Saigon Usa

This month is the Asian Pacific Heritage month at Pasadena City College, there was several events held at school and were open to all people. On May 22, 2007 in room C333, there was a documentary on Saigon U.S.A. that was directed by a filmmaker, Lindsey Jang. As I entered the room, the first thing I noticed was the amount of people that came to see this film. Personally I was impressively touched with the amount of people participated in this event, which proved that there's still a lot of people who are sincerely cared about what happened during the Vietnam War. Before the film started, the speaker welcomed and briefly introduced the film to the audiences. The speaker, Mr. Jang had made a very good point about how important for us all to have a sense of history. He thinks that most Americans do not have a strong sense of history.

Based on the film, Saigon is the place located in Orange County, California. Saigon, also, is the name of Vietnam capital city (now called Ho Chi Minh City). Saigon, U.S.A. is a documentary portrait about the struggles over identity in the heart of the Vietnamese American community, Southern California's Little Saigon. The movie started with an explosive political conflict, fifty two days of protests over a shopkeeper's display of the communist flag and Ho Chi Minh.

The documentary opened a scene in the strip malls in Little Saigon, Westminster, California, where the largest Vietnamese population in the U.S. lives. Throughout the film several Vietnamese-Americans are interviewed, including young and old people of both genders. One of the interviewees that I recalled was Vu Ly, he said "We are what all Americans are: doctors, lawyers, musicians and businessmen, but we are also refugees."

Upon arrivals, there were horrifying nightmares happened during boarding on the boats to America. Families gathered up their children and wives and boarded on the crowded leaky boats, risking their lives at sea where storms threatened to drown them and pirates waited to rob them and rape the women. Men were tied together and thrown overboard to drown, fingers were cut off for rings and women were sexually mutilated and tortured.

The United States were not able to accept the tremendous amount of refugees at one time, therefore many of them floated to Thailand. In Thailand, the refugees were forced to live in squalid refugee camps for months, in some cases years.

The film discussed about many problems when the Vietnamese first migrated to the United States as refugees. First, it was housing shortages, there was zoning regulations prohibit overcrowding.