Vietnamese Americans can only succeed if we look forward. Here’s how.

Every April 30th, for the last 36 years, our community has commemorated this day with solemn mourning and reflection on the fall of Republic of Vietnam, the war’s dead, and the refugee’s plight. We honor and memorialize the sacrifices made, both in war time and in the difficult years that followed—eternally enshrining our parents’ generation in our collective memory as our own ‘Greatest Generation’.

As Vietnamese-Americans, we are forever grateful to our parents for their tremendous struggle to give us the opportunity to succeed. Though we certainly have problems we cannot ignore, we 1.5 and 2nd generation Vietnamese-Americans have produced surgeons and scientists and soldiers, attorneys and an astronaut, engineers and entertainers, small business owners and a billionaire. We have maintained the difficult balance of a Vietnamese identity with our American nationality. But we remain forever children in our parents’ eyes.

We are entering the third generation of Vietnamese born and raised overseas–including ‘millenials’ born in the 1980s to 1990s as well as my own young children. Like their peers in Vietnam, for them the Vietnam War is ancient history. They are fighting bravely in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are creating multi-million dollar companies in Silicon Valley that could become the next Google. They instantly mobilized flood relief for Hurricane Katrina victims and worldwide protests for Internet freedom in Vietnam. These young Vietnamese are connecting to each other in Vietnam, Japan, Europe, and Australia on Facebook. They are a wordly, wired generation using ideas and technology we can only dream of to create a new, global Vietnamese culture… a kind of ‘Viet Kieu Nation’. Shall we burden them with our sorrow, our hatreds, our petty differences and prejudices? Or do we let them take the lead, to go where no Vietnamese has gone before?

We cannot forget our history. But let us not be burdened by it. I humbly propose that in 2011 we stop thinking about ourselves as the victims of fate but instead as the makers of our own destiny. Are we an ‘exile community’, forever in mourning? Or are overseas Vietnamese like a lotus blossom, rising from the mud..a phoenix, rising from the ashes?

Trust in this new generation of young Vietnamese. Trust that they carry the values you have taught them. And trust that they have the ideas, the energy, and the passion to ignite the world and the history books with the greatness of our people.