Little did we know

They say if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. That’s why we started preparations a month and half beforehand for our event “Spojeni Sametem: Vietnamské a české vzpomínky na Sametovou revoluci” (United by Velvet: Vietnamese and Czech Memories of the Velvet Revolution)! While we were still enjoying the summer rays and sipping on cold fresh drinks little did we know that time to plan for our grand event was upon us.

Actually we started to make some plans at the end of August but when we got an offer to organize another intercultural workshop at Charles university our planning got delayed for a bit. The point is we didn’t have much time to waste. Excited to plan another event soon escalated to being concerned how we are going to manage to persuade Vietnamese potential candidates for our panel discussion to come and speak in front of the people. Little did we know more issues on that day would surface. 

Finding a venue: checked 

In September we got an offer from Charles university to organize an event for their 10th anniversary of Klub Alumni (a club for graduates from CUNI). Great! We thought. Let’s make our panel discussion during this program of Klub Alumni. Our worries about finding a venue for this event will fade away and we can shift our focus to other things like… conducting interviews with candidates for this topic – Velvet revolution.

Last time we talked about the Velvet revolution we met up with a formal Vietnamese student in Czechoslovakia. This time we reached out to him again and thanks to him we got in contact with another person from the Vietnamese community. Funny thing is, while we were manifesting and praying on our knees this meeting will be more successful, Mai bumped into him in Sapa and immediately started a conversation with him. He remembered our little project “Roots” and our event last year on the 17th November that he himself and his son attended. We told him about this event in November that we are planning and he agreed to meet us at the headquarters of his company.

One of the things we might be guilty of is keeping our hopes high. Because it would always come crashing down soon after that. Martin (our formal team member) told us to not make a big deal out of it. If you approach someone with a goal to meet up with them and talk about a certain topic they would often reject you because they believe they have nothing to say and they’re not that interesting. But we were always determined to at least meet up and I have to admit that we had a fun conversation every single time.

Getting back to our roots – topic I.

In the 80’s a lot of Vietnamese students and workers immigrated to Czechoslovakia during the communist regime. Some had a hard time integrating into the society and some did not. Some Vietnamese people engaged in activities and advocated for human rights. Others weren’t taking the risk of being deported and lived rather a simple life. This was our way to get back to our roots again. How did Vietnamese immigrants deal with the events in 1989? 

My mom came to Czechoslovakia in September 1989. She told me everything she knew about the Velvet revolution was from watching the TV where she saw people protesting in the streets. But for my parents, one of the hardest things immigrating here was the language barrier. If you needed to make some papers done you had to do it through someone that could translate for you. It was quite a struggle for them because they didn’t know if they’d done it right or wrong. My mum remembers how shortly after the events in 1989 there were people called “skinheads” going around and attacking Vietnamese people in the streets and even in dormitories where Vietnamese people were living at the time. 

How relevant this event was for us – topic II. 

Hundreds and thousands of Vietnamese people were immigrating to Czechoslovakia especially in the 80’s and 90’s due to official bilateral relationships between these two countries. These contracts specified that they would work or study here for some time and after that they would return back home to Vietnam where they’d apply their new gained knowledge and experience. But a lot of them didn’t want to return back home. They knew that Vietnam wouldn’t be able to provide them with a lot of job opportunities and better future as Europe would do.

The Velvet revolution and change of regime played a crucial part in the lives of not only Czechs but also Vietnamese people. For them it meant that they could continue to work here. And the only way to do that was to start a business as entrepreneurs. Thanks to the Velvet revolution and former president Václav Havel, Vietnamese people were given a chance for a better future. But the story didn’t end here. A door with a new opportunity was opened for Vietnamese immigrants but the journey to new beginnings was far from a field of roses. 

As children of immigrant parents we used this chance to explore and learn new things about our roots – our parents and the first generation of Vietnamese immigrants. We discussed this topic not only with our parents but in addition conducted a few interviews with the first generation of Vietnamese immigrants we have never met before.

And just as our parents once struggled to learn and understand the Czech language when they first arrived, we now find ourselves in a similar situation, struggling to speak and understand Vietnamese.

Questioning future generations – topic III. 

The Vietnamese minority is the third largest minority in Czechia but as time goes they’re starting to blend in with the majority more. The second and third generations of Vietnamese people have integrated into Czech society very well. They know the culture, they practice the traditions and they speak the language. I dare to say that most of them speak Czech more often than Vietnamese. Which is fine. But what’s gonna happen in 50 years?

Will future Vietnamese generations in Czechia still be able to remember their roots and speak Vietnamese? Probably yes, but I have my doubts seeing how the second generation is already struggling with their mother tongue. 

But to end it on a positive note. Some of the young generations have now learnt to acknowledge and accept their Vietnamese identity. They are proud of their Vietnamese heritage and the major society has started to explore Vietnamese culture as well. Whether it’s through food, celebrating their holidays or attending Vietnamese festivals in Czechia. But at the same time it’s important to point out that not everyone accepts their Vietnamese heritage which is OK too.

The big day – the day everything went to hell 

Even though the last event the year before was quite successful in numbers of participants, this year we were still worried not a lot of people would come. Despite having support from the university and the biggest festival for celebrating democracy and freedom in Czechia, promoting this event laid mainly in our hands. We were struggling a bit which topics we would want to cover during the panel discussion.

