The fall of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War as well as the most dramatic turning point in the history of the Vietnamese diaspora. From the mid 1970s and the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees were resettled in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. Their lives were defined by concurrent and overlapping experiences of national loss, family separation, and difficulties among their loved ones in Vietnam amidst their own survival and adaptation in the new societies. They constructed their exilic identity through a host of media and built exilic communities through internal migration. Starting in the late 1980s, legal migration led tens of thousands of other Vietnamese to Little Saigon communities. In turn, they have enlarged the economic and political prowess of those communities, and helped to shift the collective experience from an exilic identity to a transnational identity.

This chapter analyzes the United States’ relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam from 1975 to the present. The termination of war in 1975 brought conflict of a different sort. Washington retained the wartime trade embargo and rejected Hanoi’s demands for “reparations.” Vietnam ignored US requests to account for possible prisoners of war and missing in action (MIA) on its territory. Attitudes shifted in the 1980s. America’s détente with the USSR opened possibilities for Moscow’s ally, Vietnam. Now in dire straits economically, Hanoi’s new leaders revamped the nation’s stagnant economy and opened trade with numerous nations. Vietnam was sufficiently pressed that in the 1990s it bowed to harsh US demands for what was called normalization. Diplomatic relations and trade followed. Vietnam–US relations took an ironic turn in the new century. As China emerged the dominant power in East Asia and expanded into the South China Sea, America increased its military presence in the region and formed a strategic partnership with Vietnam. Wary of China, Hanoi needed US assistance. But it feared dependency on its former enemy. Americans still condemned Vietnam’s authoritarian government and human rights’ abuses. Both seemed content with a relationship a Vietnamese diplomat called the “Goldilocks Formula”: “Not too hot, not too cold.”

How, this chapter asks, does twentieth- and twenty-first-century Haitian theater shed new light on Haitian history and ask burning questions of the nation’s present? Turning to drama has enabled many Haitian dramatists to reach out to wider audiences including illiterate or semi-literate people, as they straddle the divide between oral and written, as well as French and Creole. Many of the dramas explored here retell Haitian origin tales of dismemberment and reassembly. I identify a tradition and dynamics of adapting, remaking, reworking, and remixing that span much Haitian theater. Haitian drama often not only remakes the original material itself but also changes ways of seeing the world from a Haitian point of view. Haitian dramatists’ approaches to translation, adaptation, remaking, and remixing sometimes change the original language, or shift the political and cultural contexts to a Haitian worldview. These acts of rasanblaj often reflect on Haitian history, culture, and current events through a process of constant remaking and call-and-response collaborative interaction. Haitian drama portrays the Haitian people as the main actors and agents in their own stories.

The epilogue explains that the resilience and stubbornness of Le Duan and other communist leaders hindered the country’s reconstruction and development after the Vietnamese Civil War finally ended. In the decade of life and leadership left for Le Duan, few positive changes took place in Vietnam. The 1978–9 incursion into Cambodia eliminated the Khmer Rouge threat, but the decade-long occupation of that country by Vietnamese forces that followed brought worldwide condemnation. Vietnam contained the Chinese incursion into its own territory in 1979, but anti-Chinese campaigns domestically prompted an exodus of tens of thousands of productive members of society. Through all this, Le Duan’s unwavering adherence to Stalinist principles of economic transformation hampered economic growth. His death in 1986 paved the way for Đổi mới, the “renovation” policy that introduced market reforms. It also set the stage for the normalization of diplomatic relations with the United States – and of life itself for average Vietnamese. Although Vietnam’s American War and Fourth Civil War have been over for nearly fifty years, the struggle for their memory continues.

