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Writing exile: Vietnamese literature in the diaspora
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Writing exile: Vietnamese literature in the diaspora
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WRITING EXILE: VIETNAMESE LITERATURE IN THE DIASPORA by Anh Thang Dao _____________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY) August 2012 Copyright 2012 Anh Thang Dao ii Acknowledgments This dissertation was a long journey, across two oceans and three continents, across several countries and culture. Yet, along this journey, I never felt lonely thanks to the support and love of many people, who have remained by my side as I forged ahead. Thank you for laughing and crying with me, for picking me up when I fall, and for patiently waiting for me to finish. I would not be here without you. I cannot ask for a better dissertation committee. Viet Thanh Nguyen, John Carlos Rowe Macarena Gómez-Barris, Panivong Norindr have been there from the beginning. They mentored me in the classroom and independent studies, read my work and see it grow from the papers I have written for them. Viet, my dissertation chair was the one who informed me that I had been accepted at USC, and has also been the one to help me through the maze called graduate school. I thank him for his generosity and patience in reading this project since its earliest stage, for giving me the freedom to explore my research, and for providing much needed guidance when I am lost. And, I thank him for always, always answering my frantic urgent emails for help in the most calming way. I feel lucky to count John as a mentor, whose critical comments were crucial in the development of this project. His broad knowledge never ceases to amaze me and his work ethic is humbling. I am grateful to Macarena for the lessons that I learned from her inside and outside the classroom. Not only did her work on memory shape this project in many ways, but the conversations I had with her also helped me keep a positive outlook on my work and personal life. Throughout the process, Pani has been the one keeping me sane. He is always available for a last minute meeting during which I can share my anger, iii frustration and laugh. Finally, I thank Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, the honorary member of my dissertation committee, who taught me, among many other things, to believe in what I know and do. I am indebted to the staff in the department of American Studies and Ethnicity, who have simply accepted that I am a trouble child and love me anyways. I thank Jujuana Preston Kitty Lai and Sonia Rodrigues for their patience going through endless paperwork with me, for terrorizing payroll on my behalf when my payment is late, for sending me positive energy and hugs when I am homesick and for making sure I know when there is free food around. I thank Miss Sandra, who is no longer in ASE for the love and care she has given me since the first day. Thanks to her, my parents can feel at ease even though I am half a world away from them. Since my days as an undergraduate student I have been fortunate to work closely with many faculty members who have contributed to my overall intellectual development. At Mount Holyoke College, Jeffery Santa Ana, Nitasha Sharma, Ahmed Siraj, and Antonio Tiongson took me under their wings. They introduced me to the idea of graduate school and worked tirelessly to help me with my applications. During my time in ASE, Laura Pulido, Jack Halberstam, Jane Iwamura, Lon Kurashige, Natania Meeker and Josh Kun helped me grow as a thinker, reader and writer. At the first conference in my graduate career I met some amazing people who have since become friends and mentors. I thank Mimi Nguyen and Fiona Ngo for the endless hours they spent editing my first publication. I am grateful for Minh-Ha Pham’s feedback on my very first presentation. I still don’t know how Cathy Schlund-Vials and Mariam B. Lam iv find the time to answer my emails and calls for help with their busy schedule, but they always do. Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and Aimee Phan – we make a good team, and I feel so fortunate to have had the chance to work closer with both of you. I would not have been able to complete this difficult journey without the many co- conspirators, at USC and elsewhere who have made this process so much easier with food and drinks, conversations and laughter. I thank Perla Guerrero for taking me into her car and into her life within my first two weeks in LA, and for remaining my eres all these years. Laura Fugikawa is the nicest person I know and I thank her for all the chocolate and help she has given me and other people. The key word group: Sharon Luke, Haven Perez, Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, Orlando Serrano, Tasneem Siddiqui and Yushi Yamazaki helped me work through many difficult ideas and theories over the best potluck dinners. I am glad I came to know and learn from Deb Al-Najjar, Wendy Cheng, Michelle Commander, Carolyn Dunn, Araceli Esparza, Emily Hobson, Imani Kai Johnson, Alvaro Marquez, Margaret Salazar-Porzi, Mark Padoongpatt, Gretel Vera- Rosas, among others who have made ASE such a wonderful place to be. I want to thank Huong Ninh, Long Bui, Mimi Khuc, Trangdai Glassey-Trannguyen and Quan Tran for being my friends over emails, phones and conferences. Last but not least, I am grateful to Jennifer Barrager for the wonderful job she has done helping me proofread this entire dissertation. This project would not be possible without the financial support of many schools and organizations. I was fortunate to have received fellowships from USC, AAUW and the Wallis Annenberg Foundation, which allowed me to focus on my course works and v writing. It is a privilege that many graduate students do not have. I would also like to thank Mount Holyoke College and USC Diversity Enhancement Summer Stipend Award committee for supporting my research in Europe in the summer of 2010. Outside of the academy I have a small circle of friends who have stayed with me over the years, despite my many border crossings and the physical distance between us. I thank Nga, Hà, Phương, Kim Anh, Vân, Minh, Hương for remaining my friends since elementary school and for letting me fall right back into their arms every time I come back as if I had never left. I thank Hudi for remaining my biggest friend. I remember Berlin and Potsdam fondly mostly because of Ring. Hạnh Lê has been there for me since high school and I know I can always count on her advice and love even if sometimes we are too busy to talk for months. I thank Ngọc Anh Hoàng and her family for taking me in as a sister and a daughter. I got to know Mayur Shah in September 2006, only a month after I got accepted into graduate school and moved to Los Angeles. The past six years have not always been easy, but I am grateful for his understanding as I experienced the ups and downs of life in the academia. I also appreciate the many conversations we had that helped me learn to talk about my work in a concise and understandable way. I cherish his love and care, and thank him for sharing with me not only the joyful moments but also the disappointments, frustrations and homesickness. Whatever the future may bring, you have been a most wonderful part of my life. I would also like to thank Mr. Mayank Shah, Mrs. Manjuri Shah, Jill Shah, Milan Shah, Deven and Kieran Shah who have welcomed me into their family and given me a second home. vi From the beginning, my family has been my biggest source of strength, inspiration, support and love. My sister has sacrificed much of her own freedom so I could explore the world. I hope she knows how much I admire her and look up to her. Ha is the brother that I never had, and I thank him for his support as well as all the books and the conversations that we share. I thank my nephews, Pi and Pit, who have been a source of joy in my life ever since they were born. Though I haven’t been able to be close to them, they are always in my heart and I am filled with pride as I watch them grow. If I could get another Ph.D. it would be in chemistry, so I could follow my father’s footsteps. I thank him for his belief in me, for always encouraging me to pursue my dreams even when they are unconventional and for his unyielding pride in my achievements. I thank my mother for her patience as she sees me moving from one school to the next, going further and further away from home. Her love pushes me forward and gives me strength. I know that my dreams are possible because they have given up many of their own. Con cảm ơn bố mẹ thật nhiều. vii Table of Contents Acknowledgments……………………………….………………………………………..ii Abstract………………………………………..………………………………………...viii Introduction: Between Homeland and Diaspora…………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Without the Shadow of Homeland: Exile As a Practice of Radical Freedom in Linda Lê’s Slander and Thuận’s Chinatown……....…………….………….28 Chapter 2: A War of Memory: Gender, Sexuality and the Vietnam War in Lely Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places.........................................................................82 Chapter 3: A Different Modernism: Race, Language and Colonialism in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt………………………………………………………….......125 Chapter 4: The Tale of Quyên: The Undocumented Vietnamese Woman in Nguyễn Văn Thọ’s Novel Quyên…………………………………………………........151 Conclusion: An Incomplete Story..………………………………………...…………..197 Bibliography:…………………………………………………………………………...204 viii Abstract In Writing Exile I re-conceptualize the notion exile as a framework to discuss the limitations and potential of diasporic cultural and literary productions. Departing from a traditional understanding of exile as being cast out from a nation-state or native country, the project highlights a concept of exile as a process that encompasses multiple moments of geographical and ideological displacement. This process starts in the homeland and continues beyond its borders, linking histories of colonialism and imperialism with current power regimes governing relationships of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the diaspora. Within this framework, the project examines the multilingual literary and cultural productions of Vietnamese diasporic communities in the United States, France, and Germany, which are informed by histories of ethnic conflicts, French colonization, American military intervention, and global Cold War politics. Locating this literature at the intersection of many national, imperial, and colonial aspirations, I suggest that a reconceptualization of exile is helpful in understanding how the multiple histories and social conditions leading to exile continue to characterize the lived experience of diasporic subjects. At the same time, this notion of exile questions claims of origin and authenticity to present a series of choices and opportunities for diasporic cultural productions to challenge the constraints of the diaspora, which cannot be contained within the trajectory of the homeland and the diaspora as respective openings and endpoints. Within this struggle, which reveals rather than conceals the multiplicities and conflicts shaping diasporic communities, our understanding of diaspora is constantly questioned and remade at the same time. 1 Introduction: Between Homeland and Diaspora This dissertation departs from existing scholarships on exile and diaspora to develop a different understanding of exile as a historical process that encompasses multiple moments of geographical and ideological displacement. Instead of differentiating between the two notions of exile as referring either to an outcast from a home country or a political dissident, the project highlights exile as a process that starts in the homeland and continues beyond its borders, linking histories of colonialism and imperialism with current power regimes governing relationships of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the diaspora. Using this new concept as a theoretical framework to study the literary and cultural productions of Vietnamese diasporic communities in the United States, France, and Germany, I suggest that such reconceptualization helps demonstrate how the multiple histories and social conditions leading to exile continue to characterize the life and experiences of diasporic subjects. At the same time, through this notion of exile, I also want to point out the opportunities, which allow diasporic cultural productions to challenge the multiple constraints of the diaspora. As one of the first projects about Vietnamese literature in the diaspora, Writing Exile is unique in its multilingual approach. In the project, I study the multinational literature of Vietnamese diasporic writers alongside newspaper articles, social commentaries and critical works in four different languages. These journalistic and critical accounts reflect the literature’s condition of production and allow us to explore the different aspects of the re-conceptualized theoretical framework of exile. Navigating multiple languages and histories of the Vietnamese diaspora through a transnational and 2 comparative approach, Writing Exile makes crucial interventions in several humanities disciplines. In so doing, the project also highlights the many historical moments that have led to the displacement of Vietnamese people since the end of the Vietnam War, and the different modes of difference, which continue to regulate the diaspora and transnational subjects in an increasingly globalized world. The dispersal of Vietnamese people to other parts of the world is not a new phenomenon considering the country’s long history of colonization under various foreign powers. Different colonial authorities often employed forced displacement as a mechanism to break up political insurgences, sending Vietnamese activists and political prisoners to places as far away as French Guinea. At the same time, the anti-colonial effort motivated a number of intellectuals to go to countries like Japan or France to find a way towards decolonization. These earlier exilees, though important for the understanding of the genealogy and diversity of the Vietnamese diaspora, were few in number as opposed to the mass exodus at the end of the Vietnam War, which marked a turning point in this history both in terms of the number of displaced people and the geographic scope of the dispersal. Several movements characterize the post–Vietnam War formation of the Vietnamese Diaspora, reflecting the historical ethnic conflicts in Southeast Asia, colonial ties between Vietnam and France, Cold War politics, and global immigration flows. The most documented trend is the escape of former Southern Vietnamese personnel and the boat people from Vietnam after the communist regime came to power. Immediately before and after the fall of Saigon, around 130,000 Vietnamese, mostly people with close 3 ties to the American army and the Southern Vietnamese government, were evacuated to U.S. army bases in Southeast Asia, from which they were transferred to the United States. They joined a small number of students, scholars, and war brides who had left Vietnam before and during the war. In the years between 1978 and 1980, Vietnam experienced another exodus, which is associated with the “boat people.” This mass departure was both profoundly political and economically motivated, because it arose as a result of several factors: the continuous persecution of former soldiers and sympathizers of the Republican government; the dire economic situation following the end of the war, which was the result of both Vietnam’s economic policies and the U.S. economic embargo; and the border conflict between Vietnam and China. The group that left as part of this immigration wave was stratified in terms of class, education, gender, and ethnic affiliation. More than half of the people who successfully left as part of this wave ended up in the United States. A large number found themselves in Western countries like France, West Germany, or Australia. 1 A significant number of people never managed to leave the intermediate refugee camps and today remain in Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand or the Philippines. Lastly this trend also encompasses more than 200,000 former re-education camps prisoners and Amerasians, who were allowed to immigrate to the United States between 1984 and 1995 as part of two humanitarian programs negotiated among the United Nations, the United States, and the Vietnamese government. 2 1 West Germany is the common English name for The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) or Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD). 2 The Orderly Departure Program was negotiated between the United Nations and the Vietnamese government in 1979 and allowed Vietnamese people to enter the United States if they had relatives living in 4 The second current forming the present Vietnamese Diaspora is part of a labor and intellectual exchange program between countries within the communist bloc during the Cold War period. Though significant in shaping the present state of the Vietnamese Diaspora, little research has been done on this population. In the years between 1975 and the beginning of the 1990s, thousands of Vietnamese people, mostly from the North, were sent to the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries as guest workers to labor in factories and sometimes on collective farms. At the same time, a number of Northern Vietnamese students and scholars were sponsored by the Soviet Union and other European communist regimes to obtain further education in Eastern Europe. After the gradual disintegration of the Eastern European communist bloc in late 1980s and the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of these guest workers and intellectuals remained in Europe, sometimes moving from one country to another. Others went back to Vietnam only to return after a few years. The majority of these former workers and scholars now reside in Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany. The third trend that shaped the Vietnamese Diaspora is the subsequent movement of Vietnamese people in the diaspora as well as secondary migrations for purposes of family reunification or as a result of labor networks. Considered a hub for Vietnamese people overseas, Southern California has attracted many people who have resided in other parts of the United States as well as in other countries. In Europe, many Vietnamese people in Russia left for Poland and Germany after the fall of the communist regimes in the United States who were willing to sponsor them. The Amerasian Homecoming Act was passed in 1987 and allowed mixed-race Vietnamese, the majority of whom were abandoned children of U.S. soldiers, to emigrate to the United Stated with their families. 5 these countries. Lastly, this trend also accounts for a population of undocumented Vietnamese immigrants who have been crossing the borders of the European Union in growing numbers. All of these factors contribute to form a Vietnamese Diaspora marked by differences and change. Within this context, a study of Vietnamese literature in the diaspora seems, from the beginning, an impossible task. Although only the largest communities—in places such as the United States or France—have a significant body of works published in internationally recognized venues, many more literary productions circulate within smaller communities through community news sources, in communal meetings, and, increasingly, in online forums. At the same time, the literature of larger communities such as the Vietnamese American community is also marked by diversity in terms of language, the socio-political issues they address, and generational differences. This dissertation is not an attempt to provide a survey of this rich body of literature. Instead, I take a closer look at five authors from the United States, France, and Germany whose works have gained an outsized influence in different national, transnational, and diasporic contexts. Le Ly Hayslip and Monique Truong are arguably two of the most well known Vietnamese American writers of the first and second generation while Linda Lê has received much critical attention not only in France, but also in the United States. At the same time, Thuận and Nguyễn Văn Thọ, though they are less established within the U.S. context, have both received awards from the National Association of Vietnamese writers in Vietnam. Nguyễn Văn Thọ’s novel has also gained tremendous popularity among members of the Vietnamese diasporic communities in Eastern Europe, while Thuận’s 6 work received its first critical acknowledgement in France after the translation of her third novel Chinatown and its publication by Le Seuil, a major French publisher. Reading the novels within the context of their history of reception and condition of production, the project explores how writers in the diaspora must write from and within different historical contexts, for multiple audiences, and fulfill conflicting expectations. On the one hand, I argue, this literature is symptomatic of the multiple memories, histories, and conflicts characterizing the Vietnamese Diaspora. On the other hand, it also questions the hierarchies of power resulting from these contradictory relationships in the diaspora. An important factor influencing the choice of this body of work is language. While Hayslip, Truong and Lê write in the dominant language of their national contexts, Nguyễn Văn Thọ and Thuận both write in Vietnamese. Diasporic readers also accessed the works of these last two authors in online venues before the novels were published in Vietnam and, in the case of Thuận, before they were picked up by a publisher in the country of settlement. 3 Within the context of the Vietnamese Diaspora, Vietnamese- language literature plays a significant role, although it receives little attention from either the mainstream society of the host country or the younger generation in the diasporic community. In the case of Vietnamese Americans, the emergence of a second generation of Vietnamese American writers who publish in English further eclipses the many literary works by first-generation authors in the community, raising questions about the power 3 Throughout the dissertation I use the term host country interchangeably with country of settlement to indicate the receiving country of displaced Vietnamese people. The choice of a term does not reflect on the different degrees of attachment to the country to which Vietnamese people have been displaced, which certainly exist within the Vietnamese diaspora at large, and between the authors discussed in the dissertation. In my first chapter I will talk about the consequences of the different degrees of attachment, which often result from the context of displacement, without introducing different terminology. 7 dynamics governing the publication and consumption of minority literature. In France, contemporary Vietnamese diasporic writers must reckon with the complicated relationship between France and Vietnam, and with a tradition of Vietnamese Francophone writers whose works in French presented a negotiation with both French colonialism and the constraints of a Vietnamese society under colonial rule. Consequently, the choice between the dominant and minority language also reflects the historical moments shaping the different factions of the community. Focusing on a multilingual body of literature, my analysis emphasizes how particular manifestations of hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in both the homeland and the host country produce different ideological works and aesthetic forms in Vietnamese literature in the diaspora. At the same time, my analysis also highlights how this literature can function as an affirmation of existing hierarchies of difference. For Vietnamese people in the diaspora, literature often works to distinguish them as communities distinct from, and yet grounded within the history of both Vietnam and the host country, an effort to counter the multiple limitations that these communities experience. Yet, this effort often perpetuates dominant discourses of nation building, which has displaced them from the homeland and continues to marginalize them in the diaspora. Focusing on the intersection of different modes of difference, my project moves away from an essentialized understanding of diasporic subjectivity, based on a celebratory notion of cultural hybridity and border crossing as a feature of the globalized world. Instead, I aim to highlight the multiplicity of experiences to warn against an easy grouping of Vietnamese diasporic people that does 8 not take into consideration the antagonistic relationships between and within different communities of the diaspora. Reading the novels through the lens of exile, I do not intend to make a generic claim about Vietnamese diasporic literature as necessarily oppositional, but try to find within this body of work moments of rupture that can expose this literature’s potential to challenge the different regimes of oppression in both Vietnam and the different countries of settlement. Exile and Diaspora In order to understand the meaning of a reconceptualization of exile that this project proposes, it is necessary to examine the articulation of diaspora and exile, to see where they overlap and diverge and how a new notion of exile can help explore the complexity of diaspora in current usage. Due to a similar semantic development, diaspora and exile are interrelated concepts in discourses of displacement. Both terms were initially used to refer to the dislocation of Jewish people as related in the Bible and were adopted by scholars to describe the dislodgement of other ethnic groups. According to Martin Bauman, as a result of a popularization (and secularization) process, diaspora moved from its biblical origin as “an integral part of a pattern constituted by the fourfold course of sin or disobedience, scattering and exile as punishment, repentance and finally return and gathering” to mean any “expatriate national, cultural, or religious groups and communities“ established outside of their original geographic territory. 