Giao Tran and Carolyn Le: Holding On To The Rage
Giao Tran and Carolyn Le are community organizers and founders of ViệtUnity South Bay, a grassroots Vietnamese progressive community for multi-issue, multi-racial, & multi-class peace, justice, & self-determination. Formed in 2016, they have fostered Vietnamese leadership and activism through deportation resistance and defense for Vietnamese immigrants and civic leadership programs for the local community.
What was it like to grow up as Vietnamese womxn in your hometowns, and how did your childhood informed your life journeys?
Giao Tran: I mostly grew up in Orange County, which has a huge Vietnamese population; I think there’s a lot of parallels with the Vietnamese community politics here in San José and in Orange County. There’s still differences, but the common threads are there. I grew up really involved during my high school years with groups that considered themselves anti-communist. I thought that this was the way to be involved in the community, because they called themselves Vietnamese, and they always proclaimed themselves as the ultimate embodiment of what a Vietnamese person is; that’s how I first got involved.
As I grew in my work, I started understanding myself more, and started to see a lot of contradictions. For instance, there’s an annual Têt Parade in the city of Westminister, which is in the hub of the Vietnamese community, and it was originally organized by the city, so anyone really could participate. Once the city lost funding for that parade [back in 2012 or 2013], it went into the hands of a private Vietnamese group. The group wouldn’t allow the LGBT contingent to be a part of the parade, calling that community all the horrible things you can imagine, like: “These people are sick, our children shouldn’t be around them. They’re not Vietnamese, they shouldn’t be with us.” That created a whole controversy, and I remember being there and feeling so conflicted. I think it was moments like that that really built me to come to the conclusion that we need more progressive activism in our community, and a progressive voice, with all its imperfections. Being involved in Vietnamese work has always been something that just came to me naturally. I’ve always really enjoyed it, as hard as it can be sometimes. For me being Vietnamese is synonymous with my queer and bi identity and my progressive values. I’m really proud of that because it was a long journey to get here.
Carolyn Le: I was never really involved in the community as an advocate or organizer until recently. I was born and raised in Eastside San José — never moved, same home, same neighborhood. In San José, there’s a very huge population of Vietnamese people. Growing up Vietnamese, I felt like I was just growing up. I saw so many Vietnamese people that I didn’t really feel like there was a different identity, but I did feel that there were rifts within our community. While there are a lot of Vietnamese people in San José, especially Eastside San José, I could tell that our identity or the way people kind of talked about their identity, was not very celebrated. We’ll get together and have food and barbecue, and go to Têt events, but outside of that, for people my age, at least when I was going into high school and junior high, there were those who did not want to speak Vietnamese, and those who did speak Vietnamese — it was like two different groups that wouldn’t associate with one another.
As an organizer now, I think a lot about my upbringing. Growing up I had a lot of strong women family members. My parents divorced when I was really young before I started school. I only had sisters and my mom, and I would go to my aunt’s for daycare, but what I felt looking back at that [time], I felt a lot of resentment. I felt incredibly suppressed by Vietnamese Confucian values. A lot of times, women are sometimes the perpetrators, and they uphold and maintain Confucian values, or patriarchal values. I was so constrained and repressed by the rules of femininity, and I harbor a lot of resentment over that. As an adult now, I feel like a lot of change needs to happen– no more excuses, this behavior of just upholding and maintaining patriarchy within the Vietnamese family, and Confucian values– it just has to change. There’s no more excuses for that anymore. Part of the reason why I’m an organizer is because I want to enact that type of change.
How did Việt Unity begin, and what trends have you seen in the San José Vietnamese community in moving towards more progressive values?
GT: Việt Unity in the South Bay began in late 2016. At that time, I and other folks were organizing in the Việt Unity East Bay chapter, and in that chapter we had been talking about possibly forming a Vietnamese for Black Lives group. [We were] feeling inspired by the movement for Black Lives, and to do that internal work on structural racism in our own community. We started having meetings in San José because we were taking turns of where we were having our meetings. I was coming from San José, and other folks were in Oakland, so we would switch on and off. We continued having meetings in San José, trying to bring other San José people together, because San José has such a huge Vietnamese community. While there’s still a Vietnamese community in San Francisco and Oakland, it’s not as big. [We wanted] work to be done here.
