The first two presentations chart the exodus of ethnic Chinese from both northern and southern Vietnam in the late 1970s. Jana Lipman draws our attention to the more than 200,000 ethnic Chinese Vietnamese in northern Vietnam who fled via land to China. For the purposes of the UNHCR and the Chinese government, they were Chinese and resettled. However, many Chinese Vietnamese looked at the global landscape, and realized that if they had fled to Southeast Asia or Hong Kong, they would be classified as “refugees” and gain access to western resettlement countries. Lipman analyzes how Chinese Vietnamese attempted to circumvent their resettlement in China and clandestinely enter Hong Kong to claim refugee status. Alvin Bui recenters Taiwan and how this “resource-limited island” nation fared with an influx of boat people primarily from southern Vietnam amidst the announcement that the U.S. and China were establishing diplomatic relations. He intertwines this influx with the publication of the Nanhai (South China Seas) Blood Letter, which implied that the fate of the Republic of Vietnam would come to Taiwan if the people of Taiwan did not stand up for themselves against communist aggression.

The next two presentations focus on Vietnamese Australians and Vietnamese Israelis. Nathalie Nguyen draws from a key national oral history collection on second-generation Vietnamese in Australia to examine the accounts of two cousins, born twenty years apart. She analyses their reconstruction of their family history, articulation of the process of remembrance, transnational connections with family members in North America and Europe, and their negotiations of their family legacy and their identities as Vietnamese Australians. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi examines the Cold War migration of Vietnamese refugees to Israel-Palestine in the late 1970s–the first time that Israel offered asylum and eventual citizenship to non-Jewish subjects. She argues that Vietnamese Israelis are positioned as “model refugees” in contrast to Black and Arab asylum seekers, as well as displaced Palestinians.

Responding to the Global Asia(s) (Chen, Yano et al., 2021) call to re-map Asia, this panel dialogues with critical refugee studies and histories of migration to show the global reach of the Vietnamese diaspora.