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“…that’s why I became an oral historian. Because I just didn’t know what other way I had to reformulate the stories that my parents never told me.”
Previously the curator of UC Irvine’s Southeast Asian Archive, an archive that documents the histories of populations from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, Dr. Thuy Vo Dang is currently in her first year as an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. Her most recent book, A People’s Guide to Orange County, which she published with co-authors Elaine Lewinnek and Gustavo Arellano, is an alternative tour guide to Southern California’s landmark and pop culture-ridden county, documenting “sites of oppression, resistance, struggle, and transformation in Orange County, California.”
Her research focuses on Asian American communities and ethnic studies, and she is currently doing work centered around building archives for groups that have been historically marginalized.
In this interview, she sat down with us to talk about what inspired her to do this work, and the importance of oral history, and graciously imparted her wisdom to those wanting to preserve their own history!
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How did your background inspire you to do this work and research?
I grew up all over Southern California, but when I came to the United States, I was a refugee from Vietnam - I was very small, and I came with my large family. We were resettled by a church in upstate New York, so pretty close to the Canadian border. My parents didn’t speak any English - none of us did, this is the early 1980s. They found out through different social networks (this was before the internet and before actual social networks), they learned that there was a growing community of Vietnamese refugees in Orange County, California. So, they put us on a Greyhound bus and headed west towards Orange County, and we rebuilt our lives here.
Growing up in a very diverse region of California, I did see a lot of other people who looked like me and other people of color. But there was a lot of racism and challenges growing up poor and as a working-class family. I think all of that really shaped my desire to do work that could help my community, particularly around the idea of claiming my voice and claiming the tools to write our own stories. I think a lot of that unfolded in my own home where I didn’t hear any stories and I certainly didn’t have any kind of access to artifacts or documents - I didn’t even have any baby pictures of myself.
So, without any of this material culture to represent my family story, there was a huge gap in my own knowledge about my identity and my family. So much of the work that I do is personal, even though it sometimes manifests in my research and writing about other groups. Often it is about figuring out what tools we have, and what are the ways we can build the capacity for groups that have been historically and continue to be marginalized by dominant and oppressive forces. One way that I think is so compelling and powerful is, of course, by building archives on our own terms. That’s why I became an oral historian because I just didn’t know what other way I had to reformulate the stories that my parents never told me.
In what ways do you think oral history impacts and influences differently than just reading about history in a textbook?
History in textbooks does not cover everything. We know that there are so many gaps. So, the scholarship that forms what ends up making it into history books is done by researchers looking into archives. And usually, they’re looking at institutional archives, formal archives, whether it’s state, government, university archives, historical societies, museum libraries, or very official spaces that hold these primary source documents. So, when they continually look at the same types of sources and aren’t attentive to how these archives are often incomplete (people who work in archival stewardship know this very well), we know that archives are incomplete. They’re not neutral and they’re not objective - the processes by which they’re assembled really speak to the priorities of any organization or the curators or the individuals that oversee those collections.
So, when you have these textbooks that depend on these types of written sources, these records, they’re the same ones repeatedly - we kind of reproduce the same types of narratives about history. Good historians will often look at alternative sources, such as oral sources and testimonies. Sometimes they must turn to things like popular culture, and music. Oral histories form a really viable source where textual records might fail us. Not to say that oral histories offer a more complete type of narrative, it is a different type of narrative. It’s often one that gets at how people felt, the texture of their experiences. We may know the chronologies of any particular event.
So, for me, it's like oral history really opens this opportunity to engage the emotional and the affective. It’s not about just getting at the facts. It’s really trying to piece together how did significant historical events transform lives, transform communities to shape the way that people think about something? And then that often reverberates into the next generation in very subtle and nuanced ways. So, I think to me that’s the power of oral history, that when you read it, you read oral history in combination with all these other sources, and you get a much fuller account of something in the past.
I can imagine that doing this work and research can be heavy at times. How do you motivate yourself to keep going?
It is heavy. When I was at UC Irvine, I developed a project called Viet Stories, where I went out to interview my elders - a lot of first-generation refugees who had lived through war, who had lived through losing their country and coming here and starting over again. I hadn’t realized how hard it would be when I set out to do it. I felt really prepared, I understood the technology, you know, recording and having my backup. So even as prepared as I was, and with all the experience that I had had before, the emotional toll that it took on me was something that I really wasn’t quite prepared for until I felt all these things.
So, it was one day when I had scheduled two oral histories on the same day. I was on my way to my second interview when I just felt suddenly overcome with emotion and I pulled over, parked my car, and started crying. Sometimes people were sharing with me stories that they had never told anyone else, not even to their own children, even though their children are about my age.
You know, in retrospect, I understand now that it was really me not giving myself the space and the time to process being the listener, being the holder of these stories. And so, from that moment on, I found myself a therapist. I went regularly, and I talked about a lot of these experiences and how it was impacting even my own family dynamics because I have kids. I’ve learned now to really give myself the time and the space, and sometimes the distance away from the interview as needed to process the experience that I was listening to.
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I feel like you not only learn a lot about your community as a whole but also learn a lot about yourself. What would you say you’ve learned about yourself in this process?
I’ve learned so much about myself. I think being an oral historian has been one of the biggest learning curves, the most rewarding aspects of learning too because the oral history that I conducted did change me. And they change me in different subtle ways, or they change me in really kind of big and obvious ways.
