Voice creates agency through the ability to share experiences, it holds power against being socially erased by the impositions of a dominant authority. The lack of power to communicate creates a profound sense of vulnerability. It is important that we hear, feel, and share voices that hold different sounds, accents, histories, and tones in the public realm to promote communication and not remove this from community experience.

Music is not a ‘one way’ mode of communication, it is integral to life even under the most difficult circumstances and offers collective hope in protest. Much is communicated through song, instrumental music and voice may find expression through no other means. Forced migration often inhibits sonic heritage, inducing guardedness in migrants in the face of danger and trauma in the torment of remembering and the fear of forgetting.

The power of collective song lies in the essence of being and life, in birds, insects, animals, humans, the search for togetherness and shared language.

Song should be seen as a site of contest and conflict, of voices in allegiance demanding a platform for appearance. Lyrics that lament of love and loss, often overlooked as superficial and indulgent, are words and sounds that play out the incommunicable in a shared history of collective trauma, social exclusion and political discontent.

The Vietnamese have an unmistakable penchant for song, through distorted speakers one will without doubt encounter collective occasions of shared singing throughout Vietnam and within Diaspora groups around the world.

The most popular repertoire still comprising of Nhạc Vàng songs now popularly known as Bolero, many compositions hailing from the pre 1975 era.

The inception of Tân Nhạc in Vietnam, or modern music, traces back to the early nineteenth century during the period of French occupation. The influence of European musical traditions introduced to Vietnam by the French, initially manifesting in the form of hymns within Catholic churches. Priests played a pivotal role in imparting musical knowledge for missionary objectives. Subsequently, music found its place in military contexts following the French invasion of Hà Nội in 1873, marked by the introduction of novel instruments, such as brass trumpets.

The elite embraced the French introduction of popular songs, heightened by talking movies and ballroom dancing. The emotive and romantic essence of French chansons significantly shaped early modern Vietnamese popular music before and after 1975. Vietnamese composers later crafted a distinctive style by blending various foreign and domestic influences. Notable vocalists, including Khánh Ly and Thái Thành for the refined audience, and Thanh Tuyền and Chế Linh for the general listeners, played a key role in popularising this genre.

The communist leadership banned Nhạc Vàng during the war years, citing the ballads would induce softness, excessive emotion and render the whole country inert and unable, unwilling to continue the effort to mobilise the country in war.

During and in the aftermath of the war, many Vietnamese fled the homeland, unable to bring with them any objects of memory, in their hearts they carried with them across the sea and into new lands the sounds of Nhạc Vàng.

In South Vietnam, the ban on exiled and yellow music was strict, while it was more accessible in the North. Paris By Night (PBN) products, popular in homes or discreetly in karaoke bars, were sought in Hanoi's small video shops.

From the late 1970s, Saigon residents sent music recordings from overseas Vietnamese relatives. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, pirated PBN videos, tapes, and CDs from the diaspora flooded the black market, shaping consumer trends despite government efforts. In 1993, despite campaigns against the black market, people openly watched these products, from 1980-1990, Vietnamese exiled music gained traction, with a large portion of the population embracing diasporic music.

I discovered Uncle Lộc Vàng’s story through records of the Nhạc Vàng café he ran in Hà Nội, it no longer exists, he is passionate about singing and continues to sing in a small café on the West Bank. We finally met in Vietnam in 2018, through my research on Nhạc Vàng as Bolero Music. In this work I proposed Bolero a transnational diasporic music phenomenon as a site of understanding and repair for Vietnamese people and her Diaspora, this research came to form the foundation for a performance work called ‘The Bolero Effect’ created and performed in Hà Nội Vietnam 2019, in collaboration with local community performers, including Lộc Vàng.

Uncle Lộc Vàng was arrested in 1968, during the war, accused of being a revolutionary for continuing to sing the censored Nhạc Vàng repertoire, he endured an unfair trial with the music group he sang with and was consequently imprisoned for 10 years in a hard labour camp and 4 years on probation.

Uncle Lộc Vàng sings to protest what he calls the heavy-handed censorship on songs that speak only of love and peace. Uncle Lộc Vàng embodies the survival of voice and voice as a site of resistance. He is over 80 years and has been singing since he was a child and still lives in Hà Nội, Vietnam.

The history of Lộc Vàng is sketchily documented through random interviews in print and online.