The German Vietnamese

Stefan Canham, Phuong-Dan Nguyen

Much has been written about the Vietnamese who came to Germany. Research has focused on ‘contract workers’ in the GDR; on Vietnamese children who were to be trained as the new socialist elite; and on boat people who fled from war and poverty to West Germany. The cigarette bootlegger and the model immigrant are stock characters evoked in the media. But who are these ‘German Vietnamese’ really? Nguyen Phuong-Dan, the son of Vietnamese immigrants, wanted to find out. Together with Stefan Canham, he travelled to Vietnam and visited Vietnamese men and women who had gone to Germany over the past decades for various reasons and later returned to Vietnam. Nguyen and Canham met people who gladly took the opportunity to tell their moving, at times absurd stories of emigration and return. The exhibition combines present-day portrait photographs, interior views of private homes in Vietnam, and historic material from the protagonists’ time in Germany. The foreign feels surprisingly familiar, but home looks like a strange land.