The American Dream in Vietnamese by Nhi T. Lieu (review)

The majority of the work done on Vietnamese Americans concentrates on the trauma of exile. This body of work focuses on the sense of loss and the displacement of the community and represents the Vietnamese American as a perpetual refugee. In The American Dream in Vietnamese, Nhi T. Lieu challenges this portrayal and looks to the ways in which Vietnamese diasporic cultural productions help shape and complicate Vietnamese American identity formation. Lieu adeptly analyzes beauty pageants, music variety shows (both live and taped), Internet websites, and other sources in order to problematize this singular envisioning of ethnic identity formation, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of Vietnamese American subjectivity. Moreover, Lieu calls attention to the ways in which Vietnamese Americans—by which she includes refugees, immigrants, generations born in the United States, and those settled outside of U.S. borders—and their cultural productions trouble the prevailing narratives of Asian America and of U.S. history more broadly.

In chapter 1, Lieu details the treatment of Vietnamese Americans by the mainstream media as perpetual refugees, arguing that this imagining of Vietnamese Americans helped mask the role of the U.S. government in the Vietnam War, allowing the United States to be seen as a safe haven and a protector of democracy for all. As a result, Vietnamese Americans, faced with the effects of their refugee status and the need to justify their presence in the United States, encountered "an overdetermined construction of their identities as war victims" (1), which pushed them to assimilate as quickly as possible. Lieu astutely points out that "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" (2). This embracing of model minority status allowed the upper-class elite to speak as representatives of the Vietnamese diaspora, even though their concerns did not necessarily fall in line with the politics of Asian American groups because they supported conservatism and the U.S. military. Lieu argues in favor of understanding the historical context of the refugees, as their anticommunist politics continue to shape the diasporic community.

In chapter 2, Lieu examines the creation of Little Saigon and the ways in which Vietnamese Americans fought for a special domain of their own, refusing to allow the space to become pan-Asian. The need to establish and consolidate an ethnic identity drove the creation of Little Saigon, but, as Lieu points out, "these institutions symbolize the triumph of what South Vietnam could have been while they simultaneously create a market that produces and augments the desire for authenticity" (29). This nostalgia or imagining of both a potential and lost South Vietnam is further explored in chapter 3, where Lieu addresses the performance of cultural identities in beauty pageants of the Vietnamese diaspora. These pageants work to symbolize an imagined peaceful prewar Vietnam. Moreover, the female participants are expected to be both traditional and modern, symbolizing the contrasting ideals of Vietnamese cultural citizenship.

This idea of modern Vietnamese citizenship is the subject of chapter 4, as Lieu turns to the role of videos and media produced by and for the Vietnamese diaspora. These videos, Lieu argues, "privilege a 'new' diasporic Vietnamese subjectivity, shedding an 'impoverished refugee' image for a new hybrid, bourgeois, ethnic identity" (81). Lieu reads variety-show videos and traces the popularity of certain performers, demonstrating the ways in which these cultural texts represent both generative and repressive possibilities for the exile community. She critiques the diasporic community's policing of the entertainers who also choose to perform in Vietnam (thereby calling into question their anticommunist politics), pointing out that "anticommunist rhetoric also consolidates and strengthens Vietnamese exilic identities, defining for them what is properly 'Vietnamese'" (91). Yet these same videos and variety shows also allow audiences the connection to a larger diasporic community that they might not have access to otherwise. This opportunity for a...