In a speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 22, 2007, President George W. Bush said: “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’”¹ He went on to cite the 400,000 Vietnamese who were sent to prison camps and the tens of thousands more who perished after America’s withdrawal from Viet Nam in 1975. This recollection of the past clashes with the normative memory of the conclusion to the Viet Nam...

Vietnamese American writers have published more than one hundred literary books in English since 1963. This body of work is diverse and heterogeneous.¹ This chapter provides an overview of some of the major phases of that literature. Although not exhaustive, it traces its development and delineates and discusses main themes and issues.

Most Vietnamese in the United States before 1975 came as students and returned to Viet Nam. Very few wrote novels or memoirs, with the exception of a few such as Tran Van Dinh, author ofNo Passenger on the River(1965), a novel about the breakdown in the...

I committed to the field of Asian American studies instead of anthropology because of its emphasis on race, class, and gender, and because I believed fighting for social change needed to start here, in my new American home. In France, critical discussion of race was nonexistent in high school. Asian American studies classes resonated with me. I could relate, for example, to Maxine Hong Kingston, who grew up in Stockton, California, in the 1950s, and her struggles with the act of speaking. Like her, I was almost mute as a child. I read Vietnamese American literature in part to better...

Vietnamese American communities originated with war. As in the Philippines (1898–1910) and in Korea (1950–1953), American intervention in Viet Nam (1959–1975) was a manifestation of empire building.¹ In contrast to those conflicts however, the Viet Nam War was highly visible, both domestically and internationally. The Vietnamese allies of the Americans were forcibly displaced, deprived of their nation, and their clans and families were broken up. Depending on the conditions and time of departure, and their length of stay in refugee or reeducation camps, some from the first and 1.5 generations faced death repeatedly, inevitably shaping their common...

Mikhail Bakhtin has argued that literature does not fully reflect the real but rather “a social struggle for unity.”¹ Although Vietnamese American texts can be used carefully and strategically to draw commentary about the experience of the group, they are creative works that respond to what Bakhtin describes as “the quotidian pressures and opportunities in life.”² Vietnamese American authors, like all authors, are creating within and in relation to the context in which they are being read. Those who write in English respond in particular to a majority culture in which their country of origin represents a thorn in the...

In a recently published, highly acclaimed book of short stories entitledThe Boat,author Nam Le explores issues of authenticity.¹ Speaking to a journalist about the first story in his collection, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” Le talks about pressures of containment that writers of color often face. “One of the chief ambitions of the story,” says Le, “was to play with that idea of what we consider to be authentic, how much autobiography is implied or assumed, how we read something differently if we think it’s been drawn from the author’s life.”² In...