Vietnam and the Contested Memory of April 30, 1975
Was the fall of South Vietnam something to celebrate or grieve? New grassroots initiatives in Vietnam are working to diversify and democratize historical memory.
On April 18, several major streets in Ho Chi Minh City were closed for military parade practice in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam on April 30. The roadblocks, coinciding with rush hour in the biggest city of Vietnam, led to massive traffic congestion. The next day, Bích Hồng, a well-known contract anchor for SCTV, a state-owned cable television network in the city, posted a complaint on her Threads account:
Many thanks to the parade. Because of you, instead of taking 45 minutes to get from District 12 to District 7 [in Ho Chi Minh City], it now takes an hour and a half. [Cars] inched forward bit by bit on the road. As someone born and raised in Saigon, I excuse myself not to feel happy, excited, and proud. It’s very annoying.
Her short and slightly sarcastic message traveled fast. Within hours, it has been reposted on various platforms, including Facebook, the most popular social media channel in Vietnam, with almost 84 percent of the population being users. Shortly after, Hồng became a target of online attacks in Vietnam.
Her post was condemned in the domestic press as “offensive” and “shocking.” Netizens criticized her for being unsympathetic and above all, ungrateful to those working hard to prepare for the biggest ever nation-wide celebration of the liberation of the south. Her working contract with SCTV was immediately terminated.
A few days later, Hồng publicly apologized for being “unable to control negative feelings” and “imprudent with words.”
In other parts of the world, overseas Vietnamese communities have held other commemoration of the same occasion, though with different names: the day of Losing the Country of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), or Black April, or the National Day of Resentment (quốc hận). Such appellations have been condemned as distortions of Vietnamese history in the domestic media.
2025 also marks the 30th anniversary of the normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam. While the Vietnamese government has quickly upgraded its relations with its former wartime enemy, Hanoi is not ready to reconcile with the historical narrative related to the defunct RVN regime. Although many state discourses have focused on reconciliation, Vietnamese authorities have shown only half-hearted efforts toward reconciling with those who lived under the defeated regime.
Yet a number of bottom-up initiatives from those on the winning side are working to diversify and democratize histories, despite rigorous domestic censorship, to right the wrongs against the “puppets of the Americans.”
A Day of Victory or a Day of Mourning ?
There has been no top-down punishment in the case of Hồng, at least for the time being. In a country where one can be imprisoned for Facebook posts, as in the case of the high-profile journalist Huy Đức, or face an administrative fine simply for saying a piece of rock resembles itinerant monk Thích Minh Tuệ, the public surveillance and quasi-uniform criticism of Bích Hồng on social media channels are far from surprising.
The first part of Hồng’s comment – her complaint about the traffic jams caused by the parade rehearsal – was shared by many other citizens working and living in the biggest economic hub of the country, formerly known as Saigon. Singer Lê Trung Cương was also attacked for complaints about the parades, supposedly the biggest ever taking place in the city. Yet it was the second part of Hồng’s post that proved particularly controversial.
More precisely, her remark evoked the uncomfortable reality that the victory of April 30, 1975 came at the expense of a fully sovereign state, which the government of the unified country has never officially recognized. In Vietnam, which ranked 173th among 180 surveyed countries in the 2025 Press Freedom index by Reporters Without Borders, a party-centric single version of history is taught across all levels of education and in the state-monopolized media. Hồng’s post flew in the fact of that narrative monopoly.
Many Vietnamese dissidents, both at home and abroad, have supported her freedom of expression. They have been joined by others – those who lost their country with the fall of Saigon and their descendants – who do not share in the celebratory spirit surrounding the commemoration.
The idea of allowing those who lived under the now-defunct RVN to grieve for the lost country, and to be spared from the dominant liberation-oriented narrative, has been proposed by various politicians and intellectuals. Back in 2007, in an interview with the BBC, former Prime Minister Võ Văn Kiệt emphasized that not everyone was celebrating. “When mentioning the war,” he told the Vietnamese media, “a million people feel happy, but another million feel miserable.”
A week after Hồng’s post, Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) General Secretary Tô Lâm made a sensational speech that has been widely welcomed and circulated on social media:
Today, Vietnam and the United States – once former adversaries – have become comprehensive strategic partners, cooperating for peace, the welfare of the people of both nations, and regional security and stability. Therefore, there is no reason for Vietnamese people – sharing the same bloodline, descended from the same mother Âu Cơ, who always yearn for a united and prosperous country – to hold onto feelings of hatred, division, and separation. National reconciliation does not mean forgetting history or erasing differences, but rather accepting diverse perspectives with a spirit of tolerance and respect, in order to move towards a greater goal: building a peaceful, unified, strong, civilized, and prosperous Vietnam, so that future generations will never have to witness war, separation, and hatred, nor the losses faced by their ancestors.
