Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora by Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde (review)

This important book explores connections between Viet Nam and its overseas U.S. population from 1975 to 2012 by way of four case studies: transnational popular music, transnational virtual community, ethnic news media depictions of a controversial Vietnamese American artist, and the recall campaign against San Jose’s vice-mayor Madison Nguyen over her name choice for the Vietnamese ethnic economy. Valverde’s study is based on two decades of longitudinal, multisite, ethnographic research into the lives of Vietnamese Americans in Northern and Southern California and of Vietnamese in Sai Gon (Ho Chi Minh City) and Ha Noi, based mostly on over 250 interviews across all sites. Broadly, the study reveals that extensive transnational connections exist between the overseas community and Viet Nam despite their contentions, and that the players within are diverse along lines of class, generation, and gender. I was most taken with the tailored findings, some of which I thought could have been emphasized much more, such as the construction of “community” as an entity almost synonymous with staunch anticommunism. Ultimately, tensions in the population are over the construction of a Vietnamese identity and past, which are concepts shaped by the U.S. government, the Vietnamese government, and anticommunist American segments. The immigrants, she contends, are an example of the internal, not exogenous, forces that drive a community to painful conflict.

The strength of Transnationalizing Viet Nam is its analysis of multiple and divergent facets of transnational life. I find its greatest strength to be the analysis of the political battles involving Madison Nguyen (red-baited for not complying with the anticommunists’ “Little Saigon” moniker). Incisively, Valverde finds that in large part “political discontent” and a sense of threat, not true ideological persuasion, explained the red-baiting here. Her analytic attention to gender in this case is especially laudable. Rather than the more common analysis within transnational studies of how gender changes by way of cultural remittances sent across borders, she addresses how anticommunist ideology was defined by Confucian patriarchy and sexual policing. As these were fascinating but relatively short treatments that tended to be extricated from the vast literature on the topics, I found that these analyses inspired more questions about gendering, such as in the case of the controversial female artist Huynh, and about the role of class and sociocultural citizenship. To be sure, I really appreciated that Valverde made her political allegiance to Madison Nguyen and to an organization that ruptured the anticommunist “monopoly” known and analytically relevant. Needless to say, such a rare choice by a scholar is responsible, courageous, and impressive.

Perhaps what is most significant about Transnationalizing Viet Nam is not only that it is the first book-length study of anticommunism within the Vietnamese American community but the twenty years of research Valverde undertook to realize it. Twenty years (of longitudinal, multisite fieldwork, at that) is almost unheard of. Such a commitment to the research, all despite seemingly inexorable obstacles (e.g., detentions outside of Viet Nam for months at a time; harassment by authorities and locals) must be commended. While I am supremely impressed by the field work and its attention to the macro and micro levels, it is precisely its extraordinary scope that engenders one of my main critiques. That is, theoretical advances proffered by the book do not seem to match the enormous depth and breadth of the data gathered. The relatively short book could have proceeded further in explicating what theoretical literature the findings advanced, challenged, or complexified. For instance, the author states that she analyzes the influences of U.S. government and society, Vietnamese government and society, and anticommunist Vietnamese Americans on the subjects in Viet Nam and diaspora, but surely twenty years of research would reveal tensions within each governmental regime. Yet, both regimes are treated mostly as monoliths in the book. We hear largely (and understandably) about a human...