The General: Vietnam in the Age of Tô Lâm
Directed by Laura Brickman
Laura Brickman: 2025
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They’re following us—driving, driving next to you.” The narrator states before the camera pans to a motorcyclist who’s filming the team on a mobile phone. It was a moment in a documentary—The General: Vietnam in the Age of Tô Lâm, directed by the journalist Laura Brickman—that mirrored the reality of its screening at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club Thailand in January. The venue was packed. We knew that there were people from Vietnamese intelligence present. Before my move to Asia, where I intended to continue my participation in civil society activism, an elder from the Vietnamese community in Australia warned that the Vietnamese state has “eyes and ears everywhere”.

My parents escaped their homeland after the Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975, and I was born in an Anglophone democracy to a not-very-political family. I only stumbled into the civil society sphere after delving more into Vietnamese language studies. In 2023, an elder from the Vietnamese community in Perth invited me to a commemoration of Hoàng Cơ Minh, the first chairman of the Việt Tân (or the Vietnam Reform Party), considered by many to be a leader of the anti-communist resistance in the 1980s. I hadn’t known then that the Việt Tân was considered by the Vietnamese government to be a “terrorist force”. But I could sense that something was amiss when, even in a sleepy Australian suburb, aunties and uncles wondered if livestreaming the event on Facebook would attract unwanted attention from the Vietnamese state authorities.

• Tags: Issue 44, Laura Brickman, Theodore Pham, Vietnam