On May 15, the UC Irvine Department of Global & International Studies Global Forum, in collaboration with UCI Illuminations, will host a conversation reflecting on the legacies of the Vietnam War fifty years after its official end. Featuring Cham, Vietnamese, and Cambodian artist-scholars, the event centers on the role of art, memory, and healing in confronting the traumas of war and displacement. Below, event organizer Long T. Bui, UC Irvine professor of global & international studies, and two of the event's three featured voices - Tram Le, former director of the Vietnamese American Oral History Project at UCI and current Arts and Culture Specialist of Santa Ana, and Quyên N-L (Nguyễn-Lê), a Vietnamese filmmaker born to boat refugee parents where Chumash and Tongva lands meet in Los Ángeles, California - consider how the fifty-year milestone offers a timely opportunity for reflection, community dialogue, and imagining futures beyond violence.

Q: This event marks 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War. Why is this particular milestone a powerful time to reflect on the war’s ongoing impact through the lens of art and memory?

Bui:  This milestone tells us to remember why the war mattered and still matters. Artists are helping us remember with their craft and brilliant forms of memory-making.

Le: The 50-year milestone since the end of the Vietnam War is a powerful moment for reflection. It invites us to engage with the war not only as history, but as lived experience that continues to shape lives, communities, and cultural memory. Half a century offers enough distance for generational perspective to emerge, where veterans, refugees, descendants, and historians share space with artists exploring the complexities of war, trauma, resilience, and identity through a creative lens and explore untold or overlooked stories. Yet it remains close enough for the echoes to still be felt, through inherited memory and community history, reminding us not only of what was lost, but of how far we’ve come, and how art continues to bridge memory and meaning.

Ly: The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 signals the official withdrawal of direct foreign intervention from not only Vietnam but the region once called “Indochina”, ending a century of French colonization, Japanese occupation, and U.S. interventionism and military operations. Fifty years after such a moment, the historical memory of the war is still fractured and unevenly acknowledged across political, ethnic, and racial lines. Available official narratives that commemorated the war continue to reflect the hierarchies between and within the U.S. and the impacted countries. For example, male soldiers—Americans and indigenous forces recruited in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia--still take center stage as the injurious subjects of the war, with various levels of recognition in and outside of their own community. Through the lens of art and memory, differential, unique, and dismissed perspectives can emerge to highlight family histories, women’s experiences, and the ongoing struggle under militarism and colonization, old and new.

Q: All of you bring a unique fusion of scholarship and artistic practice to your work. How do creative forms like film, performance, and storytelling help us access parts of history that traditional narratives often miss or silence?

Bui: Art mixed with and informed by research gives us a critical/creative lens to recall history beyond facts and use our imagination to think of better worlds.

Ly: Knowledge exists in multiple forms and languages—textual, visual, sensory, conceptual. As an academic, I have traced and written about Vietnamese political subjectivities that got lost, mythicized, or obscured in the official and activists’ archives due selective or incomplete collection, politicized language, and the fickle nature of oral history. As an artist, I want to express and encourage “critical fabulations” rather than explain or educate. Performance arts, films, storytelling, and other types of space-based art practices allow a communal space for the artist, the work, and the audiences to respond, interact and generate meanings from the way they are held in that space. From mind to mind, body to body, history can be conjured up and felt, intimately, in parts or whole.

Le: In a university context, this reflection becomes even more powerful. It challenges us to think critically about how wars are remembered, whose voices are heard, and how we carry forward histories that are both painful and vital. Art becomes a site of learning, healing, and resistance, a space where academic exploration meets personal truth. This milestone is not just about looking back, it’s about how we, as the next generation of thinkers and creators, choose to remember, reinterpret, and engage with the past in ways that inform a more empathetic and informed future.

Q: The Vietnam War is often remembered through a U.S.-centric lens. What shifts when we center Southeast Asian voices—especially those of women and queer creators—when revisiting the war’s legacies?

