Student Spotlight: Khánh Lê Explores Vietnamese American Identity and Intergenerational Trauma Khánh Lê Khánh Lê (Urban Education) says that his dissertation, Cùng với nhau chung tay: A Collaborative project with Vietnamese youth, for which he recently received a Graduate Center dissertation fellowship, is based on his lived experience. He was born in Vietnam, spent time in a refugee camp in Thailand, and arrived in Philadelphia with his family when he was 6 years old. His father spent eight years in prison in Vietnam after the war because he had fought for the United States. His parents’ and grandparents’ experience of the war, their migration to the U.S., and his education here inform his identity as Vietnamese American, an identity that is built out of the generational trauma of the war.