The Affects and Ethics of the Gift in Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet

Aimee Phan’s collection of interlinked short stories, gathered under the title We Should Never Meet (2004), engages a variety of forms of “failed” reciprocity. Inspired by Operation Babylift, the militarized evacuation and transnational adoption that sent Vietnamese orphans to the United States toward the end of the Vietnam War, Phan’s collection follows stories of young adult adoptees and refugees in Orange County, California’s Little Saigon and of people who cared for orphaned children during the war. In these stories studded with tropes of kinship, intimacy, and communication, gifts fail to be exchanged, signs of favor are misunderstood, and good intentions are paid back with violence. The multiple episodes and emotions constitute the conundrum of mutuality interwoven throughout this work. In particular, I place the stories set in Little Saigon in dialogue with the dominant narrative of postwar reconciliatory reciprocation between Vietnam and the United States and with the dominant, teleological figuration of the refugee as desperate alien turned grateful guest. My key argument is that Phan presents instances of disintegration and dislocation that threaten the “good” equilibrium of this reparative narrative, one that would promote progress and relegate the unassimilated refugee to the condition of a “bad” and ungrateful visitor. Writing against this state-to-state moral economy, Phan renders what is foreclosed from the symbolic narrative of the “good” perpetrator (an apologizing and benevolent America) and “good” victim (a forgiving and grateful refugee figure); she turns to an ethical realm that unfolds the dysfunctional site of that particular “good” teleology and renders a possible alternative mode of being and thinking.

The trope of the gift is the underlying concept in my reading of Phan’s composite collection, which I consider against the backdrop of the U.S. liberal-imperialist epistemology operative in refugee figurations. Building on Mimi Thi Nguyen’s work on the gift of freedom as an affective-moral economy between a freedom-giving empire and indebted refugees, I show that Phan’s characters contest the logic of moral imprisonment and linear temporality through their eccentric embodiments of time and subjectivity. As Nguyen argues, if the gift of freedom is a new logic of biopolitical domination that affectively binds and controls Vietnamese refugees, it is, more than anything else, a regulation of time that extends the period of affective confinement to one without end (indeed, it is almost impossible to find a proper endpoint for gratitude). While Nguyen highlights the duration of this time as a prolonged domination and as an invitation into the proper timetable of universal history, Phan’s characters present a temporal otherness that has an oblique relationship to the economy of the gift of freedom. In Phan’s literary world, “failed” reciprocity reflects adoptee/refugee figures’ frustrated longings and belongings and their protracted sense of loss after arrival in the U.S. The gifts in her stories, which on the surface level refer to material objects exchanged between the characters, are not simply items of freedom but rather signs that the normative narrative of freedom and completion has been interrupted.

Phan’s characters linger in the space of transition from desperate to assimilated. As an embodiment of interrupted time, hesitancy in the stories contours and overshadows equivocal feelings and delayed decisions, straddling a static and traumatic immobility and a complete state of reform and assimilation. I argue that this rendering of adoptee/refugee figures as being in a state of hesitancy, one filled with the psychic and physical labor that accompanies loss, constitutes an alternative affective knowledge countering the tendency to pathologize refugees. After the Vietnam War, the category of trauma was differently (and unequally) applied to American veterans and Vietnamese refugees. While the traumatic symptoms of American soldiers were considered to be evidence of humanity and functioned as a decisive factor in the institution of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) as a clinical category, comparable symptoms in Vietnamese refugees, such as the repetitive compulsion of being helplessly drawn to the past, were seen as evidence of their underdevelopment. Phan’s model of hesitancy stands ambivalently between...