I recently traveled to Cát Tiên National Park with my partner, an evolutionary biologist, in search of what Vietnam’s natural beauty still had to offer. This park, one of the largest tropical forests left in Vietnam, was once home to hundreds of species—from butterflies to giants like the Javan rhinoceros, Asian elephant, and gaur. By the end of our trip, we were left both inspired and disappointed. Inspired, because the canopy still hums with distant calls of hidden life. Disappointed, because the number of animals we encountered—versus what we know should exist—paled in comparison to places like Costa Rica, where biodiversity is preserved and central to national heritage.
The stories of Cát Tiên are, too often, stories of loss. The Javan rhinoceros? Gone. Its last individual poached in 2010. The Siamese crocodile? Once so abundant in the Bàu Sấu wetlands, it was hunted nearly to oblivion, and declared locally extinct by the late 1990s. However, for this creature, fate was not sealed. Between 2001 and 2005, sixty genetically verified crocodiles were reintroduced. By 2005, hatchlings appeared. Then, by 2019, surveys counted nearly 300 individuals, most of them juveniles, proof of a population not just surviving but expanding.
The work of restoration has extended to primates as well. The Đảo Tiên Endangered Primate Species Centre has rehabilitated and reintroduced golden-cheeked gibbons, black-shanked doucs, pygmy lorises, and silvered langurs. But even here, success is fragile. Poaching remains a persistent threat, and the deeper wound of the war remains palpable. Bombs and defoliants like Agent Orange stripped away the forest, leaving behind not only destroyed habitats but land so scarred that regeneration remains a struggle decades later.
And while some species have returned with deliberate, concerted effort, others never will. The environment has shifted too drastically. What was once home now feels foreign, uninhabitable. Even if a handful of the endemic species could be reintroduced, survival would remain tenuous, provisional, without any guarantee.
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On August 23, 2024, in a welcome meeting at the Presidential Palace, Tô Lâm—in his dual role as Party General Secretary and State President—extended a warm greeting to a delegation of overseas Vietnamese who had returned for the 4th World Conference of Vietnamese People Abroad and the Vietnamese Overseas Scholars & Experts Forum. Around 400 delegates from 42 countries and territories gathered in Hanoi for the occasion.
During this event, Tô Lâm publicly recognized and praised the heartfelt, valuable advice that Việt Kiều delegates offered on issues ranging from high-tech development to sustainable growth, the preservation of Vietnamese language and culture, and the renewal of national solidarity. When I use the word Việt Kiều here, I write primarily from the vantage point of a Vietnamese American returning, though the term encompasses the millions of Vietnamese living across Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Depending on one’s politics, one can sneer, critique, or point to the litany of on-going human rights abuses that make such gestures questionable. But what’s undeniable is the government’s increasing, and in some ways earnest, effort to draw Việt Kiều back, and the numbers testify to this trend.
A 2023 report estimated that of the half a million overseas Vietnamese who return each year, about 25,000 intend to resettle permanently. Vietnam has made no secret of its strategy: attracting Việt Kiều to help close talent gaps in technology, banking, medicine, and urban planning. A proposed amendment to the nationality law would even allow dual citizenship, while a five-year visa exemption already makes entry far easier than before.
Of course, these shifts are enticing: Vietnam’s growing economy, improved infrastructure, youthful workforce, and rising profile as both tourist magnet and manufacturing hub have made it a serious career destination. But this wave of return raises harder questions: How will the presence of newly arrived Việt Kiều be felt? What futures will emerge when locals and returnees navigate the same terrain? And what tensions will inevitably follow?
Today’s Vietnam is not the one our parents or grandparents left behind. Living abroad, we carry a time-capsule version of the country—an accent, vocabulary, worldview that jar against young Vietnamese today. Speak with anyone between the ages of 14 and 25 and you’ll see just how different their horizon is from many in the diaspora. This gap is both cultural and generational. Their music has moved beyond Như Quỳnh and Khánh Ly (Lynda Trang Đài is cool again, btw), and their tattoos and piercings would surprise even the most understanding Vietnamese American parents.
