À chaque recette, son histoire: Viet Kieu Food Writing and the Emergence of a Transnational Poetics

ABSTRACT

If the insistence on Vietnamese culinary practices in contemporary literatures of the Vietnamese diaspora establishes writers/artists such as Kim Thúy and Clément Baloup as members of the Viet Kieu community, these practices also serve an important narrative function. Food acts as a stimulus for memory, connecting past and present, host country and country of origin, migrant and transnational space. From this perspective, foodways provide spatiotemporal continuity while revealing the historical foundations of culture produced during the everyday interactions of cooking and eating. Yet unlike writers of the post-1.5 generation who engage with a more generic representation of Vietnamese cuisine, writers of the 1.5 generation like Kim Thúy distinguish among Vietnam's regional culinary traditions. The resulting narrative, of which Mãn (2013) is an example, recognizes and respects the diversity of Vietnamese identity that simultaneously resists and embraces cross-cultural contact and exchange. In light of these observations, this article demonstrates that ethnic foodways in Francophone Viet Kieu literature can emphasize both the global and the local, and explore how food, as a cultural signifier, and the Viet Kieu subject, as a consumer and/or producer of this signifier, can engender a transnational poetics.

KEYWORDS:

• Vietnamese Diaspora
• foodways
• cultural flows
• transnationalism
• memory
• Kim Thúy

Notes

1. See Howell, “Vietnamese Foodways and Viet Kieu Postmemory in Clément Baloup's Graphic Narratives.”

2. Baloup defines the Viet Kieu in Quitter Saigon: “Aujourd'hui, hors des frontières du Vietnam, ils constituent une diaspora active, principalement installée aux États-Unis, en France, au Canada, en Australie mais aussi présente à travers l'Europe et l'Asie. Ces Vietnamiens d'outremer, on les appelle les ‘Viet Kieu’…” (7).

3. The title of my presentation was “Folklore and Foodways: Viet Kieu Postmemory in Contemporary French Narrative.”

4. Australian-Vietnamese restaurateur, Luke Nguyen, proposes a similar culinary journey in his Food of Vietnam. Nguyen divides his cookbook into six sections, placing special emphasis on cities within regions in addition to separating coastal and mountainous regions.

5. Arjun Appadurai defines “locality as a phenomenological property of social life, a structure of feeling that is produced by particular forms of intentional activity and that yields particular sorts of material effects” (182). While locality can be anchored in the spaces where social life is performed—in this respect, Appadurai calls attention to the production of “neighborhoods” (182)—, I would argue that Thúy's novel defies spatial categories. If the multidirectionality of cultural flows are an integral part of narrative, Mãn surfaces as a wandering subject who grounds herself in seemingly distinctive spaces by the ductility of her culinary practices. It is thus significant that Mãn does not associate her identity with specific neighborhoods but, rather, with overtly cosmopolitan cityscapes such as Saigon, Montreal, and Paris.

6. According to Barthes, “[l]e punctum d'une photo, c'est ce hasard qui, en elle, me point (mais aussi me meurtrit, me poigne)” (49, emphasis in original).

7. For a more detailed discussion of restorative versus reflective nostalgia, see Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Howell

Jennifer Howell is an Associate Professor of French at Illinois State University. Her research and teaching focus on Francophone literatures and cultures, the graphic novel, photography, and ecocriticism. She is especially interested in how the memory of trauma is transmitted within diasporic communities.