If the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia helped to shatter an already ailing anti-imperialist internationalism, a concomitant refugee crisis offered the rival vision of human rights internationalism a remarkable opportunity to fill the void. What remained of the anti-imperialist left contributed little to resolving the issue, yet the human rights internationalists stepped into the breach. Former French radicals turned humanitarians worked with Vietnamese refugees, Eastern European dissidents, and human rights groups such as Doctors Without Borders to organize a campaign against human rights violations in Vietnam. They chartered a hospital ship to rescue the refugees, which amounted to interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation-state, showcasing a new kind of humanitarian interventionism. At the same time, they internationalized the campaign, even winning the support of the US government, which was only too happy to use the crisis to rewrite the history of the war, rebrand itself as a virtuous nation, and shine a harsh spotlight on the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Despite efforts to deflect charges of rights violations, the SRV could do little to explain itself in the face of undeniable evidence of repression. If anti-imperialism helped secure their international victory in the 1960s, human rights sealed their defeat a decade later. The remaining radicals in the North Atlantic fought back but had little to offer as an alternative. With the core notions of the Leninist problematic in question, the radical left’s vision of internationalism lost its appeal, particularly among a new generation of activists looking for a way to do good in the world. And with anti-imperialism’s influence over the wider progressive milieu slipping, human rights internationalism made a giant leap in consolidating its hegemony, so much so that even some committed anti-imperialists ended up accepting its terms as the least bad option.

The arrival of 19,000 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ after 1979 came after nearly two decades of immigration restriction, when Britain was entering its deepest recession for fifty years and just as Thatcher’s New Right government’s marketisation and anti-statist policies were being enacted. If this signalled new and significant challenges facing these refugees to Britain, this chapter shows that the reception and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam also saw a number of significant continuities with earlier periods. Internationally, this included the continued importance of colonial and Cold War geopolitical considerations, which pushed Britain into reluctantly participating in the UNHCR-led Vietnamese resettlement programme. Domestically the reception programme emphasised the ongoing importance of voluntary action and revealed the persistence of housing problems, poverty and racism for the new arrivals. This all took place against the backdrop of the continued emergence of an ever more diverse – ‘multicultural’ – society where the state and refugee agencies alike were being reshaped by their own increasingly heterogeneous workforces. And yet, despite this apparent new openness, educational and linguistic disadvantages of the refugees themselves collided with limited state support and high levels of unemployment to ensure that the Vietnamese were often only able to establish lives for themselves at the margins of British society.

During the late 1970s, US policymakers attempted to resume formal relations with China and Vietnam, respond to the Indochinese diaspora, and institutionalize human rights into US foreign policy. These efforts all became deeply enmeshed. Although attempts to normalize relations with Hanoi failed, they cast a long shadow. Thereafter, US policymakers demanded a withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia and a “full accounting” of missing American servicemen were before Washington and Hanoi could resume official talks. These conditions tabled formal negotiations for nearly a decade.

Human rights and humanitarianism became increasingly entangled in this fluid environment. US policymakers described the Indochinese diaspora as both a human rights and humanitarian concern and implemented the Refugee Act of 1980, which codified a human rights definition of refugee with a humanitarian exception clause. The advocacy of the Citizens Commission on Indochinese Refugees (CCIR), select congressmen, and growing Holocaust awareness helped solidify these connections in American thought and law. Nonexecutive actors also created significant momentum for expanded admission opportunities for Indochinese refugees. Because the White House remained preoccupied with other issues, the information, pressure, and publicity the CCIR and its governmental allies garnered were instrumental to creating a broad base of support for refugee admissions.

Between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, more than one million Vietnamese “boat people” fled from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam by crossing the South China Sea. Some 700,000 were permanently resettled more than two dozen countries across the world. This essay compares the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in West Germany and the United States to illuminate similarities and differences in international and local responses to the influx of this refugee population within the context of the Cold War.Covering topics such as government responses, humanitarian interventions, public perception/reception, and refugee networks in the US and West Germany, the essay emphasizes connections overlooked in previous studies that examine Vietnamese boat people resettlement in only one national context.It underscores the multilateral impacts of the Vietnamese boat people exodus and its legacies in contemporary Germany and America.