Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Ko Pei-Chun, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

As 40 years have passed since the “fall” or “liberation” of Saigon, the young men and women who fought and survived the American-Vietnam War are now entering older adulthood. The relationship between war exposures and health has been widely investigated in American veterans and war refugees in transit and resettlement settings. Yet, aside from scholarship on dioxin exposure and a spate of recent anthropological research and memoirs that explore survivors’ emotional and spiritual sufferings, the impacts of war on Vietnamese survivors’ health has been quite limited. Seeking to broaden understanding of the enduring burden of conflict upon health in populations widely impacted by war, we conducted the Vietnam Health and Aging Pilot Study (VHAPS) in one commune of northern Vietnam’s Red River Delta in 2010. In this seminar I will describe our study and the war-time experiences and current health conditions of our sample (N=405), which includes male and female veterans of the People’s Army of North Vietnam, as well as those who served in paramilitaries, and nonveterans who were affected by war in myriad ways. I elaborate upon key findings from analyses of the VHAPS, in which we detect patterns of posttraumatic stress and physical health conditions (e.g., arthritis) suggestive of long-term ‘scars’ to health among veterans, especially in men whose duties involved killing/causing severe injury and witnessing war atrocities. Older Vietnamese women, too, have been widely impacted and the health effects of war exposure endure, with current posttraumatic symptoms more common among those who experienced a child’s death and/or spousal separation during the war era. Despite several limitations in the study design and pilot data, the patterns emergent in this cohort suggest that living under the conditions of war can bring a wide array of stresses and strains which scar health over the long term.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Kim Marie Korinek (PhD University of Washington, Sociology) conducts research on aging and the life course; migration and its impacts upon health; household economy and rural institutions; intergenerational support, and social and demographic change in Asia. Geographically, her scholarship has focused on Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam and Thailand, and has used a lens of cross-national comparative analysis. She has published her research in the journals Demography, Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Public Health, Social Science & Medicine, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, International Migration Review, and others. She has co-edited (with Sara Curran) a special issue of the Asia Pacific Migration Journal on migration and development, and has co-edited (with Thomas N. Maloney) a volume published by Routledge on Migration in the Twenty-first Century. Korinek has served as the Associate Director of the University of Utah’s Asia Center, a US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center, since 2011. The Asia Center and the Center’s Mekong Region Development Research Group aim to build language and area studies capacity among US undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to build international collaborations with scholars in education and research settings spanning Asia.

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