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
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