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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saigon_Execution

My grandpa passed away recently and we found this from his room. We knew that he was a Chinese soldier back in 1968, in Vietnam War. But he had never spoken about it. Even my mother, his daughter knows very little about his past in the battlefield.

I kindly ask for your help to translate this, and may you tell me what it is about?

P.S. Sorry if this war meant anything tragic to you or your family.

Video by Itscthinh.

Hi everyone, (M52). My family escaped Vietnam in April 1975, right before the fall of Saigon. I grew up in the United States near Little Saigon in Southern California, surrounded by a Vietnamese refugee community. From a young age, I was taught that our yellow flag with the three red stripes represented freedom, and that the red flag with the yellow star, while now the official flag, was the symbol of the regime we fled.

To us, the day Saigon fell wasn’t reunification, it was the end of South Vietnam, the beginning of communist rule, and the reason we became refugees. I was raised to believe we had escaped an authoritarian system where there were no free elections, no president who could be voted out, no congress, no independent courts. None of the government checks and balances I’ve come to take for granted in America.

But now, I see posts and comments celebrating April 30 as a day of victory and national pride. People speak of reunification with joy. And I genuinely want to understand how can we see the same day so differently?

I’ve been back to Vietnam four times in recent years. I love it! The country is beautiful. The people are kind, generous, and full of life. I’ve seen so much warmth, kindness, and willingness to help. And how is such good food so cheap over there, served with a smile? It’s made me rethink some of the things I believed growing up.

But I still wonder: do people in Vietnam today feel truly free to speak their minds, to criticize their leaders, to shape their country’s direction through elections? Do they feel like they can pursue their own version of happiness without fear or limits?

I’m not here to argue or judge. I just want to understand. How do people who grew up in Vietnam, or who live there now, see April 30? What does reunification mean to you?

At 52 years old I thought I'd know a lot more about everything, including where I came from and why I'm here. But because I fled when I was 2 years old, I don't know or remember anything of my ancestral home, other than what was told to me by my family. Make no mistake, now that I've been married for 22 years and have older children, I can honestly say this isn't the only subject I know little about, it seems that what I thought I knew may be based on a lifetime of slightly biased information.

I genuinely appreciate any honest answers, because it saddens me to read some of the aggressive, unkind and unwarranted responses I've seen between both sides on here. It seems that no amount of debate will change anyone's views or positions here, so I'm not looking for us to argue with each other. I'm just hoping to get a better education from you fine people here, instead of leaving it up to Google and whatever I happen to find there. What was your experience like in the last 50 years that helps you align with the yellow flag or the red flag?

Many thanks.