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Ngo, Tam T. T., and Nga T. Mai. "In Search of a Vietnamese Buddhist Space in Germany." Refugees and Religion: . By Birgit Meyer and Peter van der Veer. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 105–122. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350167162.0013>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 17:24 UTC. Copyright © Birgit Meyer, Peter van der Veer and contributors 2021. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 6 In Search of a Vietnamese Buddhist Space in Germany Tam T. T. Ngo and Nga T. Mai Introduction This chapter attempts to capture the contesting and contradictory migration categories by examining the different Vietnamese migrant groups in Germany. Vietnamese boat refugees, Vietnamese contract laborers, and other Vietnamese migrants are regularly distinguished from one another on the ground of their political background, migration routes, and integration experience. This distinguishing encapsulates the division that has begun from Vietnam as the war and historical legacies. The main argument is that all these people have left Vietnam, but have not left it behind. Vietnam, as the country of origin, still looms large not only in an imaginative sense but also in a direct political sense. One could call this the enigma of arrival, that one never fully arrives and that many of the troubles that make one move to another country keep following the migrant. This enigma of arrival is addressed by Buddhism both in a religious and in a political sense. Buddhism in Germany has become a major site of contesting people’s relation to Vietnam. This chapter starts with a description of how the Vietnamese came to Germany. It then goes on to discuss the political history of two Buddhist temples in Berlin. Finally, it examines how Buddhism addresses the spiritual needs of the different kinds of Vietnamese migrants. Vietnamese in Germany The two large groups of Vietnamese that have been received in Germany are the boat refugees of 1978 and the subsequent years in the German Federal Republic (hereafter GFR) and the contract laborers in the same period arriving in the 106 Refugees and Religion communist German Democratic Republic (hereafter GDR). On April 30, 1975, Saigon fell, and in 1976 North- and South Vietnam were officially united as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. When the Americans left South Vietnam, they evacuated some 130,000 Vietnamese to the United States (Espiritu 2014: 24). The communist regime targeted first the former South Vietnamese military and civil authorities and put them into reeducation camps that contained up to a million people. Subsequently, small businesses were disowned, and their owners put in reeducation camps in order to create a socialist plan economy. Among them were many Vietnamese people of Chinese descent. During 1978 and 1979, about 250,000 Chinese-Vietnamese in North Vietnam began to flee to China with permission (Osborne 1980), but in fact, they were pushed by the Vietnamese authorities, because the relations between China and Vietnam had deteriorated quickly after the victory of North Vietnam and especially after the invasion of Pol Pot’s Cambodia by Vietnamese troops. Soon other groups also started to flee Vietnam: students, shopkeepers, former South Vietnamese officials, and intellectuals; prominently also Catholics and Buddhists who feared the religious persecution by the communists (see Nguyen, this volume). Many of them fled by land to Cambodia and Thailand or by sea to Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines; the number of asylees registered in Southeast Asian countries reached 209,000 by July 1979 (Stein 1979). In July 1979, a refugee conference was called in Geneva and decided to speed up the adoption of refugees in the so-called third countries. The number of refugees to be distributed was determined as 260,000 for 1979 and 1980. The United States, Australia, Canada, France, and, with lesser numbers, the GFR and Britain were the main recipients. The governments of Indonesia and the Philippines declared a willingness to act as regional centers for redistribution over third countries (Robinson 1998). Immediately after the Fall of Saigon, the GFR government had declared a willingness to accept a contingent of refugees without submitting them to individual asylum procedures: first, a thousand, which later expanded to 6,000, then to 10,000, and, finally, to 38,000 (Wolf 2007: 6). The government of Lower Saxony decided on its own without consultation with the federal government to bring 1,000 refugees out of camps in Thailand and Malaysia. The Vietnamese boat refugees who were brought to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1979 did not have to apply for asylum when they were taken out of refugee camps in Southeast Asia or from boats crossing the South China Sea. For this purpose, a specific legal status was developed, that of the Kontingentflüchtling, which made it