Ever notice the colour of the flags at a Vietnamese restaurant? Well, we’re tired of binaries

Our generation’s role isn’t to adjudicate between competing narratives of 1975, but to build spaces – digital, cultural, emotional – where Vietnamese from all shores can rediscover one another. When a 70-year-old refugee from Springvale and a 20-year-old student from Hanoi both paused to reflect at the Yarra River, I glimpsed the future: not forgetting history, but allowing once-divided worlds to overlap gently.

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At a recent Melbourne gathering, I watched a 29-year-old architect – her parents’ escape story tattooed on her forearm – show a video of her first trip as an adult to Ho Chi Minh City. “The traffic terrified me,” she laughed, “but the bun rieu tasted like coming home.” Around her, elders nodded with grudging approval. This is how healing begins: not with erasure, but with expanded possibilities.

This 50th anniversary year, I dream of new rituals: elders placing family photos beside NASA’s livestreams; kids asking not “What did we lose?” but “What can we build?” The war taught us to see only divisions – between North and South, between those who left and those who stayed. Amanda’s trajectory shows another way: an arc that bends toward reconciliation.

The war tried to divide us: victors versus victims, communists versus refugees. But the human story is always more complex – like my uncle, who fought for the South but now admires Vietnam’s economic growth, or my Australian-born Vietnamese cousin, who broke down watching a cai luong performance in Vietnam, finally understanding why her mother had always hummed those melancholic melodies.

As Amanda Nguyen and Pham Tuan watched the sky together – separated by politics but united by stardust – they showed what diaspora children have always known: No border drawn by war can contain Vietnamese dreams. From space, they saw no borders, only one luminous planet.

The stars have been waiting for us since long before we learned to divide ourselves.

Like Amanda gazing at our shared atmosphere, I’m learning to hold both my cities – Melbourne and Saigon, past and present – in one grateful, unbroken vision. History tried to define us. We’re choosing to redefine ourselves.

Jenny Tran is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and storyteller at 100 Story Building. She is passionate about identity, belonging and bridging cultures across generations.

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