Found my topic!!! Super Duper excited :D

Last night I was slaving away at my chemistry homework in Odegard library on the third floor (quiet floor). I was very frustrated with a problem involving molar fractions, vapor pressures of pentane and hexane, density of these gases, and so on with the science train. My eyes were so dried it felt like my contacts were a heavy sheet of hot sand. I finally gave up on the chemistry problem and started researching my topic for Berlin. I was still unsure on my specific area of interest within my top two topics. So, Google came to my rescue like always. I typed in Berlin Media and the first thing that pops up on the search was Google maps listing places in Berlin with the word “media” in it. Epic fail. However, I was still able to find information about the newspapers, news channels, libraries, and publications. I could already tell that all of this information was leading me nowhere far. Thus, I started searching fore more details on minority population in Germany. I was looking at charts and statistics on different nationalities residing in Berlin. As my eyes are scanning over the various population numbers and nationality labels, I was not expecting a big surprise. I saw Turkey listed with the most citizens and then Poland, Serbia, Russia , etc. But then something caught my eye, the data listed “Vietnam (12,165). Then I looked further to see if these statistics were all that out of the ordinary. What I found was very striking, aside from Thailand, which has the smallest population (5,878) living in Berlin, Vietnam was the only Asian country listed. This was very intriguing to me and so my Googling mode switched into high gear. It was amazing how much information I found about the Vietnamese experience in Berlin. I was very excited because not only does it relate to me personally, but I learned so many new history about my country and its people.
Here is some of the information that found:
Towards the end of the Vietnam War, there were myriads of Vietnamese refugees that had escaped to West Germany. They were called the “boat people”. The German government aided these people socially and economically. Soon, they were able to assimilate and adopt the German culture and lifestyle. Even more is that most of children of these Vietnamese refugees grew up only knowing German and lost most of their links to their Vietnamese culture. Additionally, East Germany at this time also invited lot of North Vietnamese people to come to Berlin to study and be trained in industrial programs. They had 5-year contracts with the East German government who mainly just wanted to do this in order to increase labor force.
The most interesting aspects about these two different groups of Vietnamese immigrants in Germany is that they were indeed separated by the social and political wall in their homeland, but even after they have escaped, they are confronted by a new dividing line; physically it is the Berlin wall, but figuratively it is the same wall that they had left behind in Vietnam.
This quote is referring to the East German Vietnamese workers. “In terms of their characteristics and relations to mainstream society, they were almost the exact opposite of the boat people: they were the elite of their country of origin, rather than refugees from it, and they knew that they would leave Germany, so put forth little effort towards integrating into East German society or learning the local language”.
I am very glad I came across this one small statistical fact on Germany’s minority population, which led me to discover so much more information about my home country. I am excited to find out more about the Vietnamese’s people’s experience now and before the fall of the wall. From what I have read, there is still tension between the Vietnamese people living in the East and the ones in the West. This seems to the shared sentiments for Berliners as a whole. I am curious about the effects that the Berlin wall has on the people surrounding it and not only that, but the social structures that were formed.
Ultimately, I am excited to be learning more about Berlin as a city of history, struggles, and conflict, but it will allow me to discover my own culture and how it was affected so much by a single philosophy “communism”.