1 Year Ago: Red Ship Release, Tour, 'Celebrating' Empire with Untold Refugee Stories Pt. 1 of 2 (maybe 3)

Red Ship came out digitally a little over 1 year ago, and the vinyl released 6 months ago.  Also about a year ago, I reconnected with Princessed bandmates Amy Shapiro and Meagan Perkins for a short mid-Atlantic tour around Exotic Fever's 25th anniversary shows. It was such a gift and I hope we get to do it again in the future some day.  Red Ship, and the singles that led up to it, was Star Matriarch's introduction back into the music world after over 10 years away due to auDhd burnout.  Since it came out, I've been so fortunate to have been welcomed by the Tacoma DIY scene, forming new friendships, connecting with my fabulous band mates Kyle Cornwell and Jenn Schmidt.

Much of Red Ship was about my experiences as a sex worker in my 20s. The songs that were recorded last - Mỹ Lai to Rafah, It Won't Be Forever,

Xin Cho Tôi, Interchangeable - were explicitly about being a product of Imperialism and intergenerational and ancestral trauma. It's quick and easy to say that Mỹ Lai to Rafah was about solidarity with Palestine, and that Interchangeable was about racialized misogyny, but at the very heart of it all it was about the grief and rage I'm confronting about living a colonized existence. I'm a product of violent US Imperialism, and the US and Israels' actions across the globe from Venezuela to Iran to Lebanon to Palestine are constant, enraging reminders of that violence.

The 4th of July only serves as another loud ass reminder, especially with the 250th anniversary.

That tour was also when I reconnected with one of my aunts and got the details on how she, my mom, and six of their siblings came to the US when the American War in Vietnam ended.  They arrived circa 1979-1980, and I was not prepared for what I heard. Today is the 250th 'Independance Day', and I will 'celebrate' by sharing my family's refugee story, which I've been processing for the past year, and how it relates to Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and daily living here in the USA.

I wanna thank @kuwaisiana for their recent Wartime Summer Sadness post on IG. Just that phrase alone encapsulates much of what I've been struggling with in terms of how to show up on the socials, which kind of reflects how I've been experiencing life.

Before I share the harrowing journey my family made across the fucking Pacific Ocean which included pirates and deserted islands and malaria, you need to know all that led up to my grandmother making the painful decision to send her children into harms way in search of a better future. And it pertains to what you may be experiencing living in the USA right now, with expensive food and gas prices, ICE, the techno fascists, our climate crisis, the war against trans and disabled people, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and so on.

The Back Story

My mom's family is from Saigon, in southern Vietnam. The US has been teaching us that communism was what made life unsafe for the Vietnamese people, without acknowledging how feudalism, French colonization, and US imperialism played a role in the destabilization and division of Vietnam. A super quick history lesson for those unfamiliar - in the mid to late 1800s, Vietnam, along with Laos and Cambodia, was colonized by the French with the support of the US - there was slavery, indentured servitude, resource extraction (the whole point), and the imposition of French culture and language as being superior. Vietnamese resistance forces brutally kicked them the fuck out in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and the nation expected full independence and unification. However, shortly thereafter at the Geneva Conference, the better resourced colonial powers split the country into two parts - North and South. It was supposed to be temporary to transition the French out and for Vietnam to establish full independence. It's important to note that at said conference, the US quietly stated their desire to take over Vietnam for the resources since they'd invested so much in the French project, and knowing that the resistance was primarily in the North this division gave the US opportunity to shape South Vietnam accordingly.

I'll pause while you look the 1953 Iranian Coup and how the CIA, MI6, and BP (yes, the oil company) were involved and why.

Instead of free and fair elections, the US intervened under the guise of "nation-building" to sabotage any chance of such in South Vietnam, installing a puppet president named Ngo Dinh Diem. He was hugely unpopular, especially compared to Ho Chi Minh in the North. Naturally, elections were canceled. The Vietnamese people did not have opportunity to consent to this division or to their shitty US backed government in the South, this was decided by richer colonial powers. South Vietnam was essentially taken over by the US and North Vietnam reacts by sending insurgency groups (the Viet Minh) into the South to work with pockets of resistence there (Viet Cong).

This US meddling also happens in Iran, South Korea, and really ALL OVER. You can look up US-led coups and interventions - not just in Asia but also Africa, Latin America. The story you heard was always "we had to stop the spread of communism." There's always a shitty lie to justify rich white men in power taking land that doesn't belong to them, that's the one told for Vietnam. I'm not saying communism wasn't a factor, of course the greedy oppose any whiff of egalitarianism, but it's a White Savior-esque lie to claim all of it was entirely out of the desire to 'protect humanity' from it. The US and Europe wanted resources and dominance over such resources. It's why the US adopted Israel as its baby bully. Look up the Rimland theory. The impact is marginalization and oppression of the people who built their lineage on these lands for millennia. I don't ever want to hear anyone blame 'shithole' or 'developing' countries for their poverty and pain or for their refugees. US and European patriarchal greed created those conditions.

And thus from about 1955 to 1975, the American War happened, aka the 2nd 'Indochine War'.

