Three Funerals For My Father

Three Funerals For My Father

Author: VietnameseBoatPeople.org March 10, 2022 Duration: 29:08
Jolie Phuong Hoang remembers how her family ran into hiding in a temple as her town of Đà Lạt was being taken over by North Vietnamese soldiers in 1975. She escaped Vietnam in 1983 with five of her older siblings on a boat that their father had built. After 14 months of waiting in Indonesia at the Galang I refugee camp, the siblings were sponsored to Canada. She finally felt free. But that freedom would come at a cost. In 1985 her parents and her younger siblings planned a second escape. But tragedy would change her family forever and Jolie would never be the same again. She grieved for many years, trying to find answers to her open questions. It wasn’t until she started to write down her feelings and her family’s story, did she begin to heal. She published Three Funerals for My Father, a story told in three distinctive voices: her father's, her younger self in Vietnam and herself as an adult returning to Vietnam to visit her father’s grave and memories of her younger sister. 

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
A Return Home [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 24:26
What does it mean to return to the country your family once fled? To walk the same streets, speak a familiar language in a new voice, and search for belonging in a place both foreign and deeply yours? In this episode, pr…
Cooking in Community [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 19:35
In Cooking in Community, we follow producer Tricia Vuong into the kitchens and conversations of a new generation of Vietnamese cooks in New York City. Amid a city defined by hustle and reinvention, a grassroots supper cl…
Breaking the Silence [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 17:03
Breaking the Silence follows producer Ngoc Bui in an exploration of how Vietnamese families are beginning to confront the trauma passed down through generations—fifty years after the Fall of Saigon. What happens when sil…
Do you speak Vietnamese? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 26:35
Do you speak Vietnamese?” For many in the Vietnamese diaspora, this simple question evokes not-so-simple feelings —whether you’re from the North or the South, educated before or after 1975, a fluent speaker or someone le…
Season 7 Trailer - THEN & NOW [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 2:40
The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon — a moment that forever changed the lives of millions of Vietnamese people and shaped the diaspora we’re part of today. It’s a milestone that invites us not…
The Sampan [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 24:16
Phillip, the oldest of three siblings, joined the military at age 18 and was deployed to Afghanistan. The Fall of Kabul and the resulting turmoil that led to a mass exodus of refugees, changed his perspective of his pare…
Live Episode! Mother, Métis, Memory [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 28:23
Mother, Métis, Memory is a documentary film by Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, whose practice is fueled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement. Through his co…
A Love Story [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:07
Kim Thái, shares the story of how her parents Chánh and Phượng Thái met, fell in love, and began their journey as husband and wife, only to get separated by the aftermath of the war in Việt Nam. During the height of the…
Ngày Về Của Bố [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 33:03
Siblings Hương, Karin Hạnh, Hedda Hiếu, and Benjamin Hoàng Nguyễn grew up together in the San Francisco Bay Area in a boisterous Vietnamese American family. In 2019, their father, Nguyễn Khánh Hưng, a first-generation im…
2023 Mỹ Việt Story Slam [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 37:12
The Vietnamese Boat People’s fourth annual Mỹ Việt Story Slam celebrates stories from the Vietnamese diaspora, and explores the theme of Ba, Mẹ ơi. Five storytellers were selected from an open call for submissions, to sh…