In this exclusive new diaCRITICIZE, Julie Thi Underhill offers an in-depth introduction to the sometimes fraught relationship between Chăm Americans and Vietnamese Americans. She raises difficult questions, including why Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans would rather forget the conquest of the Chăm, the continuing existence of the Chăm people, and whether or not the Chăm can be compared to Native Americans. She concludes on a hopeful note whereby Chăm Americans and Vietnamese Americans can begin filling in together the “blank pages” of shared history and memory.

Although Julie Thi Underhill has previously written for diaCRITICS about Democractic Kampuchea’s Genocide of the Chăm during the 1970s in Cambodia, this provocative diaCRITICIZE essay is the first essay published in English, since 1987, which exclusively centers the Chăm in Việt Nam and their communities and identities in the US.