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Vietnam

Homecoming: Finding My Tribe in Vietnam's Central Highlands

Police documents printed on onionskin crinkle audibly with the rise and fall of my uncle’s breath. His eyes rove over the documents produced on an archaic typewriter with a wild menagerie of Vietnamese punctuation—squiggles, dots, and tiny circles—scrawled in by hand. We are in a one-story, doorless box that serves as the local police station of a hamlet in the lush coffee-plantation region of Vietnam’s Central Highlands.

Dams in the Mekong Region: Scoping Social and Cultural Issues

The standard social concern surrounding large dams and their associated reservoirs is the displacement and resettlement associated with these large infrastructure schemes. While such impacts remain of great concern, social and cultural issues associated with dams in the Mekong Region go well beyond questions of physical upheaval.

Dams and Resettlement as Development: A Case for Building Good Practice

Introduction

Dams have been a part of the economic development model of almost all nations of the world. At some stage of their development, most countries with water resources that can be economically exploited have built dams for energy, irrigation, and drinking water. Hydropower provides a non-polluting source of energy that may be generated in increasing amounts for the growing needs of growing populations.

Mother's Milk in War and Diaspora

Ten years after Samine Sophat arrived in the United States as a war refugee, her daughter planned to get married. Following the Cambodian custom, the groom offered a monetary gift that Mrs. Sophat could have retained as mother's milk money, in recognition of the work of bringing children to adulthood. As a widow and a remarried woman, Mrs. Sophat had struggled against great odds to ensure her children's survival in the 1970s war, starvation and flight to the United States. But she confided, "I couldn't bring myself to keep the money.

Fishers Among the Mangroves

The inhabitants of the small villages of Thailand's mangrove swamps, who have fished for thousands of years, have recently initiated several efforts to restore their environment and safeguard their fish supply. However, since the early 1970s a seemingly innocuous creature - the black tiger prawn - has threatened their way of life.

As the prawn industry has expanded through Asia and Latin America,d it has destroyed large tracts of mangrove forests, which are ideal sites for prawn farms.

The Diplomatic Dance: Cambodia on the International Stage

Cambodia has not known peace since well before the United States' withdrawal from Saigon on 30 April 1975. With each palace coup, and even with the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, many Cambodians believed that finally the wars were at an end. They welcomed Pol Pot's soldiers with hope for the future.

But the war did not end with Pol Pot's arrival, nor with Vietnam's liberation of Phnom Penh in January 1979 from the horrors of his regime. Nor has it ended with Vietnam's withdrawal in September 1989.

Reflections on Cambodian History

In 1975, a spokesperson for the newly installed communist regime in Phnom Penh claimed proudly that because of the revolution "2,000 years of Cambodian history have ended." By "history" the spokesperson seems to have meant the sum total of Cambodia's past, as well as all the narratives about it prior to 1975.

Editorial: Can Leopards Change Their Spots?

Since World War II, the United States has frequently flexed its political muscles by assessing which side in a given struggle is likely to come out victorious and then backing it. If the winner is not obvious, then all too often the US policy has been to support both sides of a conflict so that "our" team will be the one in power.

Buddhism and Revolution in Cambodia

From April 1975 until the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia at the every end of 1978, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot attempted to institute one of the most radical revolutions in modern history. The government of what was called Democratic Kampuchea set out in a ruthless manner to create a fundamentally new order. It was to be a racially "pure" society, in particular one purged of Vietnamese. It was to have no antecedents; all institutions of the past were to be destroyed.

Hmong Refugees and the US Health System

Although many Americans would prefer to forget about the Vietnam conflict, many of today's controversial issues stem from that era. One of these issues is the increased Southeast Asian refugee population in the U.S.

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