The Vietnam Collection is made up of objects left by the public at the Vietnam War Memorial (the Wall) in Washington DC. It contains an estimated 400,000 objects, which are stored in the National Park Service Museum Resource Center. It is a unique collection in that all objects are donated by members of the public who visit the Wall. In this way, it is a publicly curated collection, rather one curated by a single person or institution.

This project started when Kim Tran visited the Vietnam Collection in 2015. She was interested in seeing if any objects in the collection had been left by members of the Vietnamese refugee community. With the help of a curator, she found only 6 items that had been left by Vietnamese people, out of hundreds of thousands. The lack of objects from Vietnamese refugees in collection mirrors the way that mainstream narratives in the US surrounding the Vietnam War often render invisible the complex experiences of Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian community members.

The Missing Piece Project pilot occured on April 30, 2018, with support from the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. Several members of VietUnity-LA collected objects from their local communities, traveled to Washington D.C., and dedicated these items at the Wall. You can see documentation of these objects in the Gallery section.

Organize a collective dedication within your community. When you dedicate the items at the Wall, document them with photographs, written text explaining the objects, video interviews, etc, and submit these digital files on the Missing Piece Project website. We will need at least one photo of your item being left at the Wall in order for it to be included in our digital archive.

During the pilot program, people have left everything from family trees, to photographs, artwork, poetry, and historical artifacts. We encourage you to dedicate any items that speak to your experiences of the conflict in Southeast Asia and its legacy. There is no set criteria for what these objects might be. In terms of the Missing Piece Project digital archive, the types of documentation files we are accept are: jpeg, png, pdf, mp4, mov, mp3, and wav.

The physical objects will be housed by the National Parks Service Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection (https://www.nps.gov/vive/learn/collections.htm), if it meets their Scope of Collection Statement (https://www.nps.gov/vive/learn/upload/VIVE-SOCS2-compliant-08-05-16-FINAL.pdf). The digital documentation of the object will be available on the Missing Piece Project website.

Help us spread the word by sharing our website, Facebook page, etc. and telling your community about the project. You can donate to the project here.

The communities affected by the conflict in Southeast Asia are diverse in their personal experiences and perspectives. The Missing Piece Project aims to create a space that is open to a wide range of viewpoints, in order to show the complexity of these communities and their experiences. The views and opinions expressed by those who participate in the project are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organizers of the Missing Piece Project.