Episode 1: Introduction

Welcome to the Vietnamese Narrative Podcast. On April 30, 1975, Saigon had been ceded to the Viet Cong, ending just under 20 years of conflict between the Communist-backed Northern government and the US-backed Southern government. The two halves of the country, then, were unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Ever since the war, Vietnam has evolved into the country that it is today: a modern, developing, and beautiful country. But there is something that feels innately missing from that Vietnamese narrative. Within the facade of a modern, developing Vietnamese landscape are historical relics, wreckages, or remnants of a forgotten time. Whether that be the permanent scars of soldiers who traversed forests to mountains during wars, historical prisons and detention houses from wartime, to ruins of cultural, and communal symbols that had defined the communities they surrounded, all of these relics are in many ways vessels that contain valuable, unrecorded stories of past societies as well as earmarks of progress since post-war Vietnam. These are relics of Vietnamese history and heritage that I’m determined to rediscover.