The Common Place of Law in the Uncommon World of Vietnamese Immigrants: The Vietnam War Refought in Massachusetts

Abstract

The Dispute. In the academic year 2000-2001, a legal dispute arose in the heart of Boston, (the Massachusetts Dispute). A group of Vietnamese Americans filed a lawsuit against the William Joiner Center (WJC) for the Study of War and Social Consequences, an academic branch of the University of Massachusetts-Boston (the University), alleging violations of Massachusetts' anti-discrimination law. The Plaintiffs challenged the University's selection of scholars for a Rockefeller Foundation-funded fellowship for the 2000-01 school year, contending that the University had excluded qualified first-generation Vietnamese Americans from participation in a research project called Re-Constructing Identity and Place in the Vietnamese Diaspora (The WJC Project). The Plaintiffs, all in retirement age, were political refugees or immigrants who escaped communist Vietnam during the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Among the Plaintiffs were (i) the former South Vietnamese ambassador to United States, (ii) the Chancellor of a Buddhist University in South Vietnam, (iii) a former South Vietnamese lawyer, and (iii) several South Vietnamese military personnel who were jailed by the North Vietnamese at the time South Vietnam fell in 1975, marking the end of the Vietnam War. These Plaintiffs also sought to become class representatives for all Vietnamese Americans similarly situated, but the trial court denied their motion for class certification. One year after the war ended, in 1976, the Vietnamese communist party reunited the two Vietnam's into what is known today as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam). The new government's policy was to imprison South Vietnamese military personnel and political dissidents in without a trial. It is common knowledge among the Vietnamese American community that were a euphemism for the Vietnamese equivalent of the Soviet Union’s archipelago – forced labor camps set up for the imprisonment of political dissidents. In Vietnam, the gulag was used for collaborators and local employees of the United States and the defunct South Vietnamese regime after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Vietnam's reeducation policy was implemented in 1975 and continued until the early 1990s, when the Reagan Administration initiated immigration programs to bring South Vietnamese political prisoners to America. (There are not sufficient official data available to the West to ascertain whether those or remnants of them, still exist today.) All throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, many Vietnamese chose to escape the new regime, including fleeing at sea, or immigrated to America as former political prisoners under humanitarian and immigration programs sponsored by the United States. Most notably tragic was the exodus of boat from Vietnam – they either lost their lives at sea or crowded Southeast Asian refugee camps, posing an issue of conscience for the entire world. The flow of refugees dwindled down beginning in 1985, when Vietnam opened herself to the West under a renovation policy, combining a free market economy with a single-party Marxist political system. Personal freedom for the Vietnamese people also improved as a result of free market. In 1996, diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.S. were normalized and the first U.S. ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was appointed. The Plaintiffs were among those refugees and political immigrants. Having settled in America, they become part of the Vietnamese American community here. Needless to say, each Plaintiff has his own story to tell. These tales went back to the time of th Vietnam War, as well as what happened behind the new Vietnam’s iron curtain after the war ended. In the Superior Court of in Suffolk County, these Plaintiffs claimed that the University discriminated against them because they were anti-communist first-generation Vietnamese Americans over 40 years of age. The Plaintiffs’ supporters told their community that by selecting scholars from North Vietnam to study the Vietnamese diaspora, the University had opened old wounds that never healed, thereby revitalizing a two-decade war that had haunted the conscience of America. On August 27, 2004, the year prior to the 30th anniversary of Vietnamese resettlement in America and three years [CHECK] after the complaint was filed, the presiding judge dismissed the Plaintiffs' case. The Plaintiffs have since appealed the dismissal order. Despite its notoriety within the Vietnamese American community, the lawsuit remains obscurely miniscule in the public domain, and hardly catches the attention of mainstream legal scholars or sociologists.