People
NANCY BUI
Nancy Bui is president and founder of The Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation. Over two decades ago, Nancy Bui retold the story of her escape from her country in the aftermath of the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Her daughter was writing a school report about the Vietnam War. That report received a failing grade. Rattled and confused, Bui spoke with the teacher, who said that her personal story did not constitute an “official source,” and that the school curriculum gave a different portrayal of Vietnam’s communist leaders. Ever since, Bui’s goal has been to make the personal stories of those that fled persecution and impoverishment in Vietnam into official historical sources, adding to our knowledge about that period in American history. In 2004, she founded and became president of the Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation (VAHF). Thus, she has kept her promise to her daughter that, “someday, mom will try to do something; we need to tell our story, so the world knows what really happened in Vietnam in the war and our journey to freedom.”
LINDA HO PECHE, PhD
Linda Ho Peché is project director for the Vietnamese in the Diaspora Digital Archive (ViDDA) and is co-editor of the upcoming publication by Temple University Press, Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community and Memory. She is a cultural anthropologist by training with experience in public folklore and expertise in Asian American studies, Vietnamese American studies, oral history, popular religion and public history. Her current interests include the politics of representation in the digital humanities, and she is particularly interested in being attune to the varying needs of the community, academic audiences, and broader public.
TUONG VU, PhD
Tuong Vu is Political Science Professor and Department Head Department of Political Science at The University of Oregon. A former co-editor in chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Tuong Vu has published extensively on modern Vietnamese history and politics. He is the author or editor of five books and 30 journal articles and book chapters. His most recent books are The Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975: Vietnamese Perspectives on Nation Building (co-edited with Sean Fear, Cornell Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University Press, 2020), and Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is co-editor of the upcoming publication by Temple University Press, Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community and Memory.