Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Cy Luu Social Science

Same Place, Different Story: Juxtaposing Hidden Early Memoirs with the Mainstream Portrayal of Vietnamese Refugees on Pulau Bidong

Scholars Journal

Pulau Bidong, an island off the West Coast of Malaysia, stood as a camp for the passing of 250,000 Vietnamese refugees from August 8th, 1978, to October 30th, 1995. Discourse on Pulau Bidong primarily gestures to the island’s later communal development, the statistical allure of “boat people” density on the island's restrictive south beach, or the lasting effects of refugee settlement on the island's environment today. However, the same discourse circulates little to no memoirs concerning the Vietnamese refugees of 1978, before the island gained its international notoriety. Cy’s project aims to capture the oral histories of his family, spanning two generations, who were present during the first year of Pulau Bidong’s operation as a detention camp, and juxtapose their narratives against official or governmental documents of the same year and post-development refugee accounts.