"Their concerns were constitutional," she says. "I was not concerned about whether my friends would be drafted. I was concerned about how events in Vietnam would affect Vietnamese."

Tai recalls that it was difficult for her classmates to appreciate the diversity of backgrounds and opinions of the Vietnamese.

She says that in the last few decades, the Vietnamese have attempted to restore traditions while modernizing.

"In the 1960s, people's aspiration was to have a bicycle. Now [after the economic reforms of the 1980s], their aspiration is to have a motorped, a car," she says. "[But] you drive down the countryside and realize that the people don't know that they have to get out of the way of cars."

Tai talks of the complexity of Vietnam, where the officially-socialist government has carried out economic reforms but still has no open academic dialogue about its history.

Tai says she has attempted to rethink Vietnamese history during the 26 years that she has been a graduate student, then professor at Harvard.

Tai adds that she wishes she were not the only Vietnamese studies professor at Harvard and that she could teach courses on focused topics as well as broad introductory classes.

"I would like to move away from [dominant historical themes of heroism and patriotism] and teach about Vietnam's ethnic and regional diversity, as well as implications of Vietnam's territorial expansion over the centuries."