Operation Reunite

Operation Reunite

Author: VietnameseBoatPeople.org August 18, 2021 Duration: 24:53
Trista Goldberg, born Nguyễn Thi Thu 1970 in Vietnam, was adopted at the age of 4 through Holt International Agency and brought to the United States into a loving family in Pennsylvania. Around the age of 10, she was shown her adoption papers which opened up Pandora's box and would haunt her into adulthood. In 1999, the internet boom enabled Trista to explore Vietnam online and learn about the country and culture. Through Yahoo chat groups she met other Vietnamese adoptees from around the world who would motivate and support her search to find her birth family. Trista shares the ups and down of her journey that successfully led to reuniting with her birth mother and siblings. In 2003, Trista started a nonprofit organization, Operation Reunite, to provide information and support to other Vietnamese adoptees going through a similar journey and to build a DNA data bank for families to use to try to identify loved ones.

There are stories that shape history, and then there are the ones history nearly forgot, carried across oceans by those who lived them. The Vietnamese Boat People is a collection of those voices. This podcast moves beyond the broad statistics of the post-war exodus, focusing instead on the intimate, human-scale narratives of what was lost and what was forged. From 1975 into the early 1990s, nearly two million people made the desperate choice to flee by sea, embarking on journeys where the outcome was never certain. Through firsthand accounts and curated interviews, each episode delves into the complex tapestry of hope, profound loss, and quiet resilience. You’ll hear not just about the perilous escapes and the struggle for survival against pirates, starvation, and storms, but also about the nuanced reality of resettlement and the long process of building a new life in a foreign land. Created by VietnameseBoatPeople.org, the series serves as an essential oral history archive, ensuring the term "Vietnamese Boat People" is understood not as a monolithic label, but as representing millions of individual dreams and enduring spirits. Tune in for a deeply personal exploration of a defining chapter in modern diaspora, where every conversation reveals the weight of memory and the strength required to cross an unimaginable horizon.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 61

The Vietnamese Boat People
Podcast Episodes
2020 Mỹ Việt Story Slam [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:15:38
Ten Storytellers from across America were selected from a nationwide open-call for submissions, sharing their Vietnamese American experiences in celebration of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage month. Each Storyte…
Being Bao [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 23:44
Bao Nguyen is an award-winning Vietnamese American filmmaker whose work has been seen on The New York Times, HBO, NBC, PBS and more. He has directed, produced, and shot a number of short films, which have played internat…
Van Da [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 31:08
Yen Ngo is number eleven of twelve children, born in Da Lat Vietnam. Her parents were both orphans and even though they did not receive a formal education themselves, they raised their kids to excel in school. After 1975…
Be Present [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 27:21
Gene Binh Nguyen, the youngest of two children, grew up with a widowed mom. His father died in the Vietnam war when he was just two months old. Because Gene’s father fought on the South Vietnamese side, his family was os…
#16 - The Ground Kisser [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 27:01
Thanh is the oldest of six children and was just eight years old at the Fall of Saigon. She was living in Tân Châu, just six miles from the Cambodia border and she remembers vividly the blood bath from the continued warf…
#15 - LIVE Episode! Butterfly Yellow [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:35
Thanhhà Lại was born in Vietnam in the middle of the war. She wrote about growing up there and leaving on a navy ship two days before the war ended in her first novel Inside Out & Back Again, which won a Newbery Honor an…
#14 - The World Looked Away [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 29:18
Tom Pham, was born in 1971 in Saigon as Hung Quoc Pham. At the end of the Vietnam War, his father Quoc Pham, a former South Vietnam Naval officer was sent away for many years in re-education camp. His mom was left with y…
#13 Bonus Episode: Miss VSA [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 20:23
VBP Student Spotlight: Growing up in Brooklyn New York, Vivian was not surrounded by many Vietnamese people. Her parents fled Vietnam by boat as refugees in 1978. And while she grew up in the largest melting pot in Ameri…
#12 - Bolinao 52 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 27:56
In 1988, a group of Vietnamese boat people attempted to flee their country in search of freedom. Once at sea, the boat's engine died, leaving over 100 people stranded in the ocean. What happens next is an unbelievable st…
#11 - Live Episode! Nailed It [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 24:14
In virtually every city, state and strip mall across the U.S., people get their nails done in salons likely owned by Vietnamese entrepreneurs. How did our community come to dominate the $8 billion dollar nail salon indus…