Ok like…I got a lot to spill but in the meantime…don’t fckn pretend like you ain’t a slut. Shit. Just own up to it. #slutpride

curate:

(vía Ocean Vuong: Saigon America, a photo essay series on Vietnamese American life)

Vu Anh Minh (Matthew)

ETHN 191A

Prof. Marez

Advisor: Prof. Yen Le-Espiritu

Prospectus Draft

Learning How to Planeswalk: The Rise of Human Rights in the Formation of Second-Generation Vietnamese American Politics, Culture, and Identity

Abstract

This project examines the transgenerational evolution of Vietnamese American politics, culture, and identity from the first-generation to the second-generation particularly with the recent shift in the centrality of anticommunism to that of human rights.  This shift in the primary focus of political mobilization indicates a reconfiguration in the way that second-generation Vietnamese Americans understand their positionality within the U.S. nation-state as well as part of a transnational, diasporic community.  By deconstructing the discourse, politics, and culture of human rights, this project seeks to understand better how second-generation Vietnamese Americans bear the responsibility of representing their dual Vietnamese/American selves and communities.

Intro

“Tomas is the son…who keeps our mother up late with worry.  He is the son who causes her embarrassment by showing up at family parties with his muscles covered in gangster tattoos and his head shaved down to stubble and his eyes bloodshot from pot…He is also the son who says that if any girlfriend criticized our mother or treated her wrong he would knock the bitch across the house.”

—Brian Ascalon Roley, American Son

I remember Roley opening his book with this passage during my second year at UCSD while taking the class “Comparative Filipno and Vietnamese American Identities and Communities” class.  I remember feeling a strong connection with these seemingly contradictory descriptions of Tomas: someone torn by traditional ways of being and self-taught methods of survival; someone straddling the boundaries of reclusive assimilation and adventurous individualism and self-determination; someone seeking freedom yet willingly bound to customs and filial piety.  Tomas and I were two of a kind in different dimensional planes.

For me, growing up and identifying as Vietnamese American has always presented itself as a contradiction for me.  Despite growing up in a prominent Vietnamese American community in San Jose, I have never found that sort of acceptance or understanding from others who identified as Vietnamese American.  I took part in the yearly Têt festivals.  I knew the language.  I learned Vietnamese traditions and history.  I even took part in city-sponsored Vietnamese recycling campaigns when I was 5.  But for some reason, I still felt a strong disconnect with other Vietnamese(-Americans).  I was never quite “Vietnamese” enough to my elders.  Even when I started getting involved with the Vietnamese Student Association at the University of California, San Diego, the feelings of alienation with my Vietnamese American identity and from my Vietnamese American peers grew to a point that I no longer felt any deep connection with “my community”.[1]

Yet through all this, still I claim this Vietnamese American identity, and I think that is important that I do so.  I think that it is important for me to embrace the contradictions of my Vietnamese American identity and the contradictory ways that I have experienced and accepted this identity while I concurrently warred and attempted to reject it.  As Lisa Lowe writes, “These different contradictions express distinct yet continuous formations in the genealogy of the racialization of Asian Americans” but in this case the genealogy of Vietnamese American political and cultural identity.[2] My project then seeks to explore why it is that I cling to this contradiction that is “Vietnamese American.”  What does “Vietnamese American” even mean and how is that identity formed through the experiences of anticommunism and neocolonial war, terror, and forced migration?  How do these forces work to create a Vietnamese American body politic and what effects do they have on Vietnamese American political organizing and social movements?

Ultimately, my project is about the transgenerational transfer of identity and politics between the first-generation and second-generation of Vietnamese Americans and how second-generation Vietnamese Americans renegotiate Vietnamese American cultural and political identity and how it manifests in community organizing.  Furthermore, I hypothesize while anticommunism is crucial to the 1^st generation, the second-generation of Vietnamese Americans are beginning to organize around the culture and politics of human rights.  I hope that through analysis of this discourse I will be able to understand better how second-generation Vietnamese Americans position themselves culturally and politically in the U.S. as well as to the Viet Nam nation-state.

Literature Review

Lady Macbeth: Out damn’d spot! out, I say!

