The end of the war in 1975 began one of the largest refugee movements of the late 20th century. In the final days of April, tens of thousands of people left by aircraft, helicopter, and ship in what became known as the first wave — often families connected to the southern government, military, or American organizations.
The years that followed brought reeducation camps for many former southern officials and officers, new economic policies, and hardship compounded by international isolation and conflict with Cambodia and China. Beginning in the late 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people left Vietnam by sea in small boats — the group history remembers as the boat people. Many were ethnic Chinese Vietnamese. Estimates of those who died at sea vary widely and remain uncertain; the crossings involved storms, overcrowding, and piracy.
Survivors typically spent months or years in refugee camps in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, or the Philippines before resettlement. Later programs — the Orderly Departure Program, the Amerasian Homecoming Act, and the Humanitarian Operation program for former reeducation camp detainees — brought further waves through the 1980s and 1990s.
Many Vietnamese-American families carry this history without discussing it directly. Children often learn it in fragments: a photograph, a scar, an offhand comment at a funeral, a relative who is never mentioned. Asking gently, and being willing to hear a story that stops halfway, is often how it gets passed on at all.