Not long after the Vietnamese Young Leaders Association of New Orleans was founded in 2006, we began envisioning an oral history and documentary project. We wanted to use the power of storytelling to celebrate our history and culture and heal divisions within the Southeast Asian community. We also wanted to work towards incorporating voices from other communities in order to facilitate understanding and solidarity within our neighborhood.
With the help of a generous grant from the Davis Projects for Peace Foundation and the tireless work of Ashwin Balakrishnan, Julie Cao, Jacob Cohen, Minh-Kha Kim, Cassandra Tran, Andy Nguyen, Michael Nguyen, Patricia Nguyen, Laura Thammavong, Linda Tran, and Timmy Vo, the Stories of Versai project began in August, 2009.
For the past three months we have been learning interviewing, video, and photography techniques. We have conducted over 20 interviews with different members of our community, sitting with each interviewee for several hours to record their life story. We use the interview footage to create short films that highlight each person’s life, and to create documentaries that represent common aspects of our community’s history and experience.
These short videos, along with the long, uncut interviews, are stored on this website and can be easily accessed. We hope that this archive will continue to expand, becoming a home for our community and neighborhood’s history–a place where we can learn from one another and come together.
The project is ongoing, and we encourage everyone’s participation. To see how you can get involved, click here.