                        —William Shakespeare, Macbeth

It would appear that Lady Macbeth and the US have something in common.  But where Lady Macbeth’s “spot” refers to the blood of King Duncan and the persistent guilt and trauma on her psyche, the US’ “spot” is the Vietnam War and a defeat that has challenged and crippled the nation-state’s ability to maintain it’s master narrative and position as the leaders and liberators of the modern world.  The Vietnam War and its effects have and continue to remain an anomaly in the geopolitical and sociohistorical matrix of the US national psyche and present a paradox which the US nation-state has had a hard time negotiating.  How can the US nation-state maintain its position in the global order while balancing this stunning defeat that fundamentally shook up the sociopolitical roots of the nation?

Yen Le Espiritu contends that the US nation-state has to “fake it, ‘til they make it” with something she names the “we-win-even-when-we-lose syndrome”—that is a process of creating a narrative of the US being the “moral victors” of the Vietnam War, despite the massive causalities and the failure of actually “liberating” the Viet Nam nation-state, by incorporating Vietnamese refugees into the nation-state where they were finally able to find peace, freedom, and democracy.[3] How ironic this is because while the US narrative would prefer for the Vietnam War to remain a static moment in history lost and forgotten to the tides of time, it is the presence of Vietnamese Americans that serves as a haunting reminder that the war is not something easily forgotten or negotiated.  The war continues to live through the bodies of exiled South Vietnamese, reproduces itself through multiple fronts and ideological realms, and persists to be that “spot” that challenges the legitimacy of US Cold War politics and imperialism.

Yet despite this strong national desire to forget the war, the Vietnam War remains one of the most significant events in modern history and as such has been the focus of much critical scholarly work.  Much of this research has focused around Vietnamese American communities and their engagement in homeland politics and anticommunism as an anachronistic, geopolitical approach in attaining political freedom and subjecthood.  That is to say that Vietnamese Americans are specters from a bygone era practicing politics and as such situating the focus of studying present-day Vietnamese Americans in the sociohistorical past.  In his dissertation, Long Bui links the Nixonian policy of Vietnamization to the trend in scholarship and geopolitcs to shift the burden of representation and actualization onto Vietnaemse-American bodies as a way to absolve the US’s involvement in the war, their role in the demise of the South Viet Nam nation-state, and the forced migration and containment of exiled South Vietnamese.[4] Bui argues that through the discourse of Vietnamization, Vietnamese Americans are produced to be their own deterrent to attaining political freedom.  It is through the practice of homeland politics and anticommunism that arrest Vietnamese Americans in the sociohistorical past and prevent them from progressing into modern, liberal subjects.

Despite this historical trajectory of study around the Vietnam War and Vietnamese American identity, there has been a surge of scholarship that seeks to change the theoretical framework with which to understand the sociopolitical landscape in which Vietnamese Americans struggle to attain political freedom and negotiate Vietnamese American identity—a shift from geopolitics and producing good historicity to that of ongoing cultural politics and its role in the dynamic negotiation of Vietnamese American identity and political subjecthood.  In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that while culture is the medium of the present, it is also the site that mediates the past through which history is understood as mismatched and disjointed fragments.[5] And as such, it is through culture that the complications and contradictions in Vietnamese American identity, community, and politics are allowed to coexist and destabilize the historicizing nature of dominant studies on Vietnamese American communities.  Thus, it is this refocusing to cultural politics that repositions Vietnamese Americans into the sociohistorical present, restores the agency of Vietnamese Americans positioning them as fully actualized political subjects, and creates a dynamic site through which “alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined.”[6] That is to say that culture is the site where the sociohistorical past—the multiple memories, traumas, experiences, and truths—is brought into the present and deconstructed, negotiated, and debated, an act which in and of itself is an exercise of self-determination by which the Vietnamese American community is able to re-imagine community and identity outside the constraints of the juridico- and geopolitical realms.

With this shift into the realm of cultural politics, it becomes necessary to re-evaluate pre-existing scholarship.  Thuy Vo Dang reexamines anticommunism a cultural practice to reveal the multiplicity of roles it plays in Vietnamese American communities.  In her article featured in Amerasia Journal, Dang argues that anticommunism is not just a politic but also a cultural discourse and practice that is an attempt to reclaim Vietnamese American sociopolitical agency.[7] Many of Dang’s interviewees listed that the cultural discourse of anticommunism is important to them because of the erasure and forgetting they have experienced in the US where their narratives are being belittled and changed to the point where they no longer seem to represent the struggles and experiences faced collectively by the Vietnamese American community.  Thus, anticommunism was able to take form as a pedagogical tool with which the first-generation would be able to transmit their memory, history, trauma, and truth to the second-generation while concurrently serving as a means of self-determination for the first-generation allowing them to delineate the terms by which they want to defined in the US nation-state.

