The Flag of Refugees: Critical Ethnography of a Vietnamese Canadian Community Conflict

Abstract

The Flag of Refugees: Critical Ethnography of a Vietnamese Canadian Community Conflict Anh Ngô This case study illustrates the complex consequences of the pressure for political representation within a diasporic community. In 2015, an internal conflict disrupted a local Vietnamese women’s agency in Toronto, Canada, over the issue of political representation. This case study describes a conflict between the senior members of this agency and their 1.5 generation counterparts who made up the agency’s board of directors. The conflict arose as a consequence of the latter’s failure to display the flag of the Republic of Viet Nam (rvn) at its events and office. The rvn flag, visualized as three red stripes on a yellow background, represents the lost nation of South Vietnam following the civil war, which became part of the larger Cold War, lasting nineteen years and resulting in massive civilian losses (Lau 153). While to non-Vietnamese persons, the display of the flag may seem trivial, it is the chief political issue in the diaspora because the flag is charged with a complex history, memory, and transnational politics. The conflict that arose in response to an agency’s decision not to fly the rvn flag shows how Vietnamese refugees negotiate their sense of identity and community in a multicultural nation-state like Canada and how larger political forces such as the Cold War legacy and Canadian nation-building exert pressure on understandings of who and what is a refugee. I [End Page 73] argue that the multiple issues presented by the key players in this conflict became elided as the diaspora became hyper-focused on the single sole issue of political representation and overlooked other significant concerns. This case is important for it demonstrates how the often-inevitable act of community-making in an official multicultural society results in a flattening of the multiplicities and complexities of intra-group refugee relations. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of intra-community conflicts to signal the need for the literature to resist the flattening of identities. Recently, Yan, Wong, and Lai interviewed thirty-nine self-identified Chinese persons in Vancouver and noted that for their participants, who differed in place of origin and time period of migration resulting in distinct social, political, and economic systems, “transnational political tensions among the different places of origin are a factor that further divides them, representing an obstacle to generating mutual trust” (456). Contributing to the call for an awareness of multiplicity of communities’ identities, this article traces the events of a specific conflict among the Vietnamese in Toronto. I argue that this conflict, which originally emerged out of some significant complaints by the seniors, which point to deep material and structural challenges Vietnamese seniors face in Canada, became shaped and overshadowed by the larger political context so that the only issue to be addressed was that of political representation. This political context is shaped, on the one hand, by anti-communism, whose persistence attests to the lingering aftermath of the Cold War in shaping diasporic identities and, on the other hand, by the pressures of a Canadian multiculturalism which forces diverse groups of people related by ethnicity to present themselves within a boundary of static culture (Dang, Le, Nguyen). In particular for the Vietnamese community, this static representation is entangled with the events of the war in Vietnam. To some in the Vietnamese community the rvn flag is the symbol of their political purpose and identity. Particularly for those involved in formal Vietnamese associations, most identify as South Vietnamese refugees and as political exiles, having left Vietnam after the end of the war in 1975, in political protest and fear of political persecution. However, in 2015, the younger staff and board of directors of the agency contended that the display of the rvn flag is divisive, as it has come to only represent the loss of the civil war for the South Vietnamese and not the full range of subject and political positions in the diaspora. The diaspora, now over forty years post the war in Vietnam, contains a multitude of identities and sociopolitical affiliations, yet this group continues to present as one community under one flag. After...