho Chi Minh and his army, the Vietnam, defeated the French in 1954, which rattled the Western world. Countries like the US were concerned that communism would continue spreading throughout Southeast Asia. The Palais de Nassong, where the League of Nations wrestled with international problems many years ago now, is the handsome setting for the Geneva Conference. Korea and Indochina are the chief problems to be solved.

During the 1954 Geneva Conference, it was decided that France would withdraw from northern Vietnam. It was also decided that until free elections could be held, the country would be split in two. Vietnam was partitioned at the 17th parallel, with a communist country in the north and in the south, a country that was nominally democratic with a heavy U.S. influence. Two separate ideologies, territories, and flags. The flag of South Vietnam was a yellow field

with three thin red stripes running horizontally across the center. The yellow symbolized the people and the three red stripes represented the three distinct regions of the country. North, central, and South Vietnam unified under one banner. In the North leadership wanted the same thing. A unified Vietnam under these same two colors,

but theirs was a different flag, a red field with a bright yellow star at the center. The five points of the star were to represent peasants, workers, intellectuals, traders, and soldiers who unite to build socialism. These two Vietnam clashed in a civil war that lasted for two decades. The US wanted South Vietnam to be its anti-communist stronghold in Southeast Asia. But as the war dragged on, it became clearer and clearer that a democratic Vietnam was not possible. And so long story short, right? By 1973, the US troops have withdrawn pretty much completely.

They just, you know, don't want to deal with that word anymore. Here's my mom again. She actually lived in Saigon and was in law school during this time. They decided, you know, like with your from the country and then, you know, we know that we will, you know, lose your fight with Communists. If South Vietnam fell, anyone associated with the US government or South Vietnamese military could be a target for the North Vietnamese regime. My mom had family in the military and also a sister who worked for the Americans, so it wouldn't be safe to stay. But because of these connections, she was able to flee right before the city was captured. We just packed up some little thing, you know, personal thing and go. And I remember I only carry a small stuff like personal, like a love letter, a memory book from high school, and feel close.

And that's it. Just the backpack, you know, nothing else. My mom was a lot more privileged and a hell of a lot luckier than most people in South Vietnam. And she still lost everything. Oh, I'm crying when the flight leaves off. And I see the land, you know, down there. And my tears just kept my eye on it a lot. I know that, you know, down there. And it might just kept my hour a lot. I know that, you know, I never see it again. She was actually on one of the last planes

to leave the country. The next day, the airport was bombed. A few days later, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace since I got and took down the flag of South Vietnam. The war was over. The conquering tanks burst straight into the presidential palace.

For the fourth time in a month, the presidential palace had new occupants, but these had come to stay. The war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, 1975, that's the day when South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese. This is Tui Vau Dang, curator of UC Irvine's Southeast Asian archive. In Vietnam, it's known as Liberation Day, and in the diaspora, it's often referred to as Nay Makhna, or the day we lost our homeland, right, or Nygokhton, or the day of national resentment. After the fall of Saigon, the North and South once again became one nation. The new government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam immediately went to task undoing

years of capitalist influence on the southern half of the country. And so they embark on a number of measures. You know, that effected all of Vietnam, but especially some Vietnamese, right, this, this, this vision of establishing a socialist paradise, so to speak. This included changing the currency of Vietnam to undercut the wealthy elites and forcibly relocating roughly a million southerners. But the most infamous post-war policy was incarcerating former South Vietnamese military officers, religious leaders, journalists, academics, artists, basically anyone who didn't agree with the North Vietnamese government in re-education camps.

For they spent years starving and forced in a manual labor. After the country re-unified, South Vietnam didn't just lose its political recognition and its spot on the map, it was actively erased. The government confiscated records, cassette tapes, right, of music produced, you know, in South Vietnam. They confiscated, you know, hundreds of thousands of books in magazines that were published in South Vietnam. You know, and many of them were burned. So when the first wave of South Vietnamese refugees settled in other parts of the world in the late 70s and early 80s, that music, history, and culture became the responsibility

of the diaspora. Which is why the flag is so important to people like my mom. We cherish that flag, it's the day that we flag the country and we don't have the land anymore. We just have the flag. Tuan Wang says that for a lot of early Vietnamese-American refugees, the yellow flag with red stripes stands for more than an allegiance to a non-existent country. It also represents a different, less commonly told perspective on the Vietnam War. There are enough history books and documentaries on the subject to keep any retired dad occupied for years.

But these were all about America's role in the war. America's mistakes. America's loss. Even the most visible monument to the war, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC was a tribute to the US service members. But really, really, really, there was hardly anything that represents the South Vietnamese experience. The South Vietnamese flag did that. For the generation that fled the country, it became a banner, a memorial, and a link connecting the South Vietnamese scattered all around the world.