Where Dang’s work begins to deconstruct and refocus anticommunism as a cultural discourse and politic, Bui’s work attempts to trace the effects of anticommunism as a cultural politic through examining cultural productions and political movements, loosely looking at the way anticommunism has been incorporated into second-generation Vietnaemse-American politics and identity.  There has been a recent shift in second-generation Vietnamese American political organizing that has begun redirecting the focus of organizing away from anticommunism and towards the politics and discourse of human rights.  Whereas the first-generation used anticommunism as a cultural and geopolitical discourse and practice in order to negotiate their identity, community, and positionality within the US nation-state as well as to reclaim their agency and also to self-determine their narrative, I argue that human rights is the political landscape with which the second-generation seeks to negotiate the duality of their Vietnamese-ness and American-ness.  Through engaging the politics of human rights, second-generation Vietnamese Americans attempt to understand what the Viet Nam nation-state means to them and how they straddle the responsibility of representing Vietnamese-ness per the first-generation’s historical, cultural, and political work while also representing being (Vietnamese-)American through their lived experiences.  It is through the discourse and cultural politics of human rights that we may be able to understand how the second-generation positions itself between two worlds and how they negotiate their role as a sort of planeswalker through space, time, and lives.[8]

Methodology

1) Textual Review and Analysis

I will be referencing various academic texts including, but not limited to, Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics to Julietta Hua’s Trafficking Women’s Human Rights to Thuy Vo Dang’s Ph.D dissertation Anticommunism as Cultural Praxix: South Vietnam, War, and Refugee Memories in Vietnamese American Community.  With these texts, I will be interrogating the modes of political mobilization and social movements—particularly with the politics and discourse of anticommunism for first-generation Vietnamese Americans and human rights for second-generation Vietnamese Americans.  I am hoping that these theories will help support me disentangle the transmittance and evolution of Vietnamese American political and cultural identity intergenerationally.

In addition to these texts, I am interested in analyzing Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet for several reasons.  This book is comprised of 8 vignettes all spanning a total of over three decades.  Each vignette follows a few main characters in each who were all in a major way affected by the U.S. wartime policy “Operation Babylift.”[9] This focus is of particular interest to me since human rights policy and discourse tends to centralize on the sponsoring or adoption of orphans and destitute children.

2) Participatory Research

As a self-identified Vietnamese American, I believe it is crucial for me to assume the role of participant-researcher. I need to be at these sites of community building and political organizing to be able to observe and analyze the relationships that emerge from the process.  To do so, I will be involving myself with the Vietnamese Student Association at UCSD and local Vietnamese American organizations.  There are a multitude of events coming up particularly important to the Vietnamese American community including the Têt festival in late January/early February as well as Black April which commemorates the end of the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon.  Through my involvement, I hope to be able to analyze the political and cultural discourses used by 1^st and 2^nd generation Vietnamese Americans,  particularly at meetings and through literature disseminated at pertinent events.

3) Oral Histories and Interviews

While participation and observation will be key elements to the success of this project, I believe that my solitary analysis of the discourse is insufficient to bolster my claims.  To achieve that end, I will be using personal interviews and oral histories. I am hoping that these interviews will shed greater light on evincing the reasons for the shift from anticommunist politics to the politics of human rights in order to truly flesh out how second-generation Vietnamese Americans understand their positionality within the U.S. nation-state and within the transnational diasporic Vietnamese community, more specifically with the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. 

Works Cited

Bui, Long Thanh. “Suspended Futures: The Vietnamization of South Vietnamaese History and Memory.” PhD diss., University of California San Diego, 2011.

Dang, Thang Thuy Vo. “Anticommunism as Cultural Praxis: South Vietnam, War, and Refugee Memories in Vietnamese American Community”. PhD diss., University of California San Diego, 2008.

Dang, Thuy Vo. “The Cultural Work of Anticommunism in the San Diego Vietnamese Community.” Amerasia Journal 31.1 (2005): 65-85.

