My name is Annan Wynne and you are listening to They Call Us

Fear Q on the BBC World Service. My travel to Vietnam to get to know the contemporary version of the war-torn country

my parents fled in 1975. My mom was always keen to pass her culinary skills onto us,

endless details of exact temperatures for boiling rice

and instructions on how to lift a chicken out of a pot.

It was the setting for where our conversations about her life in Vietnam began.

She would tell me about her Vietnamese childhood chasing

fireflies in the moonlight, selling vegetables in the market and playing in the

ice fields. But whenever my questions turned to the Vietnam War, which would eventually make her leave it all behind,

she'd become elusive and shake her head.

And every once in a while she'd give us an odd warning that we shouldn't speak ill of the Vietnamese government

or else? Or else what? She wouldn't say. Instead, she would make us food. But her fear was inherited by me all the same and a mountain of questions

were starting to pile up.

Does the Vietnam my mother

my mother feared still exist?

How Vietnamese am I?

What are local Vietnamese like me doing?

And the biggest question that is always running through my head is

what would the Vietnam Anna have been like if my parents hadn't made the

exodus? I'm a second generation British Vietnamese people living outside the country.

My parents flowed Vietnam in 1975 in the mass exodus that followed the Vietnam War.

By the way of Hong Kong, they were resettled in London, along with 20,000 other Vietnamese. It is this community and their traumas that

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