AMERASIA JOURNAL

Please help support this documentary film by new director/filmmaker Tony Nguyen. In his feature film, he searches for answers to the unsolved murder of 27 year old Vietnamese American journalist, Lam Duong, who was killed in 1981. See kickstarter website for information about the project.

ENFORCING THE SILENCE is an hour-long documentary that explores silence and loss in the story of a young community worker who may have been murdered for expressing his political beliefs.

Lam Duong founded the Vietnamese Youth Development Center in San Francisco and published a liberal newspaper that reprinted stories from communist Vietnam following the Vietnam War. On July 21, 1981, the 27-year-old was shot dead outside his apartment in broad daylight. Local police have never convicted anyone in the killing, so the motive remains unknown. But within days of Lam’s murder, news spread that a shadowy, anti-communist group had claimed responsibility, sending a chilling message to Vietnamese refugees everywhere: stay in line with your political views or risk death. Between 1982 and 1990, five more Vietnamese Americans—four of them journalists—were violently killed, many believe for political reasons. Vietnamese journalists are the largest group of immigrant reporters murdered on U.S. soil, claiming five lives out of the ten immigrant journalists that have been killed in America since 1981. All the Vietnamese murders were linked to a terrorist group in the Vietnamese American community, but police and federal officials have yet to solve any of the cases, including Lam’s.

Thirty years later, new filmmaker Tony Nguyen unlocks the mystery of Lam Duong’s life and death, and uncovers truths that Vietnamese Americans have never publicly explored. For the first time on film, Lam’s loved ones, federal investigators, and present-day journalists speak out about their experiences and reveal the risks that Vietnamese Americans have faced for exercising their first amendment rights in the U.S.

Mixing personal interviews with startling historical and present-day footage, ENFORCING THE SILENCE provides a disturbing in-depth look at a war-torn community that continues to struggle to find its place in a democratic society. As America finds itself entrenched in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, this film offers fresh insight into the long-term costs of war.

SUNDAY, MARCH 27, LOS ANGELES: “Remembrance of Hisaye Yamamoto to Be Held in Little Tokyo”

A remembrance of short story writer and essayist Hisaye Yamamoto will be held on Sunday, March 27, at 2 p.m. in the Garden Room of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, 244 S. San Pedro St. (between 2nd and 3rd streets) in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo.

Yamamoto, the author of “Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories,” passed away on Jan. 30 at the age of 89. Her stories of Japanese American life in California have been published in mainstream literary journals as well as Japanese American newspapers and Asian American anthologies. She is best known for such stories as “Seventeen Syllables,” “Yoneko’s Earthquake,” “The Brown House” and “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” all based on the experiences of the Issei immigrants and their Nisei children.  “Hot Summer Winds,” a drama based on two of Yamamoto’s stories, was aired on PBS in 1991, and she was featured in “Rabbit in the Moon,” a 1999 documentary about the internment.

Speakers will include King-Kok Cheung, author of “Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa”; Wakako Yamauchi, author of the play “And the Soul Shall Dance” and the book “Songs My Mother Taught Me”; and Mitsuye Yamada, author of “Desert Run: Poems and Stories” and “Camp Notes and Other Poems.”  Naomi Hirahara, author of the Mas Arai mystery series, and other members of Pacific Asian American Women Writers West will read excerpts from Yamamoto’s works.

The Japanese American Cultural and Community Center and the Aratani Endowed Chair, Asian American Studies Center, UCLA, are co-presenting the event.

The event is free and open to the public, but RSVPs are requested for planning purposes.  For more information, contact J.K. Yamamoto at (213)629-2231, ext. 148, or yamamotojk@gmail.com.

The Asian American Studies Center and Department at UCLA decry the video “Asians in the Library” apparently produced by a UCLA student. As many have observed, including an insightful critique by UCLA’s Asian/Pacific Coalition, this rant — beyond the action of an individual — is clear evidence that we still have much work to do before we can claim to live in a “post-racial” society.  The Asian American Studies Department and Center call upon the UCLA administration to take immediate and specific action regarding the student in question, but more significantly, to respond institutionally since the video addresses larger issues of campus climate and culture.

“Asians in the Library” is a travesty on many levels, representing an attack on Asian and Asian American students and their families and undermining UCLA as a global university with deep ties to communities and institutions in Asia and other parts of the world.  It entails a “new racism” by foregrounding students who speak Asian languages and have different family traditions, as it insidiously groups and attacks UCLA’s American-born as well as our international students of Asian ancestry.  As the only University of California campus without a diversity requirement, UCLA surely needs to implement a diversity requirement that will expose every student to the task of living civilly with people of different origins, backgrounds, orientations, and beliefs, whether they are born here or come from abroad.

Asian American Studies at UCLA emerged from the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s to enrich the experience of the entire university by contributing to an understanding of the long neglected history, rich cultural heritage, and present position of Asian Americans in our society.  This type of prejudice and use of derogatory words cannot be tolerated at a campus that claims that “Diversity is a core value of UCLA.”

Professor Lane R. Hirabayashi, Chair
UCLA Asian American Studies Department

Professor David K. Yoo, Director
UCLA Asian American Studies Center