Council on Southeast Asia Studies: “Reconstructing Taiwan’s Role in the IndoChinese Refugee Crisis”

Event time: 
Wednesday, October 2, 2024 - 12:00pm
Location: 
Henry R. Luce Hall, Room 203 See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06520
Event description: 

The Council on Southeast Asia Studies presents

Alvin Khiêm Bùi, Research Fellow, University of Oregon’s Global Studies Institute’s US-Vietnam Research Center:

“Reconstructing Taiwan’s Role in the IndoChinese Refugee Crisis.”

This paper reconstructs Taiwan’s role in the IndoChinese refugee crisis. As a non-UN member state by the peak of the crisis in the late 1970s, Taiwan’s contributions to the IndoChinese refugee crisis are not recorded in UNHCR statistics, which detail the global nature of resettlement (across the “Global North”). By using Taiwanese and U.S. archival documents and reports from the then Free China Relief Association, I reconstruct statistics and stories behind the over 15,000 IndoChinese asylum seekers repatriated, integrated or resettled to third countries by the Republic of China/Taiwan. I use “IndoChinese” with a capital C to highlight the significant number of ethnic Chinese among those departing. I then juxtapose this archival investigation with an analysis of the 2023 Taiwanese public television documentary A Camp Unknown (彼岸他方). My analysis of texts and interviews in Vietnamese, Chinese and English focuses on the asylum seekers’ race/ethnicity, time (year) of departure, and terminology to transpacificize Critical Refugee, South/East Asian, Asian American/diasporic, and Cold War studies.

Alvin Khiêm Bùi will join Brooklyn College, City University of New York as Assistant Professor of History of Asian Peoples in Diaspora in Spring 2025. He received his PhD in History from the University of Washington, Seattle, and has published in Asiascape: Digital Asia on Saigonese motorbike YouTubers and their diasporic Vietnamese audiences.

Admission: 
Free
Open to: 
General Public