And I do have this funny story to share, that really speaks to my learning. I was in my 20s doing these oral histories, and this was in the early 2000s when there was this trendy beta fish plant that people were making. It was like the succulents of that generation. I made this very elaborate arrangement for every narrator that I interviewed for this project that I did on veterans in San Diego. It was ridiculous. Most of the people who received my gift were very polite, and they thanked me. One narrator said, “I don’t want that. Why are you bringing that to me?” And I was like “Oh. It’s nice.”
I was just so struck by her very candid “I don’t want to keep this thing alive. I don’t want to deal with it.” And I remember being taken aback at first and then saying, “I’m really sorry, I’ll take this back, take this home,” But I think that example really taught me you literally cannot use a one size fits all approach to people.
When you do the work, whether it’s research, community volunteer work, or whatever it is, when you’re working with real-life people, you must be attentive to all the ways that they have different needs. It might require different types of exchanges, and reciprocity will look different. That kind of messiness is something that I’ve learned along the way and through the grace of people who would tell me directly that’s foolish and stupid and call me out.
So, learning to take criticism, learning to pivot, and then recognizing along the way that each narrator is teaching me something about myself. It’s hard, like when you’re in grad school, you’re often trained to be this ideal researcher, and you’re reading a whole lot. You’re thinking there could be a way to prepare yourself so that you’re ready for anything. But I think the only thing that teaches you experience is obviously the best teacher. And then if you have openness to listen and to receive feedback and criticism, even when it’s hard to hear, then you have, I think, the ability to do the responsive oral history or ethnographic fieldwork that is relational dynamic, and interactive.
How do you think your work has impacted how you teach or mentor others?
I did a lot of community work aside from my research and fieldwork for my dissertation and for the past 20 years, I volunteered with organizations in San Diego and Orange County. Volunteer work, community organizing, is a really difficult thing to do. And to stay in it for the long haul you really pick up some skills that are very transferable to the classroom. So, some of the things that I’ve learned are to see myself as a facilitator.
The idea of equitable co-creation of historical knowledge transfers into my pedagogy. My pedagogy is really about co-creating a classroom environment. I’ve curated learning materials and together we work through these materials in the community with each other. So, I’ll always do things like try to establish consensus at the beginning about the structure the students want in the class. I usually do something called community agreements which is often very popular in community organizing work.
You arrive together, whether it’s for a retreat session or for the year-long project that you’re undertaking, and you build a set of agreements that will operate the entire time here together. Those agreements serve to make everyone feel supported and to make everyone feel like they have a role. So yeah, my teaching principles are really grounded in community work.
What advice would you give to anyone who wants to preserve their history as a marginalized group, especially within their own families, but doesn’t know how to broach the topic or even where to begin?
Well, I can still remember when that was a really daunting idea for me. My first assignment that ever allowed me to explore oral history was for a class in college called Asian American Women, and the final assignment was to interview an Asian American woman, so I took that as inspiration to start asking my mom questions. My mom and I don’t have that kind of relationship where we share things with each other. I’m one of nine kids, so she has had her hands full for a very long time. I saw that assignment as this kind of door opener for me.
When I asked her “Can I interview you for this assignment?” She flat-out said, “No. I don’t want to do this, and plus, go talk to your dad, I don’t have anything important to say.” And that taught me a lot about women of a particular class and generation, who often feel like their voices are not significant enough to be recorded. And then there is work that you need to do to convince them that their stories matter.
So, I used everything at my disposal. I finally resorted to saying I need to interview you so I can pass this class, I need to get an A. Upon hearing that she yielded, but it required a lot of maneuvering, like following her around the kitchen, squatting on the floor, helping her pluck vegetables, and doing all those things so that I can ask her a few questions - but I was persistent.
So even with the most kind of hesitant or unwilling narrator, there’s always a way to kind of reach them. I think for students who just want to get started, starting with a family archive is a really great place to begin because you’re already so personally connected and motivated that there’s this thread that ties you to this project. If they’re interested in working with communities that are not their own, they need to be willing to do the work and do the homework. Do the reading, talk to people, and learn from people from within the community.
When you’re trying to work with a community that’s not yours, I’ve seen a lot of folks making two different types of mistakes. The first one is coming in thinking, “I have so much expertise to give, I’ve learned all these tools, and now I’m going to apply them to your community.” That doesn’t usually work out very well. It’s extractive, and it’s very elitist. The second kind of mistake often made is being too humble in the sense of, “I’m from the outside, everything makes me anxious, and I just want to be a fly on the wall and listen.” At some point, you must engage. So, I think it is about communicating your willingness to learn and make mistakes, that making mistakes is a part of the research journey. That it isn’t something you’re trying to avoid. But to be willing to talk through your mistakes and apologize if necessary.
Whether you belong to that community or not, you will make some missteps along the way and that’s okay if you are willing to fix those mistakes and work in partnership and collaboration with people from the community. Especially elders who have been around a long time and have a lot of wisdom to impart. Youth who are rolling up their sleeves, jumping in, asking questions, and trying to learn, we can learn a lot from them too. Their energy and enthusiasm are usually infectious to me. I love working with young people because that’s when I understand some of the issues that we, who are bridging the generations, have not yet done well, which makes younger people still feel confused, or feel like there’s a gap.
Thuy Vo Dang is one of 36 scholars participating in Coastline’s NEH Higher Education Faculty Institute titled, "Fifty Years Later: The Vietnam War Through the Eyes of Veterans, Vietnamese, and Southeast Asian Refugees". This program is being offered through Coastline to enhance undergraduate teaching and expand upon the intricacies of the Vietnam War. To learn more, visit NEH Higher Education Faculty Institute at Coastline.