Yet, for the time being, those living inside Vietnam do not really have a choice in how they commemorate April 30, as the online attacks on Hồng showed. Across the country, households are requested by community leaders to display the national flag. On TV, on the radio, and on local loudspeakers, red songs were played. On April 30, all TV channels made their content uniform: to focus on the anniversary, highlighting the program on the occasion of the Liberation of the South and the Unification of the Country. Just like on other “red” days, which occur almost every month red performances are live broadcast.
“It remains unknown how much of the budget is allocated to these celebrations,” said Trường, a Hanoi-based civil servant.
Punished for the Past
In 2022, the renowned singer Khánh Ly felt the effect of crossing the line. The singer, who comes from Hanoi, immigrated to the United States in the wake of the “liberation,” but was later able to return to Vietnam.” She chose to perform the song “Mother’s Legacy” (Gia tài của mẹ) by celebrated composer Trịnh Công Sơn. The song made her famous but remains banned in Vietnam, because it uses the line “20 years of civil war” to refer to what the CPV calls the “War of Resistance Against America.”
To this day, any reference to the conflict as a “civil war” – which would imply the existence of two equal combatants – is forbidden in Vietnam.
In 2024, singer Đàm Vĩnh Hưng, a pop icon from Ho Chi Minh City, was fined $1,000 and subjected to a nine-month suspension of performance activities for wearing a costume resembling the military uniform of South Vietnam. The top-down decision stated that Đàm Vĩnh Hưng committed a vaguely defined administrative violation according to Article 11 of the 2020 decree on arts performances. The article stipulates that “Performing artistic acts using costumes, words, sounds, images, movements, means of expression, and forms of performance that are contrary to the moral standards and customs of the nation negatively impacts public morality, community well-being, and mentality.”
During this nine-month period, Đàm Vĩnh Hưng reportedly had to cancel his shows in the United States. Domestic media outlets, however, shied away from mentioning exactly what violation he had committed.
The coercive amnesia caused by erasing the RVN from history has at times led to unintended consequences. In 2021, the magazine Tổ Quốc, under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, paid a fine for a report on the Capitol Hill attack in the United States. The magazine ran a picture that included the national flag of South Vietnam. According to several informants familiar with the story, the young reporter responsible for incorporating the picture had no idea what the flag represented – and thus why its inclusion in the report would be forbidden.
“Celebrating the 50th anniversary of April 30 as ‘Liberation Day’ does more to divide than to heal,” said Andy Bùi, a boat person who left Vietnam in the 1980s. “While it’s framed as a triumph over American imperialism, the deeper implication is the erasure and delegitimization of the former South Vietnamese government, military, and the millions who supported them.
“For many in the South, this day does not represent liberation, but loss. True national reconciliation requires recognizing the pain and perspectives of all Vietnamese – not just those on the winning side of history.”
In fact, discrimination against those closely related to the defunct RVN regime is still rampant. The status of “war invalid” and the accompanying benefits are only given to those from the winning side, and not those from the losing one. Less than two months ahead of the 50th anniversary, concerns were raised about the welfare of former soldiers and disabled veterans of the RVN who were injured during the Vietnam War during the United Nations’ review of Vietnam’s implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) on March 7, 2025.
Đông from Huế (not his real name), was a civil servant under the RVN after being selected in a competitive merit-based process. His two brothers served in the army and the police under the same regime. Upon “liberation,” the three of them were sent to reeducation camps for varying lengths of time.
Yet for Đông, who turns 80 this year, the fall of Saigon mostly means an end to a life of chaos and bloodshed.
“It’s good that the war is over,” he said. Before April 30, “bombs fell, bullets strayed. Every day, we heard the sound of bombs.”
Upon the reunification of his country, however, his family members were pulled apart. In 1991, they were given the opportunity to settle in the United States as part of the so-called Humanitarian Operation. Đông decided to stay to take care of his ancestral lands, while his two brothers went to the United States and rarely returned to Vietnam.
Đông never had the chance to contribute his knowledge to the unified country. Due to his time in the reeducation camp, the intellectual bureaucrat became a manual laborer upon his release.
He explained that he was old enough to be accustomed to liberation rhetoric. “I chose to stay,” said Đông. “I have to accept it.”
