Archive April 30, 2025

According to separate reports, Harvard University students and staff have experienced anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as a result of the deeply polarized environment at one of the nation’s top universities.

Following the formation of separate task forces to combat anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiments last year amid campus protests over Israel’s war on Gaza, reports were released on Tuesday.

Additionally, Trump claims that Harvard’s decision to freeze more than $2 billion in funding for the university was prompted by widespread anti-Semitism on campus. The president’s administration also is at odds with Trump.

According to Harvard President Alan Garber, members of the Jewish, Israeli, and Zionist communities reported hiding “overt markers of their identities to avoid confrontation,” while Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian community members described feeling “judged, misrepresented, and silenced.”

According to Garber, “particularly when given the anonymity and distance that social media offers,” the reported willingness of some students to treat one another with disdain rather than sympathy, and to be critical and ostracized.

Some students reported that their peers were pushing them away from campus life because of who they are or what they believe, thereby eroding our sense of community.

In its report, the task force on preventing anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli bias claimed bias had been “fomented, practiced, and tolerated” at Harvard and more broadly in academia.

According to the task force, 39 percent of Jewish students said they felt at home at the university, while 26 percent of them said they felt unsafe online.

According to the task force, nearly 60% of Jewish students said they had “discrimination, stereotyping, or negative bias” because of their opinions, and only 25% of them believed there was no “academic or professional penalty” for expressing their opinions.

The task force quoted an unnamed Israeli Arab student who claimed, “get used to social discrimination” from their first day on campus, one of the other instances of bias in the report.

“People refusing to speak with you.” not even attempting to be nice. Some people act nice and end the conversation when they learn that they are Israeli, and then never speak to [me] again,” the student was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

Similar to the anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian biases that the task force identified on campus, describing a “deep-seated sense of fear” among students and a “uncertainty, abandonment, threat, and isolation” state.

According to the task force, “Muslim women who wear the hijab and pro-Palestinian students who wear keffiyehs spoke about being subjected to verbal harassment, being called “terrorists,” and even being spat upon.”

The topic of doxxing was “particularly highlighted as a significant concern that affects both current career prospects and physical safety,” it continued, referring to the practice of sharing a person’s personal or identifiable information online.

Nearly half of the Muslim students and staff surveyed felt physically unsafe on campus, and 92 percent of them felt they would face professional or academic sanctions for speaking out about their political views.

An unnamed student was quoted as saying, “As Muslims students we have been living in constant fear.”

I can’t help but think Harvard would have done more to stop it if there had been antisemitic trucks flying over campus and planes flying over with antisemitic slogans. “There have been trucks driving around campus for months, displaying the faces of Muslim students.

Both task forces put forth a number of suggestions for addressing bias on campus, including expanding access to legal services to combat doxxing and placing a premium on students who support open inquiry.

According to Garber, the university will make additional efforts to make sure it is a place where “ideas are welcomed, entertained, and contested in the spirit of seeking truth” and “mutual respect is the norm.”

Migrants and asylum seekers who have crossed into a newly established military zone along the nation’s border with Mexico have their first criminal prosecutions in the US.

According to court filings made on Monday and reviewed by US media the day after, approximately 28 people have been accused of breaking security laws for entering the military zone.

Although a misdemeanor, that charge could result in even worse penalties. According to the US Code, breaking security laws can result in fines of up to $100, 000 for individuals or a year in prison, or both.

The consequences of unlawful entry into the US are typically less severe. Critics, however, warn of the growing militarisation of the southern border region that includes Mexico as President Donald Trump’s administration intensifies its immigration crackdown.

The “New Mexico National Defense Area” was established on April 18 to facilitate the new charges.

Fort Huachuca, an Army installation that was previously owned by the Department of the Interior, was ordered by the Department of Defense to include 109, 651 acres (44, 400 hectares) of federal land.

A border land border area near Mexico becomes a US military zone as a result of the transfer’s three-year effective period. Trespassing is a serious offense punishable by serious consequences. This military area notably overlaps with the routes that illegal immigrants and asylum seekers use to enter the US without proper paperwork.

Despite US and international law, which protects the right to flee persecution, successive presidential administrations have attempted to impose a cap on asylum seekers entering the country outside of authorized ports of entry.