We had a series of discussions on what should we do, and eventually folks felt like, to address structural racism, we have to address all these other issues that are connected with it. It’s not just racism, it’s sexism, it’s patriarchy, it’s homophobia, it’s transphobia–it’s all these things. We felt that we wanted to create a Vietnamese group that has these progressive-Left values. At first we called ourselves the Vietnamese Justice Collective. Then, there were some folks who were from Việt Unity in the East Bay, and thought that having a chapter called Việt Unity in the South Bay would kind of streamline our organizational development. Since then, our work has really grown.
I do still think that the typical tendencies are there, but I think with our work, we’ve really started opening up the conversations and opening up space to address issues that I don’t think the Vietnamese community would have traditionally addressed, or be as vocal about such as the Vietnamese folks who have been detained and deported from the US. That hasn’t just started happening since Trump’s been in office, that’s been happening, even when Obama was in office, but it’s being escalated due to a lot of Vietnamese folks who have been formerly incarcerated. I think us being vocal about that has been making it easier for more groups to also be vocal about it. I do think that there is movement, but there’s always a lot of work to be done.
CL: I whole-heartedly agree with Giao — there’s more work to be done. I mentioned earlier that for me, trends in the Vietnamese community, at least here, definitely have lots of rifts, lots of divide. It’s definitely a narrative of “good” Vietnamese versus “bad” Vietnamese, “good” immigrants versus “bad” immigrants. Within those narratives, it’s the educated versus uneducated, like the business-owner versus the non-business-owner, and also rifts between generations — 1st generation, 1.5, 2nd, 3rd.
I got to be real, I feel like our community lacks a lot of empathy. It’s not that they don’t have empathy, but maybe that they just don’t want to feel like it’s a burden to kind of tap into your empathic self. It could be just because of Vietnamese people being in all these wars for so long back in Vietnam, where it’s just really hard to be vulnerable and emotional. I hate this cliché, but this whole idea of the survival of the fittest — I think that’s something that Vietnamese people definitely carried over from Vietnam. Something I do see with being a part of Việt Unity is that while there is a lot of work that needs to be done, it is being done, it’s being done today. A lot of organizers that aren’t Vietnamese will ask me, “How do we get Vietnamese people out?” [laughing] And I’m like, “We’re working on the same thing! You know, we don’t know; we’re just so divided at this point.” But the more work we do as organizers, the more our work becomes visible, and I think it just wakes people up, it kind of enacts them.
Việt Unity has been initiating accompaniment work around deportations and detentions lately — how did this work come about and how do you see it growing in the future?
GT: We had formed about a year or so before we had someone contact us about a Vietnamese woman who was in detention, and her family member had reached out to us. I think so much about this work has to do with where people are at, mentally and also identifying the source of where our suffering is. Our group felt that we had to do something about this. That’s when we really came together and we were trying to make contact with the family.
People Acting in Community Together (PACT) was really supporting us with doing the accompaniment because they’ve had experience with that before. They connected us with resources with the larger immigration fight, helping us learn more about the legal system and how other people and families had been accompanied. It’s been a partnership between us and PACT to do that work, and it’s just been growing since then. There were a series of press release statements that were made public by different groups, one of them by Việt Lead in Philadelphia, that denounced the deportations and put a contact number — that was one of the first ways Vietnamese people had a number that they could call. It was one or two press releases after that, one of which Việt Unity signed onto, where we put a local number that people in the South Bay can call if they are at risk of being deported or about to go into a check-in with ICE. It’s really growing — we’ve accompanied and made contact with about 30 families so far, and everyone we accompany is different. Right now we have families who are really enthusiastic and such a light in the dark because they share so much hope. By sharing their stories they can help other people feel like they’re not alone. I feel like our work is at a really great place right now.
I hear it sometimes with the people who I accompany, who’ll say, “Why do you advocate for me? I’ve done so many bad things in my past.” And I tell them, “I don’t advocate for who you were. I advocate for who you could be and you could be so many things. You have so much potential.” That’s why I think it’s so important to do deportation resistance work, so that [people] aren’t defined by their past mistakes.
