‘Viet Kieu’ still feel close to home from far away

Among them are those who helped a Vietnamese film crew make a documentary for the Ho Chi Minh City Television Station on the Southeast Asian country’s sovereignty over its seas and islands last year. 

Meeting fellow countrymen means seeing homeland

Engineer Tran Thang, chairman of the Institute for Vietnamese Culture and Education in the US, has compiled nearly 170 maps and four atlases that serve as evidences of Vietnam’s sovereignty over the Truong Sa (Spratly) and Hoang Sa (Paracel) archipelagos. He has already offered all the materials to Da Nang City authorities.

Thang invited the filmmakers to the US to shoot and managed to get a visa for each of them. He also introduced the group to many scholars for interviews and provided them with necessary materials.

Thanks to Thang, the crew was able to access and use materials regarding Vietnam’s sovereignty over the two archipelagos at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, part of Harvard University. 

He also took the group to his home in West Harford, Connecticut so that the documentarians could photograph the maps of Hoang Sa and Truong Sa he had compiled.

The filmmakers interviewed a number of Vietnamese professors at many American higher education institutions, including Harvard University, Yale University, George Mason University, and the University of Maine; as well as American scholars about Vietnam’s ownership of the two archipelagoes.

Thang shuttled between Boston, Connecticut and New York to arrange meetings, presentations and interviews for the group.

He also guided the filmmakers through different areas in New York where they could look for material to shoot.
“For expatriate Vietnamese like us, whenever we meet fellow countrymen, we feel as if we were in Vietnam,” he told the group.

Project for children in Vietnam

Dr Kieu Quang Chan, who lives in Santa Ana, California, and his wife, Quynh Kieu, set up the “Vietnam Project,” funded by the American Academy of Medicine, in 1997 to help Vietnamese children who suffer from face and jaw deformities.  

Under the project, the couple annually invites medical experts, including Prof Steve Ringer at Harvard University and Prof Ronald Clarke at Stanford University, to Vietnam to organize health seminars and training courses for local doctors, nurses, and midwives.

Chan is not only a doctor, but also an antique collector, and an expert on the Dong Son culture.

Therefore, he was happy to grant an interview at his home about the dissemination of the Dong Son culture from Vietnam to other Southeast Asian countries to the filmmakers. 

His residence comprises a French-style villa adjacent to a traditional nhà rường (a house built with numerous beams and pillars, and a surrounding garden).

He had arranged altars, horizontal lacquered boards (engraved with Chinese characters), calligraphy, and hundreds of antiques in his house, turning it into a space imbued with Vietnamese cultural identity.

In the spacious yard in front of the house sits a bronze pillar featuring patterns usually found on Dong Son bronze drums, which were historically fabricated by the Dong Son culture in the Hong (Red) River Delta of northern Vietnam.

The pillar features an engraving in Chinese characters that translate as: “The country of Vietnam is unshakable like this pillar.”

Exhibition on Hoang Sa

Another Viet Kieu who helped the filmmakers is Dr Ngo Van Tuan, who works for the Netherlands-based Vietnam Development International Organization. He is also a researcher at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations, located in The Hague.

Tuan, who once lived in Ho Chi Minh City, has yet to return to Vietnam since he left the country in 1980, but he always keeps himself informed of its current affairs.  

Tuan has learned that Da Nang will host an exhibition on the historical evidence of Vietnam’s sovereignty over Truong Sa and Hoang Sa this month.

Tuan has said he will organize a similar event in The Hague this year.

Before the group arrived in the Netherlands, Tuan explained the subject of the documentary to a number of local scholars and experts in history and international public law. Thanks to Tuan’s help, the group later interviewed these specialists.

Tuan also treated the filmmakers to a party full of Vietnamese dishes at his home. During the bash, he told the filmmakers about what he had done to contribute to strengthening the relationship between the Netherlands and Vietnam.

He spoke as well of his project to exhibit the historical evidence of Vietnam’s sovereignty over Hoang Sa in The Hague.

Search for maps that prove sovereignty

Philippe Truong, who lives in France, is another expatriate Vietnamese who provided assistance to the film crew. He is an independent researcher, specializing in Vietnamese and Asian antiquities.

A major in Asian Arts at Louvre’s University of the Arts twenty years ago, Truong is also an expert in Vietnamese porcelain and ceramics.

Many museums in the US and Europe use him as an appraiser of antiques, while numerous French antique auction firms often ask him to work as a curator at Asian antique auctions.

Truong works closely with many libraries, archives and musuems in France and the rest of Europe. Before arriving in France, the filmmakers sent him a list of maps and materials they were seeking.

He later helped them find what they wanted, in addition to a list of 36 maps, kept at the French national library, related to Vietnam’s sovereignty over the two archipelagoes.

Truong took them to the library to photograph these maps upon their arrival in Paris.

He then referred the filmmakers to the French National Audiovisual Institute, a repository of all French radio and television audiovisual archives, to search for and reproduce documentaries on Vietnam during the Indochina War.