One of the deterrents has been the threat of more severe penalties.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth visited the recently established military zone last week and praised the strip as a new front against an “invasion” of migrants and asylum seekers.

“This is a piece of government property.” Federal property is present in the National Defense Area, which was formerly known as the Fort Huachuca annex zone. Hegseth said any illegal entry into that area would mean entering a military base, which is a federally protected area.

You could be held in custody. You will be held in custody. Border patrol and US troops working together will interdict you.

An estimated 11, 900 soldiers have been stationed at the border as a result of the Trump administration’s increase in troops since January.

Hegseth revealed during his visit that he intends to establish additional military berths along the US border to protect against illegal immigration. He emphasized the dangers of lengthy prison sentences and complex criminal prosecutions.

“You will be monitored if you are a crossing without permission.” US soldiers will be in custody with you. He predicted that you would be temporarily detained and turned over to Customs and Border Patrol.

The government’s property is destroyed if you have jumped over or cut through a fence. Like you would any other military base, you are evading law enforcement if you have attempted to evade. When you add up the charges against you for misdemeanors and felonies, you could face a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

The first group to pass through the military zone, according to him, is “can’t wait to prosecute” New Mexico’s attorney general.

The new tactic is opposed by organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, which claim military deployments to address civil offenses pose a risk to human rights.

The expansion of military detention options in the “New Mexico National Defence Area” or “border buffer zone” is a dangerous omission from the constitutional principle that the military should not be policing civilians, according to senior staff attorney Rebecca Sheff of the organization.

Beyond the government’s efforts to limit irregular immigration, Sheff added, there might be unintended effects.

Cuba’s highest court has ordered two prominent dissidents to be taken back into custody on the basis that both had separately violated the terms of their parole.

On Tuesday, the Tribunal Supremo Popular – sometimes translated as the People’s Supreme Court – authorised the arrests of Jose Daniel Ferrer and Felix Navarro.

“In addition to failing to comply with the terms of their parole, [Ferrer and Navarro] are people who publicly call for disorder and disrespect for authorities in their social and online environments and maintain public ties with the head of the United States embassy,” said Maricela Sosa, the court’s vice president.

Both men had been released earlier this year as part of a deal mediated by the late Pope Francis and the Catholic Church. As part of the agreement, Democrat Joe Biden, the outgoing United States president, briefly removed Cuba from a list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Biden’s decision was quickly reversed as Republican Donald Trump replaced him as president on January 20. The very next day, Trump ordered Cuba to be restored to the list, which restricts foreign assistance, defence sales and other financial interactions with designated countries.

Still, by March, Cuba had announced it had completed its end of the bargain, releasing a total of 553 people. While critics of the Cuban government have called them “political prisoners”, Havana maintained that the released people represented “diverse crimes”.

On Tuesday, the US Department of State issued a statement condemning the latest arrests, which also reportedly swept up Ferrer’s wife and child.

“The U.S. strongly condemns the brutal treatment and unjust detention of Cuban patriots [Ferrer], his wife and son, as well as Felix Navarro and several other pro-democracy activists,” it said in a social media post.

It added that the US Embassy in Havana “will continue meeting with Cubans who stand up for their fundamental rights and freedoms”.

One of the most prominent critics of the prisoner release was Ferrer himself. A fisherman and founder of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), Ferrer has advocated for democratic reforms on the island, leading to clashes with Havana’s community government.

In an interview with The New York Times following his release in January, Ferrer framed the Vatican-brokered deal as a publicity stunt for the Cuban government.

“In a gesture of supposed good will, they free a number of people who should never have been jailed, and then they want in exchange for that for the Church and the American government to make concessions,” Ferrer said.

“They are applauded, and the world sees that they are so generous.”

Ferrer had publicly refused to accept the conditions of his release, including mandatory court appearances, on the basis that he should have never been imprisoned in the first place.

Both he and Navarro had been arrested before, beginning in 2003 with an incident known as the Black Spring. That saw 75 dissidents be swept into detention based on accusations they were colluding with the US government.

Ferrer had also been arrested in 2019 on allegations he had kidnapped and assaulted a man, a charge he denies.

Then, in 2021, Cuba convulsed with mass protests at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as basic supplies like food and medicine grew scarce. Many protesters blamed the Cuban government for the shortages and denounced the limits to their civil liberties.

