SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
When the spacecraft carrying scientist and rights activist Amanda Nguyen pierced through the Earth’s atmosphere last month, the Vietnamese diaspora held its collective breath. In Houston, political refugees who had fled postwar Vietnam clutched their chests as the rocket ascended. In Hanoi, government officials applauded their nation’s first woman in space. And in Melbourne, I – a peacetime migrant from Vietnam – found myself unexpectedly weeping at the sight of that rocket trail: a perfect diagonal stitch across the sky, sewing together what history had torn apart.
Nguyen – a civil rights advocate, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and daughter of Vietnamese refugees – made history as the first Southeast Asian and first Vietnamese woman to travel into space. Her scientific experiment, carried aboard a Blue Origin mission, was conducted in collaboration with Vietnam’s National Space Centre.
Vietnamese American Amanda Nguyen made history with her trip into space, and has shown a path forward for a generation of Vietnamese. Credit: PA
As her capsule orbited, an extraordinary diplomatic choreography unfolded. In Hanoi, the US ambassador hosted Vietnam’s first cosmonaut Phạm Tuân to watch Amanda’s launch. In Texas, Vietnam’s ambassador greeted her return, bearing a congratulatory letter from Vietnam’s president. The same government her parents fled now celebrated her achievement.
Fifty years ago, Amanda’s parents were among the thousands who scrambled onto overcrowded boats, fleeing a country reshaped by political transition. Each year on April 30, while Vietnam celebrates Liberation Day – the reunification of North and South – diaspora communities gather under yellow flags to mourn what many call Black April or National Resentment Day – the fall of Saigon.
This duality lives in our bones: in the way elders still hoard plastic bags like wartime rations, in the hesitation when hearing a Northern accent. Many raised their children with warnings about returning to Vietnam, creating what sociologists call “inherited disconnection” – where second-generation kids know more about their parents’ trauma than their ancestral homeland itself.
I’ve seen this play out in Footscray nail salons and Springvale phở shops, where young Vietnamese-Australians speak of a homeland frozen in 1975. A friend once confessed her non-Vietnamese colleague had been to Vietnam more often than she had. “How do you mourn a place you’ve never known?” she asked.
Then came Amanda’s Instagram post after landing: “How do you find belonging when the foundation of your identity is rooted in a legacy of conflict?” Her answer – người Mỹ gốc Việt (an American with Vietnamese roots) – echoed inside me, the way I explain to Aussie friends.
We, who grew up after the war, live in this liminal space. Like Amanda, we code-switch between worlds: explaining bánh mì to Aussie friends while fielding our refugee relatives’ warnings about “communist influence”. We’re tired of the binaries – of being asked to choose between celebration and mourning, between the red flag and the yellow.
Our generation’s role isn’t to adjudicate between competing narratives of 1975, but to build spaces – digital, cultural, emotional – where Vietnamese from all shores can rediscover one another. When a 70-year-old refugee from Springvale and a 20-year-old student from Hanoi both paused to reflect at the Yarra River, I glimpsed the future: not forgetting history, but allowing once-divided worlds to overlap gently.
At a recent Melbourne gathering, I watched a 29-year-old architect – her parents’ escape story tattooed on her forearm – show a video of her first trip as an adult to Ho Chi Minh City. “The traffic terrified me,” she laughed, “but the bún riêu tasted like coming home.” Around her, elders nodded with grudging approval. This is how healing begins: not with erasure, but with expanded possibilities.
This 50th anniversary year, I dream of new rituals: elders placing family photos beside NASA’s livestreams; kids asking not “What did we lose?” but “What can we build?” The war taught us to see only divisions – between North and South, between those who left and those who stayed. Amanda’s trajectory shows another way: an arc that bends toward reconciliation.
The war tried to divide us: victors versus victims, communists versus refugees. But the human story is always more complex – like my uncle, who fought for the South but now admires Vietnam’s economic growth, or my Australian-born Vietnamese cousin, who broke down watching a cải lương performance in Vietnam, finally understanding why her mother had always hummed those melancholic melodies.
As Amanda Nguyen and Phạm Tuân watched the sky together – separated by politics but united by stardust – they showed what diaspora children have always known: No border drawn by war can contain Vietnamese dreams. From space, they saw no borders, only one luminous planet.
The stars have been waiting for us since long before we learned to divide ourselves.
Like Amanda gazing at our shared atmosphere, I’m learning to hold both my cities – Melbourne and Saigon, past and present – in one grateful, unbroken vision. History tried to define us. We’re choosing to redefine ourselves.
Jenny Tran is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and storyteller at 100 Story Building. She is passionate about identity, belonging, and bridging cultures across generations.
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