CL: I also wanted to mention about how we, Việt Unity, became involved in deportation resistance work. It was one of the first times that all these Vietnamese organizations from all over the country met in Washington, D.C. — it was just so powerful and timely. It was a Southeast Asian conference, and there were Vietnamese organizers and organizations there. We all came together and talked about [the fact that] there’s a huge elephant in our community that everyone’s ignoring and we need to talk about it. Viêt Lead had been leading the way, and I think this was the moment Việt Unity joined into it. It was the first national coalition of Vietnamese organizers, and I felt that it was so powerful just to see so many progressive Vietnamese people all over the country. It just felt really nice, and it fuels me. I also think about why our work in deportation resistance is so important for our community. It’s because we have this idea of the “bad” Vietnamese– these narratives get swept underneath the rug so often, but telling these narratives is just a way of showing these human stories and the realities of being human that there’s no such thing as a “bad” or a “good” Vietnamese or those types of binaries.
Sometimes there are people within our community who will say, “Why do you advocate for criminals?” I hear it sometimes with the people who I accompany, who’ll say, “Why do you advocate for me? I’ve done so many bad things in my past.” And I tell them, “I don’t advocate for who you were. I advocate for who you could be and you could be so many things. You have so much potential.” That’s why I think it’s so important to do deportation resistance work, so that [people] aren’t defined by their past mistakes.
What dreams do you have for your people in San José and globally?
CL: I think unity, Việt Unity [laughs], solidarity, and empathy. I feel like if we can get that down, we can do so much more work.
GT: It’s a hard question. I think what I dream for the Vietnamese community is what I dream for everyone, that hopefully, one day, we can have a more just society, that we don’t sweep people to the margins, that we stand up for what’s right, that we don’t police people based on these lines that we draw, that we don’t separate families, that we welcome everyone, no matter how they identify and who they love.
I would like other people like me to know that they’re powerful in who they are, and they don’t need to be this embodiment, this idea of strength, in a tough, patriarchal way. They can be strong in their vulnerability; whoever takes advantage of that, that’s not on you, that’s on them.
How do you want to grow as organizers in this movement?
CL: I believe that when you advocate, you have to advocate with an intersectional lens. When you advocate for some type of cause, you have to think about how race, class, economic standing, language, education, gender– how it all fits in– because if you don’t think of it intersectionally, you may reproduce the same type of harm that you’re trying to dismantle. You may be oppressing other people. Advocating with an intersectional lens is like advocating with a feminist lens; so your advocacy should be feminist. One example that doesn’t really pertain to Việt Unity work is a lot of people are advocating for a complete ban on plastic straws. I know San Francisco is implementing that, and IKEA is phasing out plastic straws. To advocate with an intersectional feminist lens is to think about, well, if we get rid of all these plastic straws, which is going to be great for the world, what about people who really need plastic straws in order to take up liquid? For people with disabilities, there might be people who can not hold a cup, and even when they hold it, they spill it. These plastic straws need to be bendy, so if you advocate on a ban on plastic straws, you have to think about the disabled community and how it’s going to affect them. We can’t just say, “Hey, city government, ban plastic straws!” and then, with the disabled community, “You guys, figure it out.” If you’re gonna advocate something, you gotta think about everything.
GT: I think one way I’m growing right now as an organizer, just as a person is — being a relatively young woman, who also happens to be queer and is Asian, I’m always kind of putting myself on guard to be ready to stand up for myself. I’m always coming up with a front like, “What are you gonna do about this? Are you gonna try to take us down?” I’ve been slowly trying to learn that I can still be powerful while being more gentle with myself, and not needing to approach things, in a way that’s confrontational with anybody and everybody, but more so about finding a balance between that. I think it’s possible, and I’m trying to figure out what that balance is for myself. I would like other people like me to know that they’re powerful in who they are, and they don’t need to be this embodiment, this idea of strength, in a tough, patriarchal way. They can be strong in their vulnerability; whoever takes advantage of that, that’s not on you, that’s on them. So I’m trying to learn that more.
What words of wisdom do you have for other Vietnamese womxn and queer organizers?
CL: Hold onto your rage, it is a very nice driving force. [laughs] And also, advocate with a feminist lens.
GT: I would say, don’t be afraid to ask. Never be afraid to ask. Surround yourself with like-minded people who support you and nurture you. Always remember that you’re a dope badass, and nobody can tell you otherwise.
