Walking around 'Exodus," the heartrending exhibition of photographs of refugees on view until Oct. 20 at Shibuya's Bunkamura in Tokyo, Kim Chi Tran stops in front of pictures of Vietnamese boat people. "See that refugee camp?" she says. "Twenty-one years ago I was there."
Today Kim is an associate professor in the School of Policy Studies at Kwansei Gakuin University in Sanda-Hyogo, near Osaka. With a flat in Paris, and recently returned from two months in Latin America, she exemplifies as dramatic a change of fortune as it is possible to imagine.
She recalls an incident in 1968, when the communist Viet Cong attacked Saigon. "We thought firecrackers were being let off, but then saw the houses opposite explode into flame. I was in a war zone. Then my grandfather came to our rescue in an ambulance and drove us to his hometown, Bien Ho. Mostly I remember American GIs as drunken red-faced giants, but they can't have all been like that."