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Still Healing - Three Decades Later |
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Growing up in Saigon, Vietnam, during the war, Prof. Nguyen-Marshall's childhood contrasts her daughter's. She lived in a poor, intensely urban area, in a country at war - no playgrounds. "While I wasn't exposed to war, I knew about the war," says Prof. Nguyen-Marshall, who joined Trent University's Department of History in 2003. "When you are born in a war and grow up in a war, you accept that war is the norm." Today, Prof. Nguyen-Marshall teaches Trent's fourth-year course on the Vietnam War, and this month, takes the time to reflect on its consequences three decades later. April 30, 2005 marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. While Prof. Nguyen-Marshall's research focuses on poverty and relief in French Colonial Vietnam, she says study of the war is integral to the study of Vietnamese history. As well, she is personally drawn to, as well as repulsed by, the details of the war. Prof. Nguyen-Marshall, her seven siblings, parents and grandmother came to Canada via a U.S. refugee camp when she was eight years old. "We were lucky to be able to come," she says. But 30 years later, there remains a rift between Vietnamese populations in North America and the Vietnamese State. The two sides are divided by the outcome of the war, Prof. Nguyen-Marshall explains. "The Vietnamese overseas and the Vietnamese State have not come to terms with what happened. The Vietnamese overseas say the end of the war was 'the fall of Saigon,' while the Vietnamese State says it was 'the liberation of Saigon'." Meanwhile in Vietnam, babies continue to be born with severe deformities as a result of Agent Orange, and landmines continue to explode in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Many of Prof. Nguyen-Marshall's students have written their final papers on the aftermath of the war and she believes it is important for them to realize its long-term effects. "It (the war) still has an impact on peoples' lives today. It makes us pause to think about the enormously long impact of war. Yes, it ends on a certain day or year, but it goes on in many ways," she says. Prof. Nguyen-Marshall is working to organize an academic panel whose members will discuss the aftermath of the Vietnam war at the Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies Conference this fall at York University. At the same conference there will be a roundtable retrospective of the war. For further information, Prof. Nguyen-Marshall can be reached via vannguyenmarshall@trentu.ca. ¶ Posted April 28, 2005 |
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Dr. Van Nguyen-Marshall's six-year-old daughter has a hard time believing
her mother didn't play on the monkey bars as a child.