Espiritu, Yen Le. “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon.’” American Quarterly 58.2 (2006): 329-352.

Hua, Julietta. Trafficking Women’s Human Rights. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. London: Duke University Press, 1996.

Phan, Aimee. We Should Never Meet. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004.

Roley, Brian Ascalon. American Son. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Matthew Vu

ETHN 191

Prof. Marez

Advisor: Prof. Espiritu

Introduction & Methods

Project Description and Research Questions

“I believe that truth has only one form: that of a violent contradiction.”

            —Georges Bataille, The Dead Man

One of the foremost intellectuals on human sexuality, Georges Bataille has done much to explore the darker relationship between love, sex, death, and spirituality.  At the core of his work, he delves into the muddy interstices between morality and taboo, between sex, love, and pleasure.  But while thinkers before him understand the transgressions of violence and death into the realm of sex and love, he argues that for some the link between morbidity and perversion is inextricably linked to pleasure and sexuality in a way that is inescapable.  That instead of denying this link, we must dwell in this realm of contradiction and incomprehensibility in order to evince the workings of sociopolitical and economic powers on the way people choose to make their sexualities, desires, and beings legible.  Through the contradictions we are able to evince hidden truths and begin to take a deeper, more critical examination at the inner workings of social structures.

For me, identifying as Vietnamese American has always presented itself as a contradiction for me.  Despite growing up in a prominent Vietnamese American community in San Jose, I have never found that sort of acceptance or understanding from others who identified as Vietnamese American.  Though I participated in the Têt festivals, studied Vietnamese traditions and history, took part in city-sponsored Vietnamese recycling campaigns, I was never quite “Vietnamese” enough to my elders.  Even when I started getting involved with the Vietnamese Student Association at the University of California, San Diego, the feelings of alienation with my Vietnamese American identity and from my Vietnamese American peers grew to a point that I no longer felt any deep connection with “my community”.[1] Yet through all this, still I claim this Vietnamese American identity.

My project then is to explore why I cling to this contradiction that is “Vietnamese American.”  What does “Vietnamese American” even mean and how is that identity formed through the experiences of anticommunism and neocolonial war, terror, and forced migration?  How do these forces work to create Vietnamese American body politic and what effects do they have on Vietnamese American political organizing and social movements particularly of the 2^nd generation?  Ultimately, my project is about the transgenerational transfer of identity and politics between the 1^st generation and 2^nd generation of Vietnamese Americans and how 2^nd generation Vietnamese Americans renegotiate Vietnamese American cultural and political identity and how it manifests in community organizing.  Furthermore, I hypothesize while anticommunism is crucial to the 1^st generation, the 2^nd generation of Vietnamese Americans are beginning to organize around the politics of human rights.  I hope that through analysis of this discourse I will be able to understand better how 2^nd generation Vietnamese Americans position themselves culturally and politically in the U.S. as well as to the Viet Nam nation-state.

Methodologies

As a self-identified member of the Vietnamese American community, I believe that it is necessary for me to assume the role of participant researcher.  I need to be at these sites of community building and political organizing to be able to observe and analyze the relationships that emerge from the process.  To do so, I will be involving myself with the Vietnamese Student Association at UCSD and local Vietnamese American organizations.  There are a multitude of events coming up particularly important to the Vietnamese American community including the Têt festival in late January/early February as well as Black April which commemorates the end of the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon.  Through my involvement, I hope to be able to analyze the political and cultural discourses used by 1^st and 2^nd generation Vietnamese Americans.  I would also include oral histories as well as literature produced by 2^nd generation Vietnamese Americans.

As for theoretical frameworks, I wish to explore the role of anticommunism in Vietnamese American community organizing.  Anticommunism has been a sort of hegemonic monolith in the community.  If there were a defining characteristic of Vietnamese American communities, it would be the fierce anticommunism that has simultaneously propelled politicians into office, regulated cultural production, dictated local economic development, and solidified an entire generation.  Although there has been much scholarship already done on anticommunism, none really approach anticommunism as a cultural politics as Dang does in her dissertation[2].  As Lisa Lowe argues in her book Immigrant Acts, in the tradition of Bataille, it is through the realm of cultural politics that we are able to fully flesh out the contradictions of Vietnamese American existence in the U.S. nation-state—through cultural politics are we able to bring to light the dark and traumatic history of violence, war, forced migration, and racialization which is so crucial to Vietnamese American identity formation.[3]  While Dang’s work does much to evince the multiplicity of roles that anticommunism plays for 1^st generation Vietnamese Americans, I wish to see how anticommunism is transferred intergenerationally.  In addition, I think that I will be using Julietta Hua’s  Trafficking Women’s Human Rights in order to understand the intersection of sex and gender and the politics of human rights.[4]

