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M O R E T H A N T H R E E D E C A D E S after the “shock of arrival,” Vietnamese refugees, immigrants, and their U.S.–born children have transformed themselves from unexpected strangers to familiar, and often celebrated, ethnic minorities.1 Mainstream social scientists and policy makers have analyzed meticulously the pace and character of Vietnamese assimilation, pointing to their positive inclination to vote, speak English, take up white-collar professions , and move to the suburbs.2 Looking for the mechanisms by which Vietnamese have been able to advance themselves in the absence of larger structural opportunities, researchers have focused on the significance of “ethnic” community ties, trust, geographic concentration, and in the case of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs, links to overseas capital.3 These findings are important because of the possibility that future refugees and immigrants might face similar conditions in U.S. society, and their difficulties might be mitigated by policies and practices that enable a smoother incorporation . At the same time, to the extent that researchers and policy makers frame Vietnamese accomplishments in model-minority terms—erasing U.S. militarism and imperialism and emphasizing Confucian traits of collectivity , perseverance, and sacrifice so that the concurrent claims of structural racism on the part of poor blacks and Latinos may then be downplayed as racially coded “cultural” or “behavioral” deficiencies—then the efforts of Vietnamese to make a home in America have also been twisted to reinforce complicated and racialized narratives about belonging and national identity . It is as if Vietnamese refugees and immigrants inadvertently have become agents of a structural adjustment plan to remake the face and body politic of the United States. This book emerged out of and in response to my unease with the treatment of Vietnamese Americans in the social scientific literature. I saw how easily Vietnamese Americans were slipped into existing accounts of belonging and nationality without the discussions of ideology or history that are Chapter 5 Implications for Community and Place 123 necessary to contextualize that experience. I was confused by the absence of sophisticated theorizing about the racialization of Vietnamese—instead, they are either assumed to be “Oriental” or treated as “junior whites”4 — and by the inattention to overall spatial issues which, because refugees are displaced by definition, seemed a phenomenal and gaping omission. I suspected that Vietnamese Americans were not oblivious to the dominant collective views of the Vietnam War, and that their efforts to make a life in the United States were circumscribed by these and other prevalent beliefs. I set out, then, to investigate what community and place meant for Vietnamese Americans, outside of what I saw as factually inaccurate narratives of immigration and assimilation. I took seriously the admonition that Vietnamese refugees were a “deprived and captive” population (Yu and Liu 1986, 499). I did not want to participate in what my students commonly refer to as an “anthropological” problem by creating a situation where as an academic I would lord over refugees who had little choice but to tell me exactly what I wanted to hear. By focusing on community-building and place-making from the point of view of Vietnamese American leaders, I hoped to avoid exploiting subordinate and helpless people. Leaders are people with vested interests, and I acknowledge the limitations of my leader-centric approach. At least by interviewing leaders, I focus on people who intend to—and often do— make an impact on the outside world, rather than reanimating the idea of the refugee cum passive victim. By comparing two instances of community and place, I orient the project away from description toward explanation. In this book, I have attempted to explain why Vietnamese American community and place in Boston and Orange County are different, despite similar goals among leaders. These goals include creating networks, businesses, agencies, events, monuments, neighborhoods, and whole places that generate and support Vietnamese culture and identity in the United States. I reject the notion that community and place are fixed or given. Both community and place are active, contested, and multidimensional categories. I do not intend to glorify or romanticize either one.5 Community-building and place-making involve debate and struggle. Moreover, the kind of communitybuilding that I emphasize here must involve place not merely as a spatial gesture but as a multidimensional reality involving location, physical form, and narrative or symbolic representation. Certainly some important forms of Vietnamese American community-building do not involve...

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