Upcoming Events

10-27-2025 – Song of Earthroot: Film Screening and Talkback with Kinh Vu

Monday, October 27, 7 PM
Room 104, 808 Commonwealth Ave, Brookline, MA

Please register here.

Song of Earthroot is a feature-length documentary that centers on Kinh T. Vu, a gay Vietnamese American music education professor, who was adopted at the end of the American War in Vietnam. We follow Kinh as he returns to Vietnam for the 37th time in 11 years as he reclaims his story by writing his first song, titled “Việt Nam, Tôi Xin Lỗi” (I’m Sorry, Vietnam).

This story is not about an adoptee’s search for birth parents, blood belonging, or adopted belonging. Nor is it about the “heroism” of the West for saving kids via adoption - that white saviorism is best left for another author. Instead, this film is a yearning to re-assimilate and reconnect to roots, even in his middle age. Kinh attempts a rejection of the Western socialization forced upon him when he was adopted, paired with much deeper reluctance or perhaps inability to do so. There is guilt, driven by shame. There is delusion, driven by ego. There is the universal struggle to self actualize desperately as he grows older but fights to remain young at heart. Through song and conversation, we follow Kinh as he writes what he feels is the last piece of the puzzle before he can buy a one way ticket to return Home.

10-30-25 – From Refugees to ‘Non-Criminal Collaterals’: Immigration after the Vietnam War and Now with Ben Tran

Thursday, October 30, 2025
4 PM - 5:30 PM
120 Bay State Road, Boston MA
Please register here.

This lecture explores the contrasting policies directed at refugees following the Vietnam War and the racialized criminalization of migrants today. It analyzes how the socio-political climate of the late 1970s and 1980s facilitated a relatively robust support system for Vietnamese refugees in the United States, characterized by humanitarian aid, community-building efforts, and federal programs aimed at integration. In contrast, the immigration landscape in the US today is more draconian, influenced by shifting political narratives and contexts. This paper further compares these differences by underscoring Vietnam’s post-civil war nation-state and the history of Asian migrants to the US. Contemporary capitalism, the paper argues, has reached a new register of profiteering from and exploitation of "illegal aliens.”

This talk is brought to you by the BU College of Fine Arts School of Music, Center for the Study of Asia at the Pardee School, Office for the Arts, and the Center on Forced Displacement. With grant support from the BU Center for the Humanities.

Ben Tran is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and English at Vanderbilt University. He researches and teaches the politics and aesthetics of twentieth- and twenty-first century Southeast Asian, Asian American, and Anglophone literatures. He is the author of Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam (2017); and his work has been published in Cultural Critique, PMLA,  positions: asia critique, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Ben Tran’s current scholarship has two trajectories. The first project traces how the biological necessity of breathing has become a universal right to breath that we must now fight for, amid the weaponization of the atmosphere, increasingly transnational police tactics, and the history of air conditioning. The second, entitled Digital Coolie-ism, examines how Asian migration during 19th-century European imperialism intersects with the current border-control system and the increasing use of biodata.

11-01-2025 – The Odyssey, Music by Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, Blood Moon Orchestra, and Arneis Quartet

Saturday, November 1, 2025, 7:30 PM
Music by:
Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, Blood Moon Orchestra, and Arneis Quartet
Boston University Tsai Performance Center
685 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215
OPEN and FREE to the public.