Cuba – which has long blamed US sanctions for the island’s economic distress – answered the demonstrations with a police crackdown, resulting in widespread arrests. Navarro and Ferrer were among those detained, until their release in January of this year.

In a series of social media posts, Ferrer’s sister Ana Belkis Ferrer Garcia announced he had been taken back into custody early on Tuesday morning. Her brother had recently been running a soup kitchen in the city of Santiago de Cuba.

She noted that UNPACU’s headquarters were “looted” and multiple activists were arrested, along with Ferrer’s wife Nelva Ismarays Ortega Tamayo and their son Daniel Jose.

“All of them were taken to an unknown location,” Ferrer Garcia wrote on X. “Miserable and cowardly criminal tyrants! We demand their immediate release and that of all detainees and political prisoners.”

Later, she added that Ortega Tamayo and Ferrer’s son were released “after being held for several hours”.

Human rights organisations also offered condemnations of Ferrer’s and Navarro’s arrests. The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, a nonprofit based in Spain, tied the incident to the death of Pope Francis, who passed away at age 88 on April 21.

“Raul Castro and Miguel Diaz-Canel have not waited even 72 hours after Francis’s burial to undo their commitments,” the observatory said in a statement, naming Cuba’s former and present president, respectively.

Hanoi/Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – Although a child of war refugees, Victoria Ngo got to learn more about her Vietnamese identity only during her college years in the United States in the 1990s.

The eldest daughter in a refugee family with a Vietnamese father of Chinese descent, Ngo grew up in a Chinese-speaking community in the US and for a while thought of herself essentially as just Chinese.

As an inquisitive schoolgirl, Ngo had noticed the differences, though, between her experience as Vietnamese and those of the Chinese people she grew up with.

Curiosity about her identity increased over the years, partly because questions she asked about Vietnam went unanswered by her parents and other relatives.

“I lived with people who only spoke Chinese. My siblings and I went to Chinese school on the weekends,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I also speak Vietnamese, and my name is a Vietnamese name. My experience is very much a Vietnamese experience in the sense that I came as a refugee and came during the wave of the Vietnamese refugee,” she said.

But Vietnam was just not spoken about. And certainly not the war that ended 50 years ago when South Vietnam’s then-capital, Saigon, fell to North Vietnamese forces and their leaders in Hanoi.

Trying to fill in the missing pieces of her family’s past, Ngo recounted how she signed up to attend a conference about the war in Vietnam at her college, “thinking that my father would be proud of me”.

His response was stark and unexpected.

“He said, ‘If you go to that conference, you are not my daughter!’” Ngo recounted.

“And I was like, ‘Wow, I thought I was just learning about our history,’ to which he responds: ‘That is not our history.’”

Ngo’s experience is not uncommon among Vietnamese families who fled their country as refugees after Saigon fell on April 30, 1975.

The fall of Saigon ended the war and marked the reunification of North and South with Hanoi as the new capital of post-war Vietnam.

But many of those who worked under the US-aligned government of the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam as it was then known – its civil servants, soldiers, businesspeople – chose exile over unification and living in a communist Vietnam.

Too many lives had been lost. Too much blood had been spilled – North and South – that many, like Ngo’s father, could never forgive nor live with their wartime foes in peacetime.

For others, exile as refugees would be a choice taken to stay with relatives who feared persecution – or so they believed – if they stayed in Vietnam after the war.

‘There is this void in our history that doesn’t get talked about’

The US-backed wars in the three countries of Indochina left huge losses in their wake. Laos and Cambodia suffered an estimated 1.45 million deaths under US bombings.

In Vietnam, there were an estimated 1.1 million military deaths on the communist North’s side alone and more than 254,000 on the side of the South Vietnamese republic. Compounded with civilian deaths, the estimated death toll from the war in Vietnam stands conservatively at 3.1 million people.

For the victorious communist forces, they were left with a country in ruin. The northern part of the country was subjected to heavy US bombings. The railroads were inoperable. Most of the major roads were bombed into cratered tracks. Its economy was shattered. The northern population had also witnessed decades of conflict after the onset of French colonial rule in the late 19th century.

Southern Vietnam’s urban infrastructure was less damaged by the war. The countryside was in ruins as rural areas had become the front lines in the guerrilla warfare that marked most of the fighting in the South.

