Introduction

Hurricane Katrina chased dozens of thousands of Vietnamese from their homes in Louisiana and Mississippi. Their plight captured the attention of Vietnamese around the United States who rushed to their support. An Asian market in Houston became the focus of survivors pouring into town and volunteers flying to their aid.

The storm also captured the attention of Vietnamese and everyone else around the world, who looked on in fascination at the poorest citizens of the world’s richest country, flushed into media view by the rising waters. African-American advocates here grasped the implicit comparison and rejected it firmly, asking observers not to call the survivors what we were all calling them, “refugees.”

Their point is that most of those chased from their homes by the storm are Americans native to the delta for centuries. They were not refugees from war in a distant land, but citizens at home. Still, many among the evacuees had indeed once come here as refugees, as few from around the world watching displaced Vietnamese in the United States were likely to forget.

Hurricane Katrina is as important as it was startling for those in its path, for those who mobilized to help them, and for those who watched from abroad as the world’s mightiest nation descended into chaos and lost a storied metropolis to some weather.

For Vietnamese in the Gulf states, obviously, the storm is another great disaster that has destroyed some and others will rise above. For Vietnamese across the country the aid effort has become an opportunity to band together to help their own and so integrate further into the larger American community, as Vietnamese.

Our purpose is to put art to work to maintain attention on the disaster and keep it in memory forever. For more immediate relief to the afflicted we provide a link to Boat People SOS, an organization that has been working with Vietnamese since they first became refugees.