possible to accept refugees as a group rather than as individuals. Also, the Kontingentflüchtling obtained asylum without going through a regular In Search of a Vietnamese Buddhist Space in Germany 107 procedure requested by the Federal Republic. It also allowed for distribution over the regional states of the GFR. All family members of those who had been accepted as Kontingentflüchtling were also included in this status. At the same time, the GDR began to recruit Vietnamese contract laborers. In the mid-1970s, the GDR had signed treaties with Vietnam, Cuban, Angola, and Mozambique to bring contract laborers to work in the industry. These contracts ranged from four to five years. The treaty with Vietnam was signed in 1980, exactly at the time that the GFR was accepting boat refugees. Since then, the largest number of contract laborers in the GDR was Vietnamese, amounting to more than 60,000 in 1989 (Weiss 2005; Hüwelmeier 2017). Besides contract labors, the GDR also received Vietnamese for educational purposes. Between 1973 and 1978, the GDR had a program for teaching children of political cadres that reached 10,000 Vietnamese children. These flows of humans and supports were part of the socialist development program that had had a modest beginning in the 1950s and was part of a Cold War mirror program of Western development aid. Contrary to a widespread understanding among Vietnamese themselves, Vietnam paid its war debts to the GDR not by the contract labor, but rather by agricultural products (Raendchen 2000). With the fall of the Communist regime in the GDR and the East- West reunification, a new situation emerged, in which the Vietnamese Kontingentflüchtlinge in the GFR, who had come in the early 1980s, still applied for family reunion, albeit obviously in diminishing numbers, while new refugees had to go through the regular asylum procedures. At the same time, the consensus was that Vietnamese contract laborers should, in principle, be sent back to Vietnam after having concluded their five-year contract. In practice, the collapsing economy in the GDR at that time could not even provide jobs for the ongoing contracts. Seventy percent of Vietnamese workers were unemployed (Hillmann 2005). Contract workers were encouraged to return to their homeland with 3,000 Deutsch Mark as compensation. During the transition to a unified political system, legal status for the contract workers of the GDR was a complicated question. In the meantime, the Vietnamese government reluctantly took back its citizens who had a firsthand experience of the revolution leading to the loss of communism in Europe and who did not sign on a return application (Weiss 2005). After negotiations, the German and the Vietnamese governments came to an agreement in which the former paid development aid of 100 million Deutsche Mark in 1995 and another 100 million in 1996. In return, the Vietnamese government declared a willingness to take back 20,000 people. All of this, of course, boils down to a negotiation between the states of Vietnam and Germany in the aftermath of the Cold War, 108 Refugees and Religion signaling the possibility of new economic relations. The German government took it for granted that returnees, all of them contract workers, would not face persecution back home. As of December 31, 1990, about 21,000 contract workers remained in unified Germany (Weiss 2005: 80). The Vietnamese who remained in Germany found themselves living in legal limbo. Many of them applied for asylum with the hope that they would prolong their residency in the GFR (Weiss 2005). There is no information about asylum applicants and the political and religious motivations of their claim. Among those who returned to Vietnam, some were regretful about their decision (Hillmann 2005), and some found ways to go back to Germany years later (Weiss 2005). In this chapter, we propose to see the “Vietnamese migration” as a total phenomenon in which people who suffered from the devastation of their country after several decades of war did everything they could to leave for more promising regions of the world. This “total phenomenon” approach, deriving from the notion of “total social fact” of Marcel Mauss (1990), means that, on the one hand, Vietnamese migration is seen as the single case study, and on the other hand, this single case requires an examination of the historical and social context of the interrelated world in which it is situated. The imposed difference between Vietnamese boat refugees and Vietnamese contract laborers is contested by Vietnamese migrants themselves. Who they are depends on the way their choices and actions are narrativized in conflicting versions of nationalism within the context of international relations. The relation between the Northern Vietnamese contract workers and Southern Vietnamese boat refugees is but one of many examples that show how state policies, both German and Vietnamese, failed to capture the dynamic realities.
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