The dissertation is focusing on migration in the EU, specifically on comparing Vietnamese communities in the Czech Republic and in France. The first and the second part of the dissertation is comparing these two Vietnamese communities. The historical background, migrants'integration to local community and position of immigrants at the Czech and French labour markets. The third part is assessing the impact of these communities on Vietnam.

My thesis will be a collection of short stories about Asian and Asian-American families and the expectations of their children that leads them to certain decisions and actions. The majority of the stories will be focused on Vietnamese-American families, but I will explore the family dynamics within the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese families as well. Through this short story collection, I hope to dramatize the internal conflicts of children of Asian and Asian-American families as they question their identities and aspirations and as they struggle to preserving culture while simultaneously creating their own individual cultures and redefining what it means to be Asian or Asian-American. For my critical introduction, I will examine the immigrant literature of Junot Diaz. Particularly influential to my own writing are Diaz’s focuses on familial relationships, his experiments with point of view, and his use of a native family language (in his case, Spanish) alongside English.

No description available.

The importing of tra, basa, and channel catfish at relatively lower prices has resulted in less catfish purchased from U.S. farmers and processors. Claims have been filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) accusing Vietnamese exporters of selling catfish to the U.S. at less than fair market value. Consequently, the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled against Vietnam in 2003 and recommended tariffs from 37% to 64%. The primary objective of this research is to assess the impact of the tariffs on imported Vietnamese catfish on the U.S. catfish industry. In this study, we develop a supply and demand model of the U.S. catfish industry at the farm and wholesale level. In this model, we incorporate the effects of imports and estimate the short-run and long-run effects of changes in import prices on U.S. prices, quantities and welfare at the farm and wholesale level.

published_or_final_version / Comparative Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

The role that culture and trauma plays in shaping mental health outcomes continues to dominate debate in the field of transcultural and post-conflict mental health. The broad aim of this thesis is to investigate key issues relevant to these two factors in relation to the Vietnamese. A meta-analysis of international epidemiological research indicated that countries of North and South East Asia appear to manifest low rates of mental disorder compared to English-speaking countries. A meta-regression analysis of research undertaken specifically with refugee and conflict-affected populations, confirmed a robust association between torture and general trauma and risk to mental disorder. The thesis then examines data from three population-based mental health surveys: 1,161 Vietnamese-Australian residents in the state of New South Wales; 3,039 Vietnamese resident in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam; and 7,961 Australian-born persons drawn from a national survey. All surveys applied the Composite International Diagnostic Interview, with the Vietnamese surveys also applying the Phan Vietnamese Psychiatric Rating Scale, an indigenously-derived measure of mental disorder. The ICD-10 classification system yielded lowest rates amongst Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta, intermediate amongst Vietnamese in NSW; and highest rates amongst the Australian-born population. The Phan Vietnamese Psychiatric Rating Scale added a substantial number of cases in both Vietnamese samples. The findings suggest that sole reliance on a western-derived measure of mental disorder may fail to identify a cases of mental disorder across cultures. Trauma remained a substantial risk factor for mental disorder amongst Australian Vietnamese accounting for a substantial portion of the total burden of mental disorder in that population. The implications of these findings in developing a more refined model for understanding the mental health consequences of mass trauma across cultures are discussed.