4 4 Martin Bauman, “Diaspora: Genealogies of Semantics and Transcultural Comparison,” Numen 47.3 (2000): 317–322. 9 Throughout this semantic development, two characteristics have defined diaspora: its geographic-sociological connotation—“the enduring, often glorifying identification of a group of people with a cultural-religious point of reference outside the current country of living”—and its connection to identity— “an identificational difference of the diaspora group in contrast with the society’s dominant cultural and religious norms and orientation.” 5 It is this combination of identification and dis- identification that gives rise to the notion of a diasporic identity and consciousness, which invokes a feeling of completion and fixity—diaspora as a community and its identity are the products of a history of change, but now this process has come to an end and the group has developed a way of life and understanding of itself that is distinct from the rest of the society. Diasporic identity is collective, indicating a bonded group, a people with a shared culture and history. 6 Many scholars have pointed out the danger of this fixity in the understanding of diaspora. Looking at the Chinese diaspora, Rey Chow argues that the minority discourse that accompanies the imagination of the Chinese diaspora makes it difficult to talk about Chinese women, or other “sub-groups” within the Chinese diasporic community for that matter. Subsumed under a rhetoric of the oppressed minority, scholars in diaspora often forget to point out their own privileged position, assuming that everyone in the community is subjugated to an equal degree. 7 Within this scholarship, diaspora becomes a fixed category, a community that can be defined, bound, and separated from others 5 Bauman 327. 6 See Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 7 Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 107–109. 10 through a common history that can be as much about remembering as forgetting. Scholars of the African diaspora also point at the need to articulate diaspora through differences. Stuart Hall theorizes a cultural identity within a diasporic context as determined “not by essential purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of identity which lives with and through, not despite difference.” 8 Brent Hayes Edwards, in his analysis of a Black transnationalism through literature, also emphasizes that “the use of diaspora . . . forces us to articulate discourses of cultural and political linkages only through and across differences in full view of the risk of that endeavor.” 9 Other scholars also criticize the overemphasis on the notion of homeland, in political, cultural, and geographical terms, as a defining feature of diaspora, leaving processes of re-diasporization (movement from one diasporic space to another), as well as the horizontal connections among different diasporic communities, unexamined. On the one hand, diasporic communities are identified with “the enduring, often glorifying identification of a group of people with the homeland.” 10 On the other hand, as scholars like Aihwa Ong and Gayatri Gopinath point out, diaspora is also often celebrated as a space in which diasporic subjects oppose different forms of state power, be it capitalism 8 See Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990); and Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 9 Edwards 13. 10 Baumann 327. 11 as represented by the new country or patriarchy as represented by the homeland. 11 Such understanding of diaspora as an oppositional space masks the fact that the different systems of disciplining leading to exile can continue beyond geopolitical borders, and conceals the multiple ways in which the diasporic community can replicate the disciplining of both the homeland and the host-country. In the concept of exile, the homeland also plays a central role. Elizabeth Brofen writes, “exile—often used as a synonym for banishment, expulsion, emigration, expatriation—means the forced removal from one’s homeland, an act of punishment that forces the displacement from the civil society and coerces the one it targets to find a place to live in a foreign land.” 12 This displacement from one’s native land is the foundation of an understanding of exile that charts the movements of diverse populations of people: from the mythical wandering of the Roman hero Ulysses and the biblical deportation of the Jews from Jerusalem to the escape of European Jews from Europe during World War II and the exodus of millions of Southeast Asians after the Vietnam War. In each of these cases, the loss of a homeland marks exile’s beginning and thereby continuously defines and reproduces it. 13 Within this understanding, the concept of exile, like diaspora, overemphasizes the notion of homeland, which functions as the object of longing and 11 See Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); and Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 12 Elizabeth Bronfen, “Entortung und Identität,” The Germanic Review 69 (1994): 71. Quotation translated from German by author. “Exil—oft synonym gebraucht mit Verbannung, Vertreibung, Emigration, expatriation—bedeutet die Zwangsausweisung aus einem Heimatstaat, einen Strafakt, der den Ausschluss aus der Rechtgemeinschaft anordnet und den Betreffenden zwingt, einen Wohn—und Handlungsort in der Fremde zu suchen.” 13 See Joseph Brodsky, “The Condition We Call Exile,” in Literature in Exile, ed. John Glad (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 100–109; and Dominica Radulescu, “Theorizing Exile,” in Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern European Voices, ed. Dominica Radulescu (New York: Lexington Books, 2002). 12 nostalgia for displaced subjects. More importantly, for Amy Kaminsky, exile also charts “a state of constant changes and movements,” which starts with the displacement beyond the border of the homeland and the end of which is expressed in the diaspora. 14 The homeland and the diaspora, thus, mark the respective beginning and end of exile. Many writers have dwelled on this aspect of exile, especially the fact that the homeland within the exilic imagination is always a distorted image. For Edward Said, the homeland inspires a never-ending mourning, a constant reminder of the past, which prevents those in exile from focusing on the future. A prolonged memory of the place they have left stops them from seeing the new place in which they now live. 15 For Linda Lê, the homeland resembles a disease in the life of a person in exile. In a collection of prefaces that she wrote while awaiting to prove herself as a writer, Lê writes, “I carry my country like this young peasant carries his twin’s fetus. It is a monstrous link. A link in which the native country, the twin, is protected and suffocated, recognized and denied, and finally carried just as one carries a dead child.” 16 Using a metaphor from medicine she refers to the native country as the one being “protected and suffocated“ in the rare occasion when a twin develops and dies inside his brother. The metaphor of the monstrous link between the brother who died and the one who survived speaks to the complicated relationship between the homeland and exile, in which the former is distorted through the latter’s longing and nostalgia. The homeland, as Lê frames it, is the pathology of exile—a disease that the people who have been displaced must carry, a 14 Amy Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), xvi. 15 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage, 1994), 36. 16 Linda Lê, Tu Écriras sur le Bonheur (Paris: Puf, 1999), 330. 13 tumor that permanently plagues their lives and which they cannot deny because it is a defining part of their own body. While acknowledging the importance of the homeland in the experiences and imagination of the displaced subject, my analysis also emphasizes a different meaning of exile that draws on the term internal émigré, which is often used in the context of the former Soviet Union and the notion of “inner exile,” which is more popular within the context of Latin American and Southern European dictatorships. In both contexts this meaning of exile refers to the social and political ostracism of subjects within national boundaries. Internal émigré “was used as far back as the 1920s to stigmatize as outsiders . . . [those] who, while continuing to reside within the geographical boundaries of the Soviet Union, actually or apparently did not share the ethos of the politico-cultural system,” while inner exile is usually used to describe a group of political dissidents who are alienated and targeted by the dictatorial government, yet who choose to remain in their home country. 17 This exile is no less material. The ideological dissidence is often accompanied by physical disciplining and alienation so that the exilic experience, according to Carina Perelli, is characterized by the lack of “guarantees inherent in a universe in which being and acting are dangerous activities.” 18 17 See Catharine Nepomnyashchy, “Writing in the Margins: In Praise of Emigration,” in Toronto Slavic Quarterly: Academic Electronic Journal in Slavic Studies 19 (2007); Paul Illie, Literature and Inner Exile: Authoritarian Spain, 1939–1975 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Kathleen Newman, “Cultural Redemocratization: Argentina, 1978–89,” in On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, ed. George Yúdice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 161–186; and Carina Perelli, De mitos y memorias políticas: la represión, el miedo y después (Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1986). 18 Kaminsky 10. 14 Although my understanding of exile is indebted to these scholars, it also departs from their works in an important way. Instead of differentiating between the two meanings as representative of two cultures of exile, my project emphasizes exile as a historical process that can start before the displacement, when a person is designed as an Other and subjected to inner exile, before being expelled from it geographically. This process of exile can also extend into the diaspora, since a subject can be marginalized from both the diasporic community and the dominant society of the host country through processes of racialization, ethnicization, or gender and sexuality politics. Within this framework, exile does not start with the displacement nor does it end with the establishment of a diasporic community, but can result in further moments of exile, from the homeland, the diaspora, and the host country. A recuperation of exile, de-linked from the homeland to connect internal dissidents and displaced subjects within a multidirectional process, I argue, is helpful, to point at the complex relationships and differences that characterize the diaspora, which scholars like Hall, Hayes, and Chow have emphasized. This concept of exile underscores both the geographical displacement across the border and a social and political dissociation with or alienation from a “home” without literally leaving it. However, it links the two meanings within a non-linear process, a lived experience that highlights multiple histories and social conditions leading to exile at the same time that it can present a series of choices and opportunities to challenge these constraints, which cannot be contained within the trajectory of the homeland and the diaspora as respective openings and endpoints. 19 19 Kaminsky 15. 15 Beyond Vietnam and America Looking at a multinational body of literature, my analysis is both grounded in and departs from scholarship in several disciplines: Vietnam War Studies, Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Studies, Asian American Studies and American Studies. Out of the three Vietnam related disciplines, Vietnam War studies is arguably the most established given that the Vietnam War, according to John Carlos Rowe, has been “the most chronicled, documented, reported, filmed, taped, and—in all likelihood— narrated war in history (of the United States).” 20 This American obsession with the War resulted in a large number of cultural productions and scholarships, which focuses on a wide range of issues including the military, socio-historical and political aspects of the war. For the most part, however, this multidisciplinary body of scholarship tends to see the war, and by extension the country and people of Vietnam from the perspective of American self-interest and ethnocentrism, with little interest in Vietnamese and Southeast Asian points of view on the military conflicts, or the social impact of the war on the society of Vietnam and other countries in the region. The study of the Vietnam War for the most part also disregards the experience of Vietnamese Americans and other Vietnamese diasporic subjects, whose displacement often took place as a result of the war. As such, the Vietnam War studies rarely overlaps with Vietnamese studies, which is the area study of Vietnam, and Vietnamese American studies, which focuses specifically on the history and experiences of people of Vietnamese descent in the United 20 John Carlos Rowe. The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 173. 16 States. Vietnamese studies, like many other area studies in the United States, emerged after World War II, when the “threats from the Soviet Union, China, the emerging Cold War [and] the passions and prospects of decolonization in Africa and Asia,” force the United States to reckon with its intellectual ignorance of the non-Western world. 21 Vietnamese Studies, thus, could be said to have started as a component of Southeast Asian Studies, which remains, until today, a contested field due to the lack of a single geographic, linguistic or religious center. 22 Yet, the field experienced a tremendous growth due to the 30 years of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, which produced an interest in different aspects of Vietnamese language, culture, history, and politics. Today, Vietnamese studies, as exemplified by the few established programs at universities and colleges in the United States, focuses on producing scholarship about modern Vietnamese literature, society, history and other aspects of modern life in Vietnam, with a special focus on language instruction. Although the leading journal in the field, The Journal of Vietnamese Studies, claims to promote research about the Vietnamese diaspora, which is generally excluded from traditional area studies, the field still lacks a genuine interest in the many Vietnamese communities scattered all around the world. Vietnamese American Studies, on the one hand, began in the many reports, books, and journal articles that describe the arrival and dispersal of Vietnamese refugees in the United States following the fall of Saigon. This early body of work often explains this history as a component of U.S. benevolent policies during the Cold War. On the other 21 David Szanton Ed. The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 7. 22 Szanton 386. 17 hand, however, Vietnamese American Studies also emerged within the framework of Asian American Studies, which has incorporated the new scholarship with some ambivalence. This ambivalence stems from the fact that although Vietnam served as a rallying point for the political movements of the 1960s, around which Asian American Studies and other ethnic studies programs came to life, the arrival of Vietnamese people forced Asian American Studies to reinvent itself in order to incorporate a new Asian immigrant population, which could not easily be subsumed under previous cultural and political agendas. Often, Vietnamese Americans are treated as an addition, a new population whose writings need to be included in anthologies and studies, and as yet another group whose experiences can be readily explained by existing narratives of exclusion and exploitation. With a new generation of Vietnamese American scholars, however, we can also glimpse the contours of an emerging body of scholarship that engages more critically with both points of origin. In his book Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, Viet Nguyen focuses on Le Ly Hayslip’s novels/memoirs, among other works, to pose a critique of the tendency of Asian American scholars to read for opposition in Asian American cultural productions. Rather, he argues through the case of Hayslip and others that the distinction between assimilation and opposition in critical works about Asian American culture operates as a binary that does not allow critics to recognize all the nuances and “flexible strategies” that authors have employed to deal with their ethnic and political experiences. Thus, Nguyen looks at an example of Vietnamese American literature to caution against a tradition of Asian American critical 18 work that dismisses the multiplicity of Asian American experiences and subsumes the ways literary productions deal with these experiences within a narrowly defined discourse of opposition. If Nguyen’s work offers a point of departure from the Asian American tradition within Vietnamese American Studies, Yen Le Espiritu, in her article "’We-Win-Even- When-We-Lose’ Syndrome" considers Vietnamese American history in relation to the U.S. nation state. She points out that the extensive coverage of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese refugees after the war only serves to recuperate an image of America as a world hegemon, which justifies its continuing policing of the rest of the world. Not only does the diversity of the Vietnamese population get erased within these accounts, but such portrayal of America as the rescuer also conceals the role of the United States in inducing the displacement of Vietnamese subjects through its imperialist foreign policies. The kind of critique voiced by Nguyen and Espiritu is echoed in two special issues of Amerasia Journal on Vietnamese Americans. The 2003 issue titled “Vietnamese Americans: Diaspora and Dimensions” attempts to counter the homogenous depiction of Vietnamese Americans by exploring the diversity of the population through a multiplicity of genres, methodologies, and issues. Specifically, the issue evokes a diasporic framework to explore the relationship between Vietnamese Americans and Vietnam as well as Vietnamese history, an effort at re-examining the displacement of Vietnamese Americans through a different framework than the narrative of victimhood embraced by mainstream American imagination. Edited by Yen Le Espiritu and Thu Huong Nguyen Vo, the 2005 issue of Amerasia titled “30 Years AfterWARd” is another attempt to 19 rethink the Vietnam War in order to reflect the range of experiences of Vietnamese Americans. More importantly, in suggesting an alternative history, one that dwells in “ghostly” spaces in-between the endless accounts of the war, the editors point out that the issues pertinent to the study of Vietnamese Americans—war, race, and violence—need further consideration in Asian American Studies as well. Though these journal issues emphasize the need to employ a diasporic dimension, scholarships in the field of Vietnamese American Studies are still mostly concerned with the experiences of Vietnamese in the United States, sometimes with a focus on the relationship between Vietnamese Americans and their homeland, Vietnam. Often, in an attempt to counter the pervasive official history of the United States, Vietnamese American scholars tend to dwell on the memory of the Vietnam War and the boat-people experience as the most important historical framework of analysis, thus reproducing an essentialist understanding of the Vietnamese diaspora that fails to take into consideration the multiple experiences of displacement. My project addresses the fundamental flaws in the three existing Vietnam related fields of studies. Focusing on multiple diasporic communities, the emergence of which is oftentimes the direct or indirect results of the Vietnam War, Writing Exile challenges the American centric perspective of Vietnam War Studies. It points at the need to look at the impact of the Vietnam War on the country and people of Vietnam. At the same, it also urges scholars to understand the armed conflict and its consequences within a global and transnational framework. Such diasporic perspective pushes the field to consider the Vietnam War as a multisided conflict, which involves many international actors, whose 20 presence shaped the course of the war as well as its meaning and legacies among populations around the world. Highlighting the complex ties of Vietnamese diasporic subjects to the homeland, multi-sited community formation process, and transnational connections, Writing Exile also challenges Vietnamese Studies’ ignorance of Vietnamese diasporic subjects, whose mass displacement remains an important episode in Vietnam’s history. More importantly, these populations have and will continue to have significant social, economic and political impact on the Vietnamese society. Lastly, employing a comparative approach that allows us to talk about the experiences of Vietnamese Americans not only in terms of their relationship to Vietnam or the United States, but also vis-à-vis other Vietnamese diasporic communities, Writing Exile decentralizes the Vietnam War as the departure point of discussions about Vietnamese diasporic populations to treat it as one important factor, alongside other histories of colonization, ethnic conflicts, and collaborations within the communist bloc that also led to the displacement of Vietnamese people. Invoking different power dynamics and social relationships, such analysis can help further distance Vietnamese American Studies from its problematic starting points. This project also departs from a larger debate surrounding transnationalism as a necessary paradigm within both American Studies and Asian American Studies. As a response to the way that both fields have been traditionally confined within the national boundaries of the United States, transnationalism as a framework points at the multidirectional circulation of people, capital, and knowledge across national borders that has always defined the subjects of study in these fields. For American Studies, it is a 21 movement away from the narrative of American exceptionalism, which has defined the field as a study about the United States, to focus on issues related to (1) the Americas, North, South and Central, and (2) other parts of the world, which have been affected by U.S. policies informed by this discourse of exceptionalism. For Asian American Studies, it is an attempt to redefine the field, which has encountered a crisis as a result of a demographic overturn. Born out of the political movements of the 1960s, Asian American Studies relies on a concept of “Asian American” that is narrowly defined through a history of exclusion, a focus on citizenship (broadly conceived), and efforts of Asians to “claim America.” 