The Chinese-Vietnamese community is a unique one in that they are part of not just one but rather two diasporas. Can you share with us a little bit about your family’s history and immigration story? How has your experience as a refugee shaped you both as a child and as an adult? 

I came to the U.S. as a child refugee. My family is ethnically Chinese and we were part of the Chinese diaspora in Saigon, Vietnam, who had been displaced by World War II in China. I was born in Saigon after American military withdrawal, which was a particularly precarious time for my family, as my father had been drafted into the South Vietnamese army during the war and served as an interpreter because of his language skills. He had taught himself how to speak English as a teenager, and similar to interpreters in Iraq and Afghanistan, my father’s ties to the Americans meant that he was a target for the newly established government. Today, there are Special Immigrant Visas for Iraqi and Afghan interpreters, but at the time, there were virtually no protections for people like my father. We had family friends who had been sent to the labor camps, only to surface much later after having endured years of hardship. I was really young at the time, but government troops would raid our house, taking anything of material value. My father was in constant hiding, so it was clear that we had to leave. This would mark my family’s second displacement by war. 

But leaving was hardly a safe endeavor. We had to pay a lot of money for passage on a creaky wooden boat that was overloaded. That was our migrant caravan. Piracy was known to be prevalent in the seas we set out on, and boats were frequently ravaged and sunk by inclement weather. But to paraphrase the poignant words of Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, my parents would not have put me on the boat if it had been safer on land. Once on the boat, conditions were overcrowded. My mother was able to secure a cramped seat below, a prime location, but it meant she could not leave her seat or someone would take it. So I sat on her lap for days on end. Drinking water was scarce and my father once had to make the difficult decision to deny water to his brother to ensure that there would be enough for his children. These are the choices that no one ever wants to make. This perilous escape also formed the basis of much of my exilic trauma. As a child, I was plagued with anxiety about people being left behind, and to this day, I still have some hydrophobia. 

When our boat finally harbored in Malaysia, the Malaysian government would not accept us, so one of their military ships towed our boat to Air Raya refugee camp on an island in the Indonesian archipelago. The camp was...dirty. My earliest memory in life is kicking up dust on a hillside of the camp and getting dirt stuck inside my shoes. We built our shelters out of sticks and palm fronds and old rice sacks. My grandfather jury rigged an oven out of mud. It was a difficult, uncertain time, a seeming embodiment of “bare life” that the theorist Giorgio Agamben contemplates in his writings about refugee camps. UNHCR periodically brought supplies and I still remember how much I hated their wool blankets because they were so itchy. 

After a year and a half at the camp, we received sponsorship from a Baptist church in small town North Carolina. You can imagine what a change that was, to go from tropical breezes to snowstorms; from crowded camp life to isolation in sparsely populated rural America; from faces that mirror your own to the complete foreignness of white neighbors. The church was amazing, providing us with a house and a car and supplies and support. But after a year, we moved to California where relatives and friends from the old country had settled. And that’s how I ended up in Los Angeles.

What was it like for you growing up as a 1.5 generation Vietnamese American in East L.A.? In what ways did your upbringing influence not only how you saw yourself, but also your community and the world around you?

We may have been better off than in the camps, but what felt like bare life continued in East L.A. As a family of six, we lived in a seedy two-bedroom apartment where the roof leaked, mushrooms grew on the kitchen floor, and there were rat and roach infestations. My sisters and I once piled into the car in the morning for school, only to spy blood splatter on the hood. I witnessed a person get stabbed on the street, the distinct smell of human blood lodged permanently in my olfactory memory. Growing up in East L.A. also meant that my peers were primarily Latinx kids. As a result, my early experiences of discrimination came in the form of derogatory Spanish epithets. I remember cringing in high school Spanish class upon learning the word for Chinese: “chino.” As a kid, this word had been flung at me pejoratively and it still evokes memories of playground taunting. But subtler forms of discrimination also came from my Asian peers, many of whom were native born or whose families had come to the U.S. under different circumstances. They had immigrated here, as opposed to being exiled. They had not come from a country ravaged by war. There was always a sense of exclusion from other Asians for my exile and my poverty, a divide that exposed some of the intra-racial tensions that can pivot along migration and class strata, and that made my identification with the category of Asian American an uneasy one. I had not yet learned how to fully reconcile that history and those tensions for myself. 

How have your intersectional identities as a refugee, an immigrant, and a Southeast Asian American womxn played a role in your work as a lawyer and a scholar?

