You Don’t Know the Whole Story
In recent news, there has been a lot of talk about the Syrian Civil war and its four million refugees that it is producing. Unfortunately living in the United States, all the talk about the Syrian refugees has been very negative. It’s shameful hearing all the comments about civilians who are escaping a war that they do not want to be a part of as if they were the ones themselves who started the war.
Even though I know very little about the war itself and what is going on in their homeland, I can still connect on a deeper level to them because of my own family lineage. My parents left Vietnam in 1990, about 20 years after the Vietnam War when it fell to communism and they raised my brother and I here in the US. For most of my dad’s life from 1970 to the mid 1980s, my dad tried, just like the Syrian refugees, to escape Vietnam and its war. He spent most of his childhood and teenage years going in and out of jail and being beaten for trying to leave his country and flee a war that he did not want to be a part of. He was pushed and dragged off boats, swam from the ocean to the shore when the boat couldn’t handle all the people on it, and beaten by the Viet Cong. It wasn’t until he met my mom when she finally convinced him to take the legal way to take refuge in another country. The Vietnam War was one of the biggest and last refugee resettlements before the Syrian Civil war with more than 1.4 million people resettling in the US. I was born to parents who were escaping a horrible government. I understand the current situations of the Syrian refugees and will understand their children’s first-generation-Americans situations when they grow up. What people will not understand is that our parents made a choice to leave their old lives behind in order to pursue a better life for their family, even if it meant sacrificing everything they knew and start over in a country where they know nothing, barely even the language.
What ties me back to my roots is my language. I grew up learning to speak Vietnamese as my first language. My mom didn’t let me speak English until I was four and about to go to preschool because she didn’t want me to lose my identity of being Vietnamese. Even with all the horrible things that happened to the country that she was from she was still proud to speak the language and she was still proud to make her children learn it as well. I identify more with being Vietnamese more than I do as an American because the language is what I identify more with because it’s what keeps my family together. Just like how Gloria Anzaldua states, “I am my language.” My linguistic identity is part of my identity and it plays a major role in the person that I developed into today.
What’s really disgusting about the Syrian refugee resettlement is not the victims of the war, but the people who are refusing to lend a hand because they categorize these victims as the same as the ones who caused the war. They are letting the rotten few spoil the whole bunch. It is upsetting to see that my family was able to resettle back then, but now these people cannot. I can see all the good about these people but everyone only sees the bad. And what’s unfortunate is that even if they are able to resettle, they will have to face discrimination and racism towards them by the select few who did not want them there in the first place. The only thing that will keep them together and hopeful is their language; the language and culture that they will bring with them from overseas because it is what kept them together. And what will hurt them most will be others telling them that their language is not welcome here and they will be forced to learn another language that has no meaning to them. Strip these people of their language and culture and they will lose their identities.
