In the two decades after 1975, over 1 million Vietnamese resettled in the United States. New resettlement programs arose not only in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and in the years immediately thereafter, but also in 1979, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989, and 1996. These initiatives resulted from unilateral US policies, multilateral programs organized under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, bilateral programs negotiated between Washington and Hanoi, and, often, a combination of the three. This chapter explores how the Vietnamese diaspora influenced the American approach to normalization with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). It argues that normalization was a protracted process that unfolded over decades and that negotiating and implementing migration programs was a central part of the that process. The US approach to post-1975 US–SRV relations saw significant input from nonexecutive actors. Nonstate actors provided information and political pressure, and created close relationships with elected officials outside the White House, especially members of Congress. These groups, the actions of first-asylum nations, and other transnational forces combined to make negotiating and implementing migration programs a US priority. The contact, cooperation, and compromise that process required normalized US–Vietnamese relations, despite US assertions to the contrary.

This chapter analyzes the United States’ relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam from 1975 to the present. The termination of war in 1975 brought conflict of a different sort. Washington retained the wartime trade embargo and rejected Hanoi’s demands for “reparations.” Vietnam ignored US requests to account for possible prisoners of war and missing in action (MIA) on its territory. Attitudes shifted in the 1980s. America’s détente with the USSR opened possibilities for Moscow’s ally, Vietnam. Now in dire straits economically, Hanoi’s new leaders revamped the nation’s stagnant economy and opened trade with numerous nations. Vietnam was sufficiently pressed that in the 1990s it bowed to harsh US demands for what was called normalization. Diplomatic relations and trade followed. Vietnam–US relations took an ironic turn in the new century. As China emerged the dominant power in East Asia and expanded into the South China Sea, America increased its military presence in the region and formed a strategic partnership with Vietnam. Wary of China, Hanoi needed US assistance. But it feared dependency on its former enemy. Americans still condemned Vietnam’s authoritarian government and human rights’ abuses. Both seemed content with a relationship a Vietnamese diplomat called the “Goldilocks Formula”: “Not too hot, not too cold.”

Reading Lowell’s depictions of madness in poems from The Mills of the Kavanaughs to Day by Day, this chapter follows Lowell’s negotiation of literary conventions to arrive at a notion of diverse mental states that, in life, cannot entirely be controlled. It is argued that he effectively contributes to the reduction of stigmatization by slowly working through conventions of representing madness, such as the gothic, or othering mad persons through race and gender. He arrives at finally owning his mental state as a derangement of his senses, especially his vision, and foregrounds art and humor as coping mechanisms when facing the fragility and suffering of human life.

According to the postulates of quantum mechanics, the state of a system is associated with a wave function that contains any measurable information on the system at any time. In this chapter we become familiar with wave functions and how they represent the position of particles within the system. Within the realm of quantum mechanics, the position of particles is not deterministic. It is defined by a probability distribution. The wave function is a position-dependent complex-valued amplitude, whose absolute value squared is identified with the probability density for locating the particle in the position space. This identification of the wave function with a probability amplitude imposes some limitation. Particularly, for a closed system in which the particles are bound, the wave function must be proper (square integrable) and normalizable. These properties are discussed and demonstrated for different coordinate systems.

Chapter 5: Many abstract concepts that make linear algebra a powerful mathematical tool have their roots in plane geometry, so we begin the study of inner product spaces with a review of basic properties of lengths and angles in the real two-dimensional plane. Guided by these geometrical properties, we formulate axioms for inner products and norms, which provide generalized notions of length (norm) and perpendicularity (orthogonality) in abstract vector spaces.

This chapter analyzes how diplomacy over Sino-American scientific cooperation was central to the final agreement for China and the United States to establish official diplomatic relations, finally reached in December 1978. In the wake of Mao Zedong’s death in September 1976, China’s emerging post-Mao leadership prioritized the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s scientific development, believing that drawing on scientific knowledge from outside of China – including from the United States – was critical to the country’s development. The Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC had long been arguing that China’s interest in US science provided leverage to the United States and, after President Jimmy Carter recruited the top leadership of the CSCPRC into his administration, utilizing this leverage became a critical part of US China policy. Thus, Chinese and US leaders, working hand-in-glove with the nongovernmental CSCPRC, achieved a simultaneous upgrading of the Sino-American scientific and diplomatic relationship in 1978 that offered a final demonstration of the symbiotic relationship between exchange and high-level Sino-American diplomacy in the pre-normalization era.

This epilogue briefly considers the landscape of the Sino-American exchange program as and after the establishment of official diplomatic relations – or normalization – was realized in 1979. It argues that, despite the changes in the US-China diplomatic relationship, there were as many continuities as there were changes between pre- and post-normalization exchange contacts, at least in the immediate wake of the establishment of official diplomatic relations.

Chapter 2 examines the second era of veterans’ return journeys, from 1995–2005. This era of return was characterized by “normalization”: the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and Việt Nam offered security to tentative veterans who had watched the reconciliation process from afar. Lifted travel restrictions and a growing tourism industry provided returnees with more latitude in their returns, resulting in a more diverse return group. Increasingly, veterans from both countries returned on “healing journeys,” approaching Việt Nam as the locus of their trauma. A discourse of trauma emerged in their narratives, mirroring the rising popularity of therapy and psychoanalysis in Western cultures, with the majority of normalization returnees describing their returns as therapeutic. Many of the normalization returnees became engaged in reconstruction activities as a form of atonement in Việt Nam, reshaping early returnees’ reconciliation processes into personal healing projects.

The humanitarian issues and nonexecutive advocacy that constituted the basis of ongoing US-Vietnamese dialogue in the absence of formal relations remained of pivotal importance before, during, and after Washington and Hanoi resumed formal economic and diplomatic relations in the mid-1990s. Although American policymakers attempted to conclude the humanitarian programs they had earmarked as preconditions to more formal ties, varying definitions of full accounting, the repatriation of migrants to Vietnam through the CPA, and efforts to bring the HO into line with worldwide standards precipitated profound disagreements. Ultimately, US officials moved forward with formal relations with Hanoi and (re)created special programs for South Vietnamese migrants. The 1996 Resettlement Opportunity for Vietnamese Refugees gave screened-out migrants who were repatriated to Vietnam under the CPA one more chance to apply for resettlement in the US.The 1996 McCain Amendment created loopholes to permit the original, exceptional terms of the HO to remain intact. US-Vietnamese collaboration on humanitarian issues, and normalization itself, persisted after the resumption of formal economic and diplomatic relations. The ties between American and South Vietnamese people outlasted both the collapse of South Vietnam and the resumption of relations between Washington and Hanoi.

Chapter 3 continues the focus on methodological concerns, outlining and demonstrating how typical acoustic analyses proceeds from fieldwork to acoustic measurements and data extraction to analysis.This treatment goes deeper into the nuts and bolts of "doing" sociophonetics, with more hand’s on procedures for the identification, processing and measurement of vowels and sibilantsThis chapter is intended to introduce readers to and provide the work flow for some basic analyses using common software.The survey of key methods and fundamental terms presented in this and the previous chapter provides a foundation for reading and understanding the approaches used in sociophonetic literature and in exploring the research presented in subsequent chapters.

This chapter is not about one particular method (or a family of methods). Instead, it provides a set of tools useful for better pattern recognition, especially for real-world applications. They include the definition of distance metrics, vector norms, a brief introduction to the idea of distance metric learning, and power mean kernels (which is a family of useful metrics). We also establish by examples that proper normalizations of our data are essential, and introduce a few data normalization and transformation methods.