April promises to be a busy month, with the arrival of Huu Thinh, poet, director of the Vietnamese Writers' Association and editor of Van Nghe; and To Nhuan Vy, novelist and former director of the Writers' Association of Hue and editor of Sung Huong. Carolyn Forché arrives on the 14th, as the University's first Grace Paley Visiting Writer. She'll be visiting classes, offering a public reading from her work, and giving out the first Grace Paley Award. A week later we'll be welcoming this year's fellows from Bosnia, Serbia, and Vietnam. It will be the first trip to the U.S. for all three. We'll be scheduling events for them through May and June, when they'll be participating in our 22nd Annual Writers' Workshop. The month will close with two days of presentations on April 25 and 26 from our most recent group of Rockefeller Foundation fellows.

All who attended last weekend's conference "One State for Palestine/Israel: A Country for All Its Citizens?" agreed it was a great success. Over five hundred attended two days of intense and tightly argued panels. Those wishing to order DVDs can visit www.gvfj.org for copies, which should be available in a few weeks.

As April gives way to May, the Joiner Center will host a premier screening of Aftermath on May 3rd. This film follows the lives of four wounded veterans from the war in Iraq. The film is produced and directed by Iris Adler of NECN and will be introduced by Senator John Kerry.

In the meantime, our wishes for a gentle wind from the west go out to Joiner Center staff member and webmaster, Sean Lunde, who'll be running his first Boston Marathon on April 20th.

Nguyen Ba Chung is a staff member of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences. He is the Director of the Rockefeller Residency Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

What was the initial impulse that led you to pursue this program?

The time was 1999, a quarter of a century after the end of the war, with over a million Vietnamese refugees settling in all the major states of this country, from the cold climate of Massachusetts to the sunny skies of California. It was distant enough from the fiery passion of the post-1975 evacuation, but still indelible enough in memory for academic scholars and activist-exiles to take a measured examination of one of the most painful periods of Vietnamese history. The idea originally came from Kevin Bowen and Peter Kiang, who pulled together a group of interested professors and activists within the UMass community - Rajini Srikanth, Michael LaFargue, Paul Watanabe, Hiep Chu, Trinh Nguyen and myself. That was our first Standing Committee. Later we had the privilege of Harvard Professor Hue Tam Ho Tai's participation and UMass Boston Professor Shirley Tang as an additional Standing Committee member. Peter was one of the principal moving forces of the group, especially in the early days of proposal writing. Kevin, as the principal investigator of the project, provided institutional grounding, networking coverage and administrative support.

The real motivation for the project was the realization that there had been no major efforts, in the United States or elsewhere at that time, addressing all the deep-seated issues still moldering openly or subterraneously in the Vietnamese Diaspora. It was time to bring them onto the academic operation table for literary and sociological examination.

The Proposal - "(Re)Constructing Identity and Place in the Vietnamese Diaspora" was submitted and accepted by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1999 for the 2000-2003 period. Because of the success of this program, we were encouraged to submit a follow-up -"Culture, Art, Trauma, and Development: Vietnamese Context." It was one of the rare occurrences at the Rockefeller Foundation when we were funded for the second project, from 2004 to 2007, to extend that inquiry into postwar Vietnam as well as the Diaspora with both seen together as an unbroken continuum. The issues, indeed, were both intra- and trans-national.

What are the objectives of the program, in both its sweep and some of its particulars?

As stated in our first proposal: "The fellowship program will support scholars researching how diverse constructions of Vietnamese identity and community, as well as Vietnamese history, literature, and culture, are being shaped and reshaped in the contemporary post-war and post-refugee eras across generations throughout the Diaspora. Although themes of post-war reconciliation have emerged in recent years in literature and public policy between the U.S. and Vietnam, few scholars have had resources and opportunities to examine the parallel emergence of Vietnamese diasporic voices, perspectives, and communities, particularly in relation to changing social, cultural, political, and economic realities in Vietnam itself. The fellowship program will significantly advance interdisciplinary scholarship in these areas and facilitate the development of new conceptual and pedagogical approaches for teaching Vietnamese history, culture, and social issues as well as for reconfiguring local/global relationships between ethnic studies and area studies more broadly."

It is, perhaps, the first project of its kind that starts a scholarly dialogue, not just among the exile communities, but also between many sides of the Vietnam conflict, and as no pioneering work can proceed without controversies, it has also brought about a firestorm of oppositions from the resolutely anti-communist wing of the Vietnamese refugees, both locally, country-wide, and internationally.

What role has the program played in the overseas Vietnamese community?

These overseas refugees, mostly former officers and officials of the Republic of South Vietnam, who suffered years of harsh treatment in communist re-education camps and daily discrimination afterwards, still harbor hope of a future overthrow of the communist government, which demands a policy of total isolation and ostracization of Vietnam. Over a quarter-century after the end of the war, for the warriors of the old generation, the emotions are still deep, the wounds still raw.

It is not the objective of the project to recommend or promote bias towards any particular solution. The aim is, however, to create a space where dialogue could be spirited but safe and substantial. A great number of face-to-face meetings between parties of opposite persuasions have been arranged over the years, and they have created an enormous impact on both sides. For the first time, many hardened activists and fighters could meet and see the others, not as determined enemies of the past, but simply as searching individuals of the present, each as humanly mired in his or her own problematic world as the other. To be able to recognize the other as an image of oneself, with undeniable differences of perspectives and projections, is a first step towards a profound journey of self-discovery and understanding.

Once a connection is made, like a stone thrown into a still pond, its circle starts widening, quiet wave after quiet wave.

Can you point out some specific contributions the program has made?

One of the most important achievements of the program is its contribution to the process of reconciliation - not the kind of political reconciliation that remains controversial and still out of reach, but a deeply human and cultural reconciliation. The great differences that might divide us do not erase the even greater common cultural heritage that still subterraneously binds us. It has been demonstrated fully that, despite all the deep and seemingly unbridgeable divisions, it's still possible to dialogue, share a poem, read a story, and work towards a better future, not for any particular ideology, but for those who have already suffered so much for so long.

Academically, the many research projects highlight many new findings in postwar Vietnam and the Diaspora - from Tran Tien Dung's essay on the post-1975 young adults who had to go through the process of re-integration to socialist Vietnam in their own country, to Bui Ngoc Tan's incredible journey as the reluctant bearer of history, to Nguyen Mong Giac's "Study of the Formation and Development of Prose in the Overseas
Literature."

As a norm, a Rockefeller program would select from two to four fellows per year at the most. Ours, however, has anywhere between seven to 13 scholars per year, multiplying its impact from three to six-fold.

As an example of this circle of wave impact, To Nhuan Vy, a writer and former editor-in- chief of Song Huong literary journal, contributes an essay on the Issues Involving the Process of Global Integration in Vietnam. A group of overseas writers picks it up and creates a special website to discuss it, on which writers both from inside and outside Vietnam spiritedly join in debates. Vietnam may still be divided in terms of politics and regions but, culturally, the gap has become narrower and narrower. For that, we have much to thank the William Joiner Center, all our Standing Committee members who have worked so hard quietly behind the scenes to make the program a substantial success, all the scholars and activists who have participated in our adventure and, last but not least, the generous funding by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Fellows from the Rockefeller Residency Program will make presentations at UMass Boston April 25-26.