VIETNAM’S 50TH REUNIFICATION DAY: YOUTH NARRATIVES AND HISTORICAL MEMORY THROUGH DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Vietnam underwent severe challenges of war, from the resistance to the French to the Vietnam War with the United States. On April 30, 1975, Vietnam was officially reunified, and the country could embrace a long period of peace and opportunity for reconstruction. The 50th anniversary of Vietnam's Reunification Day (April 30, 2025) presents us with a significant opportunity for a national moment of reflection and remembrance of our history. Historically framed by the state narrative focusing on the victory that brought unity to Vietnam, this moment of commemoration will also reveal a generational shift in how history is seen, particularly with regard to memory, questioning, co-memorializing, and retelling of the past by Vietnam's youth, who became youth only after the war ended. This paper analyzes how youth (ages 18-30) in Vietnam engage in historical memory and narratives about the subject of reunification and national reflections about the war through their use of digital storytelling across TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. This paper presents the analysis of a small curated corpus of youth-generated material from the anniversary. The analysis demonstrates the wide range of stories told, from personal family stories to critical reflections to performative reenactment and political parody. The archive of youthgenerated digital stories suggests a more sophisticated and nuanced re-imagining of memory, which is inherently personal, collective, and mediated. Youth use digital storytelling not just to commemorate, but to challenge their inherited histories and claim their place in Vietnam's changing national story. The paper considers how memories cannot be simply frozen in the digital world, but retraced and re-formed, and youth are increasingly at the center of how the nation tells itself to remember.