And then I got this idea to ask our followers on Instagram. But since nobody reached out to us I thought that it’s pointless anyway. And a funny thing happened when I looked into our feedback forms after the event. Someone wrote that next time it would be a great idea to try to ask people online which topics they’d be interested in being discussed!

The whole event of Klub Alumni lasted more than 4 hours from 6pm to 9:30 pm. A week before we placed an order with Vietnamese food from Sapa in Prague to ensure people wouldn’t starve and die of hunger. What and how much to order was a discussion in our team. We didn’t want to waste food but at the same time we didn’t know the exact number of people that would actually attend that day. We bought fried spring rolls, sesame balls and shrimp crackers that everyone enjoyed.

But surprisingly there was one person that complained there wasn’t enough food! :)) After all the break lasted only 15 minutes. So it wasn’t possible to have a bigger buffet. 

Everyone in the team had their own role that they fulfilled for this event. Five days before that day we thought about how the panel discussion is mainly made of the older generation and so we thought it would be a good idea to age it down a little and put someone young among them. And that was Nikol, our team member, who kind of represented the voices of younger generations and our parents that came here working in manufactures. But things quickly went down south. They provided us with a venue and technical stuff. Our task was to ensure this panel discussion will go smoothly and care for the comfort of everyone. 

We thought we planned every single detail and minute. But there were still some parts we didn’t consider. Technical difficulties. When they did the mic check everything was working perfectly. The acoustics of the room were good. But for some people that aren’t used to speaking with a microphone it was a little more difficult. Noises from the café below and the streets. That was something that made it harder for people to enjoy the discussion and something that was out of our control… kind of. The noise from the coffee machine. The noise from the tap water. The noise of people talking aloud in the café below. Everything was irritating as we were going up and down trying to deal with the issue. 

“Hi, there’s an event going on upstairs. Can you please not talk that loud? Thank you.” “Hi, you have the tap water constantly running and it’s disturbing our event. Would you mind turning it off?” “Hi, people are almost struggling to breathe. Is it ok to open the door for a flow of air please?” Yeah well, that was apparently kind of a problem and we were hit with an answer

“I’ll have to ask the manager.”

When we first found out it was going to be in a Café I was startled but I thought since we are going to use microphones, people won’t probably see much in the back but at least they will hear the discussion. And boy was I wrong. 

Our previous goal was to have a capacity of 80 people in the room. But soon after I saw the venue and found out how low the ceilings were, I suggested reducing the number to 60-65 people. In the end there were really about 60 people (cramped up) in the room which nobody expected. So I guess our goal was fulfilled after all!

If you had asked us if we enjoyed the event the answer would be “No.” The way things went wasn’t in our favour. The venue would be great for smaller gatherings but for this event I’d consider it a disaster. But at the end of the day we were grateful that they offered us a place to organize this event. Our expectations were placed just a bit higher. And some of people’s expectations were even a little higher than that.

Guilty of keeping our hopes to high

Here’s how we imagined and wanted the discussion to flow. First we reserved 10 minutes of time for introduction including talking about our initiative, providing people with a small historical context of this discussion and introducing our moderator with a small presentation. You know how people don’t arrive in time and there would still be people coming in at the start of the events? That’s one of the reasons we thought it would be a great idea to have a max 10 minutes intro and not start the discussion right away for late-comers. People knew about our speakers of the discussion and all of the focus would be of course shifted towards them. But they didn’t know much about our moderator (unless they really followed us on social media) so we reserved this introduction to also introduce him and sort of build up the tension and get people excited to the main part of the event. But I guess it kind of backfired? Since some people didn’t like how we took too much time wasting on some introductions on everything. 

Moving on. The panel discussion started and so did the technical difficulties. We wanted to screen a short part of a documentary but unsuccessfully. The “stage” was cramped up. If we turnt on the projector screen it would project onto the speakers that were sitting there. The discussion… I don’t remember much from that but I know it was kind of going nowhere and it was already about 20-30 minutes into the discussion. We were standing beside and trying to sign to the moderator to speed things up a bit and later signing him to slowly start the Q&A discussion. That was stressful but funny at the same time.

Overall how can so many things go down south? If people were frustrated, we were a thousand more frustrated.

Leaving footprints on the sands of time

It was late and I wasn’t even in the mood to talk to people afterwards. But I’m always glad when they approach us and share their feelings with us. First thing I automatically ask them is how they enjoyed the event. And this time I was pretty curious. Surprisingly, some of them told us that they really enjoyed the event and nothing was bothering them even when we asked them again if they were sure.

Whether the event was a success or not at the end of the day we were glad to be given an opportunity to open up a discussion about this topic. Czech people perceive Vietnamese as a closed community and say they don’t know much about them. And so do we ironically. The Velvet revolution played an important role in the lives of Czech people and Vietnamese immigrants and we wanted to explore this chapter of our history and open a discussion together with other people.

Our aim is to support a conversation surrounding these topics, inspire others and motivate them to actively engage in these discussions.

We believe an open conversation and sharing different perspectives can bring a positive change to the world around us.

We want to encourage young people to confront big topics like these, explore their roots, heritage and the richness of their culture. 

After all, we feel enormously grateful for the Faculty of Humanities Charles university for giving us space to get creative and Díky, že můžem for including us in this festival and celebration of democracy and freedom.

We’re thankful for those who came, helped us open this discussion and followed us this whole time on our little European Solidarity journey. ❤ 

Thank you and see you soon hopefully!

Team Roots of the Future.