[1] I just could not vibe politically with the rest of my peers.  We did not see eye to eye when it came to issues of anti-racist work not when it came to our ability to converse about what it meant to be “Vietnamese American.”  Many were unwilling to discuss politics at all and dismissed politics as a real that was immaterial to the Vietnamese American condition.

[2] Dang, Thanh Thuy Vo. “Anticommunism as Cultural Praxis: South Vietnam, War, and Refugee Memories in Vietnamese American Community.” PhD diss., University of California San Diego, 2008.

[3] Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. London: Duke University Press, 1996.

[4] Hua, Julietta. Trafficking Women’s Human Rights. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Of course, I would procrastinate on my writing assignment and not be done at 7:30am on the day that it is due.  Yet through all my procrastinating, I stumbled across the works of Georges Bataiile…and I must confess that this shit is fckn crazy bomb.com!  I swear, people who are reading my shit probably see no continuity or that this stuff has no relevance.  I would like to think that I am being led to these things because they are all connected…but there is a slight possibility that I am making these connections in order to fool myself into writing a cohesive paper.

A grad student *coughAnthonyKimcough* read my literature review and actually liked it (: This affirmation really came at a good time for me because I’ve been really unsettled about my work lately.  I constantly feel behind.  I’m not confident in my ability.  Basically I feel like I’m not cut out for Honors, which is bullshit because I know that I am here for a reason.  I just need to keep my focus and keep on going.

I need guidane and the way that I’m gonna get that is by talking to Co Yen more often.  If anything, Honors is really pushing me to manage myself better.  Thank god.

Learning How to Planeswalk: Negotiating Transgenerational

Vietnamese-American Politics, Culture, and Identity

 Matthew Vu

Lady Macbeth: Out damn’d spot! out, I say!

                        —Shakespeare, Macbeth

It would appear that Lady Macbeth and the US have something in common.  But where Lady Macbeth’s “spot” refers to the blood of King Duncan and the persistent guilt and trauma on her psyche, the US’ “spot” is the Vietnam War and a defeat that has challenged and crippled the nation-state’s ability to maintain it’s master narrative and position as the leaders and liberators of the modern world.  The Vietnam War and its affects have and continue to remain an anomaly in the geopolitical and sociohistorical matrix of the US national psyche and present a paradox which the US nation-state has had a hard time negotiating.  How can the US nation-state maintain its position in the global order while balancing this stunning defeat that fundamentally shook up the sociopolitical roots of the nation?

Yen Le Espiritu contends that the US nation-state has to “fake it, ‘til they make it” with something she names the “we-win-even-when-we-lose syndrome”—that is a process of creating a narrative of the US being the “moral victors” of the Vietnam War, despite the massive causalities and the failure of actually “liberating” the Viet Nam nation-state, by incorporating Vietnamese refugees into the nation-state where they were finally able to find peace, freedom, and democracy.¹ How ironic this is because while the US narrative would prefer for the Vietnam War to remain a static moment in history lost and forgotten to the tides of time, it is the presence of Vietnamese-Americans that serves as a haunting reminder that the war is not something easily forgotten or negotiated.  The war continues to live through the bodies of exiled South Vietnamese, reproduces itself through multiple fronts and ideological realms, and persists to be that “spot” that challenges the legitimacy of US Cold War politics and imperialism.

Yet despite this strong national desire to forget the war, the Vietnam War remains one of the most significant events in modern history and as such has been the focus of much critical scholarly work.  Much of this research has focused around Vietnamese-American communities and their engagement in homeland politics and anticommunism as an anachronistic, geopolitical approach in attaining political freedom and subjecthood.  That is to say that Vietnamese-Americans are specters from a bygone era practicing politics and as such situating the focus of studying present-day Vietnamese-Americans in the sociohistorical past.  In his dissertation, Long Bui links the Nixonian policy of Vietnamization to the trend in scholarship and geopolitcs to shift the burden of representation and actualization onto Vietnaemse-American bodies as a way to absolve the US’s involvement in the war, their role in the demise of the South Viet Nam nation-state, and the forced migration and containment of exiled South Vietnamese.² Bui argues that through the discourse of Vietnamization, Vietnamese-Americans are produced to be their own deterrent to attaining political freedom.  It is through the practice of homeland politics and anticommunism that arrest Vietnamese-Americans in the sociohistorical past and prevent them from progressing into modern, liberal subjects.