As the US rekindled diplomatic relations with Vietnam in the late 80s and 90s, a new wave of migration took place to the west. Many of those South Vietnamese had been political prisoners after the fall of Saigon. So to them, seeing this flag flying broad took on new meaning that wasn't just about nostalgia. The experience of Vietnamese, right, who were living difficult lives in Vietnam after the war, right? And then who eventually came to the US, and you know, Canada, so on, right?

The experience is a symbol of freedom, you know, post-war freedom. Municipalities all over the world actually fly the South Vietnamese flag out of respect for local Vietnamese communities. And it has been reclassified as the freedom-inherited flag in a number of cities across the country. If you spend enough time in a Vietnamese enclave, you might end up thinking that this was the official flag of Vietnam. I 100% grew up thinking that. I actually remember the day that I found out Vietnam's official flag was something different. I was in sixth grade, and our social studies class was assigned a project.

It was something that you've probably had to do at some point in grade school. It was a country report. You choose a nation, and then compile a bunch of data, tuck it into a neat little binder, and then present it to the rest of your class. Being Vietnamese American, and also wanting to put in as little effort as possible, I naturally chose Vietnam. But part of the assignment was to draw a picture of that nation's flag, so I booted up in Cardin 95, a program that I was using well into the year 2001, and used some colored

pencils to transpose the graphic that I saw on the Oshita paper. It was a red field, with a bright yellow 5-pointed star at the center. I didn't recognize this flag, but who was I to question in Cardin 95? The morning my project was due, my dad was horrified at the sight of that 5-pointed star on my homework. And that reaction is pretty common among South Vietnamese refugees. You would never want to show that, Vlad. People will really throw things at you. A lot of refugees see the official flag,

the red flag with the yellow 5.0 star, as a reminder of what they'd fled in Vietnam. So as Vietnamese Americans became more politically active in the 90s and early 2000s, essentially anywhere the official flag appeared, a protest would follow. They were a constant thing every weekend, you know, in Little Saigon. There was a protest that was somehow related to the flag. The biggest incident happened in 1999, at a suburban strip mall right at the heart of Orange County's Little Saigon.

Actually, just two blocks from where my parents worked. The scene was reminiscent of the 60s, row after row of police and full riot gear. Civil disobedience. The owner of a video store called High Tech TV and VCR was a recent immigrant from Vietnam, and he decided to put up the red flag along with a portrait of Ho Chi Minh. The owner in this case was kind of asking for trouble. Well, he was literally asking for trouble. The store owner actually sent facts messages to local Vietnamese community leaders, detailing what he had done and daring them to do something about it.

The protest lasted for months, and at its peak, the LA Times recorded over 15,000 protesters in one day. I used to get my hair cut in this plaza, and I cannot imagine that many people cramming into that little parking lot. No! No! No! No! Where's Haldirov? Tweebo Deng actually went to these protests back in 1999. And you can see that, yes, the official red star flag was capable of setting off a firestorm of controversy. But the yellow flag of South Vietnam could also be a polarizing symbol,

especially when you think about who is excluded and what kind of conversations are shut down by it. It is the only flag allowed in little flag on. So that is a certain kind of sanctioning as well, right? And how do people who have immigrated here very recently have grown up in Vietnam with the red flag only? How do they feel around the lunar new year when they walk around bolstaya venue and only see the yellow flag? The South Vietnamese flag could be especially inciting when used in community politics.

If the official five pointed star flag of Vietnam is viewed as the Communist flag, then the yellow flag with red stripes of South Vietnam is seen as the anti-communist flag. When you call someone a communist in the little site on community, that's like a death knell for their political career. It's land-dressed, it's like... So, I mean, I see that used in ways that have been intended to cause harm, right, to leverage the emotional weight that we've put to this flag, right, and try to hurt others. These staunch anti dichomingous views are actually a big part of why first generation Vietnamese Americans have always been a pretty reliable

Republican voting block. That and a lot of Vietnamese people also tend to be drawn to the GOP's hardline stance on China, which I don't agree with. But apparently a thousand years of occupation and territorial disputes can lead to a pretty gnarly grudge. That is something that we can actually generalize meaningfully. The easiest way to anger a Vietnamese is just say something nice about China.