23 The 1965 immigration law, as well as the end of the Vietnam War, brought a large number of “new” Asian immigrants and refugees, who can no longer be adequately subsumed under the existing definition of Asian American, thus forcing the field to find a way to deal with this new reality through a transnational approach. The “transnational turn” in American Studies was officially inaugurated in the presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2004 by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, titled “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies.” In her address Fishkin points at transnationalism as an important framework within American Studies. Stressing the porosity and decline in importance of national borders, she emphasizes the collaboration with Americanists in other countries as one way for the field to move away from its exceptionalist history. Fishkin’s address, formally important as it recognizes a new trajectory in the field of American Studies, summarizes an ongoing 23 See Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 22 trend within the field. The transnationalist paradigm is part of a New American Studies framework, which was outlined by John Carlos Rowe in his book New American Studies. In this work, Rowe characterizes the five approaches of the new framework: comparativeness, post-nationalism, post-structuralism, multi-disciplinarity, and new- internationalism, all of which call for multilingualism, a reciprocal learning between American and non-American scholars, and the incorporation of scholarship from populations which have traditionally been treated only as objects of study by American Studies. Thus, Rowe proposes a new framework of analysis, which takes into consideration the many networks of transnational exchange that not only define the subjects of studies, but also directly contribute to the process of knowledge production within the field. Unlike Fishkin, however, he points to the centrality of the circulation of people and knowledge across national borders within the debates of American Studies, while at the same time acknowledging the continuing importance of nation states as a unit of analysis and of criticism. As Rowe makes clear, at the heart of transnationalism lies a paradox that the ever increasing transnational flows of people, capital and ideas can lead to the strengthening of nation states and national boundaries. Though important in pointing out the necessary changes in the field, the transnational turn as advocated by both Fishkin and Rowe has not resulted in a change in what Donald Pease calls “the field imaginary.” The appeal for collaboration with non– U.S. American Studies scholars has resulted mainly in debates among American and European Americanists regarding the authority of scholarship about the United States, while dissenting works by and about people of color in the United States, which often 23 employ a transnational approach, continue to be excluded under the label of ethnic studies. The United States remains the main subject of study, when even Rowe’s book reexamines established works within the new framework. This practice can be dangerous in reiterating the existing canon instead of exposing works that have been obscured by earlier ideologies that established this canon. As a new methodology and intellectual framework aiming to remove the field from its exceptionalist and U.S. centric root, transnational American Studies necessitates new materials that are not conventionally included within the exclusive repertoire of the field. Within this context, Writing Exile exemplifies the transnational turn in American Studies through its focus on understudied cultural productions of populations, whose history and lived experience have been and continue to be impacted by America’s long history of political, economic, and military intervention in different parts of the world. In so doing, it makes clear how a study of the socio-historical effects of U.S. policies on people and communities outside of the United States can help scholars in the field conceptualize alternative understandings of “America” and “being American” within a global context. Like American Studies, Asian American Studies’ turn to a transnational paradigm is also an attempt to move away from the limitations of its founding premises. In his survey article, Eric Hayot identifies several paradigm changes within the field as it moves away from an identity-based social movement that defines Asian America through a homogenous history of exclusion that is often masculinist and essentialist. For this project, the works of Lisa Lowe, Aihwa Ong, and Rey Chow are especially important in 24 locating the Asian American subject within a transnational flow of labor, capital, and culture. At the same time, their works also make clear the contradiction between these transnational movements and the strengthening of national borders, which perpetuates the cultural and political exclusion of Asian Americans. Like American Studies, the transnational turn in Asian American Studies has not managed to move the field away from an effort to “claim America,” as scholars still focus primarily on the dialectic relationship between Asia and America as well as the struggle of different Asian American groups to be incorporated into the national body. Drawing on a new body of works by scholars such as Gayatri Gopinath, David Eng, and Nayan Shah, who approach Asian American Studies through the framework of queer diaspora, Writing Exile studies the multidirectional linkages among the different Asian diasporic communities, which reveal how a seemingly homogenous ethnic group like the Vietnamese have radically different ethnic experiences in different countries due to particular processes of racialization, local gender and sexual politics, and histories of colonialism and imperialism. Decentralizing the United States as a primary site of study, the project employs a comparative approach, which challenges the dominant cartography of the field and highlights the global context of Asian American experiences. Writing Exile My first chapter, titled “Without the Shadow of Homeland: Exile as a Practice of Freedom,” looks at the novels Slander and Chinatown by Vietnamese French writers Linda Lê and Thuận. Engaging with several historical moments, such as the French 25 colonization of Vietnam, the Vietnam War, and the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979, these two works expose the complex condition of formation of the Vietnamese diasporic communities in France. Through a textual analysis of marginalized subjects within the novels—the ethnic Chinese, the madman and the minority writer—the chapter also proposes a theoretical analysis of the significance of homeland within our understanding of exile and diaspora. De-linked from homeland, I argue, exile can be conceptualized as one practice of radical freedom, which enables the authors to criticize the multiple international and national forces that caused the exile of their characters. This practice of exile also allows the protagonists to challenge the regimes of racism, classism, and heteronormativity that France has engaged to deal with the arrival of its colonial subjects to the metropole. As a form of radical freedom, exile links the national and diasporic spaces within the rhetoric of marginalized subjects and illustrates the complex relationships shaping the diaspora. In my second chapter titled “A War of Memory: Gender, Sexuality and the Vietnam War in Lely Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places” I look at how certain memories about the Vietnam War, which fail to account for the lived experiences and gendered effects of war and dislocation, shape the Vietnamese American community’s collective identity. Studying Le Ly Hayslip’s memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and the author’s critical reception within the Vietnamese American community, this chapter argues that within the process of Vietnamese American community formation, feminized memories, which challenge the exploitation of memory in the national and communal imaginations, have been exiled and suppressed. 26 At the same time, focusing on the popularity of the memoir among American critics, the chapter also questions the selective consumption of certain kinds of memories, marked through the discourse of the minority woman writer. Through this analysis I expose the way that minority literature, which is exiled and suppressed within a transnational and diasporic framework, can still perform a normative function within a national context. My third chapter, “A Different Modernism: Race, Language, and Modernism in Monique Truong’s Book of Salt,” looks at Truong’s first novel as a counter-archive that allows us to reconsider an important period in American cultural history through the point of view of a queer, exiled, colonial subject. Since the publication of Lely Hayslip’s memoir, a number of college-educated, second-generation Vietnamese American writers have emerged, who struggle to challenge the way Vietnamese American literature is framed within a history of the Vietnam War. Focusing on the issue of language in the novel, I argue that Truong’s exploration of a different history shaping the Vietnamese diaspora brings together issue of race, sexuality, and aesthetics to challenge American high modernism’s claim to transnationalism. In my fourth chapter, “The Tale of Quyên: The Undocumented Vietnamese Woman in Nguyễn Văn Thọ’s novel Quyên” I return to Europe to focus on the ever increasing number of undocumented Vietnamese immigrants, whose experience add further complexity to the formation of the Vietnamese diaspora. Looking at the novel Quyên by German Vietnamese author Nguyễn Văn Thọ, I argue that cultural productions of the diasporic Vietnamese community in Germany reinforce the impossibility of representing a subject who does not exist legally and is exiled socially and culturally. 27 Rewriting the story of Kiều, the novel displaces the undocumented Vietnamese woman through a discourse of exaggerated victimization, in which her struggle can only end with the return to the homeland. Exploring the novel within a history of European racialization and ethnicization, this chapter analyzes how the homeland is evoked as a way for the diasporic community to exile the subjects who do not fit into the two dominant discourses about Vietnamese diasporic subjects in Germany. 28 Chapter 1: Without the Shadow of Homeland: Exile As a Practice of Radical Freedom in Linda Lê’s Slander and Thuận’s Chinatown. As a result of history, Vietnamese diasporic literature in France is located at the conjuncture of multiple trajectories of displacement, informed by the imperialist, colonialist, and nationalist aspirations of several nation-states. While existing scholarships about the Vietnamese Diaspora usually focus on the end of the Vietnam War as the key event leading to the formation of the Vietnamese Diaspora, France’s nearly century-long colonization of Vietnam and its post-colonial policies towards its former colony resulted in a large Vietnamese diasporic community settling down in France long before the fall of Saigon. Other historical events, such as the Sino-Vietnamese War between 1977 and 1979, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, resulted in new waves of Vietnamese emigration to France, and led to the formation of a heterogenous population whose stories elucidate the contradictions within our current understanding of diapora and exile as dependent on the notion of homeland. In this chapter I focus on two novels—Slander and Chinatown—by Vietnamese French writers Linda Lê and Thuận, respectively, to gesture at a more productive theory of exile that can help reconsider the limitations of diasporic thinking. In Slander and Chinatown, the main characters face multiple forms of marginalization that begin in the homeland and are intensified through their banishment into the diaspora. Slander is written from the perspectives of two narrators: the uncle who engaged in an incestuous relationship with his sister and, as a result, was sent to an asylum in France, where he 29 settled down after being released from the institution; and the niece, who left Vietnam with her mother’s family after the fall of Saigon and struggles as a writer in Paris. In Chinatown, the narrator who has been living in Paris for 10 years reminisces about her life in Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and Paris. Permeating this life story are memories about Thụy, the husband she lost, who was an ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. For all of them, the process of exile starts in the homeland and continues across borders in the diaspora. Focusing on multiple historical events, which are not contained within national boundaries and resulted in the continuous displacement and internal ostracism of the protagonists, my analysis of the novels points at this trajectory of un-freedom. The experiences of the protagonists, I argue, can only be adequately understood through a notion of exile that encompasses multiple moments of geographical and ideological displacement—from the nation-state, the diaspora, and even the family, which, in certain forms, functions as a disciplining tool of both the state and the diasporic communities. As such, the chapter aims to disrupt the binary between homeland and diaspora and to emphasize exile as a radical practice of freedom that marginalized subjects adopt in order to counter, to different degrees of success, this continuum of un-freedom. My understanding of radical freedom draws, on the one hand, on Wendy Brown, who warns against an understanding of freedom as merely a theoretical idea. 24 Treating 24 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power And Freedom In Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Brown argues that it is important to emphasize freedom as a contextual and historical practice, because freedom is always rooted in specific historical practices, oriented against specific institutions, so that treating freedom as an abstract concept would mask not only the domination it is designed to challenge, but also what is denied and suppressed by such freedom. She distinguishes, for example, three problematic forms of freedom that I call “capitalist freedom,” “leftist freedom” and “bourgeoisie freedom.” According to Brown the rise of “capitalist freedom” is partly the result of a conservative political culture that gripped the United States in the 1980s. Embedded within the discourse of 30 freedom as a set of abstract concepts, according to Brown, “not only prevents appreciation of their local and historical character, but preempts perception of what is denied and suppressed by them, of what kind of dominations are enacted by particular practices of freedom.” 25 On the other hand, the chapter also incorporates a Marxist perspective that even the most limited struggle for freedom produces possibilities, which can “enhance the scarce political space needed by subordinated subjects seeking to alter their conditions.” 26 In this chapter I look at exile not only as a state’s disciplining tool, but also as a practice of radical freedom, understood as a relational and contextual practice contingent on the active contestation of locally and historically defined un-freedom. As such, it can generate possibilities and potentials for subordinate subjects to further challenge the regimes of domination suppressing them. This alternative understanding of exile can take place when exilic subjects embrace this state of being as a position that one should inhabit rather than escape from, in order to criticize and struggle against regimes of un- freedom that extend from the homeland to the diaspora. For Vietnamese diasporic the free market and capitalism, this “freedom” was deployed to “justify thuggish mercenaries in Central America,” the millions spent on cold war defense, and “the destruction of unions with ‘right to work’ protection.” This “freedom” also lies at the foundation of the United States’ past and current military incursions all around the world. Within this understanding of “freedom,” which has become a popular refrain, “freedom other than free enterprise was cast as selfish, infantile, or killing” and in contrast to commitment and sacrifice. In response to the rise of “capitalist freedom,” leftists thinkers either omit “freedom” from their “political lexicon” or evoke an agenda that likens freedom with equality. Thus, in opposing freedom as free enterprise they evoke the state as the protector of the individual’s freedom from the social forces of capitalism. Lastly, and also as a result of the prominence of “capitalist freedom,” some feminist, postcolonialist and cultural theorists have come to regard freedom “as a token of bourgeois- individualist modern West,” the pursuit of which is implicitly imperialist. Consequently, “for many toiling in these domains, “freedom has been swept onto the dust-heap of anachronistic, humanistic, androcentric, subject-centered, and “western” shibboleth.” 25 Brown 6. 26 Brown 21. 31 subjects in France, exile as a practice of radical freedom necessitates the criticism of the multiple international and national forces that caused their dislocation—French colonization; U.S., Soviet, and Chinese imperial aspirations; and the nationalist dreams of both the Northern and Southern governments of Vietnam to claim the country as their own during the Vietnam War. At the same time, exile as a subject position would also allow diasporic Vietnamese to challenge the regimes of power (sexism, racism, classism, and heteronormativity) that France has engaged to deal with the arrival of its colonial subjects to the mère patrie. As a form of radical freedom, exile links the national and diasporic spaces within the rhetoric of the marginalized while highlighting the potential of these subjects to struggle against the disciplining in their homeland and in the diaspora. Métèque and the Representative of Wounds: The Authors and Their Works The biographies of Linda Lê and Thuận reflect the different historical and political forces that shaped the Vietnamese diaspora in general and the Vietnamese diasporic community in France specifically. Born in 1967, Thuận (given name Đoàn Ánh Thuận) is known within the Vietnamese literary circle primarily as the daughter-in-law of Trần Dần, a famous author of the Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm affair. 27 Thuận’s biography contains only four 27 Trần Dần was a Vietnamese poet and novelist. Born in Nam Định, Vietnam, in 1926, he joined the communist anticolonial movement against French occupation of Vietnam. In mid-1950, like many intellectuals in the North of Vietnam, he felt disillusioned with the Communist Party and joined Nhân Văn, a group of dissident writers and intellectuals in Northern Vietnam. He was an active participant in the publication of two periodicals, Nhân Văn and Giai Phẩm. In December 1956, the Communist Party closed both periodicals and arrested all participants. Trần Dần was jailed in Hỏa Lò, and his works remained banned from publication until 1988, when the Đổi Mới policy revoked the ban on Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm 32 points that mark her rugged path to becoming a writer in the diaspora. She was born in Hanoi, and, like many Vietnamese intellectuals in the North after the end of the Vietnam War, she received a college education in the Soviet Union. Thuận graduated with a degree in English pedagogy from Pyatigorsk State Linguistic University and later received her master’s degree at the University of Sorbonne, Paris, after moving there with her husband. Her fifteen years of living in Paris was interjected with brief returns to Hanoi, and a short stay in East Berlin, Germany. Thuận started writing after coming to France. She had a few short stories published under her real name Ánh Thuận. Yet, it is not until her first novel Made in Vietnam, which was published in 2003 by the Vietnamese American publishing house, Văn Mới, in California, that she found her literary voice. 28 The act of changing her pen name to Thuận, according to the author, marked her divorce from her earlier works as well as the recognition of a new vocation. Since then, Thuận has published four more novels, all of which were printed in Vietnam. Chinatown was her second novel and her first to be translated (by her sister Đoàn Cầm Thi) into French. The French edition of the book was published by Le Seuil in 2009. 29 Thuận’s novels are often read in light of her autobiography. Made in Viet Nam, her first novel featuring the life of Vietnamese people in East Berlin, is supposed to be based on the author’s short stay in Germany. It caused a minor scandal when some characters from the community threatened to sue her for misrepresenting them. Thuận writers. Trần Dần, like some of his peers, received a state prize posthumously in 2007, yet, in 2008, his name was once again in the headlines when a collection of his poems were stopped from being distributed shortly after publication. The affair caused a small uproar among Vietnamese writers as 134 of them signed a petition to request a lift of the ban. The government never gave an adequate response to the demand. 28 Thuận’s first novel, despite its English title, was written in Vietnamese. 29 The French translation keeps the novel’s original title, Chinatown, and Thuận’s name is spelled without the intonation mark, as Thuân. 33 does not deny that she draws on her real-life experiences for her novel. Chinatown’s main character, a middle-school teacher in a suburban area of Paris, came into shape during her months working as a substitute teacher in the most desolated immigrant communities on the outskirts of the City of Light. Yet, she claims none of her work as being even remotely autobiographical. Instead, as she mentions in one of her interviews, writing works to destabilize her own everyday life, to embark on an adventure into other people’s lives. 30 These people are “the little immigrant[s],” those with “dark to very dark skin” who are, in her opinion, “the ultimate victims of the widening gap between the West and the Third World.” 31 Linda Lê ’s path to France could not be more different. Born in 1963, the author spent her young childhood in Đà Lạt and moved to Saigon with her family at the height of the Vietnam War. Lê’s maternal family was Francophile. The writer’s grandfather served in the metropole army, which had earned him and his family a naturalized French citizenship. At a time when growing American involvement forced the French influence in the South of Vietnam into decline, Lê still received her education at a French school, Le Couvent des Oiseaux in Saigon. Unable to read and write in Vietnamese and English, she was stranded from the South Vietnamese society even while living there. Following the footsteps of her aunt and uncle who settled down in Paris in the 1950s, Linda Lê, her 30 Mai Sen, “Thuận: Có Quyền Con Người Thì Cũng Có Quyền Nhà Văn,” Vietnamnet 27 April 27 2009, <http://vietnamnet.vn/vanhoa/2009/04/844359>. All quotations translated from Vietnemese by author. 31 Thu Nhan, “Thuận: Tôi Rất Muốn Biết Vì Sao Mình Được Tặng Thưởng,” Vietnamnet 20 October 2006, <http://vietnamnet.vn/vanhoa/tintuc/2006/10/624508/>. All quotations translated from Vietnamese by author. 34 mother, grandmother, and three sisters sought refuge in Le Havre after the fall of Saigon. 32 A productive writer, Lê already has ten published novels and numerous essays. Slander (Calomnies in French) was her fifth published book, the second in what she considered her more mature works. Her first work to be translated into other languages, Slander brought Lê international recognition. Like Thuận’s works, Lê’s novels are often read in light of her autobiography. However, in her interviews, the author refuses to categorize her books, and specifically Slander, as autobiographical, pointing at her conscious act of leaving the country where the novel’s story originates unnamed. Instead, what she wants to emphasize is the general feeling of loss for those who are rootless– exiled. This intentional abstraction of “the Country,” however, does not stop Lê from evoking important moments in the history of Vietnam throughout the book. The history of French colonization, the Vietnam War (described in terms of a war between the occupation army and “skinny, ugly men in black”), and the exchange of power at the end of the war that led to a mass refuge by sea in leaking river-boats, are woven together to form the historical context of the novel. 33 Slander is written from the perspectives of two narrators: the first, a woman writer, who migrated to France from an unnamed country at a young age, and who tries her whole life to get away from her maternal family; the second, her uncle, who was condemned as a madman in the same country and was sent to a sanatorium outside of 32 Nancy Kelly Millner, The Saigon-Paris Connection: Marguerite Duras and Linda Le. Exile and Colonialism (Diss. Boston College, 2003), 201–203. 33 Linda Lê, Slander, trans. Esther Allen (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 45. 35 Paris after engaging in an incestuous relationship with his sister. The uncle, released from the sanatorium after fourteen years, spends the remainder of his life working at a public library. During this period, he receives a letter from the niece, who wants to find out from him the truth about her father. Her mother, in a desperate act to bring her back to the family, has revealed in their correspondences that her father is not the man whom she has always cherished even after he was left behind in the unnamed country. Rather, she is the daughter of a foreigner, the commander of the occupation army who left her pregnant mother when the war could no longer be won. Unwilling to believe what has been revealed to her, the female narrator writes to the only member of the family she trusts, the uncle who has been banished as an outsider. As the book unfolds, the uncle begrudgingly provides a family history and the niece reveals her life as a writer in a foreign land. The narrator and protagonist of Chinatown is an unnamed Vietnamese woman who works as a substitute English teacher in the suburb of Paris. Chinatown takes place within the span of two hours, when she and her son, Vĩnh, are stuck on a train forced to stop at a small station due to an unattended bag that was suspected to be part of a terrorist conspiracy. During these two hours, her son leans his head on her shoulder to sleep and other worlds unfold: the world of the past where she met and lost her husband, Thụy, the father of her son; the world of her son’s fantasy about parachuting into Baghdad with three passports—Vietnamese, French and Chinese—to establish a family business in the new Chinatowns; and the world of an unfinished novel titled I Am Yellow, in which the narrator tries to work out the reason why people have to leave even when they are not sure where they want to go. 36 Through these snippets of memory and fantasy, readers learn about the life of the narrator. Born in Yên Khê, she grew up in Hanoi, where she lived with her parents. During a school trip in high school, she met Thụy, an ethnic Chinese teenager who faced ostracism and alienation as the result of the mounting anti-Chinese sentiment that accompanied the Sino-Vietnamese War. Her parents, who are strongly anti-Chinese, did not approve of their friendship. A model student, the narrator went to the Soviet Union for study after finishing high school to fulfill her parents’ wish that she have “a bright future.” She stopped corresponding with Thụy in her third year of study after receiving a letter from her mother stating that his family had left Vietnam. Upon returning home, the narrator found out that the letter was another attempt of her parents to break up their relationship. She met Thụy again, and they got married a few months later. They lived together for one year before Thụy, who was unable to find a job after he graduated from college, decided to leave Hanoi and move to Chợ Lớn, Saigon, leaving behind the narrator and their one-week-old son. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Vietnam and France renewed their diplomatic relationship. The narrator received a scholarship to finish her Master of Arts in Paris. Yet, she has not completed her degree and spends her day working as a substitute teacher in the suburbs of Paris to support herself and her son. Readers learn that she has been living in Paris’s second Chinatown, Bellevue, for ten years, yet has never stopped thinking about Thụy. The novel ends as it started: she remains on the train, stuck at an obscure suburban station. Formally, both Slander and Chinatown are fragmented, defying the rule of linear narrative and offering contradictory points of view from unreliable narrators. Slander’s 37 chapters seem to be pieced together at random, without chronological or spatial order. The narrators’ memories of their lives in the Country commingle with their struggles in the present day to form a narrative arc, which is constantly intersected with digressions and unanswered questions. Going further beyond the linear narrative, Chinatown is narrated as of a stream of consciousness that wavers between different moments in time and space, without division into chapters, sections, or paragraphs. It is a narrative that refuses to be read without the reader getting lost and feeling displaced as pieces of information are forced together to create a simultaneity of events that does not encourage understanding. The multiple repetitions and random sequences narrating dreams do not provide a pleasurable reading. Instead, they remind the reader of a dull knife, “jerking on the skin painfully, yet without a cathartic final pain.” 34 In the case of Chinatown, the fragmented form of the novel is often described in terms of an emerging Vietnamese postmodern literature. Though demonstrating a similar style, Linda Lê’s works are celebrated as an example of French contemporary literature. Yet, in both form and content, Lê and Thuận’s writings also reflect the difficulty of writing in the diaspora. Within the context of the diaspora authors must write from and within different historical contexts, for different audiences, with certain expectations about the authors and their work. These struggles are evident in both Slander and Chinatown, in which the narrators are writers navigating, unsuccessfully, between the expectations of mainstream society for minority writers and their own ideas about what literature is and should be. In both cases, the choices they make define their success as 34 Duong Tuong, in the blurb for the 2005 edition of Chinatown. Translated from Vietnamese by author. 38 writers; the niece in Slander abandons her writing and leaves, while the narrator of Chinatown constantly revises a story that she refuses to finish. While the narrative remains unfinished and unpublished, she continues to be denied as a writer. The authors themselves also voice these struggles. According to Esther Allen, the translator of Slander’s English version, Lê consciously leaves out the name of the countries to avoid being categorized as a minority writer, whose concerns apply only to the specific case of Vietnam. Yet, the ongoing debate surrounding whether her text should be counted among French modern texts or Francophone texts continues to make clear that the expectation of the public does not necessarily correspond to the writer’s self-definition. Similarly, Thuận, in an interview, claims that, “a position of the outside is most suitable for me.” Yet, despite Thuận’s public declarations of her desire to remain an outsider of national and diasporic literature, in 2006, she received an award from the National Writer’s Association of Vietnam for her third novel Paris 11/8 (Paris October 8th). The award is meant to celebrate outstanding works in the contemporary Vietnamese literary scene. Thuận did not show up to accept the award. In an interview given shortly after the news, she expressed her desire to know why she was given the prize. She did not issue any statement, however, when Chinatown was translated into French and published by a major French publisher in 2009. In the case of both authors, the choices they make differ greatly from the choices of their writer-protagonists in the novels. Though conveying multiple social critiques through both the form and the content of their works, Lê and Thuận have gained a certain degree of popularity in France, Vietnam, and internationally. The discrepancy between 39 the choices of the authors and narrators, and the consequences thereof, have great significance for our discussion of exile as a strategy of radical freedom that I will return to at the end of this chapter. The Ghost of Exile: Incest and Madness in Linda Lê’s Slander At the heart of Slander is the story of a strange love between the uncle and his sister. For this sin, the family pronounces him insane and sends him away. For this love the sister hangs herself in a room full of rotten flowers, which following her death never ceases to engulf the house and its inhabitants in a haunting smell of death, insanity and ghostly desires. “The uncle was his sister’s only love,” Lê writes, and she was his. They shut themselves up in a little room, reciting poems to each other, laughing, whispering. “In the little room, they let their monstrous love grow, a love that led no where, that didn’t allow them to dream of happiness. Would their children be beautiful? Would the soup be warm in the evening in their home? There would be no home, never. It was a useless investment, a sterile love.” 35 Once they become aware of the relationship the rest of the family members live in a constant state of alert. They try different ways to cure the uncle from his “unnatural” love. They lock the door to the sister’s room to keep her from being close to him, but he spends his days and nights in front of the door. They send him to hypnotherapy, to a sanatorium on the countryside, yet every time he comes back he only thinks about the new poems he has learned just to recite to her. Finally, the family sends 35 Lê 78. 40 him across the ocean, to another sanatorium from which he can never come back. For weeks, the sister sits on her bed waiting for him, with a piece of garment he left with her, in which she sleeps at night. As the days pass, she slowly rips the piece of garment into strips, braids them together into a long cord that she ties to the window bars. One night, she slips outside, gathers flowers from the garden and scatters them on the floor. “Days went by before the family found the decomposing body.” 36 As the primary reason for the uncle’s exile, both within and across the borders of the Country, this story of incest and insanity forms the center around which the book unfolds. In this chapter I am less interested in the psychoanalytic reading of incest as integral to familial formation in the form of the Oedipus complex. Rather, I draw on Jacqui Alexander to provide an analysis of incest as a non-normative and non- reproductive sexuality that falls under the discipline and control of the family and the state. Such analysis, I argue, can expose the socio-historical condition that forms the context of the novel. Referring to the politics of sexuality in postcolonial Trinidad, Tobago, and the Bahamas, Jacqui Alexander claims, “not anybody can be a citizen anymore, for some bodies have been marked by the state as non-procreative, in pursuit of sex only for pleasure, a sex that is non-productive of babies and of no economic gain.” 37 The postcolonial state is in a moment of crisis, as major international political and economic incursions result in the erosion of state authority. To compensate for that corrosion of authority, the state evokes the heterosexual nuclear family by “collapsing 36 Lê 77. 37 Jacqui Alexander, “Not just (Any)Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” Feminist Review 48 (1994), 6. 41 identities into sexual bodies,” producing the “other” in the form of non-heteronormative sexuality and then criminalizing it in order to naturalize the heterosexual family, which it sees as “the archetypal source of state legitimation.” 38 In the novel, the family declares the love between the uncle and his sister a threat that must be contained through exile and death because it implies a disinterest in procreation and a disregard for social norms. Engaging in a non-procreative and non- productive sexuality, the lovers are punished by the family in collaboration with other state apparatuses such as the medical institution (which continues the containment of the uncle behind the walls of the asylum) and the immigration office (which enables his dislocation across borders). If, as Alexander argues, “criminalization functions as a technology of control, and much like other technologies of control becomes an important site for the production and reproduction of state power,” 39 the criminalization of the uncle and his sister implies a larger threat, not only to the family, but also to the Southern Vietnamese state, which, at the time the story was taking place, was experiencing a moment of profound internal crisis. According to Patricia Pelley, “the idea of post-colonial Vietnam is essential but also problematic.” 40 The official marker of the post-colonial era of Vietnam, the August Revolution, was contested by different factions of Vietnamese, all over the country. Yet, Pelley argues, these internal disputes were not the reason why the postcolonial moment was postponed. Rather, the intervention of foreign powers—the Kuomintang (Chinese 38 Alexander 9. 39 Alexander 6. 40 Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Duke University Press, 2002). 42 National Party), Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the People’s Republic of China—“vitiated what the revolutionaries had so triumphantly proclaimed.” 41 By the time the anti-French resistance war began in 1946, the contours of the two Vietnams already started taking shape, each supported by an international bloc: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam backed by the Soviet Union and the Republic of China, and the Associated State of Vietnam (the forerunner of the Republic of Vietnam) supported by the Allies. By 1954 there were already two Vietnamese states, which received regular political, economic and military support from a range of foreign powers, all of whom saw or would come to see Vietnam as the battle ground for their own political and military sphere of influence. Thus, from the beginning, both the Northern and Southern Vietnamese states suffered a crisis of authority that deteriorated even further with the Vietnam War, which marks the time when the love story of the uncle and his sister took place. While Thuận’s novel goes in depth about the Northern Vietnamese state’s way to deal with the crisis, in Slander we encounter a Southern Vietnamese state deeply engaged in a civil war. Throughout the war, the Southern Vietnamese state both relied on and tried to maintain autonomy from the ever-increasing influence of the United States and its allies. At the same time, the state also had to battle its internal dissidents, those who speak out against the war and its dependence on foreign powers. Within this context, the criminalization and pathologization of the incestuous relationship between the uncle and his sister serve to reinforce a certain social norm, the 41 Pelley 2. 43 heteronormative family with children, which compensates for the erosion of state authority in other realms. Yet, this social norm is not enforced consistently. In the novel, the love between the uncle and the sister is not the only kind of sexuality that falls outside the definition of the heterosexual family. The niece’s mother, according to the uncle, engages in promiscuous relationships with officers of the occupation army. “When her husband was around, she played the role of an irritatingly conformist bourgeois housewife, but in a hotel room with her lover, she was a courtesan with a very healthy appetite for bed.” 42 Although the sexuality she engages in outside of the house is non- procreative, the mother is not punished in the novel. Considering that the emotional and sexual relationships between Vietnamese women and foreign men during the war carry a negative connotation in Vietnamese society, the lack of punishment for the mother for engaging in such a relationship is better understood within an allegory of the family in the book. 43 As the uncle explains, “Faced with the questions of freedom or power? My relatives have always chosen power; they have always chosen to be the courtiers…my relatives have always been the spokesmen of oppressors, the servants of butchers.” 44 Within the context of postcolonial Vietnam, the family functions as an allegory of the urban colonial elite, whose members, Fanon argues, are only concerned with their own power, their own individual political and economic success. 45 Instead of seeking to 42 Lê 20. 43 I will go into more details about the negative social perceptions of Vietnamese women engaging in a relationship with foreign men during the war, and the devastating consequences such relationships carry for the women, in my second chapter, in which I discuss Lely Hayslip’s memoir. 44 Lê 47. 45 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 22. 44 overthrow the colonial system, they seek within the system the chance to empower and enrich themselves, negotiating and collaborating where necessary with the colonial power. In the novel, the family allies itself with the power at hand, learning new languages where necessary, cutting ties with those who can no longer give them protection and benefits. Seeking only the company of the powerful, they see all those who were killed in the war as conspirators, blaming the victims for their own misery to explain away the violence caused by those in power during the war and their own role in the massacres of war. The mother’s sexual relationships with foreign officers fall in line with the family’s intentions. Not only do these relationships bring material benefits, the gifts and fruit baskets, but her sexuality also serves to strengthen the family’s ties to those in power. The mother is the family’s gift to the occupation army, in exchange for “a few crumbs of power in return.” 46 The relationship between the uncle and his sister, on the other hand, stands at odds with the desire of the family and the state to pursue power. “In their determination to safeguard themselves, to calculate the interest on their emotional investments…[they] judged the love of the uncle for his sister indecent, indecent because there was no plan, no falsehood underneath it.” 47 Their love does not involve a calculation for a better future in the sense of more power, more money, or even a reproduction of themselves in the form of children. Their love does not bring the family any material or political benefit; therefore, it is useless. More importantly, however, within the context of the civil war the love between the brother and sister functions allegorically as a threat. To the family, such 46 Lê 47. 47 Lê 73. 45 a relationship makes clear the connection between the family and the victims they label conspirators in order to deny their role in the atrocities of the war. To the state, it highlights the thin ground on which the conflict was based, a reminder that the soldiers who are being turned against each other might see that they did not have to fight each other. A political incest among the Vietnamese people is a threat for all the regimes of power, national and international, which rely on the conflict to carve out their own spheres of influence. Consequently, in order to safeguard themselves from this love, the family with the help of other state apparatuses brands the couple as insane, a pathologizing practice that discredits the legitimacy of their actions. The punishment for a non-normative sexual practice is hidden within the discourse of madness, with different consequences for each participant in the relationship. “The world wanted to save the uncle but there was no question of saving the sister.” 48 While the sister was left to die in her room, the family sent the uncle away for therapy at a sanatorium in the countryside, trying to cure him of his unnatural feelings for his sister. When all had failed, the family members sent him across the ocean, to another sanatorium to forever isolate him, not from her, but from themselves. His exile is as much a way for the family members to punish him, as it is a way to differentiate themselves from his “unproductive” way of life. The figure of the madman appears throughout Slander, forming a canvas on which the story is told. Not only is the uncle, the male narrator, introduced as a madman, who is never again considered normal even after his release from the sanatorium, but madness 48 Lê 75. 46 has plagued the family for generations. This family problem started with an ancestor who was proclaimed insane. To prevent him from being seen, the family kept him inside, first behind barricaded windows, then inside a cage. “To silence the rumors about the mental state of the master of the house, the family declared that the ancestor was dying, then dead. For years the family sent flowers to the empty tomb and a gardener was sent to maintain it”; ever since, the female narrator relates, “everyone in the family experiences brief eclipses of consciousness. Every generation sacrifices one of its own so that the others can live their lives sheltered from the threat of madness. Every generation designates the one who will be the acknowledged madman.” 49 The uncle, having been locked up in sanatoriums both in the home country and in France for half of his life, is the chosen victim of his generation. According to Foucault, the massive confinement of the mad, in the seventeenth century, “marked a decisive event: the moment when madness was perceived on the social horizon of poverty, of incapacity to work, of inability to integrate with the group.” 50 As one of the responses to “an economic crisis that affected the entire Western world: reduction of wages, unemployment, scarcity of coins,” the containment of the mad transformed both the experience and understanding of madness as it linked poverty and labor within an ethical discourse. While poverty was explained as resulting from a lack of morals and the discipline to work, labor was elevated as the means to solve social unrest, which was understood as a consequence of idleness and sloth. The mad were included 49 Lê 15. 50 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 2001), 64. 47 within this proscription of idleness, and as such they were socially useless, in need of confinement to bring them back into the ethical pact of society. Their containment and potential “healing” became an affair of the state, so that the sanatorium held “the power of authority, of direction, of administration, of commerce, of police, of jurisdiction, of correction and punishment.” 51 If we follow Foucault’s argument that the containment of the mad has become, since the seventeenth century, a punishment for those deemed unproductive for society, then the family’s alienation, imprisonment, and exile of its mad members must be understood within a larger context of state disciplines. In the novel, the family functions as the first state apparatus that designates certain subjects as socially unproductive, and consequently in need of containment. A cage or a locked room inside the family house is the first step that takes the madman closer to the sanatorium in a different part of the country, in which other state apparatuses will replace his family members to punish him for refusing to contribute to the ideological and physical reproduction of the heteronormative family. The story of the ancestor, however, also makes clear that the uncle is contained because he is seen as a permanent reminder of the fragility of the social norms that divide the mad from the sane. As the uncle explains, “what they call my sickness is only a sudden change of character: one day I decided to obey my feelings and not follow the rules of conduct they dictated to me any longer.” 52 Pathologizing and criminalizing the individual to reproduce their own power, the family and the state face a constant threat. At any moment another person might refuse to follow the role prescribed 51 Foucault 59. 52 Lê 108–109. 48 for him or her within the family or society. Instead of addressing the issue of why the existing norms are resisted, the family and the state blame the individual, the same way that the European states in the seventeenth century blamed the poor for their own poverty. Thus, the mad person, against whom normality is defined, must be contained and, if necessary, permanently exiled as a measure of social precaution. The exile of the uncle across the border, to a sanatorium in Corrèze is the final act of punishment that serves to eliminate him as a threat for the family and the Country. As the uncle admits, “by sending me to that asylum, they were hoping to annihilate me. Even if I wasn’t destroyed, they knew they had rid themselves of me. Being in that asylum in Corrèze was the same thing as being dead and buried.” 53 Unable to bring back him back to their way, the family, with the help of other state apparatuses, locks him up in a foreign country among people who speak a language he does not understand, to ensure that he is permanently cut off from them. Out of sight, he is forgotten as if he never existed and his challenge of the rules never took place. Erasing his memory, they make sure that his actions will not become an example for others to follow. His exile is intensified and takes on additional meanings in France. He is not only isolated physically and socially by the cells and the walls of the sanatorium, but also by a language barrier and a history of colonialism that mark him as a subject to be distrusted and in need of discipline. The containment of the uncle in an asylum in Corrèze is not only a measure of punishment and correction for a madman, but also a means to discipline a colonial subject, whose appearance forces France to come face to face with 53 Lê 65. 49 its colonial past. 54 As a colonial subject, the uncle functions as a different kind of threat in France, a threat that can only be neutralized if he is willing to accept his place in the new society–a place among the poor, the foreigners who provide a source of cheap labor. After years in the asylum, the uncle is released, upon the recommendation of a doctor who also asks the asylum director to find the uncle a place to live and a job that will leave him time to read. His release was approved once he has managed to learn the French language with the help of said doctor, shown his eagerness to learn about culture through pieces of books given to him, and proved himself useful as a laborer in the asylum. As the uncle explains, “I had to perform a task, give my evidence of my aptitude for sanity. I reigned over the antechamber of the washhouse.” 55 Having proved that he can be socially useful again through his manual labor in the washhouse, the uncle is sorted out by the authority, just like a garment that is only slightly soiled, and declared “able to be made used again.” 56 Yet, it is not just his capacity for manual labor that determines the uncle’s categorization as mad or sane, and his location inside or outside of the asylum. After the uncle leaves the asylum, the director finds him a job in a public library, where “the librarian holds [him] up as an example. The madman, the loathsome, swarthy foreigner, the métèque who set himself up to reading books. Culture saves…” 57 54 For a further discussion, see, for example, Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. (New York: Grove Press, 2008). 55 Lê 26. 56 Lê 26. 57 Lê 2. 50 Culture and language, according to postcolonial theorists, are important aspects of the colonization project. 58 The colonizer’s culture and language forcefully replace native language and culture as part of the process to civilize the colonized population, and save them from themselves as well as from their own inferior and backward culture. This process helped justify and maintain European colonization in other parts of the world. Yet, it has controversial results when the colonized subjects arrive in the mère patrie during and after the colonization process. On the one hand, as a postcolonial subject the uncle can only be useful for French society if he acknowledges that French language and culture saved him from his own madness and foreignness, the same way that French culture and language saved his Country from its own despotism under French colonization. On the other hand, even while inside the asylum, his attempts to learn the language were met with distrust from some attendants, who “watched [him] with hatred and suspicion.” 59 As a madman, his attempt to communicate and his effort to be understood are dangerous because they signal his struggle to blur the boundary between the mad and the sane, to erase the main difference between himself and those with the power to watch and punish him. As a colonial subject, his attempt to learn the language raises even more suspicion because the result could blur the boundary between the colonizer and the colonized, the native and the foreigner. In the end, the uncle is allowed to return to the society only as a marked subject. The odor of insanity permeates his skin like the smell of dirty laundry, so that 58 For further discussion on the role of culture in colonization, refer to Ngugi wa’Thiongo, Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey Ltd, 1981) and Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. (New York: Grove Press, 2008). 59 Lê 68. 51 even after leaving the sanatorium he continues to be seen as a madman. Even after having learned the language and the culture, he is still considered a “swarthy foreigner,” “a métèque,” who cannot be trusted with the key, who must constantly be watched to make sure he does not relapse into his mad and foreign ways. He manages “to leave the country of madmen without entering the land of normal people.” 