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5. Whose Community Is It Anyway? Overseas Vietnamese Negotiating Their Cultural and Political Identity: The Case of Vice-Mayor Madison Nguyen
- Temple University Press
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5 On an uncharacteristically sunny and warm early winter day in February 2008, council member Madison Nguyen calls a press conference at her campaign headquarters in her recall election. Easily spotted in the crowded room, Madison wears an impeccably tailored, stylish, and formfitting gray suit as she scurries about with a huge grin. As community members and journalists enter the room, she greets them warmly, pausing for the occasional whisper in her ear by her chief of staff, Louansee Moua, and her campaign manager, Melanie Jimenez, both as youthful as Madison Nguyen. The room is filled with Vietnamese American journalists, many of whom had written extremely critical pieces on Madison’s performance as a council member, and a few of whom came under attack themselves when they praised her. As the press conference begins, Madison comes to the podium, where she succinctly announces the release of her free, thirtyminute Vietnamese-language DVD highlighting the accomplishments of her three years as council member. Although she does not explicitly say as much, the documentary is clearly meant to convince the Vietnamese American public not to recall her. After the DVD announcement, one of the event organizers introduces a “very special guest.” He is Madison’s sixty-seven-year-old father, a former soldier in the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam. Dressed in a modest suit and wearing spectacles, Nho Nguyen begins speaking to the press in Vietnamese in defense of his daughter and presenting evidence she is not a communist. (Field notes 2008b) I t is difficult to imagine that a controversy over the naming of a business district would erupt into a full-scale recall election, but because she did not support their choice of the name Little Saigon for a San Jose business district, Whose Community Is It Anyway? Overseas Vietnamese Negotiating Their Cultural and Political Identity: The Case of Vice-Mayor Madison Nguyen 114 Chapter 5 a group of Vietnamese Americans determined to oust a council member. As in the case of the artist Chau Huynh and her controversial Pedicure Basin installation , divisive politics led the Vietnamese American community to attack council member Madison Nguyen with slander and accusations of corruption. Madison’s ability to keep her seat in the end signaled a new beginning for the Vietnamese American community—a significant recognition that there is diversity of thought in the diaspora and a willingness to expose malicious acts against individuals.1 With three generations of Vietnamese in the United States since the end of the Viet Nam War, it may seem strange that anticommunist sentiments remain so strong. Indeed, community in relation to Vietnamese Americans has become almost synonymous with holding staunch anticommunist views. Few are openly procommunist in any form, and other, more pressing issues exist, especially for the younger generation, including creating a place for themselves as Americans in the United States and negotiating a complex relationship with their home country, Viet Nam. Because perceptions and understandings vary greatly depending on each individual’s connection and conceptualization of the Viet Nam War experience, it seems that Viet Nam truly is more than a war and even more than a country.2 It has become not just one but many “imagined communities ” in the Benedict Anderson (1983) sense, in which collectives imagine themselves as belonging to multiple communities. The image of Viet Nam can be and has been manipulated to form enforced realities, but when not everyone subscribes to these realities the struggle for real and perceived history begins. This chapter examines the cultural and political struggles of Vietnamese Americans for political representation and dominance within the contemporary Vietnamese American community. This struggle includes coping with continued relations with the home country; adjustment to the host country; and the need to mediate divergent ideas within the ethnic community, felt particularly by staunch anticommunists. These three factors are sources of influence constituting a framework that can be used to uncover the causes of friction within Vietnamese American communities. Friction arises from residual sentiments surrounding the war—including anticommunist ideology, loss, and sorrow, which in turn hinder reconciliation with the country of origin and acculturation in the host or birth country. Additionally, class, generation, and gender have emerged as points of contention among community members. I focus on one key figure—San Jose vice-mayor Madison Nguyen—who, despite a strategy of openness and compromise, found herself in a battle with members of her Vietnamese American community over representation in the naming of a business district and...