Ly: When women and queer creators of Southeast Asian descent take center stage, we bring you a different focus and at times, pictures of the complex reality of living that has yet to become legible. Sometimes, illegibility is the point. Southeast Asia consists of multiple regions, territories, cultures, languages, traditions, ancestries, subjectivities—all that had been variedly touched by the destruction and interventionism that the U.S. brought during the so-called Vietnam War and all that a U.S.-centric lens could not (or desire to) account for. The U.S. centric lens historically had erased what it wanted hidden and limited the language and images we can use to remember, to mourn, or to pass on knowledge. I, for one, want no authoritative voice to control the narratives of what millions of people experienced.  

Le: Women and queer creators, in particular, offer insights that challenge traditional war stories. Their work often resists binary thinking—enemy vs. ally, hero vs. victim—and instead reveals the complexities of identity, resistance, and remembrance. Through their lenses, we are invited to confront the silences: the overlooked stories of care, kinship, migration, gender-based violence, and cultural inheritance. These narratives expand the meaning of war and peace, not as static outcomes, but as ongoing negotiations within bodies, families, and communities. When these voices are centered, we begin to see the war not as a singular moment in American history, but as a prolonged, lived reality that continues to shape lives across generations and borders.

Bui: Representations that center marginalized voices help us revisit the war’s legacies by showing there is not a singular narrative or focus or protagonist to this collective story.

Q: In the context of current global conflicts and rising student activism, how do you see the Vietnam War continuing to resonate with younger generations today?

Ly: The Vietnam War is considered by many people in Vietnam and around the world as a David vs. Goliath story--where people from a poor, colonized country made unimaginable sacrifices to fight and won against giant powerful foreign enemies. During that time, Vietnamese political leaders utilized many ways to mobilize global support; through people’s diplomacy and political exchange, the Vietnamese cause had directly influenced and validated the antiwar and solidarity movements abroad. This way of relation has widely and deeply influenced activists at the time and continues to serve as a radical hope for those still fighting against imperialist and colonial wars. Currently, many activists and scholars, including Palestinians, Vietnamese in Vietnam and in the diaspora, are mobilizing this history to rally to support for Palestine resistance against foreign invasion and land crouching. Seeing the student encampments, not without state repression in all level, I think that this moment is an opportunity for reawakened popular resistance, activist culture, and advocacy work.

Bui: The Vietnam War split American society and it galvanized movements around the world. It is a touchstone for understanding college protests and activism today over U.S. military excursions abroad.

Le: In a time when students are again at the forefront of global justice movements, the Vietnam War reminds us that youth have always been powerful catalysts for change. Younger generations, especially those from diasporic or marginalized backgrounds, are re-examining the Vietnam War not just as a U.S. military conflict, but as a deeply personal and cultural inheritance. Many are reclaiming family stories, exploring intergenerational trauma, and using art, scholarship, and activism to fill in the gaps left by dominant narratives. The war becomes more than a distant history lesson. It becomes a lens through which students examine the moral responsibilities of citizenship, the role of media in shaping public opinion, and the power of protest in demanding accountability.

Q: This event promises to be a “multi-sensory” experience. Without giving too much away, can you give us a preview of what audiences can expect to feel or take away from the evening?

Bui: Yes, we have a filmmaker, visual illustrator, and actress who will ask the audience to feel their way through texts and images presented.

Le: I'll be sharing a special preview from an upcoming documentary on Club O' Noodles, the first Vietnamese American theater troupe founded in 1992. Their groundbreaking work gave voice to a generation grappling with identity, displacement, and survival in the aftermath of war. Through this clip, viewers will witness not only the artistry, but the courage and humor that this group brought to the stage, a reminder of how performance can reclaim space, tell truth, and foster healing. Alongside the film, I’ll be showcasing visuals from past multi-art exhibitions with rich, layered works that blend traditional and contemporary forms, and offer an intimate glimpse into the ways Southeast Asian artists have processed war, diaspora, and resilience across decades.

The event will be an invitation to feel—to feel the weight of memory, the power of creativity, and the beauty of stories that refuse to be forgotten. Whether you come with personal connections to this history or are encountering these narratives for the first time, you’ll leave with a deeper sense of how art continues to shape, complicate, and expand our understanding of the past and our place within it.

Ly: My work hopefully will take audiences on a journey from postwar childhood in North Vietnam to the colonized landscape and waterways of Minnesota, wherein reflections on matrilineal lineage and gendered labor take on a visceral form of forgetting, remembering, and maternal worship.