Ngọc, from Phú Thọ province, is the granddaughter of a former soldier under the RVN regime. Her family is still bearing the consequences – a background check permanently denied her the chance to become a civil servant in Hanoi.
Silence and Sorrow of the Winning Side
The tendency to portray the RVN and its people as pro-American puppets or and the rest of Vietnam as happy winners reduced people with diverse opinions to a single stance.
“Don’t Mention My Name” by non-fiction writer Phan Thuý Hà is a collection of anecdotes by those she met in her self-funded field trips. The book reflects the prevalent and pulsating fear Vietnamese have of telling their own war stories or listening to the stories of others. This is true for both sides, but especially so for those from the victorious North. Those who lived through this history, or their children and grandchildren, worry that their own stories might invite trouble from the Communist government – whose pride and legitimacy are rooted in the military victory and manipulated memory.
Yet there is much to grieve, even for those who lived under or fought for the CPV prior to April 1975. In his 2018 book “A l’épreuve de possession” (“on the possession test”), anthropologist Paul Sorrentino, an associate professor at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in France, disclosed the deep sorrow of the war experienced by many Vietnamese families. While the deaths of Vietnamese on the winning side are often collectively commended as sacrifices for the independence and reunification of the country. But for their family members, they are nothing but “bad deaths” in the Vietnamese tradition: dying far from one’s homeland, dying in absolute solitude, dying by being dismembered or mutilated, dying without descendants, or a proper funeral of one’s own. According to traditional Vietnamese beliefs, those who died fighting for Vietnam’s liberation could not have their own souls liberated. The glorious titles conferred on them in death failed to comfort the families they left behind.
With no help coming from the state immediately after the war, many families resorted to spiritual mediums to help locate the remains of their loved ones. “There are 208,824 bodies of soldiers that have not been found. According to these official figures… there remain over half a million soldiers whose families have not been able to recover their bodies,” wrote Sorrentino.
In her 2007 book “Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past,” historian Patricia Pelley, an associate professor at Texas Tech University, noted that Vietnamese historiography has been mostly written by CPV cadres rather than real historians. In officially sanctioned tellings of the past, the war must be against a foreign aggressor; Vietnam has always been united, only to be divided by foreign forces and their “puppets.”
A few days prior to April 30, in the heart of Hanoi, a poster featuring a dove sitting on top of a U.S. military helmet was displayed near Hoàn Kiếm Lake. In light of online outcry, it was removed.
More Than a Single Celebration or Commemoration
Living outside Vietnam allowed the diaspora to disclose diverse feelings regarding the demise of their own country. Phi-Vân Nguyen, an associate professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Science of University of Saint-Boniface, Canada, recalled that there were two commemorations in Ottawa in April 1976 by Vietnamese diaspora groups in Canada: one to celebrate the liberation of Saigon and the other to mark a year of exile.
“There are indeed very different feelings regarding the end of the war: some celebrate it while others mourn it,” said Nguyen. “Among those who mourn, not everyone shares the same sentiments about their fallen country.
“Many blame each other for the problems that paralyzed Southern Vietnam in the final years, such as corruption, command errors, poor leadership, etc. There is a genuine internal debate among these Vietnamese refugees about whether their memory of the South, or even the use of the flag of the RVN, should detach from the legacy of former President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, for example. For these various reasons, there was no unanimity in commemorating this event in the early years.”
For Duyên Bùi, a lecturer of Political Science and International Studies at Hawai‘i Pacific University, commemorations of April 30 as the Fall of Saigon or Ngày Quốc Hận by Vietnamese diaspora reveal how the losing side in the war attempts to heal and make sense of their reality and trauma.
“It is how a community commemorates this day that can reconcile past wounds and hurt. I’ve seen how time has allowed families across generations to finally share their grief and pain, creating more understanding and recognition for the struggles that those before had to overcome. The efforts to record family history, formally or informally, is the attempt to not have those narratives be silenced,” said Bùi.
“As people process war trauma, others have taken this day to look forward on how to build community within and beyond Vietnam. One of those ways is to focus on similar values that were fought for then and now, such as freedom, particularly freedom from oppression in whatever form that has taken.”
Phi-Van Nguyen is hopeful about the people-to-people reconciliation, despite the state’s liberation discourse.
“It is clear that all the commemorations held have not prevented the normalization of diplomatic relations or the development of economic ties,” she said. “If we speak of ‘reconciliation’ among Vietnamese people, it is already taking place on several levels and for various reasons. We can no longer count the Vietnamese abroad who return to the country for family, professional, and other reasons.”
