When Vuong Nguyen sets up his guitar and breaks out his notebook of poems to perform, he often draws odd stares. But he’s not there to sell albums, make recordings, or gain a following – he’s there to help his Vietnamese American community “face the music.”

When playing in the corner during Tet New Year, or busking in a lonely Dorchester Avenue parking lot, he says, he can feel invisible, but his words aren’t ignored.

Dubbing himself Nguồn Thiêng, or “spiritual root,” he has taken to folk singing – a rarity of a choice in the polished and upbeat “Golden Music” of the Vietnamese American diaspora – to relay to his listeners the difficult atrocities that happened to the Vietnamese on their way to America, and to Dorchester.

For Vietnamese refugees who came in the 1980s and the immigrants who came a decade later, starting over in Dorchester meant forgetting the journey, or as Nguyen says, “whitewashing” the details in stories told to children and grandchildren.

“Some days [the reception] is pretty hard. It’s not the nice package people are usually expecting,” he said. “They don’t know what to do with these songs, or with me. But they listen.”

Recording the stories and honoring the refugee and bridge generations in Vietnamese American communities has been a trend this year during commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975. There is a sense of urgency within the first- and second-generation as their elders age and pass away without telling their truths.

“We’re growing a lot of flower trees but not growing any fruit trees at all,” he said in a recent interview. “The flower trees look great, but the fruits and seeds are what we need to hand down these real stories to our kids and keep them going…There has to be more depth to this – some fruits, and shade, and seeds.

“There are people in the community now that are looking for a way not to go quietly,” he added, saying that it’s not always about keeping quiet, but that the language is difficult, and the situations are complex. Some of the terms in Vietnamese don’t exist anymore, he noted.

“Even I can’t figure out sometimes how to say it in Vietnamese. These are people frozen in time,” he said. “But I’ll continue gathering up all the stories because these stories go with the people, and they die with them if not told.”

Nguyen sings stories of the “Boat People”— refugees who were sometimes tortured, raped, and even killed on their journeys away from home. He sings of the brokenness of the former soldiers and police officers from South Vietnam who immigrated later under the Humanitarian Operation (HO) having been tortured and “re-educated” in camps after Saigon fell and Americans left. Most of the gory details are hidden, he said, inside the older generation in wounds that have never healed – but need to.

“People ask if I have an album, and I don’t because for me it’s about storytelling and giving people chances to come talk,” he said. “They are afraid to say it because no one prompts them. If I can prompt them with these songs, I can let some of it out. If we can put a finger on our scars, maybe we can heal them before it’s too late.”

The 41-year-old Nguyen is a successful tech consultant in his day job, but he has always loved the arts and music. He arrived in Dorchester in 1995 at the age of 12 as an immigrant in the HO program and after stints at Dorchester High School and Cathedral High School, he literally talked his way into a spot a BC High, from which he graduated. Singing in the St. Williams and St. Ambrose Church choirs and founding art programs with his future wife, Vy Vu, at VietAID during high school and college, he became deeply embedded in the community.

Now, with children of his own, including daughters, he picked his guitar back up to introduce them to music. He began writing poetry and recording songs on YouTube and soon he was introducing his kids to some uncomfortable stories. They urged him to sing “happier” songs or to delve into K-Pop, but he continued on his “different path.”

He described himself as the typical “gung-ho” immigrant youth striving for success until a time in college when he had to fill in for his mother at a meat packing job while she cared for a sick family member. That experience drew him to the plight of Vietnamese women, as they talked openly around him.

“One of the women was on the way out of the meat packing plant, and it was hard work, being in a freezer all day packing meat,” he recalled. “She muttered to herself, ‘Living like this, I’d rather die.’ This was someone who had raised two young men who were both at Harvard and amazing people.”

Most recently, he has compiled 10 songs focusing on the experiences of the refugee “Boat People,” who set off on difficult journeys that often were upended by cruel pirates and south Thailand fishermen. The United Nations once estimated that 80 percent of women aged 15 to 20 were abused by hijackers on their journeys.

The compilation is titled ‘Tiếng Hót Loài Chim Lạc,’ or ‘Voice of the Lạc Bird.’ He explained that the Lac bird is considered an authentic representation of ancient Vietnam prior to any colonization. The Lac is a migratory species with spiritual implications and is known as “lost” because it wanders north and south.

In Thai and United Nations court documents, Nguyen read gruesome accounts of what happened to the Boat People in testimony preserved in those papers, saying it “broke him” when he read about the island of Koh Kra – known as “hell on earth.” The small island was used by pirates and fisherman to dump prisoner refugees taken from the boats – often young girls who were subjected to continuous sexual assault and hard labor as they tried to hide in caves. Nguyen said he heard the forgotten voices of the suffering and wrote, ‘Flower That Bloomed on Koh Kra.’

“Please don’t forget me” – “I heard that in these stories,” he said. “It was in the story of one young girl who sacrificed herself so everyone else on the boat could go on and get to freedom. She was taken away by a pirate. The others got to go on.”

It is also reflected in the song ‘Way You Cut Your Hair,’ which was homage to why so many of the women and girls cut their hair short – and often still do, out of habit.

“It was recorded on the cave walls and warned women to cut their hair so that [captors] don’t know you’re a woman – they might think you’re a boy and leave you alone,” he recalled. “I had to sit on that because I have a daughter who is 12 and she has long hair…There was a moment in time when Vietnamese women were forced to cut their hair to survive.”

It’s such songs that often relegate Nguyen to the corner, where people hear and acknowledge, but don’t know what to do. However, he remains hopeful that his songs will help elders find healing and give the younger generation a better understanding of them before time runs out.

“They are like someone frozen in time, and you see their open wounds and it’s a scar they can’t get to,” he said. “I remain positive because I think the tide is changing a little bit. I see my children listening and some of these things I tell them, they stick.”