This is a summary of what cultural events mean to Canadians and how political groups might exploit them. This describes the environment in which Dinh Kim Nguyet works to organize her cultural events.
Culture and Politics in Canada
Canada is a nation of immigrants. That is Canada’s national identity.
Canada acknowledges that many of its immigrant citizens want to retain some of their original cultural identity. Canada’s national cultural identity is therefore the collection of all those separate national cultural identities. This makes Canada fairly unique in the world. Canadians call it "multiculturalism".
Canada, like most nations, encourages its citizens to celebrate the country’s national identity. Countless “multicultural” festivals are staged all over the country, most with some sort of public support.
In these events Canada is celebrating that its citizens have multiple national origins. Participants in the events are therefore often asked to bring the national flag of their country of origin, and do something to represent their country of origin.
Since these events are publicly sponsored, there is a convention is that any flag presented must be one recognized by the UN and Canada’s foreign affairs. The countries of origin are often interested in these events because it enables them to see that they have a healthy diaspora in Canada, often a signal of good economic relations between countries.
The convention about national flags is not without controversy. Many nations have conflicts over cultural identity, and deciding what to put on as representative culturally is potentially controversial.
Luckily, most people who come to Canada do not want to bring their conflicts with them. The Canadian media and Canadian political establishment help by refusing to inflame controversy by exploiting such divisions. The ethnic and national communities are motivated to find peace in Canada and usually do so. Avoidance of conflict is often the reason they came to Canada in the first place.
Culture and Politics in Canada’s Vietnamese Community
Among Canada's ethnic and national communities, there is one notable exception to the rule that peaceful solutions are usually found. That is Canada's Vietnamese community.
The problem is not entirely the fault of Canadians of Vietnamese origin. Canada shares one of the longest borders in the world with its neighbor, the USA, a country with ten times the population. Canadians often struggle to preserve a national identity in the face of strong influences from America. Canadians of Vietnamese origin are a case in point.
Canada’s Vietnamese community and the American Vietnamese community are vastly different entities. The American community originated largely in former Republic of Vietnam (RVN) leaders and is led by former ARVN officers who are still fighting their war in the field of propaganda. In contrast, the Canadian community originated in economic refugees who came from all over Vietnam many years after the war was over and they have left that past behind them. There are very, very few Canadians who identify with the ARVN.
The Canadian Vietnamese community probably would have found a way to represent themselves in Canada's multicultural events if it were not for the American ARVN interference.
The American leaders spotted an opportunity in Canada’s government-supported multicultural festivals. They often come to occupy the “Vietnam” slot at such festivals with their national flag of the Republic of Vietnam. They come to Canada to display their flag because they are prohibited from doing so in much of the US.
These leaders also managed to activate some other Canadian political groups to support their cause. None of them have Vietnamese origins. Among the most important of these groups was the Harper government, which was in power from 2006 to 2015. This is why Canada overlooked the fact that their flag was not a UN-endorsed national flag.
The impression that these groups wish to create is that the Vietnamese communities consist entirely of ARVN supporters who refuse to recognize Vietnam as a nation. They were not interested in finding a "Canadian compromise" that reflected the spirit of Canada's multicultural festivals. Instead, they went to extreme lengths to discourage the Canadian Vietnamese from contradicting their political message.
The result was that Vietnamese Canadians were participating in few if any public cultural events. They refused to participate in ones where the RVN flag was on display, and they were discouraged from putting on their own events. In addition, since Canada was in effect expressing a hostile relationship with Vietnam, Vietnamese Canadians were discouraged from maintaining their ties with family in Vietnam.
Enter Dinh Kim Nguyet
This is the situation as it was in 2008 when Kim began her cultural activities, and it is what Kim had to overcome. Kim and her husband examined the methods that the ARVN was using to marginalize the Canadian Vietnamese community and found ways to overcome them.
The task was not to exclude ARVN-interested people from public cultural activities, but to allow the majority to represent themselves in similar activities.
In the almost-20 years since Kim arrived, the political situation for Canadians of Vietnamese origin has improved and Kim can take at least part of the credit for enabling the community to overcome their problem. Read our description of her activities.
Vietnam the nation was also pleased about Kim's work because that nation is now represented in Canada's multicultural festivals, and the political constraints faced by the Canadian diaspora in connecting with their homeland have been eliminated.