The Debts of Memory: Historical Amnesia and Refugee Knowledge in The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

This article explores the challenges of memorywork for Vietnamese diasporic subjects in the face of postwar historical amnesia and trauma. It analyzes Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, which tells the story of two families that fled from the Vietnam War still grappling with the messiness of their war-torn past. The main character, Cherry, attempts to “reeducate” herself about her wayward kin, and while the novel may be read simply as a coming-of-age text, this major fictional work illustrates the ways second-generation subjects must recuperate convoluted histories of war to understand the causes of their own precarious life and uncertain future in the world. Offering a powerful analytic for situating gendered practices of remembering and forgetting, the term “reeducation” suggests that refugee memorywork never simply takes the form of nostalgia or denial of the past but a constant negotiation of history as interpreted through past wrongs or obligations. It raises epistemological and moral dilemmas related to refugee subject formation, characterized by more than the condition of exile from the homeland but the active processing of postwar economic bonds and demands. As a hermeneutic for critically reading the refugee as a figure of debt, “reeducation” links the programmatic indoctrination of South Vietnamese political prisoners by communists to the Western pedagogical program to civilize refugees from South Vietnam, recognizing the psychic and material debt survivors of war owe to the sacrifices and suffering of others, and the political agency found in that recognition.