For guests without a Columbia University ID (CUID): Registration is required to access Columbia’s Morningside campus. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 4:00 p.m. on October 26 to ensure campus access.
You will receive an email from CU Guest Access with a QR code before or on the day of the event. To enter campus, present this QR code along with a valid government-issued photo ID at either the 116th Street and Broadway or 116th Street and Amsterdam gates. Please ensure that the name on your ID matches the name used to register for the event. The QR code provided by Eventbrite will not grant campus access; only the QR code issued by CU Guest Access will be accepted.
For CUID holders: Prior registration is not required. However, we encourage you to register in advance to help us plan for attendance.
Opening Remarks: Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Founding Director of Global Vietnam
Moderator: Thomas Vallely, Distinguished Fellow, Vietnam Leadership Program
Speakers:
- Luna Nga Thị Howard, Amerasian activist and entrepreneur
- Anna El-Eini, writer; contributor and Notables Editor, Edible DC
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).
Lunch will be provided.