The country has moved on, and such changes, from the material reality of many to the forms of habitus, mark the passage of time—and time is precisely what makes the return of Việt Kiều so fraught, because each generation arrives to a Vietnam that is no longer the one they remembered, imagined.
The phenomenon of Việt Kiều returning is nothing new. What feels different now, however, is the scale, the facile journey, and the dramatic material changes within Vietnam since the early 2000s. These changes have not only molded the country’s new facelift, but also its modus operandi across all aspects of life. Vietnam’s rise as a tourist hotspot, for example, or Hanoi’s inclusion on global lists of most-loved cities, or the remote-expat allure of coastal hubs like Đà Nẵng, have made the return less about reunions with long-lost family, as was the case in the past, and more about life-building, career moves, and an eat-pray-love style self-discovery.
Among the younger generation, some have turned the return journey into a performance of lost origins, an Odyssean, GoPro search of diasporic provenance. Influencers livestream their daily lives, peddling cultural pedagogy of little worth, and rehearsed self-discovery as “content.” The results are uneven: sometimes insightful, but often shallow, and un-ironically naval gazing even compared to Ayahuasca-retreat-inspired-poetry. From the over-romanticization of crippling poverty, to the unabashedly shaky Vietnamese language skills, to the tendency to cluster in elite, educated expat bubbles—a dissonance vocalizing at ironic pitches only 1990s Mariah Carey could conceive.
Yes, these returnees bring skills, but many also simply bring privilege: better education, international/vehicular language fluency, and outsized human capital that can easily outcompete local Vietnamese talent. The byproduct? An un-interrogated sense of entitlement and some of the worst internet content you’ve seen—half-baked spoken word on the semantic dance between yếu (weak) and yêu (love), or breathless vlogs marveling that Vietnamese are “SOOO industrious.” No. The auntie in the nón lá and that seven-year-old selling lottery tickets past her bed time are not performing labor out of innate desire—they are trapped in a system where not selling enough invites literal, corporal punishment.
Nor are phrases like “con ăn cơm chưa?” (did you eat yet?), some secret key to unlocking some mystical and untranslatable Vietnamese love, like “thương.” Spanish, too, makes a distinction between amar and querer…Yes, acts of service are part of Vietnamese sociability, but we should be cautious not to romanticize wartime trauma and silent affection as some otherworldly poetics of tenderness. This is not the kind of relation Édouard Glissant was talking about. Within the larger Vietnamese diaspora, there is real healing that still needs to take place. The deep scars that our community experienced will undoubtedly mark us for many more generations, but shallow belletristic elaborations on superficial idiosyncrasies are not it.
And yet, I also cannot deny the siren’s call to the romance of seeking the motherland. For many, myself included, this return is as painful as it is wondrous. Indeed, the late Andrew X. Pham’s memoir testifies to the turmoil such journeys demand–a psycho-somatic windfall where past and present selves contend for narrative clarity.
There is space for us here in today’s Vietnam, and there are meaningful ways to contribute to a society that wants to shed off its old narratives. But as people of the diaspora, if there is one lesson we should have learned by now, it is that we must balance speaking with rather than speaking for those with whom we claim to support and share space. It needs to be said that the homeland is what we make together with the people who already live there, not a frozen oasis of longing and projections.
My fellow Việt Kiều who return must reconcile this truth.
Vietnam, like many of the destinations American students chase for study abroad, offers the raw ingredients for youthful self-discovery: beautiful landscapes, welcoming locals (not always fluent in foreign tongues), and centuries-long history of survival that now insists on joy, which results in an exuberant if not decadent party scene. It can be tempting to imagine the country as a site to “find oneself”, whether through the food, through the mother tongue, through the concept of the other that is ourselves, but such a pursuit risks mistaking the country for a mirror rather than encountering it as a living, changing place.
The truth is we cannot fully perceive or possess the totality of Vietnamese experience, culture, or history. Our individual encounters do not, and cannot, speak for the putative people we so often hold in our minds. These awakenings are meaningful, yes, but they are not without impact.