Croplands and forests had been poisoned by the US use of defoliant, better known as Agent Orange, the highly toxic chemical compound that was sprayed from the air to deny communist fighters on the ground the cover of trees and other concealing foliage.

Millions of Vietnamese people were affected by the use of Agent Orange, including at least 150,000 children who would be born with severe physical, mental and developmental defects, and others are still being affected to this day because the soil remains poisoned.

Unexploded bombs – in the many hundreds of thousands of tonnes – still “contaminate” up to 20 percent of Vietnam’s territory due to the millions of tonnes of ordnance used in the war, according to the Vietnam National Mine Action Center.

While their April 30, 1975, victory marked an end to the war for the North Vietnamese, for the defeated US-backed government and people of the South, the war’s end was for many the start of lengthy separation from family in “reeducation camps” or permanent exile to Western countries, such as the US, Australia, Germany and Canada.

Before the fall of Saigon, Ngo’s father was a high school principal in South Vietnam. After April 30, 1975, he was placed in reeducation camps twice before he made a desperate decision to take his family out of the country on a rickety, overcrowded boat in 1978.

The family would spend half a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines before being accepted by the US as refugees.

By the time of their arrival in the US in the early 1980s, Ngo’s extended family had lost everything. Her immediate family, two aunts and uncles, and a grandmother and her relatives shared a two-storey, 30sq-metre (323sq-ft) subsidised housing unit in Los Angeles.

Her father could not teach in the US and ended up becoming a deep ocean fisherman as well as doing odd jobs to put food on the table.

The Vietnam they fled became a bad memory to be forgotten, Ngo said.

“There is this void in our history that doesn’t get talked about. You don’t know about what’s happened in the past,” she told Al Jazeera.

A profound sense of loss is a narrative shared by many Vietnamese refugee families – deep pain from the past that is felt across generations.

Within some families, any mention of the war risks evoking strong emotions and triggering past griefs. The sensitivity is such that silence about the past is sometimes preferred.

‘Deep pain from her past’

Cat Nguyen, a young American Vietnamese poet, experienced similar evasiveness when it came to family experiences of the war.

Now based in Ho Chi Minh City – the name given to Saigon after the war in honour of the founding father of the Vietnamese Communist Party – Cat Nguyen said little was shared about their family’s past before coming to the US.

“My family, in particular my grandma, harboured deep pain from her past,” Cat Nguyen told Al Jazeera.

Cat Nguyen’s family also has a complicated political history.

While a maternal grandfather was an active revolutionary who supported anticolonial efforts against the French in pre-independence Vietnam, a paternal grandfather served in the government of South Vietnam and a maternal grandmother was the principal of an American-English school in Saigon.

But in 1975, Cat Nguyen’s family on both sides, and its political divide, left Vietnam.

Cat Nguyen’s father was just 10 years old and mother was 13 when they left Vietnam. They were “uprooted from their native land in the blink of an eye” for a new life in the US, Cat Nguyen said.

“The first few years in the US were filled with sadness for them: difficulties adjusting to a strange land, a language they were not fluent in, a people who did not understand the world they [the Vietnamese refugees] were coming from,” Cat Nguyen said.

The trauma of fleeing Vietnam was also compounded by official accounts that cast the refugees and Vietnamese diaspora as abandoning their country in its hour of much-needed national reconstruction.

This year’s 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon will be celebrated by the Communist Party of Vietnam as a day of unification and also “liberation of the south”.

That message speaks to the aspirations of millions of Vietnamese in the north and south who made great sacrifices during the war, but the party’s official history is inevitably limited.

To this day, the experiences of many in southern Vietnam and their perspectives on the war – what motivated them to resist North Vietnam’s political leadership, including Ho Chi Minh – remain absent from the celebratory narratives.

In this fateful historical showdown, southerners who fled overseas as refugees are cast in the role of puppets or traitors, lured and manipulated by the enemy’s luxuries and propaganda into abandoning their own people.

Seeing their experiences erased and delegitimised after the war added to the pain of displacement for Vietnam’s diaspora communities. It also explains the anger still harboured towards Vietnam’s leadership by an older generation of refugees, such as Ngo’s father.