60 Because he shows that he is willing to labor, the uncle is allowed to occupy a space at the bottom of society, together with the other poor and dark-skinned inhabitants of the Pommeraie Hotel, but he is not allowed to leave it. 61 In the diaspora, even after being released from the asylum, he is exiled from both the homeland and the host country. In the story of the uncle, madness is articulated through exile; both serve as means to discipline those who are deemed unproductive and therefore in need of disciplining. For the sister, however, the punishment is even more severe. While incest in the case of the man is explained through madness, a disease, which must be contained, yet which can be cured, in the case of the woman it becomes a mark of death. In her influential essay, Gayle Rubin highlights a sex/gender system, which conditions the oppression of women throughout history. 62 This sex/gender system is built upon the conception of the woman as a gift between men, who are seen as exchange partners. Marriage thus serves as a way for men to form alliances through the trading of the woman’s body. Rubin’s analysis is crucial to understand the family’s differential treatment of the uncle and his sister. In the 60 Lê 71. 61 The Pommeraie hotel is the name of the place where the uncle lives after being released from the asylum. It is a place for the poor, the “dark-skinned” of society, where 3 families and 2 bachelors share one sink and a bathroom. 62 Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Woman,” Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2d. ed., ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 770–794. 52 novel, the family encourages the promiscuous relationships of the mother because they help reaffirm and strengthen the family’s relationship to the power at hand. She acts her role as a gift that enables an alliance of power to be formed. In contrast, the sister’s relationship with the uncle defies her gender role as a gift. As such, she must be condemned. The disposability of the sister in the novel reaffirms the gender hierarchy of modern society, in which man as the subject is given a second chance to be rescued and the woman is not. Yet, reading the story of the uncle and sister solely in terms of oppression and victimization at the hand of state violence oversimplifies both their personal experiences and exilic subjectivities. From the spaces to which they are exiled—a sanatorium, a foreign country, and the realm of death—the outcasts continue to disrupt the presumed order, forcing it to come up with ever-newer ways to contain them when their absence speaks as loudly as their presence in the hollowness of oblivion. The uncle’s punishment is not enough to restrain him. On the contrary, he continues to criticize the regimes of power that imposed exile on him. “The world demanded that he let himself live but the uncle refused to let himself live, he continued to go to the madhouse, his little suitcase in hand.” 63 If living means conforming to the norms and denying his own desires and feelings, then the uncle prefers a way of not living, accepting his status as a madman and letting himself be alienated. He opts for a state of “social death,” a sane man in a sanatorium in a foreign land. 64 His alienation 63 Lê 74. 64 In his work Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative History, Orlando Patterson coined the term social death in relation to slavery as a condition of being in which the slave is alienated from the society, both in legal terms and through processes such as natal alienation, which breaks the social bonds between the slave 53 takes place at different scales; his exile has many names. Whether within his family, among his fellow madmen, or in the new society, he remains an outcast. Yet, in every situation, he identifies as an outsider and refuses to conform to what is asked of him as a member of the family and society, both the one from which he was displaced, and the one which refuses to receive him. One day, after he sends the niece the handbook in which he has recorded the story of his life, the uncle sneaks back into the library after everyone has left. He pulls books from the shelves and arranges them in a half circle. He lights a cigarette and forgets to put it out. “[His] body will be one with the books.” The uncle’s decision to send the niece the handbook is his final act of defiance against the family and his old country. Having passed on the story, his ashes do not remain silent the way the family had planned. Instead, beyond his death, he continues to speak through the handbook, denouncing how the state and the family criminalize and exile those who speak out against them to strengthen their own power. Yet, the uncle’s choice to stage his suicide in the library is also a challenge against the French state and the colonial mentality of French society. In the case of the uncle, culture did not save, because the colonized subject who arrives in France can only become a métèque, “a dirty foreigner who imitates.” Burning books and annihilating the public library, which the director of the asylum and the librarian see as the means that restored his sanity, he denounces the way French society continues to impose its power on its former colonial subjects. The madman refuses to “let himself live,” choosing instead to remain an and other people in the society. The term is also used by sociologists including Zymunt Baumann to talk about instances of social segregation that results in one group of people not being recognized in legal and social terms by the mainstream society. Orlando Patterson. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) and Zygmunt Bauman. Mortality, immortality and other life strategies (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992). 54 outsider, who takes down the institution of culture with his own death in his struggle for freedom. In a similar way, the death of the sister can be seen as a practice of radical freedom. “After the uncle’s departure, the hallway that led to the backroom resounded for a whole night with a monotonous voice, a solitary voice that sometimes hummed, sometimes, recited inaudible texts. Then the voice was silent. A smell of rotten flowers filled the corridor, permeated the wall.” 65 While the uncle remains alive within the confinement of insanity, his sister opts to commit suicide, doing exactly what the family has intended for her. “On her knees, she awaited the sentence.” 66 However, unlike them, she is not afraid to die, walking into it fully aware from the moment she rips the garment to pieces and braids it into a rope, to the night she goes to the garden and gathers flowers to scatter on the floor where she will take her own life. If the death sentence is meant to scare her, and others, from pursuing the wrong kind of love, it fails as a measure of punishment, because she never stops loving. If death itself is seen as a way to officially banish her from the family, make her disappear since she has become disposable, it also fails because she comes back, haunting them with an eternal memory that cannot be forcefully removed because it permeates the structure of their life. It is important to talk about the ghost of the sister, the solitary voice reading inaudible text and the scent of rotten flowers, not simply as a revenge of an innocent soul, the sign of her victimhood, but also as an alternative way to think about freedom and resistance against the social norms imposed by the state and the family as its disciplining 65 Lê 85. 66 Lê 73. 55 apparatus. As Avery Gordon reminds us, “even those who live in the most dire circumstances possess a complex and oftentimes contradictory humanity and subjectivity that is never adequately glimpsed by viewing them as victims or on the other hand, as a superhuman agent.” 67 This understanding requires us to take on ghostly matters and instances of haunting, in which “the ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.” 68 As a punishment for those who do not follow the rules, the death sentence in the sister’s case opens up a different space in which she can continue to disrupt the system that condemns her. The sister’s ghost, like the uncle, inhabits a space of exile, which carries possibilities. The woman who has been banished through death is nevertheless a seething presence, reminding the family of their failure to contain the complexity of life and death, of the many ways that desires and sexuality can take shape. She escapes from their grip and returns free, embodying a kind of freedom that the family cannot understand, because it cannot be given as a reward for following rules. Rather, it involves constantly questioning those rules that led to her un-freedom, rules about how to love and who to love, how to live and how to die. Her ghost proves them wrong, because her death is not a “small misfortune […] that would make it possible to control the damage that has been done, to erase the uncle’s madness.” 69 Instead, the ghost makes erasure impossible by imprinting herself on all their senses—the empty corridor resounding with untraceable 67 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4. 68 Gordon, 8. 69 Lê 85. 56 voices and permeated with a never receding scent. She makes them constantly question their eyes, which cannot perceive what their ears and noses sense. If seeing means believing, then her ghost makes them question their beliefs, question the rationality that underlies their system of order. The story of the sister also points metaphorically toward the potential for the exilic subject. Alienated and isolated physically, she is an internal exilee, who exists on the margins of society, without ever crossing the borders. These people live and die in the ghostly spaces of society, seemingly invisible, because their existence is denied and their personhood ignored. Yet, without them, as with the other alienated and criminalized subjects like the mad, the state cannot sustain itself, since it needs this “Other” to reproduce its power. Like the inaudible voices and the imperceptible smell, the ghosts of the nation-state leave traces, hidden memories and unrecognized subjectivities. The absence of those memories and subjectivities in official narratives exposes the contradictions that underlie the current system. Their potential lies in their refusal to participate in the logic of productivity that both the family and the state rely on. In imagining and living a different kind of familial relationship, which is not aimed at reproducing the family and the state ideologically and physically, they disrupt the narrative that naturalizes the state and its monopoly of violence as the only way to imagine freedom. 57 Living without Quê: The Ethnic Minority and Miscegenation in Chinatown While the history of French colonialism in Vietnam and the Vietnam War form the historical context of Slander, Chinatown highlights two different historical moments, which also resulted in a large number of Vietnamese émigrés settling in France and other countries: the Sino-Vietnamese War, which took place between 1977 and 1979, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Sino-Vietnamese armed conflict is an important episode in the centuries-long and complicated relationship between Vietnam and China. As David Marr points out, this is a relationship between a small country and its big neighbor, a condition of permanent inequality, marked by “a number of subtle nuances and creative tensions […]. There has been love and hate, dependence and independence, inferiority and pride.” 70 Indeed, the history of Vietnam is measured by its various attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to thwart Chinese invasions. Its culture is often characterized through its difference from the overwhelming presence of the next-door neighbor. Yet, it cannot be denied that, throughout history, Vietnam’s political and cultural identity has been greatly influenced by changes in China. Throughout the different periods of peace and invasion, collaboration and tension, the way ethnic Chinese are treated by the Vietnamese state has always been a sensitive issue, reflecting the ups and downs in the relationship between the two countries. 70 David Marr. “Sino-Vietnamese Relations.” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 6 (1981): 48. 58 In 1990, it was estimated that ethnic Chinese amounted to merely 1.5 percent of Vietnam’s population. This low number, in light of a long history of Chinese immigration to Vietnam, says much about the conscious effort of the Vietnamese state to forcefully assimilate or discipline ethnic Chinese with the intention of cutting their ties to native China. Under the Lê dynasty (1428–1592), after Vietnam was able to thwart the rule of the Ming dynasty, ethnic Chinese were segregated and heavily taxed if they refused to conform to Vietnamese traditions and customs. 71 Under the Nguyen dynasty, ethnic Chinese, if they wanted to have political rights, were forbidden to go back to China and were forced to wear Vietnamese clothing. They were also not allowed to join the Vietnamese army, even though elite ethnic Chinese dominated most of the major trading centers of Vietnam, including Hội An, Phố Hiến, and the famous Chợ Lớn; and some elite ethnic Chinese even managed to become high-ranking mandarins. 72 This exclusion from the army served primarily as a precaution in case of an armed conflict with China. Because of Vietnam’s long history of tension with China, ethnic Chinese, regardless of where they were born, however long they have lived in Vietnam, or whether they have Vietnamese citizenship, are always perceived by both the Vietnamese state and Vietnamese society as Chinese people, and therefore as foreigners. This sentiment was further intensified under French colonization, when as part of the divide and rule policy, French officials separated ethnic Chinese who identified themselves as overseas Chinese [Hoaqiao] and granted them the privilege of not paying 71 Tran Khanh, “Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam and Their Identity,” in Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians, ed. Leo Suryadinata (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 271. 72 Tran Khanh 272. 59 taxes. Elite ethnic Chinese were often employed as middlemen to collect taxes and facilitate trade between the native Vietnamese and the colonial elites. Several treaties between France and China also led to Chinese domination in foreign trade and industrial production. This economic hierarchy, imposed and enforced by the French colonial government in Indochina, isolates the ethnic Chinese from the majority of the colonized Vietnamese and fueled Vietnamese discrimination against them. 73 Thus, the discrimination of ethnic Chinese in Việt Nam in different time periods also entails an economic dimension, an attempt by the Vietnamese state to curb the economic dominance of elite ethnic Chinese. The persecution of ethnic Chinese in the period leading up to and during the Sino- Vietnamese War, consequently, has a dual economic and political character. Although the military deployment of the war lasted only three weeks, between February 17 and March 6, 1979, the conflict that boiled up to the actual battles started soon after the end of the Vietnam War and deteriorated with the fall out between China and the Soviet Union. Vietnam, not the least because of the historical distrust of China, took the side of the Soviet Union. The conflict between Vietnam and Cambodia, in which Vietnam accuses China of supporting the Pol Pot regime further exacerbated the already strained relationship. 74 The political tension between Việt Nam and China accompanied a countrywide campaign against ethnic Chinese. As part of an effort to transform the Vietnamese economy in line with a socialist model, all private trade in the country was 73 Tran Khanh 274. 74 For a more detailed discussion of the causes of the war see Bruce Burton “Contending Explanations of the 1979 Sino Vietnamese War,” Robert O'Neill Peking-Hanoi Relations in 1970 and Donald Zagoria Vietnam Triangle: Moscow, Peking, Hanoi. 60 banned and existing businesses were nationalized. These policies affected the ethnic Chinese disproportionately because of their domination in trading. In March 1978, the police with the aid of volunteers and political cadres raided Chợ Lớn, confiscating goods from thousands of ethnic Chinese retailers, and imposed a forced relocation of many people to the new economic zones. Two months later, the currency conversion attempted to wipe out the remaining wealth of the ethnic Chinese community by allowing each family only a modest quota for conversion. Any excess amount in bank accounts and foreign currency were to be handed over to the state. 75 On the one hand, these policies aim to eliminate all private businesses, which formed the residue of the market economy in the South of Vietnam and impose a radical redistribution of wealth. On the other hand, however, they also helped bring much-needed funds to the state of Vietnam struggling to recover from the war, which had ended only three years earlier. 76 The campaign caused a large number of ethnic Chinese to reject Vietnamese nationality and leave for China or other Southeast Asian countries, following the previous exodus in 1954, when Vietnam was divided in two, and in 1975, after the fall of Saigon. Their displacement, in a way, was encouraged and facilitated by the Vietnamese government, whose suspicion of the ethnic Chinese’s lack of loyalty to Vietnam was further confirmed with the mass departure and rejection of Vietnamese nationality. At the same time, the government also made a profit from this exodus by imposing a fee on 75 Ramses Amer, “Vietnam's Policies and the Ethnic Chinese since 1975,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 11.1 (1996): 80. See also, Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War after the War: A History of Indochina since the Fall of Saigon. (Free Publisher, 1988), and Grant Evans and Kelwin Rowley, Red Brotherhood at War: Indochina since the Fall of Saigon (Verso Books: 1989). 76 Amer 86. 61 those seeking to leave. 77 Those who lacked the resources to pay their way out remained to face continued discrimination and ostracism, including forced retirement from work, reduction of food rations, and exclusion from any field of study considered essential to national security. 78 As an ethnic Chinese living in Northern Vietnam, Thụy’s persecution takes a special form in Chinatown. Thuận introduces him as follows: The whole school calls Thụy “the Chinese.” The lackey of Beijing. […] The headmaster of the school was invited to come see the local police. Student Âu Phương Thụy needs to be watched closely. [...] The next day the whole school talks about Thụy’s family being watched. Thụy’s family receives secret missions from Beijing. No body in the class wants to be friend with Thụy. No teacher calls him to the blackboard. […] They pretend not to know who he was. In the classroom, they pretend he isn’t there. 79 A member of an ethnic minority in times of war, Thụy is forced into a state of internal exile, which is predicated upon both hyper-visibility and invisibility. On the one hand, everyone is supposed to watch him closely, to know that he is a “lackey of” and “receives secret missions from Beijing.” His mere presence alarms everyone, because his every move is assumed to carry many secrets. Yet, on the other hand, he does not exist. As a person he has no place in the society, as a student he is not recognized in the classroom, as a friend he does not register among his peers. Âu Phương Thụy, to the people around him, only signifies danger; therefore, they turn away, and pretend he isn’t there. Thụy’s exile and surveillance reflect the historical distrust toward ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. In the eyes of the people surrounding him, he exists only as a stereotype of 77 Amer 86. See also Charles Benoit, “Vietnam’s ‘Boat People’” in The Third Indochina Conflict, ed. David W.P. Ellio. Westview Press, 1981. 78 Amer 82. 79 Thuận, Chinatown (Da Nang Publisher, 2005), 5–6. All quotaions translated from Vietnamese by author. 62 “the Chinese,” the enemy at hand during the war, but also the historical figure against which Vietnamese identity is often identified. According to Trần Khánh, the nation-state in the Vietnamese understanding is synonymous with homeland/motherland and has developed as a result of Vietnamese struggle against Chinese colonization. 80 Thus, a Vietnamese identity is contingent on the will to fight against, and the will to protect the Vietnamese country from foreign intrusions, especially from China. This understanding of Vietnamese identity as the opposition of Chinese influence, it is necessary to note, is a reflection of a selective history. As scholars like David Marr points out, at different points in history the nation-state Vietnam relies on the economic and political support of China, while the cultural mutual influences between the two countries cannot be denied. Nevertheless, such selective memory has material consequence for the ethnic Chinese population in Vietnam, especially during times of tension. Consequently, when Thụy’s neighbors and classmates call him “the Chinese,” the word carries with it the resentment and distrust that have built up through centuries of contentious relationship between the two countries. These negative sentiments have led the figure of the ethnic Chinese to stand in as a reminder of the continuous danger of Chinese domination in the Vietnamese national imagination. Yet, the surveillance of Thụy during his school years as well as his inability to find a job after his graduation, are also enabled by the Vietnamese state. The state’s distrust of the foreigners led to the segregation of ethnic Chinese under the Lê dynasty, and the same distrust, intensified by the dire post-war economic situation, led to their dislocation, economic dispossession, and internal exile during the Sino-Vietnamese 80 Tran Khanh 270. 63 War. The double process of hypervisibility and invisibility employed by the state to exile Thụy highlights the fact that he is a latent danger, while ignoring him as a person and a Vietnamese citizen. Perceived as a permanent foreigner, his ethnicity is conveniently linked with the identity of those against whom the state is waging a war to justify his ostracism because the ever-present suspicion can now be quantified with every dead body, every bomb dropped during the war. 81 Thụy’s foreignness is expressed through an exclamation that is repeated several times throughout the book by the narrator: “Thụy không có quê” [Thụy has no quê]. 82 To understand the full meaning of this sentence, the term quê and its signification in Vietnamese must be examined. It is difficult to give a single-word translation of the term, since, as Amy Kaminsky notes, “places and affects come together differently” in different languages, while “the associations crisscross.” 83 Quê can be loosely translated into English as “hometown” or “homeland”; however, the term carries a different set of affects, connections, and social relationships that cannot be captured by the English translations. Within the Vietnamese word quê lies a network of relationships that determines a person’s belonging to a family, a tradition, and a place. This sense of belonging is both socio-formal, as Vietnamese paperwork always includes a section for quê, and affective, since the geographical location signifies other interpersonal relationships—either formed through blood or through time—that allow a person to claim 81 This treatment of a minority group is not an exception. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, for example, is a manifestation of the long history of Asian exclusion in the United States, which makes it possible for the state to identify Japanese Americans with the enemy even when many of the members of the group have no direct relation to their country of origin. 82 Thuận 22. 83 Amy K. Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3. 64 a link to other people from the same place. It is common for strangers who meet in a place far away from where they were born to bond over the fact that they have the same quê [cùng quê]. For people in the diaspora this notion is evoked often to build communities in a foreign land. 84 Quê is not just the place where a person is born, but it is the place where one’s parents and ancestors were born. 85 It denotes a lineage, a survival through time of a family, a survival upon which the identity of a person is based. Thus, for Thụy, having no quê means an utter alienation from his past, from everything and everyone that determines his identity. There is no place to which he can trace his belonging. As an ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam, Thụy is an outsider in both Vietnamese and Chinese societies. In response to their persecution, a number of ethnic Chinese decided to return to China only to find that they were seen as foreigners in China as well. In the novel, the narrator has a dream about Thụy taking her and their son to Hunan, where his ancestors were born, but “the police say they don’t know Thụy. Thụy mentions the name of his father and grandfather. They open the registration book. They shake their heads saying his grandfather and father have been dead for thirty years.” 86 The dislocation of Thụy’s father to Vietnam leads to a severance of social relationships, which makes it impossible for Thụy to claim a lineage in China. In a similar way he cannot claim a lineage in the country where he was born because there are no social 84 The act of forming a community in a new place through the notion of quê is best seen through the numerous hoi dong huong, associations of people from the same quê, which proliferate in many Vietnamese diasporic communities. 85 Vietnamese people differentiate between quê noi, indicating the father’s quê, and quê ngoai, indicating the mother’s quê, with greater emphasis placed on quê noi as the determination of one’s lineage. 