Despite this historical trajectory of study around the Vietnam War and Vietnamese-American identity, there has been a surge of scholarship that seeks to change the theoretical framework with which to understand the sociopolitical landscape in which Vietnamese-Americans struggle to attain political freedom and negotiate Vietnamese-American identity—a shift from geopolitics and producing good historicity to that of ongoing cultural politics and its role in the dynamic negotiation of Vietnamese-American identity and political subjecthood.  In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that while culture is the medium of the present, it is also the site that mediates the past through which history is understood as fragmented and disjointed fragments.³ And as such, it is through culture that the complications and contradictions in Vietnamese-American identity, community, and politics are allowed to coexist and destabilize the historicizing nature of dominant studies on Vietnamese-American communities.  Thus, it is this refocusing to cultural politics that repositions Vietnamese-Americans into the sociohistorical present, restores the agency of Vietnamese-Americans positioning them as fully actualized political subjects, and creates a dynamic site through which “alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined.”⁴ That is to say that culture is the site where the sociohistorical past—the multiple memories, traumas, experiences, and truths—is brought into the present and deconstructed, negotiated, and debated, an act which in and of itself is an exercise of self-determination by which the Vietnamese-American community is able to re-imagine community and identity outside the constraints of the juridico- and geopolitical realms.

With this shift into the realm of cultural politics, it becomes necessary to re-evaluate pre-existing scholarship.  Thuy Vo Dang reexamines anticommunism a cultural practice to reveal the multiplicity of roles it plays in Vietnamese-American communities.  In her article featured in Amerasia Journal, Dang argues that anticommunism is not just a politic but also a cultural discourse and practice that is an attempt to reclaim Vietnamese-American sociopolitical agency.⁵ Many of Dang’s interviewees listed that the cultural discourse of anticommunism is important to them because of the erasure and forgetting they have experienced in the US where their narratives are being belittled and changed to the point where they no longer seem to represent the struggles and experiences faced collectively by the Vietnamese-American community.  Thus, anticommunism was able to take form as a pedagogical tool with which the first generation would be able to transmit their memory, history, trauma, and truth to the second generation while concurrently serving as a means of self-determination for the first generation allowing them to delineate the terms by which they want to defined in the US nation-state.

Where Dang’s work begins to deconstruct and refocus anticommunism as a cultural discourse and politic, Bui’s work attempts to trace the effects of anticommunism as a cultural politic through examining cultural productions and political movements, loosely looking at the way anticommunism has been incorporated into second generation Vietnaemse-American politics and identity.  There has been a recent shift in second-generation Vietnamese-American political organizing that has begun redirecting the focus of organizing away from anticommunism and towards the politics and discourse of human rights.  Whereas the first generation used anticommunism as a cultural and geopolitical discourse and practice in order to negotiate their identity, community, and positionality within the US nation-state as well as to reclaim their agency and also to self-determine their narrative, I argue that human rights is the political landscape with which the second generation seeks to negotiate the duality of their Vietnamese-ness and American-ness.  Through engaging the politics of human rights, second generation Vietnamese-Americans attempt to understand what the Viet Nam nation-state means to them and how they straddle the responsibility of representing being Vietnamese per the first generation’s historical, cultural, and political work while also representing being (Vietnamese-)American through their lived experiences.  It is through the discourse and politics of human rights that we may be able to understand how the second generation positions itself between two worlds and how they negotiate their role as a sort of planeswalker through space, time, and lives.⁶

Notes

1.     Espiritu, Yen Le. “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon.’” American Quarterly 58.2 (2006): 329-352.

2.     Bui, Long Thanh. “Suspended Futures: The Vietnamization of South Vietnamese History and Memory”. PhD diss., University of California San Diego, 2011.

3.     Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. London: Duke University Press, 1996.

