The Vietnamese Student Association hosted their x annual Black April or “Tháng Tư Đen” event on April 24, a yearly commemoration of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975.

Guest speakers shared their life stories following the fall of Saigon in remembrance of Black April. Shengyu Zhang / Daily Nexus

Two guest speakers, Huy Nguyen and Dung Tran, shared stories of survival, rebuilding and hope following the fall of Saigon nearly 50 years prior in the Theatre and Dance West auditorium. The Vietnamese Student Association (VSA) served attendees with an assortment of spring rolls with peanut and fish sauces from Saigon Noodle House. 

According to VSA’s website, Black April is also known as “Ngày Mất Nước,” or “The Day We Lost Our Country,” to many Vietnamese people now living abroad and is a time of reflection and remembrance. In the 22 years following the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, over 1.6 million Vietnamese people fled the country “in search of hope and freedom abroad.”

For VSA cultural education chair and second-year sociology major Trinity Chau, VSA’s events are important for UC Santa Barbara’s Vietnamese community because there “isn’t a big Vietnamese population” in Santa Barbara.

“VSA for me is all about building community and having creative events like Black April, where it’s really about coming together and just having good times and meeting people, just forming good circles,” Chau said. 

According to Chau, VSA holds this event every year, but it is the first time that speakers were invited. Chau reached out to the speakers after the Union of Vietnamese Student Associations of Southern California (UVSA) put them in contact with VSA.

Huy Nguyen, the executive director of Vietnam Worker Defenders, a workers’ rights organization based in Vietnam with members globally, gave the first presentation of the night. Huy Nguyen was born in Hanoi before the partition of Vietnam, when the country was divided into North and South under the 1954 Geneva Accords. Huy Nguyen was attending college in the United States when Saigon fell and the Vietnam War ended. He lost contact with his family in Vietnam for three years after the war ended.

Huy Nguyen has since built a family and career as an electrical engineer in Southern California and volunteers at middle schools and high schools to teach Vietnamese language, poetry and culture. He said that he dreams of bringing a new generation of Vietnamese American youth to proficiency in the language and culture of Vietnam.

The second speaker was Tran, a Southern California representative for the Vietnam Reform Party, a pro-democracy party in Vietnam. Tran spoke about the history of Black April and his journey out of Vietnam.

Tran was one of the estimated 800,000 refugees who fled Vietnam by sea after the war, often referred to as “boat people.” Holding back tears, he recounted watching the South Vietnamese flag lowered on the ship that took him and his family away from their homeland. 

“On that day, our whole country [was] put under the dictatorship, and it’s like a black cloud that covered the whole country,” Tran said. “There’s a lot of things [that] happened between then and now. A lot of [the] time, people just see what is on the surface and think there’s nothing wrong, but actually there’s a lot of things wrong.”

He concluded his talk by sharing his determination to once again raise the South Vietnamese flag in Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, and expressed his optimism for the future of Vietnam and Vietnamese Americans. 

According to a 2025 report by human rights nonprofit Freedom House, Vietnam has a Freedom in the World score of 20/100, a metric measuring access to political rights and civil liberties, and is classified as “not free” under its government’s one-party rule.

“I am hoping that these next generations of Vietnamese Americans will get involved and be the catalyst to solve the problem with Vietnam,” Tran said. 

VSA intern and first-year computer engineering major Luke Nguyen said he left the event feeling more connected to the Vietnamese community.

“My favorite part was probably hearing about their stories and how it compared to stories that I’ve heard, especially from my parents, and first person accounts that I’ve heard from my teachers,” Luke Nguyen said. “Seeing how everyone’s kind of gone through the same struggle and how that’s connected everyone in such a unique way.”

A version of this article appeared on p. 3 of the May 1, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.