86 Thuận 110. 65 relationships preceding his birth that will bind him to the land and the community. Consequently, Thụy is left in a state of complete non-belonging—an ultimate exile from which there is no escape. If exile can end only with a person’s ultimate return to a real or imaginary homeland, then Thụy, without a quê in either China or Vietnam, has no homeland to dream of in his exile. Thụy is not the only person alienated and exiled in the novel. As the narrator relates, her own isolation begins in her school days, when, Both my father and my mother asked for me to be seated in a middle table, right in the front of the class. My father explains; so I can be watched by the teachers from all four directions. My mother explains; so no other student, male or female, touches my hands, steps on my feet or copies my tests. For 10 years in school I sit alone at one table. For 10 years at school, I know only the road from home to school. At the end of class, I go home to continue studying. During breaks I stand alone in a corner to study for the next lesson. 87 While the school, the local police, and the community enforce Thụy’s exile, the parents of the narrator ensure her alienation in collaboration with school officials. The school thus functions as a power apparatus enforcing the will of both the family and the state. Within the context of post-1975 communist Vietnam, to be a model student requires not only good academic results, but also an impeccable family history, including a loyalty to the current regime that is best demonstrated through sacrifices in the many wars against foreign intrusion, a background in the working class or peasantry, and absolutely no connection to any foreign powers. Being a model student thus implies being a “good” citizen. The case of the narrator is therefore in direct contrast to Thụy. 87 Thuận 58. 66 As a good student and a good citizen, the narrator is the tool of the family’s future and success; her duty is to work endlessly to enrich both her family and her motherland. Her position is similar to Thụy’s, however, in terms of her isolation. On the one hand, the narrator is singled out, seated alone at a table in front of the class in order to ensure her constant surveillance. In the classroom, she is hypervisible, permanently watched. Her every move is reported back to her parents, who insist on this scrutiny. On the other hand, however, she is a non-component of the classroom, in which no one seems to be able to touch her physically, or even engage in a conversation with her, without being reprimanded themselves. While others pretend Thụy does not exist, acting like he is not there, the narrator, being isolated from everyone else, is not there either. The similar methods used for the surveillance of both Thụy and the narrator make clear that even those who belong are subjected to disciplining. In fact, the boundary between “insider” and “outsider” is so porous that at any moment the residues of personal freedom that differentiate the narrator from Thụy can be taken away as a punishment, turning the model citizen into an “Other.” The thin line separating the insider from the outsider is almost blurred on a school trip to Yên Khê. Because they were both isolated from the other students, the narrator and Thụy never came into direct contact before the trip. Yet, on the bus, they find themselves seated next to each other. When Thụy lets his head drop on her shoulder, dozing off on the bus, their physical closeness defies the physical alienation imposed on both of them. When they talk and learn that they were both born in Yên Khê, the narrator not only breaks the unspoken rule that says they must all pretend Thụy does not exist, but also 67 creates a bond between them by highlighting a common quê. Yet, the boundaries within which she is supposed to live, hidden behind words like duty, or future, designated for her by her parents and the state, become visible the moment she steps out of them. One day after their meeting on the school trip, the narrator writes, The headmaster invites my parents to a meeting in his office. The head teacher pulls me aside for a private meeting. The math teacher calls me to a private meeting. The literature teacher calls me for a private meeting […] You have to focus to be top of the class at the final exam. You should focus to have top grades at the high school graduation exam. You should focus to bring honor to the school in the university entrance exam. They burden me with duties. They try to frighten me with exams. The connection the narrator and Thụy make raises alarm. The meetings are therefore called to break the connection and redirect the narrator to the appropriate track. Yet, no one mentions Thụy, or the conversations they had during the trip, which are the real reasons why the headmaster asks her to come to office and the school alerts her parents. Instead, they remind the narrator of the obligations she must fulfill to be a good student and citizen. The warnings she faces are enough to make the narrator realize her own condition of un-freedom. If, according to Wendy Brown, one of the definitions of freedom is “the desire to participate in shaping the conditions and terms of life,” then both the narrator and Thụy live in a state of un-freedom because they lack the possibility to participate in shaping the conditions of their own lives and the lives of those around them. For Thụy, it means not being able to study or work. He is allowed to continue to exist, but not to live because he is forced into social isolation and forbidden to be self-sustained economically. For the narrator, it means following a future designed for her by her parents and the 68 school. Her actions and social relationships are subjected to permanent surveillance and correction so that any attempt to diverge from that pre-designed path will result in punishment. The meeting, however, also leads the narrator to understand that the only way she can determine the conditions of her life is to defy the rules by being with Thụy, even if it means she will be ostracized with him. If being a Vietnamese citizen means she has to regard every ethnic Chinese as an enemy, then being with him lets her decide for herself who is the enemy. If being the perfect daughter means she has to work endlessly to create the best future possible for herself and her parents, then her choice to be with a person “with problems” challenges the rules that determine who can have a future and who cannot. 88 Thus, for the narrator, her friendship, courtship, and subsequent marriage with Thụy represent her struggle to attain her own freedom, the possibility to determine her own conditions of life. “At nine thirty” the narrator writes, “we rode our bicycles to go home. We did not say a word to each other […] I already forgot about our wedding an hour ago. I already forgot that Thụy and I just kissed, the first time in front of other people, the first time on the lips. I think about my parents, about our life together that finally ended. Only now can I not live for my parents.” 89 Yet, for Thụy, the marriage did not change anything in his conditions of exile. After his marriage to the narrator, he continues to be banned from holding a job and his movements remain under the surveillance of new neighbors and community leaders, who 88 In the novel, the narrator mentions several times that her parents think about Thụy as someone with problems, who could potentially ruin her future. 89 Thuận 76. 69 all carry on pretending he doesn’t exist. If marriage, according to Gayle Rubin and other anthropologists, is a way for people to build new kinship ties and strengthen existing ones, then the marriage between Thụy and the narrator can be read as a failed attempt by Thụy to establish a quê, to start a lineage that will help establish his identity, his belonging to the place where he lives and the people surrounding him. The narrator’s parents, refusing to recognize the marriage, sever their relationship with the couple. Moving from the confinement of one house to another, the marriage does not help Thụy establish any new relationships that can allow him to identify as part of the community surrounding him. More importantly, the freedom the narrator achieves in marrying Thụy is predicated on the continuation of his internal exile. Her decision to be with him can only be read as an act of defiance against her family and the state if he remains an outsider. Consequently, the attachments to the narrator and their newborn son become new boundaries confining Thụy’s life, which he tries to escape when he abandons the family. Thụy’s understanding of his own un-freedom during his marriage to the narrator can be seen through his relationship to the bicycle, which is mentioned several times in the novel. As the narrator relates, Thụy rides the bike. Making furniture all day, Thụy’s legs become restless; he can’t stand it. I come back from work, 5.30pm, Thụy waits in front of the apartment complex. I go up to the apartment to make dinner. Thụy takes the bicycle and rides everywhere. […] In the one year living with Thụy, I developed a habit, the vegetables are cooked, the rice is kept warm, I have finished several chapters of a novel, and only then does Thụy push the door to walk in, covered in sweat, the bike is either full of 70 mud or with loosed chain, exploded tire, deformed coiled ring, lost saddle. 90 On the one hand, the bike rides are a way for Thụy to survive. Riding, he escapes the confinement the state imposes upon him by denying his personhood and has a goal for the day to escape the limitations of the apartment and the surveillance of neighbors. On the other hand, the bike rides also lead him to decide to leave, because they make clear the constraints within which he is living. Every day, on the bicycle that he is only allowed to use from 5.30 PM, he wanders further and further away, until he can go no further. The “loosed chain, exploded tire, deformed coiled ring, lost saddle” are the daily material manifestations of his containment, signaling to him, and to the narrator, the boundaries within which he is allowed to exist. One year after his marriage to the narrator and one week after their son’s birth, Thụy takes the train, with only one set of clothes, and leaves for Chợ Lớn, the Chinatown in southern Vietnam. Thụy’s departure, in a way, marks the completion of the alienation process. The years of internal exile drives him away, makes him leave the few ties he managed to build and maintain throughout the years—the ties to his parents and sister, to his wife, and to his one-week-old son. In response to being treated as invisible, he disappears. Everything that happens to him from that day on, “what he did, who he met, where he lived,” becomes a question which only he knows how to answer. All the narrator has is a photograph, in which he “stands next to a two-story house [with a] Chinese sign [and] two lanterns.” 91 But, as the narrator notices, every house in Chinatown 90 Thuận 223–224. 91 Thuận 27. 71 has a Chinese sign and two lanterns, so it is impossible to recognize exactly where Thụy is. Chinatown engulfs Thụy and makes him permanently invisible. Yet, his very disappearance also challenges the hypervisibility that accompanies his forced invisibility. Becoming a question mark, the society can no longer use his being, doing, and existence to speculate and produce false facts to judge him. Departing, he struggles free from the surveillance of police, neighbors and his own nuclear family. Accepting his state of permanent exile, of having no quê, Thụy departs not for China, but for Chinatown, a place stands that stands apart from China and any other country. The nostalgia, desire, and dreams of Chinatown are reserved only for other Chinatowns, other diasporic spaces, other subjects who do not belong. Chinatown is a space for people like Thụy, who are not allowed to belong anywhere. In Chinatown, he no longer needs a homeland to dream of in his exile. His freedom, however, like the narrator’s, is enabled by the un-freedom of another group of people. Years after the end of the Vietnam War, southern Vietnam remains as foreign to northern Vietnam as another country. As the narrator explains: “The Party is more flexible with Saigon . . . Saigon needed architects . . . the Party says architects of Chinese origin are trustworthier than ‘traitorous’ architects who constructed the palace of independence and the American embassy.” 92 While in northern Vietnam, the ethnic Chinese emerges as the ultimate “Other” due to the closeness of the war with China, in the south, it is those who have worked for, or have been educated by the former 92 Thuận 26. The communist Vietnamese regime refers to the Southern Vietnamese regime and army with the term nguy, which means traitorous. For a further discussion of how the term helps consolidate the current official historical discourse of the Second Indochinese War, refer to Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 72 southern Vietnamese regime, who are the subjects of the state’s suspicion. Further away from Beijing, the ethnic Chinese in Chợ Lớn seem less a threat than the “traitors.” The danger of China is diminished next to the danger posed by the remnants of U.S. influence. Thus, Thụy’s exile to freedom is only possible because somebody else is now being watched closely and rendered invisible. Escaping from his own constraints, he joins a labor force that is used by the state to contain the new outcasts, forcing them to leave and go into exile themselves, sometimes at the cost of their lives. The freedom of one is achieved through the social and physical death of others. A year after Thụy leaves, the narrator goes to France with her son, Vĩnh. Her departure marks another crucial historical moment in the formation of the Vietnamese diaspora. As the narrator explains, Since my country started to take off the red paint sponsored by the Soviet Union and puts on the new shirt of “Renovation” it becomes strangely attractive. Western European countries crept closer. The Western European countries sniff the smell of exotic. France immediately becomes gallant, enabled by the relationship in the past that did not break completely despite years of pulling and tearing, the smell of Indochina after years still remains Indochinese. 93 In 1986, Vietnam initiated a new economic policy called Đổi Mới [Renovation], which aimed to create a “socialist-oriented market economy.” 94 After years of economic isolation, the state opened its market to other countries that were not part of the communist bloc, which was quickly disappearing from the map of the world. This new economic direction led to the renewal of the neo-colonial protectorate relationship with 93 Thuận 70. 94 Tran Quang Nhiep, “Fundamental Features of the Socialist-Oriented Market Economy in Vietnam,” paper presented at Congres Marx International V, Paris-Sorbonne et Nanterre, 3-6 October 2007. <http://www.vietnamembassy-usa.org/news/story.php?d=20031117235404>. 73 France, as the former colonizer-colonized connection was redressed within terms of economic and cultural exchange. A new wave of Vietnamese people, from northern Vietnam and from former communist countries in Eastern Europe, moved west as goods started flowing into the Vietnamese market. Paris became the new destination of the future after the dissolution of the Soviet Union took away the main supplier of power and economic necessities to a Vietnam crippled by failing economic policies and economic embargoes. Within this context, the narrator comes to Paris as a former colonial subject arriving in the colonial “motherland.” While the French state happily renews economic and cultural ties with its former colonies, the presence of formerly colonized subjects in France remains a controversial issue for two reasons: (1) these immigrants force French society to come face to face with the history it wishes to forget and (2) the French state and French people, like many other Western countries, perceive these immigrants as a cultural/racial threat and an economic burden. The Parisian riots in November 2005 are the most recent manifestation of the consequences of anti-immigrant policies the French state has adopted to deal with the problem of immigrants from its former colonies. 95 Thus, the narrator’s alienation in Paris is the result of her class and immigration status, which are enforced by French anti-immigrant policies. Unable to afford to live anywhere else, she and her son reside in Belleville. As she relates, her coworkers, would never set their feet in Belleville. On their map of Paris, Belleville is the first one to be crossed out. . . . My forty-nine colleagues, on the first 95 Stéphane Beaud and Olivier Masclet, “Des ‘marcheurs’ de 1983 aux ‘émeutiers’ de 2005, deux générations sociales d’enfants d’immigrés,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 61 (October 2006): 809– 844. 74 day of class, went into a communal stress outbreak, when I introduced that my house is in the middle of Belleville, and Belleville is in the middle of three districts eighteen, nineteen and twenty. 96 To Parisian minds Belleville is a commune of immigrants as well as the location of a second, less glamorous Chinatown, which comprised mainly of newly arrived immigrants of color. The neighborhood of Belleville lies on the outskirts of several districts yet belongs to none of them, especially since postcolonial subjects from North Africa, sub- Saharan Africa, and Asia began to replace the Jewish communities who used to reside there. For the narrator’s coworkers, Belleville is a place to avoid, even if Paris is a place they have to visit once a year. The neighborhood, located inside the boundaries of the City of Light, is never part of it, like the immigrants living there who are always perceived as outsiders. As an ethnic, postcolonial subject in Paris, the narrator is a foreigner in French society, which, she admits, remains as surreal to her after ten years as when she first arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport. Working as a substitute teacher in Paris’s suburban public schools, she wanders through the city, never quite able or willing to become part of it. “For ten years,” she writes, “I have been through many Parisian suburbs. Train wagons in which I am the only person dozing off. Obscure train stations. Ticket counters that don’t bother to open. Slumbering distance markers. Fields on which grass grew in a hustle. Darkly black, running along to infinity.” 97 The sense of loneliness pervades the description of her life in Paris, a continuation of her internal exile in Vietnam as a student 96 Thuận 218–219. 97 Thuận 96. 75 and as Thụy’s wife. Yet, in Paris, the isolation intensifies. Every sign of the world around her, the empty trains and the closed ticket counter, all point at her isolation, not only from the society, but also the physical world in which she lives. The narrator’s choice to live in Belleville, however, also carries another meaning. In Paris she adopts the identity of an ethnic Chinese, denying her own identity as Vietnamese. “I am not Vietnamese,” she cries in many of her dreams. “In Belleville,” she writes, “for the past ten years people call me Madame Âu, comment ça va Madame Âu [How do you do Madame Âu] […] My forty nine coworkers and the students call me Madame Âu to my face, but behind my back refer to me plainly as la chinoise [the Chinese] la bizarre chinoise [the weird Chinese].” Adopting an identity as la chinoise, the narrator places herself in a state of multiple non-belonging. Rejecting her own connection to Vietnam, she denies her quê, the place and the social connections that determine her identity, even when she is unable to build a social relationship to the diasporic Chinese community. Unlike Thụy, she will never be able to belong to Chinatown, because she resides in Belleville, which functions as the labor backbone of the proper Parisian Chinatown. Belleville is the place where the “Others” of Chinatown reside—the undocumented, new immigrants from China and elsewhere, who labor in sweatshop conditions to produce clothing and food that will be sold in the famous Thirteenth District. Here lives the cheap and unrecognized labor force, which the glamorous ethnic enclave, the biggest and oldest Chinatown in Europe, does not want to admit, even when this labor lies at its foundation. Denying her Vietnamese identity in Belleville, the narrator places herself in Thụy’s position—an exile from both the Vietnamese and the Chinese community. 76 Consequently, the narrator’s alienation in Paris is also an attempt to challenge the rules that both the Vietnamese and the French states adopt to designate some people as permanent foreigners. If being Vietnamese means she has to deny Thụy his personhood, to see him only as a threat, if her belonging to Vietnamese society depends on his non- belonging, then she must give up her Vietnamese identity, even if it means that she will not belong anywhere. If the only way she can be recognized in French society is to adopt the norms that dictate to her how she is supposed to live, then she will choose to wander in the suburbs of Paris, alienated and foreign, just like her husband did on the bicycle in Hanoi. Treading the marginal spaces of Vietnam, France, and Chinatown, her exile illustrates the porous boundaries between “native” and “other.” Choosing to live as an outsider in France, she renders visible the multiple regimes of power, class, race, and ethnicity that govern her life, as well as the lives of other immigrants and postcolonial subjects around her. At the same time, in actively choosing to live without a quê, in denying her own belonging, her own identity, she challenges the rules that plagued Thụy’s life in the past, and, perhaps, offers atonement for her own role in maintaining his un-freedom. A Never-Ending Dream: Writing in Exile As a Practice of Radical Freedom In both Slander and Chinatown the narrators are writers who struggle to navigate between the expectations of the mainstream society and their own ideas about what literature is and should be. At the beginning of Slander, the Counselor, the literary agent 77 of the niece, tells her that a producer is interested in having her go back to the Country and make an episode about her lost father. “You have indulged in sadness long enough,” he says, “Put your corpses away. Write some exercises in jubilation. Stop slandering yourself, slandering us.” 98 As a writer, the narrator is marked as an outsider. The counselor sees her as a native informer, who can simply go back to the Country and write an authentic story, as if the displacement process can simply be reversed. The impossibility to of her return is not acknowledged when the public demands a native story. Yet, the niece refuses to write a native story. As the uncle explains, “she says she wants to dedicate herself to writing in the same way as [he] devoted himself to madness,” to embrace it as her own exile, her own practice of freedom. Therefore she leaves, walking away from her life as an upcoming writer with only the uncle’s unfinished story. Leaving, she turns down the Counselor’s proposition for a bestselling book, choosing instead to “be nothing but a desiccated body in the service of writing, infertile writing,” the same way her uncle and his sister dedicated themselves to an infertile love that challenged the rules confining their lives. In a similar way, the narrator of Chinatown is expected to be a native informant. Expressing the expectations of French society for her as an author, she writes, “ten years later in Paris I find out that other writers are supported by large artistic traditions when Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian authors can only represent the multiple wounds of war and poverty.” 99 Like the narrator in Slander, her writing is expected to confirm an image of her homeland, which the French society has formed during colonialism. Yet, the 98 Lê 22. 99 Thuận 194. 78 narrator, whose unfinished novel titled I Am Yellow is scattered throughout Chinatown, refuses to fulfill her role as the native informant. Her novel, which is written in Vietnamese, features only two characters, who jump from one train to another in order to continue their self-imposed exile from the family and the multiple nation-states that control them. As the narrative remains unfinished and unpublished, the narrator, the writer, remains exiled and denied. Yet, in her refusal to neither finish nor abandon the novel, which is always in the process of being written, she is forever reinventing ways to criticize the two nation-states that constrain her life even in the space of diaspora. Like her narrator, Thuận’s decision to write in Vietnamese displaces her from the dominant French literary scene, as well as its audience. Invoking an immigrant experience that is not restricted to the Vietnamese community, such as the focus on Belleville as the “Other” of the Parisian Chinatown or the painful dreams of other women of color in French society, she also displaces herself from the Vietnamese national literary discourse. In an interview, she claims, “a position on the outside is most suitable for me. Not because neither the national nor overseas literature has enough appeal, but because I believe that to write, in every situation, necessarily means to challenge the public.” 100 On the one hand, Thuận’s outspoken choice to remain an outsider to both national and diasporic literature echoes her narrator’s adoption of a space of exile through writing. On the other hand, her claim that to write always means to challenge the public reminds the reader of a romantic notion of the writer as a martyr writing against the world. This exceptionalist understanding of literature continues to be cherished today and 100 Thu Nhan. 79 is repeated within discourses of modernist scholars, for whom writers and intellectuals are necessarily exiled from society. 