She hasn’t returned to Vietnam since she finished school. She is also an assistant in school and helps many Vietnamese children born in Poland with their Polish, and she also teaches Polish people Vietnamese. She is an activist, a translator and a teacher. In order not to forget the Vietnamese language, she translated Polish literature and poetry into Vietnamese.
She explains that her teachers were racist, and she didn’t know how to play with Polish children. It was the 90s and she was an attraction at school. When she was a child, Anh's dad first moved to Bulgaria, and then her family came to Poland when she was 13 years old. Polish society doesn’t let us be seen outside stereotypes that it has created, and there is a mutual lack of contact between Vietnamese and Polish communities.”Įditor's note: We are heart-broken to learn and inform you that Kim Lee passed away in December 2020 due to COVID-19. There is no representation of artists or performers. Kim says that there are two main stereotypical representations of a Vietnamese person in Poland: “You are either depicted as the mafia, or a bazaar trader in the old football stadium, which was a big trading hot spot in the 90s.
There are only around 30 drag queens in the country, and they are frequently demonized by the government.
He is half-Korean, half-Vietnamese, but his life is in Poland. Kim is the only Vietnamese drag queen in Poland. She feels both Polish and Vietnamese, and in Poland uses the name “Ola” as it helps her establish a closeness with Polish society. In 2018, she won the Polish edition of MasterChef. She was brought up in a traditional Vietnamese household and learned to cook at a young age while helping her mom out in the kitchen. Ola came to Poland with her family as a child and went to school in Warsaw. Even though she was born in Poland and Polish is her mother tongue, because of the way she looks, people have asked her before: “So where did you learn Polish?” Lan is a freelance designer and was born in Poland to a Vietnamese family, but feels like she is from Warsaw, rather than from Poland. They are both located on the outskirts of the capital, close to Wólka Kosowska, one of the biggest wholesale trading areas in Eastern Europe and a place where a significant number of Vietnamese people continue to work. There are two pagodas in Warsaw, Chua Thien Phuc and Nhan Hoa. This project seeks to challenge stereotypical representations of Vietnamese migrants in Poland as bazaar owners, nail technicians or mafia gangsters (as was the case with Netflix’s 1983 series). As a Polish immigrant living in the United Kingdom, I returned to Poland this summer and collaborated with the Vietnamese community in Warsaw to better understand the diversity of Vietnamese experiences in the Polish capital, and how this community reconciles their identity in a largely mono-ethnic country.īa Lan - meaning Poland in Vietnamese - explores the intersections of Polish and Vietnamese culture and examines the relationship between national identity, feelings of belonging and ethnicity.
Instead, slogans such as “Today’s immigrants are tomorrow's terrorists” have been increasingly seen in public spaces since 2015. The presence of the Vietnamese community in Poland is largely underrepresented in the media, arts and culture. The Vietnamese community has been part of Polish society for many generations, and to this day Poland continues to be an attractive destination for Vietnamese immigrants. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there was a new wave of economically motivated Vietnamese newcomers who were attracted by the emerging markets in countries that at the time were transitioning to capitalist economies.Ĭurrently, the Vietnamese community is the biggest non-European migrant population in Poland, with an estimated population of 50,000–80,000. Upon finishing their studies, some former students decided to stay in Poland.ĭespite the collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, Vietnamese people continued to migrate to Poland, but the nature of their migration changed. In the 1950s and 1960s, Vietnam favored fellow communist nations and rewarded students with good grades with the possibility of studying in Soviet countries. Vietnamese immigrants began to arrive in Poland in the 1950s, initially on the basis of student exchanges. In contrast with the Vietnamese diasporas in the United States or Western Europe, the Vietnamese communities in Central and Eastern Europe started to appear during the Cold War. Even migration specialists are often shocked to hear about the substantial community of Vietnamese people who reside in Poland. Poland is a largely mono-ethnic country with a negative immigration rate and has one of the lowest rates of foreigners in the European Union.