The South Vietnamese flag has been drifting towards politically conservative symbolism for a while now. For some, the yellow flag with red stripes has become a shorthand for right-wing nationalism. It had been a constant presence at Trump rallies leading up to January 6th, so many of us in the community weren't even surprised to see it at the insurrection. I was disheartened. I was angry. I was frustrated, all of those things, but I wasn't surprised. There's a huge generational divide in the Vietnamese community when it comes to politics. So much so that there's even a support group on Facebook for Asian-Americans with Republican

parents that's filled with second-generation Vietnamese kids. Like a lot of conservative America, Republican Vietnamese have been drawn to Trumpism. And for the older generation especially, the ones who experienced the war, there could still be a deep fear of communism. So when they hear stuff like this, like it or not, we are becoming a communist country. That's what's happening.

That's what's happening. That pulls on actual lived trauma. The people who brought the South Vietnamese flag to the insurrection only represented a very small and very noisy subsect of the community. Most people, including my mom, hated seeing the flag there that day. That day, that January 6, right?

That's a lot of debate after that in the community. There's a lot of people against that people bring the flag to that event. And they too, I don't like it. In the days following January 6th, a number of write-ups were published to help people, quote, decode some of the racist imagery of the insurrection. And some of them included the South Vietnamese flag. I felt queasy seeing it lumped in with all these symbols of hate. For a large swath of the U.S., January 6 was probably the first time they'd even seen

the South Vietnamese flag. It is not far-fetched to think that some observers may have wondered what radical group this yellow flag with red stripes represented. The South Vietnamese flags presents that day, brought up a lot of questions for those of us who don't wanna see it end up like Pepe the frog. But Tui Vodang thinks that this doesn't just have to be an embarrassing moment

for the Vietnamese American community. It could also be an opportunity to face our history before it gets co-opted by any side of the political spectrum. It's up to us to do the work of pushing the conversation towards understanding the nuances and complexities of our history. But I think, you know, all of the attention that came after the appearance of the yellow flag at the insurrection could enable an entry point. I think a lot of people in my generation have a very different relationship to this flag and to Vietnam itself. To me, the flag just can't be boiled down to freedom, or nostalgia, or anti-communism,

or any of the other one-liners ascribed to it. It's a complex symbol for the complicated history of how I got here. When I just started my life here, I missed everything, you know, in the past, but now it's okay. I like it here. I hadn't really thought about it before, but my mom's life directly reflects the yellow flag with red stripes. She was born in 1955, the same year that South Vietnam was created. And she fled the country in 1975, the year it ended. I just spent 20 years on my life first life in Vietnam.

And now I'm 66. So more than the book here in the United States, so I love this country. My mom said something that stuck with me that I think applies to the flag of South Vietnam too. She doesn't want to live in the past, but she doesn't want to forget it either. She wants the same for me too. Because one day, the war will stop being a living memory and just be history. And what will be left with is a yellow flag with red stripes.

After the break, Vivian comes back to help so much for that story. I always love the stories where I learn a little bit more about you guys' lives. Yeah, and talk to your parents too. Exactly. So yeah, so this is actually going to be like the Vietnamese-iest episode ever because I'm going to talk about Faw restaurants. So if any listeners don't know what Faw is, I feel bad for you because it's so good. It's probably the most visible dish that has come out of Vietnam. Like when I meet someone and they find out I'm Vietnamese and they don't know

how to make conversational watch times something like, well, I like Faw. I'm like, okay, great. Thank you for that., like when I meet someone and they find out I'm Vietnamese and they don't know how to make conversational law to times something like, well, I like fun. I'm like, okay, great, thank you for that. But like I guess to boil it down to its most basic level, it's like a noodle plus protein plus fragrant broth soup and it has like bean sprouts and Thai basil and lime and onions. You're giving a kit when you get it.

It's like, it is really the greatest soup. And I know that that's a contentious subject when it comes to a lot of people and a lot of soups and different cultures, but I'm here to tell you, full as the best, as far as I'm right. It's the best soup. Yeah. The accoutrements alone that come with the bull of us. But, you know, if you drive through pretty much any little sagan in the world, you would

probably notice that there's this really common naming convention when it comes to father restaurants. And I think it's really well articulated by Allie Wong in her comedy special, Baby Cobra. So Wong herself is Vietnamese. And there's this part where she's talking about how her now husband tried to take her to like a quote authentic Vietnamese restaurant on one of their first dates. He took me to this restaurant on the west side of Los Angeles called Faux Show. He was like, it's authentic Vietnamese. I read about it on Yelp.