4.     Ibid.

5.     Dang, Thuy Vo. “The Cultural Work of Anticommunim in the San Diego Vietnamese Community.” Amerasia Journal 31.1 (2005): 65-85.

6.     A “planeswalker” is a term I borrow from Wizard’s card game Magic: The Gathering.  Planeswalkers are powerful mages who have the capacity to travel between all plans of existence, warping from world to world, dimension to dimension.

Vietnamese-American Politics/Anticommunism

Dang, Thang Thuy Vo. “Anticommunism as Cultural Praxis: South Vietnam, War, and Refugee Memories in Vietnamese American Community”. PhD diss., University of California San Diego, 2008.

Collet, Christian. “The Viability of “Going it Alone”: Vietnamese in America and the Coalition Experience of a Transnational Community.” Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 1.2 (2008): 279-311.

Le, Long. “Exploring the Function of the Anti-Communist Ideology in Vietnamese American Diasporic Communities.” Journal of Southeast Asian American Education & Advancement 6 (2011)Web. 2011 Jun 22.

Theoretical Frameworks

Espiritu, Yen Le. Homebound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.

Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Hua, Julietta. Trafficking Women’s Human Rights. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Kim, Jodi.  Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. London: Duke University Press, 1996.

Case Studies

Bui, Long Thanh. “Suspended Futures: The Vietnamization of South Vietnamese History and Memory”. PhD diss., University of California San Diego, 2011.

Dang, Thuy Vo. “The Cultural Work of Anticommunim in the San Diego Vietnamese Community.” Amerasia Journal 31.1 (2005): 65-85.

Matthew Vu
Ethnic Studies Honor Program
Research Proposal 

Growing up in San Jose was an ironic experience for me.  One would think that growing up Vietnamese-American in an area so highly populated with other Vietnamese-American that I would be able to find acceptance, understanding, and community.  I took part in the yearly Têt festivals.  I learned Vietnamese traditions and history.  I knew the language.  I was even part of a Vietnamese city-sponsored campaign for recycling.  Yet all of this wasn’t enough for me to feel a part of the Vietnamese-American community.  As I grew older, this estrangement only worsened causing me to feel even more alienated.  I remember a specific episode of my life shortly following 9/11, near the time I was finishing .middle school  My parents had bought for me Michael Moore’s book Dude, Where’s My Country? and I remember enjoying it from cover to cover.  When I started sharing with my parents what I had learned, they were shocked.  I remember getting responses like “You shouldn’t talk poorly of your government” and “Vietnamese blend into the mainstream, we don’t make waves”.  In my own family, I was considered un-Vietnamese because of my politics.

My alienation only furthered when I entered high school and college.  I tired joining the Vietnamese Brotherhood (later Vietnamese Student Association) at my high school.  My intentions of joining were to feel a part of that Vietnamese community that I was unable to do so when I was younger.  I thought it would be a good step for me.  Upon telling my mom, she had the adverse reaction and forbid me to join the club, tell me not to waste my time with “may ky hoi vo van”, those nonsense organizations.  At the time, I resented her for it, but my fear for her got the best of me and I never entered that space again, even though I thought I had grown in the organization and was offered leadership roles.  In college, as an act of defiance (“you can’t tell me what club I can be a part of here”), I joined the VSA at UCSD.  But the more I invested in the organization and shared the space with other Vietnamese-American students, the more I started to have those feelings of alienation from within and from the organization.  I started questioning my role as a politically-minded and oriented Vietnamese-American in a space that I felt was apolitical and unwelcoming and was unable to nurture my growth.  My desire to learn critically about politics and identity were somehow at odds with the parameters of the VSA space and I found myself empty and an outsider.  To fill this void, I joined Kaibigang Pilipino, a Filipino/a-Amercan organization and a space where I felt nurtured and was allowed to grow politically.  Now instead of outsider forces pushing me out of Vietnamese-American spaces and community, it was internal.

