Guests of Empire, Ghosts of Dispossession: Traumatic Loss and the Subject without a Proper Name in The Gangster We Are All Looking For

The strategy of not-naming raises some related questions about identity and the mechanisms of identification through which identity is ascertained and secured: In what ways does a name indicate presence? Must the absence of a name be linked to loss?

—Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony

What constitutes the outrage of the Holocaust—the very essence of erasure and annihilation—is not so much death in itself, as the more obscene fact that death itself does not make any difference, the fact that death is radically indifferent: everyone is leveled off, people die as numbers, not as proper names. In contrast to this leveling, to testify is to engage, precisely, in the process of re-finding one's own proper name, one's signature.

—Shoshana Felman, "Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching"

Vietnamese American writer lê thi diem thúy's first novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) has provoked discussions on the complicated politics surrounding the memory of the Vietnam War.¹ According to Isabell Thuy Pelaud, for example, writings by Vietnamese refugees were "vivid reminders of either national guilt or the abuses perpetrated by leftist regimes—neither the American Right nor the Left were keen to hear Vietnamese American stories."² Thus, even in the field of Asian American literary studies, Vietnamese American literature was long ignored because of their positioning in relation to the conventional Leftist political formula, which idealizes "bad subjects," that is, resistant subjects.³

Since the mid-1970s, it can be argued, one basis of the US acceptance of Southeast Asian refugees was to create a cultural memory of the war based on US notions of hospitality. However, because of internal economic tensions and outward social hostility toward Southeast Asians who "embody" the war, the American public has often expressed displeasure and antagonism at receiving refugees. To achieve a smoother assimilation by easing these ambivalent feelings, the US public expected Vietnamese refugees to behave as versions of "good" refugees, principally by becoming economically self-sufficient, socially passive, and academically successful. This typical "model minority" stereotype, which most Asian American intellectuals have always disavowed, but the political conservatives often endorse, has long been attached to the image of Vietnamese refugees.⁴ "Good" Vietnamese refugees at one level appease US national war guilt and allow it to retrieve an illusionary return to "wholeness." In "Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real" (referring to Freud's version of fetishism), Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff argue that for the little boy who denies his difference from his mother and her "castration," fetishism operates in order to replace his mother's "absent" phallus.⁵ The fetish object covers up this loss by allowing the boy to maintain the misperception and turn away from his own fear of castration. With his attempt to maintain his dual relationship with his mother, he refuses or fails to enter the symbolic realm governed by the "Father." Similarly, the "good" refugees serve as "fetish" objects, allowing the United States to maintain a mode of social-political-psychical defense against the national castration/defeat, substituting the "lack" of "phallic" victory.⁶ In US official memory, the war should be remembered as a "heroic" war against communism to protect humanity, liberty, and democracy. "Good" Vietnamese refugees are often framed therefore to justify US Cold War ideology: they operate as proof that the United States can offer minorities social mobility and human rights. Thus, Vietnamese refugees have needed to behave as "idealized" guests, who follow what Jacques Derrida calls "the law of hospitality,"⁷ within the "symbolic order,"⁸ or the preexisting linguistic and cultural structure that constitutes and defines the subject. These guests should "politely" follow this "law," in exchange for receiving "conditional" hospitality. "Proper" Vietnamese American writings should therefore conform to this "symbolic order" of the host country by accepting their assigned role as "good refugees." Conforming to the ideological fantasy of a version of the American Dream, "good refugees" need to accommodate...