The Vietnamese people have always harboured an extraordinarily strong patriotic drive. But the government formed by Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) after the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) on the 2nd September 1945, the group that was to represent majority Vietnamese opinion until and after 1975, was spearheaded by the Vietminh (League for Vietnam's Independence) - a movement that did not define itself as Nationalist, but rather as an expressly Communist group. When the people of Vietnam looked for leadership, this was the obvious group to choose - the only movement prepared and willing to step in (other, more nationalist resistance groups had prematurely flourished and failed, as shall be discussed). In the Vietnam that found itself suddenly free at the close of the Second World War, no other lobby was ready, no group presented itself nationally as the Communists were and did. The Liberation Army that seized control of town after town was the military arm of the Viet Minh, formed in 1944 under Vo Nguyen Giap (b. 1912), an element of a movement that published its manifesto in February 1930, that had begun preparation and ideological training in the late 1920's in Guangzhou under Ho Chi Minh. Given the long preparation carried out by the Vietminh, the progression to the declaration of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as a Communist nation with Ho at its head was a natural one. Whilst that development seems logical given the conditions of the day, the manner in which those conditions were reached (or manipulated) has been the subject of intense debate. Was that natural progression one in which the ideologists of Communist revolution 'captured' the Nationalist movement, exploited a nationalistic fervour to produce the desired revolt, using the front of the Viet Minh to blend their esoteric dogmas with the more easily understood nationalist cause of resistance? This is a perception held by many modern historians - that, in effect, Communists are the parasites of the modernization process. This attitude was and is encouraged by examination of advice given to Asian revolutionaries by their Soviet counterparts; Grigori Zinoviev (1833-1936) - later to die by Stalin's order - argued in 1922 that Communists should co-operate with the rising nationalists in Asia, gain the leadership of their movement, and then cast aside the genuine national leaders. For by itself, the tiny Indochina Communist Party could never have hoped to attract the support of politically engaged Vietnamese, let alone the hearts and minds of the nation at large. This is the essence of the currently accepted analysis of the revolutionary Vietnamese setting - that the Communist lobby exploited a majority furious with the abuses of French rule, sliding Communism into a dominant role in Vietnamese life. The majority of people had not fought for a communist government, but to be rid of the colonial occupying power. Such a perception, as shall be discussed, is representative of the Western reading of the whole Southeast Asian region of the day. The Vietnamese people were accustomed to the use of violence to protect their independence; perennial opposition to expansionist China meant that few peoples in Asia had been compelled to fight longer and harder to retain their identity as a separate and independent state than the Vietnamese. Whilst the ability and commitment of the Vietcong in resistance to outside power has been recognised, the strong sense of Vietnamese identity in and of itself has never really been acknowledged beyond the most simplistic of terms by external observers, perhaps because of the difficulty of comprehending how such an emotion can form when looking at the odd shape of the nation on a map. Such a lack of awareness allows supposed Vietnam specialists to assert that the dominant Vietnamese self-assessment is the extent to which the country is not Chinese (and, to a lesser extent, not French) rather than entering into a more significant analysis of how a national identity formed: how, whilst certainly influenced by feelings of encirclement and domination, Vietnam also developed a separate, distinct sense of self. This, whilst a sense that has only relatively recently manifested itself in territorial demands, is a longstanding emotion and sense, in and of itself. Given an understanding of that sense or merely an awareness of its existence, the willingness of the Vietnamese to combat the most powerful nation on Earth, though certainly impressive, needs little explanation; this work has attempted to explore a more difficult question - why they chose the dogma that served them. The idea that the majority of the Vietnamese people had not fought for a communist government, but to be rid of the colonial occupying power is in truth the presentation of a false dichotomy. The fact that a group within a broad movement participates for different reasons from another group does not necessarily imply exploitation or pretense. Neither does the fact that one has a strong political ideology such as socialism forbid the possession of any other political inclination, such as patriotism. The concept of a socialist exploitation of Vietnamese nationalism will be opposed here: a discussion of the disputed importance of nationalism to the Vietnamese Communist movement in resistance, and of Communism to the nationalist movement, will form the subject of this essay. The unity of Vietnam under Communist government in 1975 seems a fitting end to the period to be considered. Much of interest - the politics behind partition, or the Communist-led conduct of war with America, for example - can be considered only briefly; fortunately, these are issues considered in great depth elsewhere. The central issue to this work shall be the development of the Communist movement in French Indochina, and the thesis herein shall be that nationalism and Marxist-Leninism occupied a symbiotic relationship in the motivation of the Communist movement and its chief practitioners in the nation once again known as Vietnam.

The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which the typological differences between Vietnamese and English influence the process of translating authentic Vietnamese sentences into English through an error analysis of the Vietnamese-English translations by Vietnamese EFL students. It starts with the assumption that Vietnamese is a topic-prominent language and the basic structure of Vietnamese manifests a topic-comment relation, rather than a subject-predicate relation (Thompson, 1987; Dyvik, 1984; Hao, 1991; Rosén, 1998), and tries to find out whether the students are more likely to make more errors when the topic of the sentence is not identical with the grammatical subject. This study also investigates the most common types of errors Vietnamese students make when translating topic-comment structures from Vietnamese into English. The analysis focuses on the errors made when translating the dropped subject and empty elements of Vietnamese. This is important, given the fact that the grammatical subject is always required in English, but not in Vietnamese. The data was collected from 95 students of English translation classes in their first, second, third, and fourth years in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Using an error analysis technique often adopted in studying the deviated forms produced by second language learners (James, 1998; Richards, 1974; Corder, 1974), the study constructs an error corpus in the form of a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet and classifies all the errors based on the categories they belong to (linguistic, comprehension or translational) and the kind of deviation they are (addition, omission, misordering or misselection, etc). The study establishes a taxonomy of errors, which includes three main categories: linguistic errors, comprehension errors and translation errors. The results of the study suggest a number of potential errors students are prone to making when translating the topic-comment structure of Vietnamese into English, and provides some practical guidelines for teachers, so that they can help students deal with these types of errors in Vietnamese-English translations. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This study is intended to provide information about the situation of first-generation Vietnamese women to the IRCO Parent and Child Program Department in Portland, Oregon. Nutrition intervention and food assistance currently offered to Vietnamese women enrolled in this program is the focus of the study. The women interviewed characterize themselves and their eating patterns as Vietnamese, though many changes in practice and concept reflect those of American culture. The study reveals several categories of food acculturation that act both separately and influence the development of each other. These categories are diet, taste, solutions, and concepts. Recommendations are made according to the categories and process of acculturation demonstrated by the participating women and the effects of this process on the health of the women and their families. / Graduation date: 2004