 Thank you so much for being interested in my work and in my book. My name is Professor Janna Lipman. I teach U.S. history here at Tulane, and I'm really excited because I just published my new book in camps, Vietnamese refugees, asylum seekers, and repatriates. And this is a project I've been working on for about a decade, and it tells the story of Vietnamese refugees as they left Vietnam, and their experiences in camps in Guam, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. And it really is meant to have us think about why does it matter where refugees land? Does it matter if they land in the Philippines versus Hong Kong? Does it matter when they land, 1975 versus 1989? And what does this mean for the present? And I began thinking about this topic a long time ago now because I came across two really different images. I'll just show them to you quickly. Amazing technology. So this is my new book to show you there in camps. But the image I wanted to talk about is this one. I found this image in the archives now many years ago. And at first, it's not clear what's going on here. This is a group of Vietnamese men who had left Vietnam in 1975. And before coming to the United States, they were all sent to Guam. The vast majority of Vietnamese men came to the United States and resettled. And we have large numbers of Vietnamese in the United States today, many of whom went through Guam in 1975. But a small number of Vietnamese did not want to come to the United States. Instead, they wanted to go back to Vietnam. And to me, this was really curious. I wanted to know what was going on. Why do they want to go back to Vietnam? What was happening? And here we can see them protesting. The image says 36 hours hunger strike sit in quiet hair shaving off. They were protesting on hunger strike to go back to Vietnam. And they do go back eventually in October of 1975 and very tragically they're put in reeducation camps in Vietnam, sometimes for years on end. Flash forward about 15 years later in 1990. And I came across images like this one as I was starting to do my research. This is again a Vietnamese in a refugee camp. But unlike in Guam, they're protesting. So again, they're protesting in the refugee camp. And I want to know why? Why are they protesting? And they are protesting because the Hong Kong government wanted to send them back to Vietnam. These Vietnamese did not want to go back to Vietnam. They did not want to be repatriated. Instead, they wanted to come to the United States or Australia or Canada. And yet the images to me raise both lots of questions. What is going on in these camps? Here we have people who are protesting. They're not passive. They are not a political rather they're engaging in political action. Secondly, the things have really changed. In the first image, you had individuals who wanted to go back to Vietnam. Well, in the second image in 1990, you had people who definitely did not want to go back. What had changed over time? And these are the questions that animated my book. And that led me to conduct research in Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, England, and Southern California in Orange County. I was able to go through all sorts of archives, records from refugee camps. I toured many places that were formerly refugee camps from sort of abandoned buildings to places that are currently parts of the Hong Kong police force, where they still do trainings. And in the end, my book has, I would say, two, maybe three main arguments. First, I argue that refugee status is not fixed. It changes over time. So if someone shows up in 1975, they were automatically a refugee. Well, if someone was able to land in the same spot 10 years later, 15 years later in 1990, they were no longer necessarily a refugee. This really matters when we think about our refugee policy today. Secondly, where someone ends up mattered a lot. I think when we think about refugees, most people think about where people fleeing from, in my case in Vietnam, where are they going to? The United States, Canada, Germany. Where we haven't spent as much time looking as the camps in between, the places in between where these men and women go before they either get resettled or repatriated. In my work, I really argue that it made a huge difference that the politics of Hong Kong or the politics of the Philippines mattered a great deal. For example, the Philippines as a Catholic country under Fernando Marcos, who was a US backed authoritarian leader, wanted to help the United States and be seen as a useful partner. Hong Kong, a British colony, did not feel that compulsion. So had a much harsher policy vis-a-vis the Vietnamese. So where someone's boat ended up or where someone got to made a huge difference and if they were able to be a refugee or not. And I think these local politics matter a great deal because they mattered at the international level as well as at the local level. Finally, activism. I'm very proud of the fact. I don't think I use the word plight of the refugee anywhere in the book. At least I hope not. But in a lot of the literature on refugees, refugees are seen as passive, apolitical, abject, unable to shape their futures, just grateful and thankful for having been saved. And in my research, I show that this really is not generally the case. People leave countries for political reasons. And then in the camps, they engaged in active political protest. Sometimes this was radical, whether it was getting your head shaved and being on a hunger strike to sometimes engaging in acts of violence. Other times it was less radical but still useful and assertive, creating networks in the Vietnamese diaspora communities, in the United States or in England or Australia. Other times writing letters to policymakers and actively lobbying governments or using allies in host countries to lobby governments for better policies. And so I argue and look at the ways in which the individuals in the camps were actively involved in these types of protests and events to improve their status and to get what they wanted, whether it was repatriation in 1975 or mostly afterwards, better conditions in the camps and easier access and refugee status in an English-speaking country. I think my book has lots to tell us about refugee politics today, both the ways in which governments have acted to keep people out, the ways in which governments have turned to camps to deter people, and the ways in which people in the camps and their advocates continue to advocate for better sort of asylum status, for more fairness, for more justice and for more humanity for refugees throughout the world. So thank you very much and my book is called In Camps.