101 Yet, as Lisa Lowe points out, cultural productions, including literature, are always torn between their normative role in the process of nation building and their oppositional role in challenging the nation-state. Within these constraints, writers can, but do not necessarily always, challenge the discourses of the nation-state or the public that often inhabits those discourses. Unlike the narrators of their novels, neither Thuận nor Linda Lê are obscure writers. Lê is often celebrated as one of the most important new writers in France, with works translated into several languages, while Thuận is well recognized in Vietnam, and has started making her way into the French literary circle with the translation and publication of Chinatown. Thus, both authors’ writings, despite their proclaimed politics, are widely consumed while their radicalism is obscured within a celebration of new literary voices, innovative forms, and the “exoticism” of the writers. The cases of both Thuận and Lê point at the danger of universalizing exile as an intellectual or artistic experience and exceptionalizing literature as the means to practice radical freedom through exile. Instead, the discussion of the novels and the authors should make clear that literature, at best, is an ambivalent tool that must be treated with caution. What does exile as a practice of radical freedom mean, when we take it outside the terrain of the text, when we treat literature as a set of cues and authors as diasporic subjects who are themselves struggling to find a way to deal with the contradictions of 101 For a further discussion of literary exceptionalism refer to Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature. (Oxford and New York: Oxford Uniersity Press, 1977) and Edward Said, Reflections of Exile and Other Essays. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 80 diaspora, sometimes with, sometimes without success? This chapter’s analysis of the novels points at a continuum of state disciplining that extends across borders, so that the exile of the characters is intensified in the diaspora. Thus, for a diasporic subject, exile as a practice of radical freedom means first of all the recognition that the diaspora is not a space beyond the control of the state. Instead it is a space located within a conjuncture of multiple nationalist discourses, and is therefore subjected to multiple forms of disciplining. More importantly, a diasporic subject who accepts exile as a practice of radical freedom must also accept that her own position as an outsider is connected to the oppression of others. In Chinatown, the alienation of the narrator in Paris is a manifestation of the racism inherent within French society as the mère patrie is forced to deal with the arrival of its former colonized subjects. In order to challenge her own disciplining she needs to connect to other subjects who are also isolated because they force the French nation to deal with its imperial past. Such definition of exile as radical freedom makes clear that the struggle of Vietnamese diasporic subjects cannot be separated from the struggle of queer activists, or the struggle against racism, at the same time that the struggle against un-freedom in the homeland cannot be disconnected from the challenge of un-freedom in the host country. Focusing on the analysis of marginalized subjects in exile, this chapter also points at the necessity for continually reinventing the practice of radical freedom. Similarly, if the narrators in the novels want to inhabit their exile to work against the different regimes of power that discipline them, they must continually rewrite their narratives. Exile, without the shadow of the homeland, allows us to understand the multiple ways in which 81 exilic subjects, on whose bodies different axes of power converge, have always challenged these disciplines. Whether inside or outside the text, an acceptance of the position of exile as a contextualized and historically specific challenge to the un-freedom promoted and enforced by the state and its apparatuses can help marginalized subjects rearticulate the diaspora in terms of radical freedom. 82 Chapter 2: A War of Memory: Gender, Sexuality and the Vietnam War in Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places Collective consciousness is thus one of those realities whose ontological status is not in question. Instead, individual memory, as purportedly original agency, becomes problematic; emerging phenomenology struggling to avoid being dismissed under the more or less infamous label of psychologism. —Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting In February 2008, several hundred people protested in one of the largest demonstrations in the history of Little Saigon in Westminster, California. The protest was directed against an article by Huỳnh Thủy Châu, an artist and graduate student of Art at University of California, Davis. Huỳnh’s article appeared in the special issue on Lunar New Year of Nguoi Viet, the oldest daily newspaper published in Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. The article reflected on the life of the author’s mother-in-law, who, like many Vietnamese refugees, worked in nail salons to support her family after coming to the United States. The story also featured a photograph of Huỳnh’s recently exhibited work of installation art, which depicts a foot spa painted with the colors of the South Vietnamese flag. A month after the publication of the article, Bùi Bảo Trúc, a former correspondent for Nguoi Viet, broadcasted a letter on Little Saigon Radio. In the letter, Bui calls the author “an uneducated brat” and accuses her of debasing the South Vietnamese flag, “a flag for which many people have died. A flag […] which covered the 83 coffins of soldiers and the graves of martyrs . . . .” 102 As the letter circulated quickly among other media sources in Little Saigon and online forums to condemn both Huynh and Nguoi Viet, protestors gathered before the newspaper’s main office, screaming for the dismissal of chief editor Vũ Qúy Hạo Nhiên and the closing down of the newspaper. A week later, Nguoi Viet fired Vũ and another editor, as well as issued a public apology, yet the protest continued on for several more weeks, making the headlines in regional and national newspapers. Bùi’s letter, which some people in the community compare to a bullet that started the weeks-long campaign against the newspaper and Huỳnh, begins with a description of two pictures taken by photographer Nguyễn Ngọc Hạnh. The first photograph depicts a woman crying after the death of a soldier in combat; the second shows a woman sewing a torn South Vietnamese flag. These images, according to Bùi, capture two dramatic instances of the war and demonstrate the importance and significance of the flag as a symbol of the Vietnamese nation. The women depicted in them contrast starkly with the figure of Huỳnh, who, he stresses, must be condemned because she is unable to understand the symbolic meaning of the flag within the imagination of millions of Vietnamese people. Within the context of this chapter, I argue, she was reprimanded for having the audacity to give an alternative interpretation of that symbol. Starting with the two photographs, Bùi’s letter reveals the role that a woman usually plays within the memory of Vietnamese Americans—the sacrificial woman whose losses of husbands and sons never stop her from supporting the nation. Calling Huỳnh “an uneducated brat” and 102 Bùi Bảo Trúc, “Lá Cờ Việt Nam” [The Vietnamese Flag]. Viet Tide. 24 January 2008. 5. All quotations translated from Vietnamese by author. 84 “a horse,” a common reference in Vietnamese for a woman of dubious morality, Bùi diminishes and questions the artists’ credibility by attacking her as a woman. 103 I begin with this incident because it is a powerful example illustrating the role of memories about the Vietnam War, and about the exodus that followed, in the imagination and politics of Vietnamese Americans. Every year in April, in Little Saigon and other parts of the world where Vietnamese refugees reside, we are reminded of the war through numerous commemorations of “Black April,” 104 in which the fall of Saigon, according to Chương Đài Võ, features like a wound that still has not healed—“a representative wound of the pain of losing one’s country, family and honor” that threatens to open at any moment when triggered by images and narratives about Vietnam and the war. 105 At the same time, this incident also highlights the difficulty for alternative memories and understandings of the past to enter the dominant collective memory of the Vietnamese American community. Lastly, Bùi’s attack on Huỳnh using representative images of the sacrificial and supporting Vietnamese woman also points at the gender politics that govern the formation and maintenance of this collective memory. As such, the debates surrounding Huỳnh and her work demonstrate the complex relationship among gender, memory, and exile that forms the crux of this chapter. 103 The Vietnamese term con ngua cai [female horse] refers in colloquial language to a woman of loose morals. 104 Vietnamese Americans call April 30 either Thang Tu Den [Black April] or Ngay Quoc Han, which translates to “national hate date.” The English translation of the second term, however, does not fully reflect the sentiments of the event. Therefore, I have opted here for the first term. 105 Võ Hồng Chương Đài, “Những Tiếng Nói Ám Ảnh Cộng Đồng” (Voices that haunt the community) BBC Vietnamese Online, 22 April 2009, http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/culture/2009/04/090522_fob_review.shtml. Quotation translated from Vietnamese by author. 85 In my first chapter I looked at Vietnamese diasporic literature in France to conceptualize exile as a historical process of marginalization that extends from the homeland to the diaspora, and as a practice of radical freedom that diasporic subjects use to challenge their un-freedom across borders. Exploring the framework of feminized memory, this chapter focuses on Lely Hayslip’s memoir, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and its controversial reception within the mainstream U.S. and Vietnamese American press, in order to further illustrate how the diaspora continues to exile people and how the position of exile can be a tool to challenge the constraints of the diaspora. In this chapter, I use feminized memory to refer to the way that women, like Huỳnh and Hayslip, use memory to counter the exploitation of memory in the national and communal imaginations. Drawing on two national discourses, I argue, the dominant Vietnamese American collective memory privileges masculinist memories of war, which feature the male, heroic soldier and the sacrificial, supporting woman as representative figures. Women and men whose experiences and memories do not fit those discourses are exiled—either ignored within the ritualistic re-enactments of the past, or called forth only to be refuted. Like Huỳnh’s artwork, which urges the audience to reinterpret a national symbol to highlight the role of the woman in the formation of the community, Hayslip’s book calls forth memories of everyday life to illustrate the violence that takes place beyond the battlefields. Such memories are often ignored within the communal celebration of heroes and martyrs. In bringing these memories forward, Hayslip also highlights how the traditional gender roles celebrated in the community have always been 86 fluid; Vietnamese men and women constantly change and adapt to mediate the daily consequences of war. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is the first of two memoirs that made Lely Hayslip into one of the most renowned Vietnamese American writers. It traces the life of the author from her childhood during the Vietnam War to her departure to the United States shortly before the end of the war. Born on the countryside of central Vietnam, the young Hayslip joined Vietcong forces as a child and continued to serve until Vietnamese Republican soldiers arrested her. After a few days of torture, her mother managed to bribe the police and secure her release from prison. Yet, the quick release led Vietcong forces controlling the village to suspect her of betrayal. Sentenced to death, Hayslip survived only because the two Vietcong soldiers who were assigned the task of execution raped her instead, and told her never to come back to the village. Banished from her own home, Hayslip went to Saigon, where she took a job as a house helper. She fell in love with her married employer and was forced to leave the house after his wife found out that Hayslip was pregnant with his child. As a single mother, she worked a variety of jobs: She sold merchandise to American soldiers as a street vendor, worked as a nurse at the hospital, and even engaged one time in prostitution. She had a few relationships with American soldiers, all of whom abused and abandoned her. Shortly before the end of the war, Hayslip married an American civilian who sponsored her and her son’s immigration to the United States. Woven among these memories from the war is Hayslip’s recollection of her first visit back to Vietnam in 1988, before the normalization of the relationship between 87 Vietnam and the United States. The trip was motivated both by her desire to see her family and an effort to build a clinic for women and children in her home village, Ky La (Binh Ky). Partly thanks to the popularity of the memoir, this initial project grew into a large-scale humanitarian organization, the East Meets West Foundation, which Hayslip chaired for a number of years. Influenced by current events at the time, such as the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, many in the mainstream American public applauded the memoir as the work that might finally give Americans “a chance to come to terms with the tragedy in Vietnam.” 106 Despite her popularity with American readers and critics, many Vietnamese Americans criticized Hayslip and When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. They labeled the author a communist traitor and accused her memoir of false consciousness and naïveté, often using gendered and patriarchal language. This attack on Hayslip, I contend, took place because Hayslip’s memoir represents a feminized memory, which focuses on the daily struggles of Vietnamese men and women in their efforts to survive and serve as witnesses to the life and death around them. This memory undermines what Ricoeur calls “the heritage of founding violence,” an original relation to war which is often celebrated as the founding event of communities and nations. 107 Challenging and at times standing apart from how the dominant masculinist memory in the Vietnamese American community is composed and reenacted, the memoir and the author are criticized and publicly denied by Vietnamese American critics and activists, who use a discourse of the “fallen woman” to discredit her account of the past. 106 David K. Shipler, “A Child’s Tour of Duty,” The New York Times 31 December 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/25/books/a-child-s-tour-of-duty.html (accessed 21 July 2011). 107 Paul Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 82. 88 Ostracized within the Vietnamese American context, Hayslip was at the same time a nationally recognized writer with political and economic privileges that many Vietnamese American writers of her generation did not have. 108 The positive reception of the memoir within mainstream U.S. society raises questions about the selective consumption of certain kinds of memories through the discourse of the minority woman writer. In the case of Hayslip, the feminized memory her memoir highlights fits into an orientalist discourse of Asian patriarchy that is often used to read the works of Asian American women’s writing. Because it challenges the community’s patriarchal ethnic nationalism, Hayslip’s memoir is easily co-opted to support an exceptionalist image of the United States as the guardian of global freedom and democracy. Within this context, the community can perceive the memoir as an act of treachery, and Hayslip as a traitor who turns against her own people to secure sympathy from a predominantly white American public. Thus, I argue, the attack directed at Hayslip is also borne out of the contradiction that a memory publicly denied within the dominant collective memory of the community is perceived as representative of Vietnamese American literature within a U.S. national context. Exploring the framework of feminized memory through the controversial reception of a Vietnamese American author and her memoir, this chapter also emphasizes how literary works, even the ones exiled and marginalized in certain contexts, can be incorporated into a nation building discourse to serve a normative function. 108 Within the last two decades, a new generation of Vietnamese American writers, mostly second- generation, have emerged to usurp the role as representatives of the community. This movement is not necessarily unproblematic. As I will make clear in the next chapter about Monique Truong, the demand for Vietnamese American writers to tell the story of the community continues to constrain Vietnamese American literature within the framework of the Vietnam War. 89 Consequently, a discussion of exile as an oppositional subject position in literature must take into consideration the historical contexts in which this literature can be both affirmative of and disruptive to different national and communal discourses. The Vietnam War in the Formation of the Vietnamese American Community As Viet Thanh Nguyen asserts, “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” 109 Over 35 years after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War still figures prominently within the political and cultural imagination of the United States, Vietnam, and the Vietnamese American community, with a multitude of narratives swirling about this set of events and their aftermath. In the United States, John Carlos Rowe claims that the Vietnam War is, in all likelihood, the most narrated war in U.S. history. 110 As one of the most controversial American wars in the second half of the twentieth century, the Vietnam War tore U.S. society apart. More importantly, its memory continues to divide people as the Vietnam War is invoked as an example of past military failure every time the United States deploys its troops to a new nation. For Vietnamese people in Vietnam and Vietnamese Americans, the war also remains a controversial issue. Each April 30, the conflict of memory reopens as celebrations of “reunification” in Vietnam coincide with commemorations of “the fall of Saigon” among Vietnamese refugees. In the official narrative of postwar Vietnam, the end of the Vietnam War marks the fulfillment of the sacred mission to liberate the 109 Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Remembering War, Dreaming Peace: On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion, and Literature,” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 20 (2009): 149. 110 John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 173. 90 country from all foreign intruders, including the Chinese, French, and Americans. In the case of Vietnamese Americans, the war is retold within a longer narrative of national heroism and historical suffering that both predates and extends beyond the founding of communist Vietnam. Consequently, for many Vietnamese refugees, April 30, 1975, signals the beginning of yet another resistance against invaders in which the new enemies—the communists—need to be conquered if the Vietnamese nation wants to be free. Thus, both sides appear to have much in common in that they narrate, deploy, and selectively remember the war as part of the Vietnamese nation’s history with different purposes in mind. This meta-narrative of the Vietnamese nation, in both cases, relies on a masculine and totalizing memory project, which often occludes the fact that the Vietnam War was a multisided war in which the North, the South, and other international actors were implicated. Memories about the Vietnam War help construct the nation not only inside the boundaries of Vietnam, but also in the diaspora. In the United States, Vietnamese Americans try to reinvent themselves by forming “imagined communities” whose memories about the war build on, at the same time that they distinguish the community from, the national narratives of both Vietnam and the United States. 111 Such processes depend on an effort to keep open “the wound” of loss that characterizes the community through ritualistic and narrative re-enactments, and the denial and refusal of certain memories that do not fit that framework. A discussion about the importance of memory in the formation of communities, whether as small as a family or as big as a nation, must always begin with (1) the 111 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983). 91 accession of memory as a terrain of struggle, in which different memories come to the fore while others are concealed at different points in time, depending on the existing social formation; and (2) the notion of collective memory, which is shared among a group of people for the purpose of creating a common past that could potentially point toward a common future. For Maurice Halbwachs, collective memory is socially constructed. “There are as many collective memories as there are groups and institutions in the society and . . . individuals being located in a specific group context, draw on that context to remember the past.” 112 Halbwachs distinguishes between autobiographical memory, which is memory of events that an individual has personally experienced, and historical memory, which is memory stored by social institutions. Historical memory is memory that a person has not experienced and which he or she can only recall with stimulations from social institution. This kind of stimulation includes, but is not limited to, reading about, listening to, or participating in commemorative activities. In all cases, however, collective memory is retained through a bond with other people in the group. Thus, collective memory can be both enabling, because other members of the community can help us recall what we on our own cannot, and restrictive, since “the framework of collective memory confines and binds our most intimate remembrances to each other.” 113 At the same time that this memory defines belonging—individuals in a group need each other to recollect a memory—it also defines exclusion in two ways. On the one hand, 112 Maurice, Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 22. 113 Halbwachs 53. 92 those who are not part of the community might not be able to retrieve these remembrances; on the other hand, others in the community might not share an individual’s memory. Yet, collective memory, even in Halbwach’s study, is neither coherent nor unchangeable. “While the Collective Memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people,” he confesses, “it is individuals as group members in a group that remember.” 114 As such, it can change when people change their social positions, or their relationship to the group. While the belonging to a certain community necessitates that we embrace a collective memory and forget or deny certain individual memories, dissenting recollections of individuals always exist. They simmer beneath the surface, burst forth, and are suppressed. Sometimes they are mentioned, but only as an “Other” that must be refuted to strengthen the dominant collective memory. Yet, when they resurface, such dissenting memories can challenge the dominant collective memory, which is often presumed to be coherent, yet which in and of itself is always heterogeneous. This discussion of collective memory is especially important for our analysis of the role of memory in the formation of the Vietnamese American community. If each social group has a collective memory that is socially constructed, then it is necessary for a new group to nurture shared memories, a set of shared mnemonic practices, if it wants to be recognized as a distinct group in the society. For Vietnamese Americans, the process of memory-making works both by connecting the community to the larger narrative of 114 Halbwachs 48. 93 Vietnamese national history, which was disrupted with the coming to power of the communist regime, and by evoking the community as a contingency of the U.S. national history, which is marked by the ideology of “American exceptionalism.” 115 This process can be better understood through the way the community deploys the concept of the communist. Some scholars have focused on the anticommunist discourse in the Vietnamese American community either to criticize the community’s seemingly outdated and reactionary politics or to read it as a way to contest the absence of South Vietnamese histories in the United States. 116 In this analysis I emphasize the communist as a concept, which the community uses both to distinguish itself as a social group and as a tool to punish and exile dissenting members of the community. Both Huỳnh and Hayslip have been accused of being communists in addition to being “bad” women, and such charges have severe personal, political and economic consequences. An all-encompassing term, the communist within the dominant Vietnamese American collective memory refers to the ruthless Vietcong guerrilla fighters during the war, the guards of reeducation camps, and the socialist Vietnamese regime after the war. As such, it connects the war with the political and religious persecutions of later years and serves to distinguish the refugees as the emblematic victims of the Vietnam War. The communist stands in contrast to the Southern Vietnamese soldier as the martyr, the U.S. soldier as the ally, and the Vietnamese refugee as the victim. The communists are not 115 Donald Pease, “Exceptionalism” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 108–112. 