Uprooting genealogy in G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica

Abstract

G.B. Tran’s graphic memoir Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010) is a text marked by fragmentation: from its non-linear narrative to its cover image of many deconstructed faces held within the disconnected pieces of a dissolving puzzle, the memoir’s most compelling trope is of brokenness. Tran’s family is broken – compromised by occupation and colonialism, severed by a nation at war and fractured by the trauma of displacement as refugees from their home in Vietnam. This article asserts, however, that non-linearity, deconstruction and visual tropes of fracture are strategies towards envisioning the migrant memory as a generative space that promises constant reconnection to the world, rather than defining it as a space bereft of its roots.

Keywords:

• G.B. Tran
• comics
• Vietnam War
• roots
• arborescent
• Confucius

Notes

1. Caroline Kyungah Hong (2014) makes an interesting note on the potential misattribution of the Confucius quote, finding approximately similar quotes in a 1958 historical text (Confucian China and Its Modern Fate) on China by Joseph R. Levenson, a Marcus Garvey saying, and Charles Seifert’s 1938 text The Negro’s or Ethiopian’s Contribution to Art. Hong suggests that “this trail of misattribution is quite fitting in relation to the transnational and palimpsestic nature of Tran’s work”, with the misattribution “complicat[ing] and confus[ing] this potentially self-orientalizing move, linking GB’s family history as much to US racial politics and history as to Asian cultural contexts” (2014, 17).

2. Vietnamerica is structured with little numeric pagination. The text is episodic, featuring 12 different narratives/chapters. Each section is 20–30 pages long and ends with a full-page, text-less image. In between these chapters, there are two numbered pages. (From these few pages I have cited page numbers throughout this article).

3. The Geneva Conference of 1954 established independence for Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and the temporary partition of North and South Vietnam along the 17th parallel (the Demilitarized Zone or “DMZ” boundary line). Civilians were permitted to move freely between the two states for a period of 300 days per the Geneva Accords, after which time elections were to be held in 1956 to establish a unified government. The period saw massive upheaval on both sides of the DMZ line as groups fled to the North or South due to religious or political motivation.