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With the sudden end of the Vietnam War in April 1975, throngs of Vietnamese fled their country. Within months, more than 130,000 arrived in the US, determined to begin their lives anew. Offering a study of this vital segment of the American population, this title features full-color photographs, fact boxes, information on genealogy, and more

This essay reviews the study of Vietnamese politics, specifically the debates about Vietnamese nationalism that have preoccupied scholars. The field has undergone two growth spurts——one in the mid 1960s and the other since the mid 1980s. These periods of growth were precipitated by Cold War politics and political developments in the United States and Vietnam, and the debates on Vietnamese nationalism evolved in a way that corresponded to trends in the field as a whole. When the field shifted, the tone of the debates and the major arguments advanced also shifted. Clearly, politics has had a deep impact not only on the development of the field but also on its scholarship.

The Vietnamese of Australian communities (VAC) still maintains many obsolete expressions originating from and related to the Southern Vietnamese political institutions of the pre-1975 Southern government. In addition, VAC has adopted English loanwords (ELs) through close contact with Australian English and uses them extensively to fill gaps in vocabulary. English loanwords have not only been borrowed in their original forms but were also nativized through the mechanism of loanwords and loan translation. Moreover, hybridised expressions have been coined by Vietnamese Australian émigrés through the compounding of one English or Vietnamese item with a Vietnamese or English item through loan blending.

This paper reports an acoustic study that examined the tonal features of Vietnamese language used by the Vietnamese community in Australia. The target of this examination is the comparative analysis of the phonetic characteristics of tones produced by Vietnamese in Australia and in Vietnam. Tones produced by young (n=10) and older (n=10) Vietnamese
Australians residing in Brisbane, Australia, were acoustically examined and compared with those produced by corresponding young (n=10) and older (n=10) Vietnamese residing in either Ho Chi Minh City or Can Tho City, Vietnam. The results showed that the main patterns of mispronunciation of tones by the young Vietnamese in Australia (YVA) include (i) confusing tones that are in the same registers or/and have similar characteristics, (ii) the tendency to pronounce complicated tones as simple tones, and (iii) confusing the diacritics marking tones. By "mispronunciation", we mean the differences in tones used in Brisbane, Australia from the tones used in Vietnam. This study also examined the frequency of the contour of all tones produced by all four groups. The results show significant differences in terms of the frequency and distribution of irregular and common tone contours between the YVA group and the three other groups, suggesting that the YVA group failed to produce the tones correctly or did not reach the required standard of tone production of contemporary Southern Vietnamese. In addition, the findings with respect to tone contours showed that the tonal range of the YVA group is narrower than that of the other three groups.

In the the spring 2018 issue of Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Martin Gainsborough's "Malesky vs. Fforde" offers to adjudicate a supposed dispute between two highly cited scholars of modern Vietnamese politics. Purportedly drawing on the philosophical traditions of ontology and epistemology, Gainsborough claims that we can gain traction as a field by looking closely into the preexisting belief systems that scholars bring to their research questions. Along the way, Gainsborough questions the plausibility of my own work and claims that I smuggle "liberal" values into my writing on Vietnam. In this response, I discuss five dimensions in which Gainsborough and I disagree and why they matter for studying Vietnamese politics. I do so by contrasting my choices with Gainsborough's scholarship (both in "Malesky vs. Fforde" and other work), illustrating how Gainsborough's research decisions lead him to faulty and damaging conclusions about my work.

From modest beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s, Vietnamese studies experienced a slow but consistent rise in Germany. In the GDR, the rise was connected first with close relations between the two communist states. Second, the area studies' concept favored Vietnamese studies as a subject of Southeast Asian studies, rather than as a side subject of sinology as it had been before. In both parts of Germany, the interest in Vietnam has grown, especially after its reunification in 1975. Since 1990, at least one place is continuing to teach the subject in the framework of the Southeast Asian Languages and Cultures Program. In this way, one of the two professorships could be preserved.

Vietnamese immigration to the United States is a relatively recent occurrence when considered within the scope of Asian immigration. Vietnamese immigration to the United States occurred in the latter half of the 20th century and continues steadily today. A vast majority of Vietnamese Americans arrived as refugees, thus their departure from Vietnam was marked with political turbulence, and their arrival in America was highly scrutinized in the news media and academic scholarship. Before 1975, Vietnamese living in the United States were students, professionals, and war brides. In the 1950s, their numbers were in the low hundreds. However, in the 1960s until 1974, the population of Vietnamese Americans swelled to about 15,000. It was during those war years that the small population of Vietnamese Americans participated in the antiwar movement in American colleges and universities. This group remains an understudied population in Vietnamese American history.

Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Vietnamese Americans have utilized their refugee status as a form of political and cultural thread stitching together a sense of identity and community out of displacement and loss. Among those classified as anti-Communist ethnic minorities by social scientists, Vietnamese in the United States are often compared to Cuban Americans who have been able to collectively align with the Republican Party to leverage representation and power in mainstream politics. With South Vietnam's collapse and the exodus of Vietnamese refugees from the homeland after the Communist takeover, overseas communities that formed in the wake of the war have been staunchly anti-Communist and vigilantly opposed to the new unified Vietnam under a socialist regime. Given the outcome of the Vietnam War, anticommunism has been the dominant community politics for Vietnamese Americans. This political ideology has often erupted in violence and controversy in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Vietnamese American anticommunism cannot be simply absorbed under the broader umbrella of Cold War McCarthyism that pervaded much of American politics in the 1950s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1989. This form of ethnic politics should be understood as a particular minority discourse fraught with tension and irresolution. Vietnamese American anticommunism ideologically opposes socialism in general, but must be historicized as a discourse emerging from the North Vietnam/South Vietnam civil strife, the evacuation of the South's urban elites in 1975, the exodus of the boat people from the late 1970s to mid- 1980s, and the reeducation camp experiences of men and women from the former South Vietnam. These particular historical events frame and help to reinvigorate anticommunism as a social movement in the United States.