Precious Objects : Vietnam’s Postwar Internees Didn’t Casually Hand Works to CSUF

Diem Xuan Le stood in a gallery strumming the humble lute he had made himself a dozen years ago, thousands of miles away. He crafted the instrument out of bomb scraps he found in Vietnamese “re-education camps,” a fancy term for forced-labor camps the North Vietnamese established after the 1975 fall of Saigon. As long ago and far away as that was, the memories are painfully fresh.

“I made it,” Le said recently in halting English, “because I was very sick, homesick.”

That aluminum lute is one of about 30 objects made by Le and other internees that are included in “Southeast Asians in California: A Celebration and a Journey,” a 200-piece exhibit on view through Dec. 22 at Cal State Fullerton’s small Anthropology Museum.

The show includes religious figurines, traditional clothing and musical instruments, photographs and memorabilia from Laos and Cambodia. But it concentrates on Vietnam as part of the university’s commemoration this year of the 20th anniversary of Vietnamese refugees’ resettlement in the United States and their achievements here.

The re-education camp objects attest to the tremendous emotional fortitude as well as creativity of the people who made them under unthinkable conditions, exhibit organizers say.

“Seeing the number of objects we have (brought) together dramatically hits home not just how many of these things were made,” said Cal State Fullerton anthropology professor Joseph Nevadomsky, who oversaw the project, “but how much art and skill and craftsmanship was carried out in the camps.”

Incarcerated without explanation--some for a dozen years or more--prisoners arose before dawn and toiled until dark, subsisting mainly on rice, corn or dried root. They were South Vietnamese army officers, political officials and others. At least 40% who went into the camps never came out, exhibit organizers say. No medical care was provided. Many men were tortured or executed for alleged espionage.

Many camps occupied abandoned U.S. military bases, where internees found the raw materials for their handiwork: aluminum cargo skids, bomb casings or airplane parts. They used handmade knives to carve wood or cut metal, nails and barbed wire for engraving, and concrete for filing or sandpaper.

Cung Duy Nguyen, a doctor, performed forbidden surgeries on fellow prisoners in the dead of night, using a crude aluminum scalpel, probe and needle, which are included in the exhibit. For sutures, he used thread from his own clothing. He kept his instruments in a canvas bag he made from the top of an old jeep.

Other men, many self-taught in such endeavors, made intricately engraved aluminum mirrors and combs for their wives (visits were allowed occasionally). They also crafted family portraits, pipes and eating utensils.

Cal State Fullerton anthropology student Joseph G. Penhall, who spoke with hundreds of Southern California Vietnamese refugees to obtain the camp materials, said in a recent interview at the gallery that prisoners made aluminum plates for their meals. Otherwise “the guards threw the food on the floor, and they’d have to eat off the floor,” he said.

An old food can on display is typical of those used by detainees to gather extra food surreptitiously while they farmed rice fields in the miserably humid jungle, he added.

“They’d catch snakes or rodents, kill them and put them into these cans and take them back and eat them. They were not allowed fires, so they’d eat them raw.” Prisoners in solitary confinement, housed in cramped shipping crates, used the same cans “to relieve themselves at night because they weren’t allowed out,” Penhall said.

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Le, now a gardener in Long Beach, is one of an estimated 25,000 detainees who immigrated to the United States. He studied at the Vietnamese Conservatory of Music before the war, then became a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese army.

Interned at six different camps between 1975 to 1982, he etched the name of each into the back of his delicate lute, whose wooden neck he fashioned from a broken pool-table leg.

“He would make this at night by moonlight, then take it apart and hide it,” Penhall said. “These things were destroyed if the prisoners were caught with them. Or the Vietnamese guards, who were not much better off, would give them to their families as presents. So all of these items are very rare.”

Penhall organized the exhibit with fellow anthropology student Jacqui Collins. To his knowledge, it’s the first such display.

“Everybody I talked to said, ‘Nobody’s ever done this before,’ ” said Penhall, a Laguna Beach resident. “So that was it for me. Then I knew I wanted to do it.”

Penhall spoke to refugees in Long Beach, Los Angeles and Orange County--mostly in Little Saigon--but, he said, “it took me months and months and months to get these pieces.”

Why so long?

Once released, many detainees “could bring only what was in their pockets,” Penhall said, “and they brought this stuff. Le spent 70 months making that lute. He got two (previous instruments) stolen. . . . Would you give me this? Would you give some poor, stupid white guy this thing? Not a chance. I had to go talk to all these people and they all had to become friends and they all had to like me, and that’s how I got (them to lend) all these things.”

Additionally, some lenders worried that participating in the show could jeopardize the safety of relatives still in Vietnam, Nevadomsky said, and others didn’t want to reawaken feelings of “sadness, hardship and struggle.”

Nonetheless, response to the exhibition has been gratifying, Nevadomsky said.

“There are many Vietnamese here who never went through the experience of the re-education camps, so for them, it’s both shocking and enlightening. It’s different from looking at photographs. You’re looking at objects created by people under very difficult circumstances, and the objects are so beautifully done. They express something marvelous about the resilience of the human spirit, whether it’s in Vietnam or Africa or Eastern Europe.”

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“Southeast Asians in California: A Celebration and a Journey” runs through Dec. 22 at the Cal State Fullerton’s Anthropology Museum, Humanities and Social Sciences Building, Room 313, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Hours are 2-5 p.m., Monday through Friday; 1-6 p.m. Saturdays through May. Free. (714) 773-3977.