This is a multigenerational resentment that still rears its head when refugee parents believe their children are being exposed to positive narratives about bustling, economically thriving Vietnam five decades after the war – which they brand as “the North’s propaganda”.

‘You crossed an ocean for me to cross another’

It is not only contemporary Vietnam’s official version of history that is problematic.

Cat Nguyen realised there were also gaps when turning to American high school textbooks to learn about the war in Vietnam.

In those schoolbooks, Washington’s decades-long military involvement in Vietnam, which left millions of people dead and millions scattered across the world as refugees, only “a small paragraph” was devoted to “how the US fought against communism in Vietnam”, Cat Nguyen said.

Although supposedly sympathetic to their former South Vietnamese “allies”, Cat Nguyen told of a US-centric perspective that still subjects Vietnamese refugees to an “Americanised gaze”.

“An Americanised gaze of refugees, meaning that Americans viewed all Vietnamese as either dangerous, threatening communists or as helpless, infantilised refugees,” Cat Nguyen said.

Such narratives had helped to justify US intervention and military occupation of Vietnam to “save” the Vietnamese from themselves and communism.

“While it is true that Vietnamese refugees suffered greatly, this gaze strips human beings of their own agency and humanhood, displacing them into a framework that upholds the system of white supremacy,” said Cat Nguyen, who has called Vietnam home for more than two years.

Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen noted in his book Nothing Ever Dies that Vietnamese refugees were able to find in the US – in whatever limited space that was available to them – opportunities to tell their immigrant stories, to “insert themselves into the American dream”.

But it was precisely that “dream” that Cat Nguyen would eventually grow disenchanted with along with its “capitalist propaganda”.

The “American dream” has erased “the history of the US’s genocide of Indigenous populations, enslavement of Black and racialised peoples, and violent colonial and imperial projects”, they said.

It is not that Cat Nguyen never had tried to fit into US society. Rather, from a young age, Cat Nguyen told of constantly being made to feel different in a society that “never sees them as American enough”.

“Throughout my life, I watched as the Vietnamese parts of me slowly eroded. It wasn’t until the passing of my grandmother – the person who taught me the most about where I come from – that I began desperately searching for a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual return to my ancestral homeland and my humanity,” Cat Nguyen said.

Seeking to reconnect, Cat Nguyen has become involved in art projects in the form of poetry, performance and filmmaking that experiment with a range of elements in Vietnamese folklore and traditional musical instruments to “unapologetically” recommit to “the fight against colonisation, imperialism and capitalism”.

Drawn to identify with Vietnamese revolutionary fighters from “the other side”, Cat Nguyen spoke of finding a source of personal strength in their wisdom and dying for their cause.

That conviction has not led to a dismissal of Cat Nguyen’s own family’s suffering as refugees in the US, but the acknowledgement of the coexistence of intergenerational trauma that Vietnam’s official history fails to include.

One of Cat Nguyen’s poems pays homage to their late grandmother: “You crossed / an ocean / for me / to cross / another and then you crossed / a world / before I / could follow.”

Ngo never did attend the university conference on the war in Vietnam that her father had threatened to disown her over all those years ago.

That was out of respect for her father’s wishes. Since then, she has gradually come to see events in Vietnam during the war years and after from the North’s perspective – albeit with critical eyes.

“I definitely see that when anything is too centralised and too authoritarian, you have corruption. But if the leadership is very strong and competent, things can move very efficiently,” said Ngo, who relocated to Vietnam more than 20 years ago.

Like Cat Nguyen, Ngo understands the trauma her family members from the South suffered.

It inspired her to pursue a career in psychology and public health focused on underserved communities. She became an associate professor of community health and social sciences at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.

“One of the reasons why I work with marginalised populations and vulnerable populations is because I also understand that experience having grown up as a refugee and in the early years not having very much,” Ngo said.

After more than two decades in Vietnam, Ngo has focused on equipping primary care clinics with the capacity to take care of poor people who suffer from mental health problems but lack access to care.

“I feel like my experience as a refugee has really made me think a lot about the human condition and what kinds of social resources and economic resources we need to put in place to help people in transition and who are marginalised, to help people who are displaced in one way or another,” she said.

For both Ngo and Cat Nguyen, being part of the Vietnamese diaspora and its painful past has given them a nuanced perspective on Vietnam’s history that is not readily found in the competing narratives of North and South.

