April 4, 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

And I recall a line I wrote in the book, Living with Strangers in the USA: Communicating Beyond Culture in 1989. The fictional teacher, Joy Taylor, is calling the role on the first day of her ESL class and as she calls the name of the student, she thinks of the different parts of our world that are sitting in the class in front of her.

Joy’s thoughts turn to her class list. Light from the window cast a shadow on the face of the woman in the seat directly in front.

“Miss Vo?”

When Phi raised her head, her large dark eyes looked directly at Joy.

“Present.”

I wonder what tales she could tell…and Joy recalled the many Vietnamese that had filled her composition class that April when Saigon fell and the young men and women had watched their families disappear on CB evening news—then came to class to write essays while their hearts were breaking. Joy pulled her thoughts back to the list of names.

And today, I think of how that war still touches our lives…Houston and the Gulf Coast received large numbers of Vietnamese refugees. So, now

…Spring rolls are as common as potato chips (at least in large urban areas of the USA). Nail salons are almost a monopoly of Vietnamese entrepreneurs.

…One of my absolute favorite co-teachers was Vincent, brought to the USA as a baby, and an amazing amalgam of cultures and individual, who joined our group of liberals and conservatives Healing Our Divisions and who now owns a Japanese food service.

…The Vietnamese family reunification program was still an important part of the Refugee Service that I worked for from 1996 to 1998.

…Vietnamese stores and goods don’t receive a first glance, much less a second one.

This cultural addition is referred to later in the book when, Phi Vo is thinking…

Throughout “Little Saigon” young men sit silently in restaurants, their shirts open, their faces expressionless, their eyes half closed against the smoke from their cigarettes held between the thumb and forefinger. The immigrants have Vietnamese income tax offices, Vietnamese insurance offices, Vietnamese sandwich shops, Vietnamese jewelry shops, Vietnamese coffee shops with rich coffee laced with sweet canned milk—even Vietnamese gangsters.

But the more it approximates back home, the deeper is the sense of loss of land, loss of families, loss of life—losses that permeate the Vietnamese songs and underlie conversations. Little Saigon, providing the goods and services to a refugee people ultimately serves as a constant, cruel reminder that this isn’t Saigon.

And for Phi, although she would never admit it and can scarcely bear to think it, she sometimes wonders…Who am I really? Who will my children be?

That war, as all wars do, touched and continues to touch lives minute by minute, day by day, year by year.

AND ALL those important men who sat in rooms over 50 years ago and made decisions about strategies and plans, setting in motion ripples that will reverberate till the edge of the cosmos left a blue print for ALL the important men sitting in rooms today and making decisions…

My father was a story teller, and I loved to hear his stories. And I became one too. I believe that if we tell one another our stories, our world becomes a better place. And so on this anniversary I recall some of the stories of souls that have crossed my path from Vietnam, from Bosnia, from Syria, from Iraq, from Rawanda, from Cambodia, from Afghanistan.

I hold their stories close—as we all hurtle toward the edge of the cosmos together.