“[Lam Thi Dep] was written after reading Yen Le Espiritu’s Body Counts and Viet Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. These works suggest how reductive and insufficient the term “refugee” can be.
Lam Thi Dep was a female Viet Cong soldier immortalized in a striking photograph, poised folk warrior, holding an American machine gun. In this song, she is jumbled up alongside a fictional south Vietnamese general and a musical theater loving child of boat people. We see these individual’s USA bound post-war fates working in bakeries, drinking cheap beer, doing nails, saving money to visit Broadway, voting Republican. This informed but imagined micro-diaspora points to the diverse lives of “refugees” which Espiritu and Nguyen highlight through their writing.
The last verse gets a bit jargon-y and is one of the more prickly passages. Read Espiritu chapter 1 and then, if you ever visit Providence, try to catch a bit of the “oppression olympics” of which the students at Brown university hold daily contests.
The first verse is all I’ve been able to write of a beautiful diary entry my aunt gave me, written in French, as she watched the North Vietnamese descend upon Saigon in 1975, her world, like millions of others’, finally collapsing.” – Julian Saporiti
Check out the full lyrics book with annotation here.