Which is why ethical engagement must begin by refusing to treat Vietnam as a hearth of lost personal memory, even if it may sometimes feel like that. It is equally important to recognize that within the global discourses of diasporic return, the very conditions of possibility for articulating the Việt Kiều returnee are already filtered through the particularity of an American diasporic framework—powerful, but not universal. To acknowledge this is to accept that return is as much about unlearning as it is about recovering, as much about restraint as it is about expression.
I, too, feel connected when I sit down for a dish of cơm tấm, but not without reminding myself I am not cosplaying life. This is life. Vietnam, after all, is a relatively young nation still negotiating its struggles with identity, poverty, unemployment, and war’s lingering damages. Like all returnees to a land that is no longer the one we left, we must constantly recognize how much the country has changed—and continues to change. Otherwise, our presence risks becoming extractive, even exploitative, echoing the very colonial logics Vietnam struggled to cast off. Like a once-endemic species with no natural predator, we must ask: do we risk becoming one ourselves?
The Vietnam many of us carry abroad is a relic. It was a protective invention to ensure our survival, and we must be vigilant in keeping parts of that culture alive, but we must also resist casting ourselves as endangered species. Unlike the Sunda pangolin, the Asian elephant, or the Indochinese tiger, we are not vanishing. We can invoke epigenetic inheritances ad absurdum, but that risks reducing our personal feats and hard-won agency. We are an adaptive population, resilient in new habitats, our challenge is less survival than how not to become invasive.
When I came to the U.S. in the late 1990s under the Orderly Departure Program, my family believed we would never return. For some Vietnamese abroad, that has been the case. Some are still barred. Others are so disillusioned, and they choose self-imposed exile over ever setting foot here again. But for many of us, even those working in cultural fields or writing about contentious subjects, the rules have been more flexible than expected, and there remain pathways to rethink our presence, our calibrated contributions, and our decision to be part of something larger than ourselves, so that one day those gestures might take root, and the changes we imagine can be felt in the grain of daily life.
The Vietnamese diaspora in the U.S. alone numbers around 2.2 million, and globally that number reaches 5–6 million. Vietnamese people are everywhere. And while Vietnamese birthrates may decline in the coming decades, we are not facing extinction. This is why we should not return under the illusion of fragility. It is perfectly acceptable to embark on personal journeys of self-discovery here, but the days of an untouched “lost homeland” are over. Vietnam’s integration into the global supply chain and the pressures of financialization mean the environment will keep shifting.
Speaking with optimistic college students here, I see aspirations far beyond what we once imagined possible, and at the same time profoundly universal in ways that should never surprise us. They too are just looking for stable ground in the midst of uncertain terrains. This is not an apologetic embrace of state narratives of progress and deliverance, or me waving a yellow-starred red banner that sings the praise of names not to be mentioned amongst Vietnamese Americans, but an acknowledgment that shifting material realities require us to shift our perceptions of time and space. May the homeland always be there, but as Việt Kiều we must realize: it is what we carry on our backs, in our hearts, and in the art we choose to make—not what we hope to find in a land trying hard not to look back.
History has shown that when it comes to Vietnam, taking sides is often unproductive, even destructive. But we should be sympathetic to why younger Vietnamese are less enthralled by the idea of Việt Kiều returning only to misunderstand or overlook a Vietnam that is living its present, not searching for its past.
Perhaps the lesson is the same one Cát Tiên has taught us: some species return, others cannot, and the forest itself is never what it once was. To enter it is to walk among absences as much as presences, to live with what has survived, what has adapted, and what will never come back. For Việt Kiều, too, the task is not to restore a lost habitat but to learn how to belong responsibly within an ecosystem already in motion.
Vinh Phu Pham is an artist, literary scholar, and critic based in New York City. His writing covers Vietnamese contemporary art, the musical legacies of the Republic of Vietnam, and Asian American literature in diaspora. He has a background in 19th-century Spanish Peninsular literature, the literature of the Spanish Philippines, and Vietnamese francophone literature. Currently, he serves as assistant professor of World Literature at Bard High School Early College (Queens).
