By Joanne Bailey-Boorsma
Imagine being a mother sent to a re-education camp — essentially a prison — where there is little food, no medicine and you are forced to do hard labor and knowing that your four-year-old son braving your war-torn country looking for you.
This is one of many stories that producer and filmmaker Diem Thuy collected for her documentary “Unforgotten,” the stories of the Vietnamese sent to live in the re-education camps after the Fall of Saigon in 1975. The documentary will be screened Monday, April 2, at the Richard M. DeVos Center’s Loosemore Auditorium located on the Grand Valley State University downtown campus. There is a reception at 6:30 p.m. with the screening at 7:30 p.m.
“In 1975 Saigon collapsed and the communist took over,” Thuy said. “They took a million of the South Korean officers to jail. Basically, they say to ‘the re-education camp’ and there was hard labor and illness. For there families, it became difficult in how to find them and support them.”
GVSU Professor James Smither, who has interviewed countless veterans and some Vietnamese refugees through the GVSU Veterans History Program that he heads up, said even as a teenager, the re-education camps sounded a little “fishy” to him.
“A lot of the debate that went on in the United States had to do with the nature of the enemy,” said GVSU Professor James Smither, who helped coordinate the screening of the film. “There was a tendency among some of the counter culture people to make the North Vietmanese out as basically Asian flower children or something like that….And the fact of the matter is the communists were not nice people.
“They were very determined to accomplish what they believe was their mission and part of their mission was basically to eradicate American and Western influence to an extent. So they rounded up basically anyone who was a military officer, government official, police official of a certain level and they put them in these places they called re-education camps.”
Even though her own father was in a re-education camp for eight years, Thuy said she never heard any stories of the re-education camps. One day, she receive a phone call that a person she wanted to interview about the camps had died. Realizing that many of the survivors were in their seventies to nineties, Thuy decided she had to make the documentary.
“Basically I want to give them a voice to tell them what happened in their lives,” she said.
Between a million to 2.5 million Vietnamese were placed in the re-education camps. American studies estimate that about 165,000 people died in the camps, although Thuy said it is probably much higher as 10,000 people still remain missing. The camps were operated in 1986 and two years later, North Vietnam agreed to release all prisoners in the camps. It is estimated that more than 500,000 Vietnamese prisoners and their families resettled in the United States.
Thuy said she interviewed between 200-300 people with every story being just heartbreaking.
“Some people would still say ‘Oh I tell you but I don’t want it in the documentary because I’m afraid that the communists are still looking for us,’” Thuy said. “They are still afraid. So that is horrible. They are in a [free] country, but they are still afraid.”
Smither said for many who came to the United States, the war continued after 1975 with Thuy’s film serving as a reminder to what was taking place after the Fall of Saigon.
“It is part of the larger history that helps you understand the full picture better and in some ways it serves as a reminder of the people who served in Vietnam that there really were people in Vietnam who valued the American presence and what the Americans were trying to do even though it didn’t work in the end,” Smither said. Smither believed so much in the importance of sharing this part of history, what happened after the Vietnam War, that he arranged to move his seminar history class to Loosemore Auditorium to host the screening of the film.
“I didn’t hear much about the re-education camps until this documentary came out because my family came over by boat,” said Grand Rapids Community College student Tina Tran. “So these other ways that people have come in, I have never heard about them.”
Thuy said she hopes the film helps to educate the next generation about what took place in these camps and why so many Vietnamese chose to come to the United States.
“Bascially for the young people, ‘Unforgotten’ reminds people how the Vietnamese history is written,” she said. “Especially for the Vietnamese-Americans, ‘Unforgotten’ reminds why you are here and how you came here.”
The screening is free and open to the public. To learn more about the film “Unfogetton,” go to unforgottenfilm.com.
