‘Like a foreigner in my own homeland’: writing the dilemmas of return in the Vietnamese American diaspora

Abstract

In what ways can refugees be both cosmopolitan and diasporic? This article juxtaposes published memoirs with material from ethnographic research in order to analyse the discursive frameworks through which Vietnamese Americans of the 1.5 generation negotiate both diasporic imaginaries and cosmopolitan aspirations. The collective memories of the Vietnam War that circulate in the Vietnamese American diaspora place obstacles in the path of a younger generation who aspire to be cosmopolitans, but are entangled in memories of the trauma and dislocation of the war and must also respond to a pervasive ideology of anti-communism, which is a form of anti-cosmopolitanism, among the first generation. This case study points to the ways in which our current scholarly efforts to expand ideas of both diaspora and cosmopolitanism to include a variety of positions and aspirations can benefit from more attention to the modes of cultural expression produced by the populations we study.

Keywords:

• diaspora
• cosmopolitanism
• refugees
• autoethnography
• memory
• Vietnam

Notes

1. I use the term ‘The Vietnam War’, common in the United States, to refer a war that is known in Vietnam as ‘The American War’. By adopting vocabularies used among my research informants, I convey, as an anthropologist, the perspectives of my interlocutors. They referred to themselves as Vietnamese Americans (without a hyphen), a usage I continue here, but are referred to in Vietnam as ‘Viet Khieu’.

2. Recent book-length ethnographic studies of Vietnamese Americans include Aguilar-San Juan (2009), Lieu (2011), Reed-Danahay (in Brettell and Reed-Danahay 2012), Valverde (2012) and Thai (2014).

3. This research project was generously funded by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation awarded to me and co-PI Caroline B. Brettell (See Brettell and Reed-Danahay 2012). Publications dealing solely with the Vietnamese material include Reed-Danahay (2008, 2010), Reed-Danahay (2012a) and Reed-Danahay (2012b).

4. See Reed-Danahay (1997) for an overview of the history of this term and its potential applications in ethnographic research.

5. This discussion is selective and it not intended as a review of all Vietnamese American memoir. On Vietnamese diasporic imaginaries in memoir, poetry, media and fiction, see Pelaud (2011), Lieu (2011), Duong (2012) and Valverde (2012). Collections of Vietnamese refugee oral histories include Chan (2006) and Nguyen (2009). See also recent graphic novel memoirs related to the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States (Tran 2010; Baloup 2012).

6. This is a frequent theme that can found in other memoirs written by members of the 1.5 generation (see Pham 1999; Su 2009; Tran 2010).

7. See, for example, Taylor (2001) and Schwenkel (2009).

8. There is a growing literature which addresses anti-communism among former Vietnamese American refugees. See also Dang (2005), Ông and Meyer (2008), Reed-Danahay (2008), Le (2011) and Valverde (2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deborah Reed-Danahay

DEBORAH REED-DANAHAY is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).