Letters to VTP: Can Social Networking Help Preserve Vietnamese Culture?

To the editors:

Re: “Why OneVietnam?–Confessions of a Viet Kieu” (Op-ed piece)

As a generation 1.5 Vietnamese living in America, I often ponder the continuation of our cultural values and mores as defined by first generation Vietnamese Americans.  In seeking to know my cultural heritage and hoping to pass it on to my children, I worry about how I can re-claim my cultural inheritance and whether our Vietnamese culture will still exist for future generations.  Can the ubiquitous social networking tool help us preserve what remains of Vietnamese culture?

While growing up in America, the question of which cultural mores to subscribe to constantly haunted me.  In the beginning, I strayed away from my cultural roots.  I suppose I acclimated myself to American culture because it was the easier path.  Later, I discovered that a foreign-born, non-white person who acclimates himself to America doesn’t necessarily become more acceptable to the Americans he interacts with—embracing a culture and being accepted by that culture are two different matters.  Somehow, though, this discovery appeased that once nagging ghost, and it re-oriented my journey of rediscovering the traditions of my parents and their generation.

I once believed that if I could go back to Vietnam I would be so immersed in the culture that osmosis would work its magic and I would find the missing cultural pieces I was looking for.  I no longer think that way.  I’ve learned many Vietnamese Americans who visited Vietnam have come back to relay that Vietnam is an entirely different country—culturally and morally—than what it was before 1975.  By their testimonies, Vietnam today seems to hold very few values that embody the values of our grandparents.  It seems we cannot look to Vietnam for the cultural values we want to preserve.

In her posting, “Why OneVietnam?–Confessions of a Viet Kieu,” Lana Huyen raises an important point when she writes of grandparents who “won’t be around for much longer.”  For her, and for me, they represent the “people where the Vietnamese culture is prominent.”  Their experience of the old culture will die with them and as Lana stresses, “when it’s gone–it’s gone.”  Indeed, while they are still with us we can turn to them—even with the difficulties of linguistic and generational barriers—and learn about our Vietnamese culture from them.

Still, I question how much can be learned and passed down to the next generation.  No doubt, social networking sites, such as OneVietnam Network (OVN), connect us and bring us together in common goals.  Even so, how many of our elders use social networking?  For them, “social networking” means personal face-to-face interaction, not virtual online connection.  The younger generation may know how to utilize social networking, but for the older generation, this new tool may add another barrier–in addition to the linguistic and generational barriers already present–to meaningful communication.

I did not miss Ms. Huyen’s point that OVN provides a solution where networking can help us connect with each other to find whatever we’re trying to understand about our Vietnameseness.  I can see there’s much to be gained in social networking.  I especially value and appreciate the existence of OVN.  Its purpose to connect Vietnamese people and its causes to help the underprivileged in Vietnam are testimonies of the goodness in the second generation of Vietnamese Americans.  Nevertheless, I question how the online connection will serve us offline and in real-time with those individuals “where the Vietnamese culture is prominent” so that we can learn, preserve, and propagate their values and mores.

I admit since joining OVN recently I have been following other members’ postings and learning more about Vietnam and my fellow Vietnamese.  However, I discern that sometimes what I’ve gleaned from short messages reflect only a veneer.  Other times, though, when the veneer is interesting enough it pulls me in for deeper inspection and introspection.  Yet, I wonder: Will we be able to get beneath the veneer of social networking and learn enough from our elders to preserve what’s left of Vietnamese culture?

Robert Pham, a generation 1.5 Vietnamese American

March 16, 2011

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