Movement and Change

Abstract

In the years following the fall of Saigon in 1975 there was a mass exodus of Vietnamese from their country as refugees. North Vietnam claimed the Republic of Vietnam in the South after a long and bitter war firstly against the French, once the ruling colonial power, and then, when they were defeated in 1954, against the United States of America. The Vietnamese who fled from communism in the following years sought sanctuary in the refugee camps of Southeast Asia, and later many hundreds of thousands resettled abroad permanently. Some moved swiftly to their new homelands; many more waited for months and years in the refugee camps, and it is this latter group with which this book is primarily concerned.