Divided by the flag

Kevin D Pham said there was a recurring story he was told while growing up in a Vietnamese refugee family in San Jose, California.

“I was told by my high school teachers and especially my family that communists were bad, essentially,” said Pham, an assistant professor of political theory at the University of Amsterdam.

Pham’s paternal grandfather was imprisoned by communist Viet Minh forces in the 1950s, and his maternal grandfather was imprisoned in a reeducation camp after 1975 and died there from malnutrition.

From a young age, Pham was taught to be proud of his Republic of Vietnam family heritage. Although he appreciates this perspective, he did not uncritically accept what he was taught. After graduating from university, he lived in Vietnam for eight months and, there, came to learn about and sympathise with perspectives from the “other side”.

But growing up in the US, he told of listening to his uncle, who was a pilot, as he recounted the glory of his younger days when he fought “the communists” during the war.

Pham’s father, on the other hand, was only 16 years old when he was forced to leave Vietnam and did not have much direct experience of warfare. Still, his patriotism for the vanquished US-backed Southern government was still unwavering.

Pham recounts how, during his youth, older Vietnamese men would stop and salute as he and his father cruised down the streets of San Jose in his father’s bright yellow Ford Mustang, which had three horizontal red stripes painted on the bonnet to represent the flag of South Vietnam.

In Vietnam to this day, the South Vietnamese flag is still taboo.

Among staunch Vietnamese nationalists, the south’s “three-stripes”, or “ba que”, flag has become a popular slur, symbolising betrayal of the nation, defeat and humiliation. Any association with the former government’s flag, however remote, has also been used to denounce and alienate.

In early 2023, Hanni Pham, an Australian-Vietnamese singer with the Korean band New Jeans, got caught up in the flag controversy and was subjected to an online campaign, which started when online activists spotted a South Vietnamese flag in a video recording made when she visited her grandparents’ home.

The only public place where you can still find an actual three-stripe flag in Vietnam is in Hanoi at the newly built Vietnam Military History Museum, where one is displayed as a historical artefact.

Yet attempts to reconcile Vietnam’s fractious past date back decades.

In 1993, under Vietnam’s then-prime minister, Vo Van Kiet, the Communist Party’s Politburo issued a resolution that marked the first official attempt at reconciliation by encouraging the country to “respect differences, join hands in dismantling prejudices, shame, hatred, and look forward to the future”.

Kiet was sensitive to the plight of Vietnamese refugees, something that he witnessed within his own family. In a well known interview in 2005 that drew both praise and criticism, he described April 30, 1975, as a “great victory” but one that left “millions happy, millions in sorrow”.

“It is a scar that needs healing rather than left to bleed,” he said.

In November, then-president and incumbent general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, To Lam, made a historic appearance at Columbia University in the US with Lien-Hang Nguyen, the daughter of a refugee family who became the first director of Vietnamese studies at the university and who has worked on building bridges between the diaspora and Vietnam.

Their meeting reflected a broader spirit of unity and healing emerging among Vietnamese people long divided by the scars of war and political differences.

Kevin D Pham said he noticed how those who have strong views on the historical North-South divide in Vietnam commonly use the word “puppets” as a slur, whether referring to supporters of the South Vietnamese government as “puppets” of the Americans or the North’s supporters as “puppets” of the Soviet Union and China.

“There is this tendency on both sides of seeing the other side as puppets who cannot think for themselves,” Pham said, adding that it indicates a “lack of curiosity” about the other side’s perspective and has become “an obstacle to true reconciliation”.

“What I encourage instead is the ability to understand multiple perspectives,” he said.

For Cat Nguyen, what is fascinating is that the current national flag of Vietnam – a yellow, five-pointed star on a red background – which once brought painful memories to family members still in the US, is now a source of comradery throughout Vietnam.

This was experienced firsthand when the Vietnamese national football team won the 2024 ASEAN championship in January. Cat Nguyen described flag-waving crowds storming onto streets across the country in celebration of a sporting, not a political, event.

“I am empathetic to the suffering from both sides despite which flags they identify with, either the three-stripe or the red flag with yellow star,” Cat Nguyen said.

“Everyone experienced so much violence, and ultimately I assign the most blame to US imperialism.”