Now as a senior, I am still very much confused as to why I feel that I am unable to claim my Vietnamese-American identity and why I feel like such an outsider.  I have begun the preliminary processes of conducting research through digging through my past.  I wrote a series of vignettes to explore the formation of my Vietnamese-American identity and how this formation is a transnational process that is informed by racial construction back in the Vietnam nation-state—a project that I presented at Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide: Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy, A Major Conference at the University of California, Riverside.  My identity crisis has forced me to ask myself some questions, which have been informed by my time doing work in Ethnic Studies—questions that I wish to explore more deeply and more wholly than I have been able to do so in the past.  For my project, I am seeking to understand what it means to be “Vietnamese-American”.  What is a Vietnamese-American identity—is there one?  What role do cultural productions play in the construction and interrogation of this identity?  How is the formation of this identity informed, particularly by anticommunist politics and by neocolonial war, terror, and forced migration?  Furthermore, how do these forces create a fiercely conservative Vietnamese-American body politic and what effect does it have on Vietnamese-American political organizing and social movements? Can Vietnamese-American identity and politics be radical? 

My hopes for this project are mostly personal.  I feel like I have harbored a lot of resentment towards the Vietnamese-American community, especially the older generation.  This resentment is something I would rather do without.  I think that most of these feelings come from the fact that I had no one to talk to or to nurture my needs and desires.  In college, this resentment came/comes from my perception that there are so few Vietnamese-Americans in Ethnic Studies or political, social justice spaces.  My hope is that my research project will be a space of healing for me, to dispel my resentment and anger and turn it into understanding and transformative growth.  With the knowledge gained from my project, I hope to be able to apply it to my organizing and my work in social justice.

To be quite honest, though I have heard that there is a wealth of material on Vietnamese-American  communities, I feel as if I have been insulated from these sources of knowledge.  However there have been some texts which have provoked these questions and there are texts and cultural productions which I wish to engage.  There is an undeniable, nationalistic fervor when it comes to many Vietnamese-American communities.  These communities have loyalties to the land they lost, the defeated and defunct Republic of Vietnam.  I will use Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism as the theoretical framework with which to understand this nationalism.  My hypothesis is that this nationalism has to do with the Vietnamese-American immigrant narrative and is tied to their process of home-making, a concept explored in Yen Le Espiritu’s Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries.  I think that this text is appropriate because of the stark similarities in the Filipino/a and Vietnamese immigrant experience, one that is informed by imperialism, colonial war, transnational migration, and assimilation.  While Espiritu’s book does an excellent job of covering the transnational negotiation of culture and identity formation, it is Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics that will provide the theoretical framework that I will use to analyze how Vietnamese-Americans negotiate their positionality within the US nation-state through the creation of cultural productions which resist assimilation and demand a reconfiguration of their subjecthood within the nation-state.  In addition to Lowe, I will be using Jodi Kim’s Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War as a theoretical reference on how different cultural productions contribute to a transnational critique on US imperialism and anticommunist politics, and, in fact, argues the possibility of a radical Asian/Vietnamese-American subject.  I know that there are many other texts and cultural productions that I want to engage with but I currently do not know what they are.  I am however very willing to be on the search for different sources with which to strengthen and more deeply develop my overarching theoretical framework.

I believe that my research project will be taking the methodological approaches of ethnography and cultural analysis.  I think that the cultural analysis is critical because there has become such a monolithic trope, in my understanding, of what it means to be Vietnamese-American.  In imagined Communities, Anderson argues that mass-produced texts are the mode by which nation(-ness/-hood/-ality/-alism) are upheld and negotiated.  Therefore, it would behoove me to interrogate Vietnamese-American cultural productions to understand the nature of this nationalism; but at the same time, I wish to see how different Vietnamese-American cultural productions reconfigure and renegotiate Vietnamese-American cultural and identity politics, and, ultimately, the way Vietnamese-Americans organize and mobilize for social movements.  At the same time, it would be bereft to ignore the importance of accounting for the narratives of 2^nd generation Vietnamese-Americans who are beginning to step into the spotlight displacing the older generations, many of whom are still very active in Vietnamese-American communities and local politics.  To achieve this end, I will be conducting ethnographic research by means of interviews and observing the ways that certain Vietnamese-American youth organize and negotiate their identities—one of my primary sites will be various Vietnamese Student Associations (VSUnion at UCLA). 

(*I’m sorry if this is not the right format!  I did not take Professor Kaplan’s ETHN 100 so I am working on what I think is adequate for a research proposal.*)

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. 

Espiritu, Yen Le.  Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Kim, Jodi.  Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Lowe, Lisa.  Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

Phan, Aimee.  We Should Never Meet. New York: Picador, 2004.