Viet America Votes: We asked Vietnamese Americans what the 2024 elections mean to them. This is essay is one of the responses.
“Please remember what I came to this country from. I came to get away from communists.”
I can’t remember which presidential election was in full swing when my mom sent me this text message. It could have been 2016, the first election I could vote in and Trump’s first run. It could also have been 2020, when he was running for re-election. Either way, I remember not responding. The only time my mom brings up politics is if she is worried about communism—whether she thinks it’s infiltrating the American government, that I will be brainwashed for studying abroad in mainland China for a summer, or that we need to prepare to always have documents on us on our first trip to Vietnam soon, because you can’t trust the communist governments not to try and get you.
I don’t fault her for this way of thinking. When you are a Vietnamese refugee with an intense and harrowing journey to escape your home, to leave it all behind as a young adult, to see and experience things that I could never imagine in my “easy American life”—of course you resent everything about communism. When you’re forced to leave by war, live in fear for years for your and your family’s safety, they are the enemy. You can’t let any little thing remotely close to communism, true or not, creep its way in and ruin the life you built from nothing in America.
We will never see eye to eye on politics, and we have the luxury of not needing to talk about our views. Maybe because we both have busy lives so we catch up as mother and daughter about everything else going on. I prefer it that way. I’ve been active politically in protests and donations that she has no idea about; she is always so busy with her life that I am not sure she thinks about politics at all. There is so much political division out in the world, especially between the current Vietnamese-American generations, that I don’t want that to even come up between us. It would just cause pain and uncomfortable arguments.
Fundamentally, even though my mom has been in America longer than she ever lived in Vietnam at this point, our views are so different. I know I am “so American.” I have an American father, I was born in America, I went to school in America. If you look at this essay and see how many sentences start with the pronoun “I”, that’s western of me to do. Here I am, writing this piece, thinking of my own feelings and myself with my own views. There is nothing wrong with that, but our divide in politics is innate in this sense. For a younger Vietnamese American like me, seeing someone like me, a half-Asian woman become the US President, gives me hope. For older Vietnamese Americans, Harris is black, traditionalists will be upset that a woman is leading, and the majority that support Trump see her as a gateway to communism. That’s three strikes for Harris on that front.
Harris isn’t a communist by any means. Even if she was, and won, the way the US government works with the House and judicial branch would stop her from ever passing anything remotely communist – but how much of the general public really knows that? How can you ask hardworking Vietnamese Americans, many of whom own small businesses that require them to work day and night, to take the time to understand the government system in their second or third language? It’s much easier to hear that one candidate is communist and stir up the fear of their business being taken away, sometimes again if they had businesses in Vietnam, to get the Vietnamese Americans to vote for Trump.
Fear mobilizes the conservative Vietnamese Americans to vote for Trump, just as the fear of Trump being president again mobilizes liberal Vietnamese Americans. All you can do is vote and one side’s fear will come to fruition in the end.
Linh is a mixed-race Vietnamese-American linguist.
