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This chapter documents the historical and social development of Southern California’s Little Saigon, with particular emphasis on its emergence as the cultural, political, and economic center of the Vietnamese diaspora. It argues that, despite its small scale, the local experience of exile in Little Saigon is intricately linked to the global emergence of Southeast Asia, particularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It considers the contribution of ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam—with business experience and access to capital—to the capitalist economic development of Little Saigon. It describes the uninterrupted ethnic conflict that circumscribes the contested relationship between ethnic Chinese and ethnic Vietnamese refugees from Vietnam as an “overlapping diaspora.” It also examines how the Vietnamese Americans constructed cultural institutions in the ethnic enclave to forge a public identity for themselves under the shadow of Chinese figures that held economic power. The chapter paints Little Saigon as a cultural battlefield where Vietnamese Americans fought to distinguish themselves from other immigrants.

This chapter focuses on the politics of respectability in Little Saigon during the 1980s, in which the Vietnamese American middle class and younger white conservatives shared a mutual interest in promoting “a responsible image of the refugees,” as evidence of who had really won the Vietnam War. Their collective intervention sought to win the postwar by constructing an asymmetrical dichotomy of model minority “good refugees” who typified the race in contrast to aberrational “bad refugees” who had a habit of attracting negative press. In reality, the “bad refugees” represented many of the practices—from using taxpayer dollars to purchase medicine for relatives in Vietnam to exceeding the legal limit for remittances—that accounted for 50% of the ethnic economy.

Studies of Vietnamese Americans have traditionally shared a linear assimilationist framework, whereby “good” refugees have successfully moved beyond the Vietnam War while “bad” refugees continue to engage in reactionary anti-communist protest. My own research into Little Saigon reveals that both types represented contrasting approaches to winning the postwar. Traditional model minority types tried to validate the South Vietnamese as a people worth fighting for while ultra-nationalist bad refugees imagined themselves as a far more capable fighting force than most Americans wish to remember. Like Greg Dvorak’s paper, this one explores the tensions present in social memory and social amnesia, where exhortations for the diasporic Vietnamese refugees to forget the past really meant they should forget their version of the past. Middle-aged veterans of South Vietnam in particular faced the challenge of maintaining an anti-communist refuge in America in the post-Cold War era where they could construct an identity for themselves contrary to the negative images dominant in Vietnam and the United States.

This chapter uses the twin concepts of dismemberment and rememberment to investigate the media discourse surrounding a controversial art exhibit held in 2009 in Orange County, California involving mass protests by hundreds of people demonstrating against a community-based art exhibit for showcasing creative reinterpretations of the South Vietnamese national flag and Vietnamese women’s role, as proper gendered national subjects fueled a public outcry against the exhibit as profane, pro-communist trash. The chapter concludes by discussing the ban on LGBT people from the community’s annual new year TET parade, and how this had to do with more than homophobia, but South Vietnamese nationalism, which allows for no alternative identities within the diasporic family. This chapter ultimately aims to broaden the scope for studying Vietnamese American “homeland politics” by venturing to speak to the puzzling ways the overseas communities and identities formed by refugees from South Vietnam are shaped, circumscribed, and policed in the current day by the politics of anti-communism.

The introduction lays out the main theoretical and narrative elements of the book. Because of its failure during the Vietnam War, the US has a vested interest in highlighting its more virtuous role in evacuating and resettling refugees. But what about the refugees? We know far more about the causes of their exodus and the national guilt of the receiving country than how the uprooted collectively made sense of their experience after arriving in the United States. This chapter explains the cultural stakes of exile identity—which in this book goes by the term refugee nationalism, specifically who gets to interpret a nation’s past, who gets to be on the right of history, and who gets to be on the wrong side of history. Cold War politics presented an opportunity for Refugee Americans—most of whom fled communist countries—to freely teach and institutionalize their version of the national past at the local, state, and national level, placing themselves on the right side of history without fear of diplomatic reprisals. This chapter emphasizes the importance of local factors in shaping the look and feel of refugee nationalism, how the Orange County plays into it, and then proceeds with a summary of the next six chapters.