The American Dream in Vietnamese

1. Assimilation and Ambivalence: Legacies of U.S. Military Intervention

1 Chapter 1 Assimilation and Ambivalence: Legacies of U.S. Military Intervention T H E C ON F L IC T in Vietnam was one of the most brutal and destructive wars fought between Western imperial powers and the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. During the Cold War, both sides used the killing in Vietnam as an object lesson for their cause. More modern weapons technology came into use in the Southeast Asian peninsula than anywhere in the history of warfare up to that point. Toxic herbicides and chemicals poisoned water, land, and air while explosives maimed bodies and decimated local civilian populations. The war physically seared Vietnamese bodies and psychologically imprinted their minds with horror, rage, denial, and repression to an extraordinary degree. Though more than thirty years separate the events of the war from the present, these memories and wounds—be they physical or emotional—still powerfully permeate the private lives of those who survived the war and fled Vietnam. As time passes, these scars and recollections crystallize to form the raw materials used by people of the Vietnamese diaspora to construct their new identities. This chapter traces the formation of contemporary Vietnamese American identities back to U.S. participation in the conflict in Vietnam to argue that cultural memories mediated by war shaped discourses of the refugee experience that followed. I contend that after dispersal and resettlement , Vietnamese asylees grappled directly with their refugee status and struggled to justify their social existence in response to the public discourse regarding their plight. The overwhelming focus on their trauma in many ways submerged historical memories and obfuscated the impact of American involvement in Vietnam while simultaneously creating an overdetermined construction of their identities as war victims. Vietnamese refugees and immigrants indeed shared a past circumscribed by war, but they areby no means ahomogeneous group. In this chapter, I situate Vietnamese refugees at the intersection of two oppositional discourses that racialized 2 Assimilation and Ambivalence them as both traumatized victims and model minorities. The assimilation process required them to employ one representational strategy—that of the successful model minority—to refute the other—the haunting figure of the destitute refugee. Both representations served to erase the history of U.S. involvement while homogenizing the Vietnamese as a monolithic group. This chapter, then, highlights not only the diversity within this immigrant group, but also discusses the larger implications refugee representations have overshadowed. I argue that refugee discourse has largely pathologized Vietnamese experiences by presenting distorted images and descriptions of the treatment of refugees before, during, and after relocation . These hegemonic representations of Vietnamese as war victims not only became the source from which these immigrants projected their identities but also form the blueprint that frames future studies of this group. Furthermore, the figure of the war refugee homogenized class and ideological differences. In this chapter, I maintain that class analysis is crucial for understanding the refugee community and that the reproduction of class privilege has enabled elite voices to emerge as cultural gatekeepers of the Vietnamese diaspora. My work critically interrogates the politics of labeling in refugee discourse by tracing the history of American imperialism, U.S. economic and military sponsorship of South Vietnam, and the eventful migration of the refugees.1 In arguing for new scholarship that examines both imperial Figure 2. From Thuy Nga’s Paris by Night 77. “30 Nam Vien Xu” ends its remarkable commemoration DVD by zooming in on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., to send out a special message from the Vietnamese American community. Assimilation and Ambivalence 3 as well as transnational connections, anthropologist Nina Glick-Schiller writes, “the role of the United States in the world, whether as a military presence or as a major benefactor of the new economic world order, stands as an untheorized aspect of the migration processes.”2 I heed Schiller’s call to theorize and interrogate U.S. power as it shaped Vietnamese patterns of migration, American memory, as well as immigrant identity formation. Deciphering the complicated politics of Vietnamese self-representation refracts the lasting implications of labeling and myth-making in the process of becoming Vietnamese American. Moreover, it reveals how a displaced population negotiates experiences and memories of war, migration, and incorporation while navigating a new terrain fraught with cultural misunderstandings. As refugee subjects entered American soil and adopted the United States as their new home, they confronted a...