In October 2020, hundreds of Vietnamese Republicans in Orange County descended upon the parking lot of Viet My Magazine in cars adorned with pro-Trump flags and signs, while an additional caravan of over 250 cars traveled around the area—some clad in South Vietnamese military outfits—in a drive-by demonstration of their support for Donald Trump. The incident was no fluke; a 2020 survey of Asian American voters found that, though a majority of Asian Americans lean Democratic in their political orientation, almost half of Vietnamese Americans supported Trump, while only ⅓ supported Biden. Of the 7 Asian Americans arrested at the U.S. capitol on January 6th, 5 were Vietnamese American.
To outside observers, the support for Trump, coming from a group whose recent immigration history has benefited from liberal immigration policies, may seem counterintuitive. But to those familiar with Vietnamese American politics, support for Donald Trump fits within a larger conservative culture among Vietnamese American communities. Scholars and activists attribute this to a number of reasons: conservative religious values, particularly among Vietnamese Catholics; an association of left-wing politics with the anti-war movement, which many South Vietnamese saw as a betrayal of America’s relationship with South Vietnam; right-wing misinformation is promulgated widely in Vietnamese media, making it difficult for Vietnamese-language speakers to access properly vetted information. But perhaps the most prominent factor is an undercurrent of anti-communist and anti-China sentiment that remains a cornerstone of Vietnamese American political values, largely as the result of communist persecution and Chinese imperialism in Vietnam. Nguyen Kim Binh, vice president of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, described a Vietnamese tendency to “idolize” Republican presidents due to the party’s hardline tactics against China, as well Vietnamese people’s own investment in the idea of the American dream.
Unlike their refugee elders, however, younger Vietnamese Americans tend to lean more heavily Democratic, in line with other Asian American groups. These discrepancy between generations is often described as a major source of conflict in Vietnamese families. As one put it, “I’ve given up trying to educate them on the matters…they’re so far up Trump’s ass, it feels impossible to take them out” (Nguyen, 2020). This conflict is particularly nefarious in an ethnic enclave already torn apart from their ancestry by war, beset by intergenerational conflict over language and cultural differences. Vietnamese Americans may feel pressure to change the minds of their elders or cut them off entirely, which risks widening an already gaping chasm between generations, threatening to alienate young Vietnamese Americans from their ancestry. Yet when located within a larger social context of historical, collective, and interpersonal traumatization, there is an alternative way to understand the generational divide over Trump. In this paper, I argue that, when situated within theories of intergenerational trauma, the generational divide appears as a natural part of the process of working through intergenerational trauma. By accepting it as such, 2nd and 3rd generations of Vietnamese Americans can bear witness to their ancestors’ histories of trauma and recognize the wisdom of elders while remaining grounded in their own political values.
Here, Volkan’s psychodynamics of large group identity offers important insight. Volkan argues that the distress associated with experiences of collective traumatization can be alleviated through adoption of group identity; thus, in times of war, protection and maintenance of group identity becomes a matter of survival (Volkan, 2001). When members of a group who have experienced a collective loss of group identity—in the case of Vietnamese refugees, through forced displacement and exile from their homeland—this is not just a loss of identity, but an ontological annihilation: the shattering of a way of being and understanding the world. To survive the loss, the exiled group will seek to adopt new group identities at any cost. As Mimi Thi Nguyen (2012) has previously written, Vietnamese refugees have sought to adopt a new group identity as Americans—in particular, as American Christians— in order to become legible to the nation-state. But because the adoption of a new group identity is always precarious and never complete, members of the first generation remain consumed with the task of survival and have few resources for repairing the trauma that caused the rupture in the first place.
The second generation receives this trauma as a “deposited image” —that is, the receipt of traumatized self-images that the second generation feels compelled, whether consciously or subconsciously, to repair (Volkan, 2001; Volkan, 2018). Yet as Volkan suggests, this repair often leads to generational conflict, as the second generation copes with the traumatized self-image in ways that conflict with the first generation. In line with this theory, research has shown that second generation Vietnamese Americans are highly sensitive to their parents’ trauma and often feel a burden to compensate for their parents’ losses, and yet their method of compensation often conflicts with parental desires (Huynh, 2024). This discrepancy should not be cause for concern, but might be seen as an early phase of working through the deposited image of Vietnamese trauma; that is, the very fact that the 2nd and 3rd generations feel capable of criticizing the American government is evidence that Vietnamese Americans have achieved greater security and reduced their sense of precarity.
The goal of this paper is not to excuse or pathologize Vietnamese support for Trump, nor is it to pontificate on the individual psychologies of Vietnamese Trump supporters; rather, my aim is to explore the larger group dynamics and the relational impact of the generational divide between elder Vietnamese conservatives and younger Vietnamese liberals through the lens of intergenerational trauma. In other words, I aim to ask: how does collective trauma get transmitted through generations, and how does it get digested by subsequent generations? What role does Vietnamese religion play in alleviating or worsening this divide? How might these methods for repairing trauma put later generations at odds with their elders? How might the 2nd and 3rd generations reconcile their elders’ conservative political beliefs with their own progressive value system without slipping into relativism?
The generational divide over Donald Trump has been well-documented in Vietnamese American communities, with the first generation highly supportive of Trump, while the younger generation tends to lean more liberal. To outside observers, that a generation of refugees would support a white nationalist, anti-immigration administration might seem both inconceivable and counterintuitive. But to those familiar with Vietnamese American politics, support for Donald Trump fits within a larger conservative culture among Vietnamese American communities. Scholars and activists attribute this to a number of reasons, but primary among them is anti-communist sentiment and conservative religious values. In this paper, however, I argue that all of these factors must be understood within the larger context of intergenerational trauma and the collective impact this has on group identity. Furthermore, I suggest that the generational divide of Vietnamese American communities might be read as a transmission of both intergenerational trauma and evidence of this trauma being repaired.