The US frames the fight as 'freedom and democracy versus communism', but the primary driver for Vietnamese resistance was the desire for full independence. The Viet Minh and Viet Cong included non-communists. This is not to say that there wasn't an extremist, nationalist fervor under the banner of communism. As a reaction to the generations of violent colonization and feudalism, there certainly was and it put millions of Vietnamese people in danger. Put people under enough duress and they reach for reasons to fight and categorize each other as enemies.

The US dropped bomb after bomb not just in Vietnam but also Laos and Cambodia. Countless atrocities occurred where US troops massacred innocent civilians, like at My Lai. If we live in the US, we certainly know how many American lives and dollars were lost to this war. But we're awful at considering the impact on 'the others'. The Viet Minh and the Viet Cong were not completely innocent either, as much as I love to view or even romanticize them for the fight against Imperialism, they too committed heavy atrocities against civilians and those they deemed enemies. The North invaded the South in 1973, and April 30, 1975 was the Fall of Saigon/Reunification Day, depending on who you talk to.

This is where it gets complicated for my family, being from the South, and having self-identied as capitalists. My mother was fluent in French, she was educated in the French way. The Westerners really sold this idea of capitalism as 'freedom' while any other economic system is anti-freedom. If you're in the US you know very well how potent that messaging is and it is no different in other colonized places. Commerce and trade have always existed, independent of capitalism, but those who stand to continually profit want you to think that the only way to freedom and prosperity is with private ownership and profiteering.

We as a species are wired for survival, and to survive is to have autonomy AND community. There were millions of Vietnamese folks who didn't want to 'take sides', they just wanted to live without fear of violence no matter what, they wanted to freely thrive and you can't blame them for it, especially when so much has been taken from them. Any abuser will target those most vulnerable, and the colonial powers left much of Vietnam vulnerable and hungry for self-determination, and depending on ones' environment and experience and community, self-determination looks different to different people. Some felt survival was ensuring no remnant of Imperialism was left in Vietnam, some felt survival was to flee, some felt survival was to go along with whatever the current authority decided.

Furthermore, where there has been longstanding instability, division, scarcity, and starvation, there is extremism. As much as I love to root for the anti-Imperialist powers in history who also happened to be Vietnam's winners in the story, there was also horrific violence at the hands of those who aligned with the North. In the aftermath of the war, countless South Vietnamese, civilians as well as former military, were sent to re-education camps and prisons without due process or definitive sentences, just endless imprisonment. Many died of starvation and medical neglect in these camps. Many were subjected to compulsive education about communism. The new authorities put restrictions on income and the people were heavily taxed, even as families starved. There was fear over who was still disloyal to the new authorities and anyone who did not explicitly, loudly proclaim commitment to the nationalist cause was unsafe. So while yes, my heart does pound with pride over the fact that Vietnam kicked the colonizers out, it also grieves over the deep harm and loss at the hands of these winners.

In any war, countless people lose to all sides. This is also why I place the blame squarely on those who extracted and created the division in the first place, the fucking colonizers.

The 'communists' were not the ones who conducted aerial bombing campaigns (aka 'carpet-bombing') in not just Vietnam but also and Laos and Cambodia. We don't hear much about Laos or Cambodia here in the US because who cares about Brown people, amirite? The 'communists' were not the ones who extracted land and other natural resources from folks living there. The 'communists' were not the ones who gave reason for latching on to any kind of reactionary ideology in the first place. Had the French (and Japanese and Chinese) left Vietnam the fuck alone, would there have been a need for such a big resistance movement? And look at Vietnam now. Did communism make Vietnam, a growing global economic power, a danger to the world like the US predicted?

I'm no scholar on geopolitics. I just have lived experience as someone with a colonized heritage and existence. But I see parallels to Vietnam as I watch our greedy, belligerent heads in power carelessly bombing and threatening Iran, withholding resources from Venezuela and Cuba, demonizing and marginalizing trans, queer, and disabled people, blocking access to care to those most poor and medically vulnerable, putting Brown and Black people in ICE concentration camps, shooting Black babies in cars, building thirsty AI data centers, destroying Indigenous land for further extraction, deepening our climate crisis as the billionnaires build fancy bunkers. Iran, like Vietnam, has been painted by the US as a dangerous, rogue state in the Southwest Asian part of the Rimland and instead of pooling our abundant resources into caring for the most marginalized, we talk flippantly about 'bombing them back to the Stone Age', just like we said about Vietnam back in the day. And now, the Iranian people and their allies are paying for it dearly, and the rest of the world will feel pain for it, too. We're paying for this war with our tax dollars, as well as Israel's genocide campaigns in Palestine and Lebanon, while millions of us can't afford healthcare or groceries or childcare or housing and those at the top are making bets on oil futures.

Part 2 - My mom's journey in the middle of the night from Vietnam to dangerous open waters to the Malaysian Navy to the completely uninhabited Kuku Island. A journey where she and her siblings nearly died multiple times and watched countless Vietnamese refugees die on the way to where...? They had no idea yet. Stay tuned for the full story in Part 2.