Search Results

This chapter explores the complex, multidimensional process of acculturation, as understood and experienced by Vietnamese refugee children and as captured by the San Diego portion of CILS. It provides a historical account of why the Vietnamese fled their country, how they resettled in the United States, and how resettlement affected the adjustment of the second generation.

This chapter examines the discourses that surround the figure of the Vietnamese refugee in America. It traces the history of U.S. military intervention and economic sponsorship of South Vietnam, suggesting that the treatment of refugees by mainstream media during and after relocation served to mask the U.S. government’s complicity in the Vietnam War. It shows how the assimilation of Vietnamese refugees into the American landscape simultaneously served both domestic and foreign policy in promoting the United States as a democratically exceptional nation that does not engage in colonialism but fights for freedom. It cites the United States’s failure to attain freedom for the Vietnamese as a historical lesson, but argues that this legacy of American intervention in the fight for democracy does not deter future engagements with war in the Persian Gulf. The chapter considers how the ambivalent incorporation of Vietnamese Americans into Americans society took place in a way that fostered a double identity for refugees.

This chapter focuses on the transformation of lived experience and modes of subjectivity for Vietnamese refugees, primarily military men who have resettled to the U.S. It traces the experiential components of postcolonial forms of power and transformation, and locates the conflicts of “fragmented selves” and the intrapsychic and intrasomatic “violence within” in the historical dynamics of the postcolonial nation-state's coming into being. The chapter discusses the experiential themes of alterity, trauma, and memory, and identifies the postcolonial problem of alterity.

This chapter examines the makeshift camps in Southeast Asia that mostly sheltered the “boat people” who fled Vietnam in the late 1970s and 1980s on crowded and leaky fishing vessels. For a large number of these second-wave refugee migrants, their stay in Asia was not temporary; they had remained stranded in asylum centers or, in rare cases, settled in these first-asylum countries. And yet, most accounts on Vietnamese refugees have continued to privilege settlement in the West. For the first-wave refugees, their camp stay was brief. In contrast, the vast majority of the second-wave escapees languished in overcrowded camps, waiting uncertainly, sometimes indefinitely, to be reviewed and then resettled or repatriated. This chapter pays particular attention to the creative capacity of these second-wave refugees to make social and political lives in a context that was not supportive of, and often actively hostile to, their intimate lives.

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 posits a critical “refuge(e)” study in investigating the ways in which the United States had wrestled with the “difficult memory” of the Vietnam War. Having been deployed to “rescue” the Vietnam War for Americans, Vietnamese refugees constitute a solution, rather than a problem, for the United States. The conjoined term “refuge(es)” is meant to encapsulate this symbiotic relationship: that refuge and refugees are co-constitutive, and that both are the (by)product of U.S. militarism—herein termed as “militarized refuge(es).” This chapter thus charts an interdisciplinary field of critical refugee study, which conceptualizes “the refugee” not as an object of investigation but rather as a paradigm whose function is to establish and make intelligible a wider set of problems.

This chapter shows how popular narratives of Vietnamese refugees have been deployed to rescue the Vietnam War for Americans. It asserts that studies of Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese refugees are necessarily joined: as the purported rescuers and rescued, respectively, they together re-position the United States as the ideal refuge for Vietnam’s “runaways” and thus as the ultimate victor of the Vietnam War. The chapter contends that it is this seeming victory—the “we-win-even-when-we-lose” certainty—that undergirds U.S. remembrance of Vietnam’s “collateral damage” as historically necessary for the progress of freedom and democracy. By critically juxtaposing the constructions of the Vietnam veterans and the Vietnamese refugees together and in relation to continued U.S. militarism, this chapter draws on and brings into conversation three often-distinct fields: American studies, refugee/immigration studies, and war/international studies.

This chapter tells the Vietnamese refugee version of the “good refugee” story, in order to steer attention toward quotidian memory places—the places where ghosts reside. According to Avery Gordon, “The ghost or the apparition is the principal form by which something lost or invisible or seemingly not there makes itself known or apparent to us.” Thus, to write from this haunted position is to look for the living effects of what seems to be over and done with. As such, the ghost is important not as a dead figure but as a sign of what is missing—or, more accurately, of what has been disappeared. Since South Vietnamese history intersects, and not just coincides, with American nationalist history, recovering the ghosts of the former would simultaneously reveal those of the latter.

This chapter examines two novels that portray the unsuccessful immigrant. Lê thi diem thúy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For and Madeleine Thien's Certainty feature protagonists from war-torn countries in Southeast Asia -- Vietnam and Borneo (later Malaysia) -- who start new lives in North America but who carry with them painful and traumatic memories that intrude upon their lives and threaten to overwhelm them. Both novels illustrate the precarity of everyday existence by revealing the ways in which war, death, and violence can lie just beneath a veneer of the ordinary and unremarkable. In Lê's novel, space and place are used to suggest a refugee family's state of contingency, both geographically and psychically. In Thien's book, memories and dreams are shown to be mediated by various kinds of technology that enable healing and global connections, even as they reawaken pain and reinforce alienation.

This chapter discusses variations in the nature of migrant journeys. It presents cases of forced migration, including the migration of Vietnamese refugees and the traumatic journeys of the Jews and Irish people. The migrations of the Jews and the Irish represent the largest European migrations of the nineteenth century. In this chapter, both the emigration of the Jews from the Russian Empire and the horrors of Irish famine emigration are discussed in detail.

Chapter 6 reads Le Ly Hayslip’s paired autobiographies, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace as major acts of reframing the war. In these works, the refugee claims center stage. The chapter considers Hayslip’s direct address to the wounded GI and the humanitarian partnership she offers as a critical rehabilitation of the friendly. Hayslip’s efforts are read in relation to the contexts of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist philosophy of peace and Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing workshops for veterans. This chapter situates Hayslip’s politics within a spiritual and literary tradition that exposes American violence as it caters to American desires for healing.