The First Vietnamese in America

The first Vietnamese in America travelled there during the interwar era. Though few in numbers, they ranged from wealthy tourists on globetrotting adventures to poor labourers pushed to the United States by the vagaries of the world economy. Allowing their experiences of the United States to speak for themselves suggests that the broader question of America in Vietnamese culture and consciousness during the late colonial era might benefit from a more explicitly "Vietnam-centric" approach to conceptualizing early Vietnamese-American encounters. In other words, their histories are more than avatars of the war to come.