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Journal of Asian American Studies 6.1 (2003) 95-100



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Signs Of Maturation:
Directions in Vietnamese American Studies


A Gift of Barbed Wire: America's Allies Abandoned in South Vietnam. By Robert S. McKelvey. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.
Buddha's Child: My Fight to Save Vietnam. By Nguyen Cao Ky with Marvin J. Wolf. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002.
The Unwanted: A Memoir. By Kien Nguyen. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2001.

The three works reviewed here represent the strong maturation of memoirs and oral history collections in Vietnamese American studies, while they likewise reflect the dearth of published critical books with groundbreaking scholarly research on Vietnamese Americans in the past year or two. Indeed, this trio of works yields fruitful discussion about the changes and continuities within Vietnamese American studies; I will return to this disciplinary issue after commenting on each of them individually.

Robert S. McKelvey's A Gift of Barbed Wire: America's Allies Abandoned in South Vietnam features a collection of oral histories of Vietnamese Americans who had lived in Vietnam's re-education camps following the fall of Saigon in 1975. The author states, "We often read about the soldiers who are sent away, but seldom about those who remain behind" (xix). Even in Vietnamese American studies, this topic of re-education camp prisoners remains a highly under-explored area. McKelvey does not deal with the reasons behind the lack of studies on this subject, an absence that may in part be explained by the fact that many from this [End Page 95] group arrived in the United States only in the 1990s through the Special Released Re-education Center Detainees Program, better known as the Humanitarian Operation implemented in 1989 by the U.S. and Vietnamese governments. According to McKelvey, approximately 165,000 of these former political prisoners and their families now live in the United States.

As the book's subtitle suggests, McKelvey argues that the United States "abandoned" its allies and the latters' lives in the re-education camps resulted from this desertion. He declares, "Very few of us [Americans]...gave more than a passing thought to the shattered lives of those we left behind. It did not occur to most of us that we had abandoned our former friends, the South Vietnamese, and even our children, the Vietnamese Amerasians" (x). The author's powerful rhetoric underscores his awareness of the need to study and assist this group, while also assigning responsibility to the United States. He supports this view with a pragmatic approach, which registers clearly in the policy-based suggestions for aid to this part of the Vietnamese population that concludes his book.

The first part of the book looks exclusively at the experiences of the former prisoners, while the second part widens to provide interviews with their families. These narratives at times relate interviewees' backgrounds to their status as targets of imprisonment. For example, the story of the medical doctor sent to a re-education camp tells of his upbringing in a French Catholic school in Dalat while his father served as a province chief for the nationalist party, as well as of the doctor's tenure as a battalion surgeon in the South Vietnamese Army. Given the communist position of the new regime from North Vietnam, the doctor's religious, political and military backgrounds all clearly explain his visibility as a target for incarceration into the camps. McKelvey raises the point that, like most men going to re-education facilities, the doctor did not resist being taken from his family.

On a quite different extreme, the former spy from the Central Intelligence Organization (the South Vietnamese agency that paralleled the CIA) profiled in McKelvey's book suffered even more intensely in the camps. Unlike most other prisoners, the spy actually joined a group of peers after almost five years in the prison and overpowered the guards in an attempt to escape. Once caught, he was beaten severely, an example of the physical violence that accompanied the emotional violence of incarceration and separation from...

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