Curated by writer and producer Sheila Ngoc Pham, The Things We Carry is a one-night-only program blending stories, poetry, and live music. Held at Riverside Theatres in Parramatta, the event brings together Vietnamese Australians—from first-generation refugees to younger artists and musicians, to reflect on memory, migration and identity.
“It seemed like an important milestone to acknowledge,” said Pham. “Because it's 50 years, and that's a very significant time period in Australian history. I mean, Australia is only 230 years old, and so now the Vietnamese have become part of its history for half a century.”
For Pham, the event is both personal and collective. As the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she has long explored cultural memory through storytelling, radio, and the stage. She is working on her latest play—set in Saigon in 1971 and Sydney in the early 2000s—provided the creative spark to convene a broader conversation.
“It seemed like the right time to bring people together to the theatre that I've been working with,” she said. “To bring different voices as well.”
The line-up includes a diverse mix of Vietnamese Australian artists: poets Annabella and Antoinette Luu, writer Chris Tran, whose Chinese Vietnamese family arrived after the war, alongside Thang Luong, one of the first refugees to arrive in 1975. Live music will come from Nostalgia, a multi-generational Vietnamese ensemble.
“I think the night is a night of reflection,” said Pham, “to just think about how we got to where we are now as a Vietnamese community in Sydney.”
But The Things We Carry is more than a showcase. It’s also an intervention. According to Pham, generational gaps and cultural rifts persist within the Vietnamese Australian community.
“One of the struggles of the Vietnamese community is... we're talking across the generations,” she said. “And also there is a struggle I think as well with the older Vietnamese who came as refugees, and then the Vietnamese who have come later as more recent migrants in the last 20 years. To me, the community seems quite divided in some ways.”
In response, Pham hopes the event offers a space of connection, not only for Vietnamese Australians of all backgrounds, but for those who might feel out of place elsewhere.
“I would hope that it brings together different kinds of people who may not feel comfortable in other spaces,” she said, “but are interested, especially if they're Vietnamese, in knowing more about their history and where their families came from.”
The title of the event The Things We Carry is a deliberate nod to Tim O’Brien’s acclaimed book The Things They Carried, which recounts the Vietnam War from the perspective of American soldiers. Pham says it’s time to flip that narrative.
“When I was looking for a title, I thought about that book,” she said. “Other perspectives on the war are often prioritised over the Vietnamese perspective, especially the Southern Vietnamese perspective. So I took the title and made it The Things We Carry, and the ‘we’ is the Vietnamese community in Australia.”
But it’s not just about naming. Pham also wants to reshape how we think about what it means to ‘carry’.
“To talk about it, it’s for one thing, it's not in the past for us,” she said. “It’s the things we carry not the things we carried. But the things we carry are not always a burden. We carry our family histories and stories, and those can also be very powerful. It’s not just the challenge. For me, it’s a great honour to be able to carry these stories and help broaden understanding in the local community, because the Vietnamese have become a very significant group in Australia's story.”
That “we” includes not only the original refugees who fled the war, but also their children and grandchildren, those born here or arriving more recently, still navigating questions of identity, belonging, and intergenerational memory.
“Even though a lot of people don't want to think about things like the war and put the past behind them,” said Pham, “it's very important history in the world, actually. The Vietnam War also had a really big impact in Australia, among the generations here as well.”
As the lights go up at Riverside Theatre on Tuesday, 15 April, will invite all of us, Vietnamese or not, to pause, reflect, and listen.