As I grew up and moved through the world of academia and professional life, I came to understand that racial discrimination can be profoundly nuanced and that institutional racism and white supremacy structure nearly all lived oppression in the U.S. All the issues that my family had struggled with—tenement housing, lack of healthcare, workplace discrimination, poverty, street violence—were part of a larger, shared experience of subjugation among the minoritized, and they were rooted in an apparatus that entrenches white power and exacerbates social inequality. To be a refugee, an immigrant, a BIPOC is to exist acutely in these interlocking systems of oppression: to experience the pains of hybridity, to be both in the overlap and the interstice. As a refugee, though, you are also expected to be grateful for this experience. Your assimilation is required, even if your full acceptance will never be achieved. Despite the geopolitical forces that expunged us into this very state of beholdenness, the “grant” of asylum means that we must be perpetually grateful for what should be the basic human duty to assist the imperiled. As long as asylum continues to be seen as a privilege instead of a right, refugees will still have to contend with the convoluted logic of these gratitude politics.

What is interesting is that whenever people have asked about my background, I have struggled with how to conjugate my identity: I was a refugee; I have been a refugee; I am a refugee. I settled on the latter because what I have learned is that being a refugee is more of a consciousness than a temporal limit or a legal definition or even a lived experience. This is why second generation refugees are able to engage in this consciousness, because their identities have been so strongly shaped by the inherited residues of war, displacement, and exile.

And so to answer the question, I think intersectional identities similarly operate as a consciousness, and this is a consciousness that I try to bring to my work as a lawyer, a scholar, and an educator. When you come from a genealogy of oppression, there is a strong compulsion to seek out the oppressed, and either shed light on their struggle or advocate on their behalf. But mostly, I try to center my work on giving people space and validation. I have represented clients who have endured unspeakable trauma and unfathomable horrors: human trafficking victims, genocide survivors, asylum seekers. A large part of my job was to give them the space and dignity to tell their stories, to assert their rights, and to recognize that their claim-making is an act of personal empowerment. Even in my work as a labor attorney, I have seen the significant impact of acknowledging to workers that their experiences of discrimination and exploitation are deeply painful and demand redress. But I do not do this work as someone who has surmounted struggle and whose intersectional consciousness is seamless; I do it as someone who is continually aware that as a refugee, an immigrant, and a woman of color, I remain subjected to the same powerful forces of subjugation as the individuals whom I serve. And my work is, and always will be, constrained by how my profession continues to process me as an Asian American woman, with all the stereotypes, biases, and encumbrances that that entails.

My father passed away three years ago and earlier this year, my uncle—his younger brother—died from COVID-19. Even in my most objective assessment, they were two of the most remarkable people I have ever met, in large part because of their tremendous resilience in surviving the boat, the camp, the resettlement. They did so much to connect me to my heritage as a refugee, so to lose both of them has felt like a generational memory loss. The task before me now is to not only reconcile this loss personally, but to also commit to engaging more critically with being a refugee on a political and professional level.

There has been an incredible growth of Southeast Asian diaspora specific studies, platforms, and community organizing over the last few years, fueled by expanding access to technology and the recognition that our positionality -- our immigration stories, lived experiences, concerns, etc -- differ from what is traditionally considered “Asian American.” How can we use our positionality to further efforts toward justice for ourselves and for others?

It is interesting to think about the Southeast Asian diaspora today, not just how we are situated within white America, but also within the category of Asian America and in relation to other racial communities, including the ascendant BIPOC category. In fact, I see parallels between the concerns that the BIPOC designation emerged from and some of the more problematic dynamics that the term “Asian American” presents. Certainly, solidarity is crucial but Asian Americans are not a monolith. It is equally important to recognize that across the Asian American spectrum, discrimination and oppression are not experienced in the same way, that there are differences of histories and languages and color, different geographies of oppression. The challenge is to maintain solidarity even as we advocate for disaggregated group causes.

But I also think there are experiences that are unique to Southeast Asian Americans that allow us to build coalitions beyond other Asian American groups. We saw this sort of cross-racial solidarity happen between Japanese Americans and Arab Americans after 9/11, recognizing that both groups had been the targets of heightened policing, profiling, harassment, attacks, and civil liberties violations in the name of national security. So many Southeast Asian Americans come from a lineage of war and exile, not unlike the experiences of more recent refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These are the opportunities that allow us to see that we inherit the common legacy of U.S. imperialism. Scholars have also referred to “border imperialism:” the uprooting of populations overseas through war, capitalism, and globalization, and the simultaneous contraction of Western borders to immigrants. It is alarming to see the assault on asylum that is happening today, both within the legal system and along communities at the southern border. There is ripe common ground in these spaces for advocacy and coalition-building. As a lawyer, a scholar, an educator, an activist, and a refugee, my hope is that greater solidarity is on the horizon for all liberation movements.