Speakers:
- Luna Nga Thị Howard, Amerasian activist and co-founder, Tim Lai
- Anna El-Eini, writer; contributor and Notables Editor, Edible DC
Moderated by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Founding Director of Global Vietnam; and Thomas Vallely, Distinguished Fellow, Vietnam Leadership Program
A survivor of the war in Việt Nam, Luna Howard will discuss growing up as a woman born of a Vietnamese mother and a Black US serviceman father, with two different worlds running through her. She relives life in Việt Nam before and after the Fall of Sài Gòn, how her father was forced to leave her family behind when he returned to the US, and how she was exiled as a little girl to a post-war communist camp and left there to die with tens of thousands of other Amerasian families. Sharing her decades-long search for her father and missing sister, she reveals the lasting trauma of war for families like hers. When she discovered that her family fought on all sides in Việt Nam, yet later found ways to seek love and forgiveness across lines of faith and war, Luna’s understanding of war was completely upended and she asked her friend Anna to join her in writing a whole new history of the war in Việt Nam.
The writer Anna El-Eini will discuss how gathering oral histories like Luna’s are essential to understanding pivotal moments that might have changed the course of history, while revealing the human cost of decades of war, and offering a pathway to healing. She will describe how she built the characters, unique settings, and narrative inspired by Luna’s story and framed it around significant moments in Việt Nam’s history that have been suppressed or forgotten. Anna will address how she and Luna were forced to face the biggest existential questions about the war head on, including the suffering on both sides; forgiveness versus justice; loyalty through political division; and national identity as a catalyst for war.
This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and cosponsored by The Asian American Initiative and the Asian American Diasporic Writers’ Series at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race (CSER).
