First Days Story Project: Voices of the Vietnamese Refugee Experience (review)

The First Days Story Project: Voices of the Vietnamese Refugee Experience is an online website containing the stories of Vietnamese American refugees and Vietnam War veterans; it was created in an effort to document the experience of these refugees and veterans for later generations. The project was inspired by the Public Broadcasting Service documentary, The Last Days of Vietnam. The film chronicles the chaotic final days of the American involvement in the Vietnam War during the evacuation of Saigon. With the North Vietnamese closing in, the Americans ultimately decided “who would go and who would be left behind to face brutality, imprisonment, or even death,” and they took it upon themselves to engage “in unsanctioned and often makeshift operations, as they waged a desperate effort to evacuate as many South Vietnamese as possible” (The Last Days in Vietnam, Public Broadcasting Service, accessed September 27, 2015, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/lastdays/). The First Days Story Project is a collaboration between the creators of the PBS film series, American Experience, along with Rory Kennedy, the director of The Last Days of Vietnam, and StoryCorps, to capture this experience through the collection and preservation of the stories of the people who lived the events.

Before exploring the First Days Story Project further, it is necessary to shed some light on StoryCorps. StoryCorps is “a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide people of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of our lives” (StoryCorps home page, https://storycorps.org). Since 2003, StoryCorps has been recording interviews between anyone and everyone who has wanted to participate, oftentimes people directly off the street with no preparation whatsoever. This will immediately set off alarm bells for professional oral historians; it violates their accepted best practices, which require prior research into the subject of interviews. StoryCorps also places a forty-minute one-time limit on its interviews in an effort to accommodate as many people as possible. This leads many historians to believe that a StoryCorps interview is less an oral history interview than it is a highly ritualized performance that inserts the tellers into a larger public culture of affect and remembering (Nancy Abelmann et al., “What is StoryCorps, Anyway?,” Oral History Review 36, no. 2 [September, 2009]: 255-60, accessed September 27, 2015, http://libproxy.library.unt.edu:4855/content/36/2/255.full). Additionally, historians criticize the editing that StoryCorps does to each interview, leading them to “wonder about what might be lost, as it were, in translation” (Abelmann, 257). However, according to the First Days Story Project, the interviews are uninterrupted and unedited. Like other StoryCorps projects, this project is archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. In the end, many historians do praise StoryCorps for its interest “in the common man and woman, the unsung hero, and in the banal, albeit the heroic in the banal” (Abelmann, 257).

StoryCorps aside, the First Days Story Project is extremely well presented and the website is very user friendly, but there are some hitches in the system that can cause some frustrations. The text within the website is presented in English as well as Vietnamese, and the interviews are transcribed in the language that is spoken by the participants. While this aspect makes much of it accessible to a wider audience, it does effectively restrict a portion of the information (20 percent, to be exact) to Vietnamese speakers. Additionally, while each interview is available online in the audio format, only selected transcripts are attached to the interviews. The playback of the audio also has its challenges. Once an interview has started playing, it may be paused, but that is the only interface available to the user. If the user wants to go...