“What Tam Tran Taught a Professor in American History"
I first met Tam, a bright-eyed, quietly energetic, young Vietnamese woman, when she enrolled in my US History since the Civil War honors seminar at Santa Ana College in 2002. She was the top student in the class, and her essays were models of clarity, logic, and insight. With a background in the history of American foreign relations, I saw to it that students were exposed to America’s deeds and misdeeds overseas, strongly focusing on US empire-building in the Pacific basin, beginning with the Spanish-American War. As an opponent of the Vietnam War, I taught my students about Lyndon Johnson’s groundless claim regarding the second Gulf of Tonkin attack, the Pentagon Papers revelations and the My Lai Massacre. Tam came to my office shortly after our seminar discussion of these matters and said that from the standpoint of Vietnamese boat people, America’s war in Southeast Asia had at least one positive consequence; it provided a means for victims of Vietnamese communists to get out of the country and immigrate to the United States.[1]
She caught me off guard. I had never thought of how the war might look to such victims, who have certainly have a legitimate point of view. To this day, I see the Vietnam War (or the American War, as people in Vietnam call it) as a colossal mistake for the United States, for many reasons. But Tam forced me to think about the that conflict from another perspective, that of families like her who were and remain grateful for the opportunity the war afforded them to live better lives in the United States. If by circumstances of history and geography, I had been a Vietnamese refugee, I could see how my view of the war might have been dictated by that plight. This is a profound lesson that the student taught the professor. I learned that the truths of history are many-sided and at times conflicting and even paradoxical.
[1] Boat people were refugees from Vietnam after the end the Vietnam war, primarily from about 1978 through the 1990s.
Questions to Think About and Discuss
- Was something wrong about the way Tom Osbourne taught the history of the United States’ Vietnam war? If so, what was it? If not, what was he doing right?
- How did Tam Tran and Tom Osbourne see American history from a similar perspective? How were their viewpoints different before Tam Tran confronted the professor?
- How can complex, even paradoxical, historical truths be used to shape or express political policies?