I was like, it's not authentic. Okay, you can tell first and foremost by the name because it don't got a number in it. So she's talking about this completely valid stereotype about Vietnamese restaurants that they're always named like the word fa plus a seemingly random number. Like right now I'm looking at a map of Orange County and there's a fun 99

right next to a Fah 86 which is less than a block away from a Fah 45 and then there's a Fah 54 around the corner from a Fah 79 which is very good by the way it's a great restaurant. So there's a very very common thing that you will see with Vietnamese restaurants that they always kind of include a number. So what's the number all about? Yeah, so sometimes the restaurant will have a number just because like the numbers themselves are lucky. Like if you see a Fav, 555 or a Fav, 888, it's because 5 and 8 are like auspicious numbers in a lot of Eastern cultures. Plus it's like super memorable to have like three numbers in a row. But if you pay close enough attention to the numbers, they can actually tell you about the restaurant's owners

family history or the history of Vietnam in general. So if you see a restaurant called like Fa 86 or Fa 79, that could represent that the owner of the restaurant immigrated from Vietnam in 1986 or in 1979. So that's a really common naming convention of Vietnamese American culture. And it's this way to kind of pay tribute to the start of this new life. Yeah, like around our office in Oakland, we have a 584, which I like to visit. So my guess is 84 makes it

one of those ones where it's indicative of a year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like usually the numbers are signifying some sort of year. So you'll also see a lot of places named like Foss 75, specifically. And 75 is a really important number in Vietnamese American culture, because 1975 is the year of the fall of Saigon and the end of South Vietnam. So a lot of Vietnamese Americans actually commemorated

every year with something called Black April, which marks the day that Saigon fell on April 30th, 1975. Wow, I'd never heard of Black April. That's really fascinating. Yeah, it's celebrated mostly in like little Saigon's and stuff. So yeah, it was a big thing where I was growing up. So you might see a lot of 75s because there was a lot of immigration activity in 1975 because of the fall of Saigon. Yeah. So another restaurant number, you'll probably see a lot is FF 54. Yeah.

So we talk about this. We talk about 54 in the piece. So this is when the creation of South Vietnam, the partitioning of the country. Yeah, exactly. So this is when Vietnam was split basically into North and South Vietnam. And this is actually a really big date in Vietnamese food culture as well, because, you know, when the country was split in two, there was this huge migration of people between North and South Vietnam because the North was now communist country, the South was

now anti-communist. So in the US, they called this operation passage to freedom, but essentially, it was this grace period where people were allowed to flee the North or the South before the border was officially sealed. So somewhere between 600,000 to a million North Vietnamese actually relocated to the south. And this is actually how my mom's family ended up in Saigon because they were part of this migration from the North to the south. Yeah. But this was important for like Vietnamese food culture specifically too because Fah is a dish that actually originated from North Vietnam. So for a long time, Fah wasn't actually something that was eaten very much in South Vietnam. Like, if you've ever been there, it's very, very hot

in the East, you know, but it became really popular in the South because this huge influx of northerners that relocated to places like Saigon and Fah itself changed a lot after it was brought to South Vietnam because of the available ingredients like in South Vietnam. So originally it was pretty simple, but that's when we started putting like the herbs and the bean sprouts and just packing it with all this stuff. And so this kind of hybrid north-south version of fa is what was taken abroad when Vietnamese started immigrating to other parts of the world after the war. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, yeah. And so actually this tradition of naming restaurants to include a number in it, like an important date or something, is actually something that you mostly see in the older restaurants, like by people who are the first generation immigrants. So newer Vietnamese restaurants tend to be, you know, less likely to adhere to that, like,

numbered name convention. So the stereotype about it not being like, quote, authentic, like a quote, authentic Vietnamese restaurant, kind of comes from somewhere just because the places with the numbers will be more old school, more traditional. Like I personally try to avoid anything with a pun on the word fa in it. You know, a restaurant called a fa, a nominal or something like that.

Well, especially ones that imply that fa rhymes with show or that it's fa. Yes. Oh, yeah. That is my biggest pet thing. It's fa. It's not fa. Please, please, please.

No. If you take anything from this code, fa. Say, do fa, you're best you can. Just remember fa. Yeah. Well, this is fascinating. I love the idea that you could drive through a neighborhood and just know a family's history from the names of the fa places.

I mean, that's the coolest. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Vivian. Yeah, thank you. 99% of visible was produced this week by Vivian Lay and edited by Christopher Johnson, Mixed in Tech Production by Amida Ganatra, Music by our director of sound, Swan Rihau. Delaney Hall is the executive producer, Kurt Colstad is the digital director, the rest

of the team, includes Loshamadon, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Chris Barube, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Long T-Buy, Diana Lai, and Grace Lai. We are part of the Stitcher and Serious XM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars on the show at 99PiOrk on Instagram and Reddit too.

You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every other past episode of 99Pi at 99Pi.org. Hi, this is Vivian's mom. Stitcher, Sears, XM. Good. Good. That's it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. X, M. Good. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.