There Is Still a Way Because There Is a Will
Despite the fractured narratives surrounding April 30, 1975, it is undeniable that many inside the country are in jovial mood in this 50th anniversary year.
“They [decision makers] make the celebrations big and boastful to show how great and strong Vietnam is nowadays. It helps scare away potential invaders,” says Cầm (not her real name) from Huế province, who survived the war but lost both legs because of an unexploded bomb in her own garden in the 1980s.
“I am looking forward to the parade in Russia as well,” she added, referencing the appearance of Vietnamese soldiers in Russia’s military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Vietnamese film director Đặng Nhật Minh was dispatched to Saigon to film the moments the liberation army took over the city. In his 2018 memoir, he described his experience, which was akin to that from other major artists hailing from the North: He was excited to liberate the South, only to find out that he had been deceived by propaganda in the North.
For all its faults, the Republic of Vietnam had a relatively free press, a decent civil society, and a thriving economy. The “liberation of the South” did not lead to individual liberty across the nation but instead extended the North’s system of censorship and control. Vietnam has never been recognized by the United States as a market economy, and it is now among top’s world jailor of journalists.
“I believe that one of the tragedies of humanity is the lack of accurate information. It is fertile ground for slander and the reign of evil. Conflicts, contradictions, and misunderstandings between individuals and between nations also stem from this,” wrote Đặng Nhật Minh.
The first surefire and sustainable step toward reconciliation is to guarantee freedom of expression so that more and more voices and memories continue to be heard and heeded. Many individuals and collectives from the winning side have been navigating perilous and porous passages to bring hidden truths to light.
In his clandestinely published 2008 book “Living with China,” writer Tạ Duy Anh from Hanoi recalled 1974, when China attacked and seized the Paracel Islands, then controlled by the RVN government. At that time, the people in the North were kept in the dark, so they did not feel the loss, and the war was seen as a matter for the Southern government.
Tạ Duy Anh proposed designating April 30 as a “Day of Reconciliation and Forgiveness,” with a view to ending discrimination among Vietnamese citizens across different historical periods and political regimes.
Non-fiction writer Phan Thuý Hà from Hà Tĩnh province in the North published “I am the daughter of my father,” which details the lives of South Vietnamese soldiers who had no choice but to stay and suffer for different reasons.
Hoàng Minh Tường, a novelist from Hanoi, viewed different segments of the Vietnamese community as parts of a dragon longing for reconciliation. He named his novel “Dragon Parts” (Những mảnh rồng), and it was published in 2018 in Germany to avoid potential censorship.
Trịnh Hữu Long, an exiled journalist and editor-in-chief of Luật khoa tạp chí, an independent outlet banned n Vietnam, has also launched a project on reconstructing the history of the RVN. A signature project was dedicated to portraying the year of 1975. On the occasion, Trịnh wrote in an open letter:
I hope that the Vietnamese people of 2075 will not have to struggle to find materials about 2025 as we are currently searching for materials about 1975. The collective memory of the nation needs to be recorded and preserved; otherwise, that nation will remain like children, endlessly confused about their identity in this world… I hope that the Vietnamese people of 2075 will no longer have to engage in exile journalism but will be able to publish freely in their homeland and exercise their right to journalism under a solid rule of law. You will have a freer press space than the generation of journalists in the early 20th century, the journalists of the Republic of Vietnam, and, of course, the journalists of 2025. I also hope that the Vietnamese people of 2075 will no longer be divided into Communist and Republican factions but will see each other as equal members of the same national community. Our generation – due to the faults of the previous generation and our own – has not learned how to love one another, and even if we do, we have not learned how to express that love. I hope you always find warmth in each other within the spirit of nationalism.
Trịnh’s vision might take a long time to come true. Huy Đức, who was among the pioneers in rewriting Vietnamese history, is now in prison, 12 years after his groundbreaking work “The Winning Side” was published online. Phan Thúy Hà had to resort to a pseudonym when publishing her seventh book on national reconciliation. Two administrators of the once-popular Facebook page “Diary of Patriotism,” which sought to rewrite Vietnamese histories, have been imprisoned and have died, respectively.
Yet ordinary people might take small and simple action for long-term reconciliation.
As as English teacher in Hanoi said: “One should begin with saying that the 30th of April marks the end of the war and reunification of the country.”
By Christelle Nguyen – The Diplomat – May 10, 2025