116 See for example Thuy Vo Dang. Anticommunism as cultural praxis: South Vietnam, war, and refugee memories in the Vietnamese American community. (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 2008) and C.N. “Better Dead Than Red”: Anti-Communist Politics Among Vietnamese Americans" in Anti- Communist Minorities in the US: The Political Activism of Ethnic Refugees, edited by Ieva Zake, (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009), 189-211. 94 only enemies of the community—those who imprisoned, murdered, and forced Vietnamese refugees to risk their lives to find freedom, but they are also responsible for the loss of the Vietnamese nation at large—the ones accountable for the sacrifice of soldiers who died to protect their country from invasion. Thus, to be labeled a communist means to be a traitor to both the community and the Vietnamese nation. In addition, Vietnamese Americans evoke the communist to differentiate themselves from the “other Vietnamese” who are the enemies of the United States. This effort has pragmatic and ideological motivations. As Isabelle Pelaud points out, by the end of the Vietnam War, only 36 percent of the American population favored the immigration of Vietnamese refugees. 117 Consequently, after their arrival, Vietnamese refugees often faced discrimination and violence. In her discussion of Vietnamese in Arkansas, Perla Guerrero highlights how Vietnamese refugees were often met with strong resistance. For example, when the first group of Vietnamese landed in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on May 2, 1975, they were greeted with a sign that said: “RESCUE USA from REDS FIRST!!! WHiTE MAN UNiTE!!! AND FigHT!!”; meanwhile, a group of five young people converged on a road leading to the refugee camps at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, holding signs that said, “Go Back to Vietnam.” 118 The opposition to the presence of Vietnamese refugees did not only occur in verbal form, but also led to physical violence and death. In many cases, the attacks on Vietnamese refugees invoked an anti-communist discourse, which made no distinctions between Northern and Southern 117 Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 14. 118 Perla Guerrero, "Vietnamese Refugees in Arkansas and “Unfortunate Circumstances”: Federal Mandate, Christian Beliefs, “Yellow Peril,” and Coveted Doctors" Asians in the South edited by Chizuru Saeki (under review). 95 Vietnamese, enemies and allies. Consequently, in fashioning the notion of the communist as the opposite of the Vietnamese refugee, Vietnamese Americans tried to protect themselves from the American wrath associated with losing the Vietnam War. In doing so, they also evoke their own history—of war and refuge—as part of the American ideal about itself as the guard of global democracy. Building on both a Vietnamese national discourse about struggle against foreign invasions and a U.S. national narrative about American exceptionalism, the dominant collective memory of Vietnamese Americans is often masculinist. According to Ann McClintock, “all nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Despite nationalisms’ ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference [so that] women are typically construed as the symbolic bearers of the nation, but are denied any direct relation to national agency.” 119 Although the figure of the Vietnamese woman is often evoked abstractly as a symbol of endurance and sacrifice, the denial of national agency that McClintock points out is not as straightforward within the Vietnamese context. In the nationalist discourse of both Vietnam and the Vietnamese American community, the figure of the Vietnamese woman is represented through two dominant images: She is either a suffering mother or an obedient daughter sacrificing herself for the family. During the revolutionary period, however, the figure of the heroic Vietnamese woman fighter emerged within the discourses of North Vietnam. This image draws upon the legend of the Trưng sisters, who defeated Chinese invaders in AD 39 in revenge for the death their husbands, the assaults on their family, and the invasion of their nation. In Northern Vietnamese wartime propaganda, this figure of the heroic Vietnamese female guerrilla fighter played an important role in advocating the nation’s resolution to win the 119 Ann McClintock, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family,” Feminist Review 44 (1933), 61. 96 war. The same image, as Trinh T. Minh Ha and Mai Thu Van point out, has also been celebrated by the anti-war movement and some Western feminists as a symbol of revolutionary socialism and the anti-imperialist movement. 120 Yet, as Trinh and Mai argue, the symbolic figure of the revolutionary Vietnamese woman also constrains the Vietnamese woman in the postwar period within a narrative of sacrifice and as such has been rejected by some Vietnamese feminists in Vietnam. 121 These activists highlight that even in the case of the Trưng sisters, the heroic act was motivated by an unconditional devotion to their husbands, who died in combat. Thus, like the other two popular images of the Vietnamese woman, the female revolutionary fighter, although she is given more agencies, underlines sacrifice as a characteristic of Vietnamese woman and casts her in a supporting role of the Vietnamese man. More importantly, because this image was exploited by North Vietnam and the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, it is perceived with suspicion by the Vietnamese American community, which perceives the revolutionary woman as a symbol of communism. This sentiment has significant consequences for Hayslip, whose memory makes clear that she, and other Vietnamese women, slip in and out of all the different traditional roles in their effort to survive the war. Within the dominant Vietnamese American collective memory, the soldier, who is usually presumed to be male, occupies an honorary position within the family and nation. He is the fallen hero during the war and the one persecuted by the communist regime after the war. Consequently, his personal experiences link the two founding memories of the community. Male soldiers also embody the primary agency of a lost nation, the flag bearers who remind people of the tragedy of dislocation and the hope of return. This privileging of the memories of 120 See Trinh T. Minh Ha, Surname Viet, Given Name Nam. DVD. Directed by Trinh T. Minh Ha. (Berkeley: JeanPaul Boudier, 1989); and Mai Thu Van, Vietnam: Un Peuple, Des Voix. (Paris: Pierre Horay, 1983). 121 Trinh T. Minh Ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 102. 97 male soldiers is best seen during commemorative ceremonies such as the celebration of Black April. In 2010, for example, there were five major commemorations of April 30 in Little Saigon, chaired by different political factions of the community. All groups evoke the heroism of those who died for South Vietnam either by having ceremonies at the Westminster memorial, which depicts soldiers in the field, or by building public shrines commemorating soldiers and captains who died in combat. Former soldiers in uniforms are reserved honorary places in the seating arrangements and are the main speakers of the events. This reiteration of traditional gender roles is not only discursive. In her study of the Vietnamese Federation of San Diego (an umbrella Vietnamese American community organization in the San Diego area), Thuy Vo Dang writes, My first impression of this organization was that it resembled an old boy’s network, organized along very militaristic lines. Very few women held leadership positions within this organization, but many worked behind the scenes to sustain the organization’s events. . . . Most of my interview participants explain that the gender imbalance can be attributed to two main factors: the multiple and strenuous demands first generation women have at home and/or in the workplace and their “traditional” upbringing that requires women to take on more supportive roles in community or public spaces. Because collective memory, as Halbwachs reminds us, is contingent on both a “body of people” and individuals who remember, this gender imbalance that Vo observes, as well as the discourse of traditional gender roles used to explain such a tendency, are important to understand whose memories are encouraged to become public. This division between supporting and leadership roles along gender lines is characteristic of many community organizations, which are sustained primarily by first-generation Vietnamese refugees. Scholars such as Sheba George and Nazli Kibria demonstrate that the process of dislocation led to changes in traditional gender roles. For example, because of the U.S. 98 preference for women of color in certain types of labor-intensive and menial jobs, Vietnamese American women have an easier time finding employment than their male counterparts in the United States. Thus, they become the breadwinners of the family. In order to reassert their masculine authority, George argues, immigrant men often take on leadership positions in the community. 122 Vo’s study also demonstrates that they are more open to sharing their stories than women, who often refuse to talk about themselves and direct the interviewer to their husbands or male friends. 123 Yet, as my analysis of Hayslip’s memoir reveals, traditional gender roles already started changing in Vietnam during the war. The participation of women in combat as well as in labor and medical battalions, which helped repair roads and take care of the sick and wounded, was more prevalent in Northern Vietnamese armed forces, although it also took place in the Southern Vietnamese army. Outside of the military, women took on additional roles, working in the fields, providing for the family, and enacting spiritual rituals, which were commonly reserved for male members of the family when the war brought about a shortage of men. However, within the context of the Vietnamese American community, the communal dominant collective memory denies memories that expose the fluidity of traditional gender roles in order to recast the Vietnamese woman in a traditionally supporting role. Through this process, the male soldier—who has experienced the most drastic fall in social status—can reclaim his masculine authority. As such, the dominant collective memory of Vietnamese Americans, like other 122 Sheba George, When Women Come First: Gender And Class in Transnational Migration. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 2005), 118-158. 123 For her project, Thanh Thuy Vo Dang conducted 16 extensive interviews, only four of which were with female interviewees. 99 collective memories, is marked by the duality of memory and forgetting. 124 Recollections about combat and the imprisonment of male soldiers are privileged as representative, as are memories of women that fall within the discourse of sacrifice and support for the soldiers during the war and the husbands and sons in reeducation camps after the war. The recalling of male experiences during and after the war also takes place in disproportionate number in community press and memoirs. The majority of these writings, significantly, is in Vietnamese and circulates primarily within the community. Through these processes of transmission, the privileged memories become reference points, which everyone in the community is supposed to know in one way or another. At the same time, feminized memories, which highlight the rich experiences of women and men that do not meet soldierly demands and expose the fluidity of traditional gender roles, are rarely recalled in commemorative reenactments or written accounts and thus face the danger of disappearing. This does not mean that any individual memory is necessarily “progressive” or “oppositional.” According to Jeffrey Olick, “the political stakes in memory are not always clear. Part of the struggle over the past is not to achieve already constituted interests but to constitute those interests in the first place.” 125 Too often, as scholars like Macarena Gómez-Barris and Viet Nguyen remind us, there has been a tendency both in the study of literature and the study of memory to think in terms of binary, official memory versus counter-memory, nationalist literature as opposed to oppositional 124 For a discussion of the the dialectic of memory and forgetting see Maria Sturken “Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering,” Pierre Nora “Between memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire” and Luisa Passerini “Memories Between Silence and Oblivion.” 125 Jeffrey Olick, States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 8. 100 literature. This inclination, Gómez-Barris explains, “occludes important gradation in terms of the labor that cultural production and symbols perform.” 126 Consequently, it is important to note that the memories evoked in Hayslip’s book are both dominant and suppressed, and that she, as an author and a witness, has been incorporated within certain discourses, but ostracized in others. Feminized Memory: Lely Hayslip within the Dominant Vietnamese American Collective Memory On June 2, 1989, shortly after Hayslip’s memoir was published, Nguoi Viet printed a two-page article by Nguyễn Giang San. Titled “The Story of Lely Hayslip,” the article starts with an introduction of Hayslip, her memoir, and the East Meets West Foundation, which aims to raise American support for Vietnam. Four subsections follow the introduction, titled respectively: “Facts that not many people know,” “Facts not worthy of interest,” “Facts worthy of interest,” and “What Vietnamese Republicans should do to deal with the [Hayslip] problem.” Motivated by the publication and subsequent publicity surrounding the memoir, the column nevertheless focuses mainly on an analysis of Hayslip as a person, as well as her foundation, which it describes as part of a master plan of communist Vietnam. In short, the column accuses Hayslip of being a communist, of working for communists, and therefore of working against the community. 126 Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and Violence in Chile (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 22; and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3-12. 101 Her collaboration with American veterans of the Vietnam War, according to the author, takes advantage of the controversy surrounding the war that still haunts U.S. society. The comments on the book take up much less space than the accusations and the call to “counter attack” Hayslip. Two issues emerge in Nguyễn Giang San’s analysis: (1) the difference between the memoir and Hayslip’s original manuscript, which omits her one-time engagement in prostitution, and (2) the truthfulness and historical value of her memoir. In the third part of the column Nguyen Giang San writes, “For Vietnamese refugees, all the details about Hayslip’s individual life during the war are not worth paying attention to.” 127 This statement precedes a brief description of her life, which focuses on three details: her rape by communist soldiers, her impregnation by a married employer, and her work as a prostitute. The author then continues to say that there is no guarantee about the “truthfulness” of Hayslip’s account. Her book was published, he asserts, primarily because it contains scandalous details that could be sold for profit. But, he concludes, even if the story did take place, all the details that Hayslip brags about are neither new nor interesting for Vietnamese people. The anecdotes from Hayslip’s life are no different from gossips about dogs biting people, people biting dogs, being arrested for having an affair etc. in ‘from city to village sections’ of Vietnamese newspapers before [1975]. How many Hayslips will it take to compare to the thousands of victims massacred by Vietcong in Hue on the avenue of terror, during the Tet Offensive. Millions of Vietnamese, in both the North and South are living witnesses to the misery caused by the war, when suddenly liberated by Uncle (Ho) and the Party to be widows and orphans. 128 127 Nguyễn Giang San, “Chuyện Lệ Lý Hayslip [The Story of Lely Hayslip, Nguoi Viet Newspaper 6 February 1989, A4. All quotations translated from Vietnamese by author. 128 Nguyen Giang San A4. 102 Lacking any historical credibility, Nguyễn Giang San declares, “Lely is not a representative or even a part of the Vietnamese refugee community in the United States.” 129 This public attack on the author—one of the first Vietnamese American authors to be published by a mainstream U.S. publisher—and her work demands a closer examination, because it forms the framework within which the Vietnamese community is encouraged to read the memoir. Like the protest against Huỳnh Thủy Châu, this critique of Hayslip takes place within a gendered and sexual discourse. In the column, the fact that she used to work for Vietcong forces, and the fact that she was tortured at the hand of both Republican and communist soldiers, are much less important than her background as an illiterate peasant woman who was raped, voluntarily became pregnant out of wedlock, and worked as a prostitute. Within two pages, her history as a fille de joie is repeated twice, with the pejorative Vietnamese term điếm (whore). Details from her life, such as the sudden deaths of her two American husbands, are mixed up with the plot of the memoir, accompanied by a lingering unanswered question about why and how they died. Together, these selected elements from the book and her life mark Hayslip as a fallen woman and raise questions about her reliability. One reason why the memoir is openly criticized is because it departs from the national and communal narratives commemorating sacrifice and martyrdom by decentralizing the discourse of military heroism. As a peasant woman, Hayslip is the victim of systematic violence from both Northern and Southern armed forces during the 129 Nguyễn Giang San A4. 103 war. The effects of these wartime terrors are made visible when the author says goodbye to her sons before embarking on the plane that takes her back to Vietnam for the first time after her escape. “’What if the communists won’t let you out of the country?’ Jimmy [her oldest son] asks. He knows all about my life before coming to America. . . . He knows I left Vietnam with a Vietcong warrant on my head. ‘What if they throw you in prison?’” Through Jimmy’s fearful questions, the violence of Vietcong forces during the war emerges as a wound that still has not healed after sixteen years. The death warrant that has never been carried out continues to haunt her life, because it is connected to the first terror, her rape by the two Vietcong soldiers who were assigned to execute her after she was accused of betrayal. Although the rape did not literally killed her, it caused a symbolic death that she continues to mourn because “it cannot be buried.” Drugged by hate and fear, Hayslip recalls, “by now I knew I was no more than the dirt in which we lay. The war—these men—had finally ground me down to oneness with the soil from which I could no longer be distinguished as a person.” 130 For the young Hayslip, being raped was worse than death because it took away her personhood. Alive, she nevertheless could not speak up or fight back against those who violated her, because the communist cadre did not recognize her life. More importantly, this act of violence cut her off from the support of her home and family because it created a sense of shame that prevented her from facing them. Within this memory Vietcong forces are her violators’ protectors, those who make it impossible for her to go back to the protection and comfort of her home because of fear and shame. 130 Lely Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. (New York: Plume, 2003), 97. 104 If the cruelty of communist soldiers forms the framework connecting Hayslip’s escape with her return to postwar communist Vietnam, then the figure of the Southern Vietnamese soldier also emerges multiple times in the memoir to terrorize and exploit her life and the life of others around her. Before she was raped, Hayslip was tortured for several days by the Southern Vietnamese police, who arrested her for cooperating with the Vietcong. The frequent arrest of villagers on the same charge reveal the police’s disregard of the double disciplining the Vietnamese peasants had to face during the war. Hayslip also recalls with contempt a culture of corruption among Vietnamese Republican officials and army officers, who protect the trafficking of young girls and keep dead soldiers on the payroll and pocket their salaries. In this memory, Vietnamese people have to deal with both the destructions of war and the exploitation at the hand of lawless and greedy Republican officials and military officers, who try to make as much profit as possible out of the situation. As such, they feature as one of the forces leading some Vietnamese people to choose to cooperate with the Vietcong, whom, Hayslip explains, they have come to see as the lesser evil. For the author, a combination of Republican corruption and Vietcong violence form the main reason pushing her to seek a better life by leaving Vietnam. After she was raped, Hayslip thinks bitterly to herself, I might be arrested again by the Viet Cong, or perhaps by the Republicans, but what does that matter? The bullets of one would just save bullets for the other. . . . Both sides in this terrible, endless, stupid war have finally found the perfect enemy: a terrified peasant girl who would endlessly consent to be their victim—as all Vietnam’s peasants had consented to be victims, from creation to the end of time.” 131 131 Hayslip 97. 105 Using her own life as an example, Hayslip’s memoir challenges the distinction between the communist as the violator and the Southern Vietnamese soldier as a martyr because it demonstrates how both the North and the South are equally implicated in the atrocities of war. As her lament indicates, for both sides, Hayslip and other peasants like her are merely tools to achieve military and political victory; tools that can be discarded when they are no longer useful. Evoking the Vietnamese peasant as a victim “from creation to the end of time,” this feminized memory questions the way that both Vietnamese and Vietnamese American dominant collective memories evoke the Vietnam War as part of Vietnam’s heroic struggle against foreign invaders. Instead, Hayslip insinuates that for ordinary people like her, wars, both the ones in the past, and the one in the present, are merely instances of violence that disrupt their lives. Returning to her village after American soldiers have replaced the Viet Cong forces that suspected her of betrayal, the narrator arrives in Ky La only to realize that the village I remembered no longer existed. Half of Ky La has been leveled to give Americans a better “killing zone” when defending the village. . . . Beautiful tropical forests had been turned into bomb-crated deserts. . . . Inside, the neat clean home of my childhood was a hovel. . . . Immediately I saw the bag of bones and torn sinew that was my father lying in his bed. . . . Who did this to you? [she asked] The enemy. It was a peasant’s standard answer. 132 In this memory, the destruction of the Vietnamese peasant’s daily life has taken place on every scale—the land, the family, and the individual body. Everything that constituted the author’s reality at the beginning of the book has been destroyed: fields can no longer be farmed; families have been devastated not only by geographic dispersal, but also by 132 Hayslip 195–196. 106 disappearances and death; and her father, whom she has always looked up to as the source of her strength, lies dying in an empty house after losing all his children either to the different armies or to the lure of life in big cities. Masculine heroism, whether of the North or the South, is comprehended by people like Hayslip and her father as “the enemy” —of the land, the people, and life itself. Together they destroyed her home, her village, and her family just as they had joined forces to destroy her as a person before. More importantly, however, Hayslip’s memoir stands apart from the dominant Vietnamese American collective memory because it reveals that the war leads to foundational changes in the gender structure of the society, as men and women adopt each other’s traditionally assigned gender roles in their efforts to mediate the destruction of social structures. Contemplating the emptiness of the village as the war progresses, Hayslip writes, “One reason so many of our young women wound up in the cities was because the shortage of available men made them liabilities to their families. At least a dutiful grown-up daughter could work as a housekeeper, nanny, hostess, or prostitute and send back money to the family who no longer wanted her.” 133 As the war takes away the lives of more young men, as bombs and killing zones clear away more fields, the labor of young women becomes an important source of income for Vietnamese families. Although Hayslip talks about these women in terms of liabilities and duty, the example of her own life suggests that this kind of labor also provides a sense of independence and agency to the young women. 133 Hayslip 198. 107 After she gives birth to her first son, Hayslip becomes a “souvenir seller” to support her son and mother, who the Vietcong also banished from the village. The business is a simple process of exchange. American soldiers stationed in Vietnamese cities exchange their rations of soap, liquor, and cigarettes for local souvenirs. Hayslip and other women like her then sell the merchandise on the black market and buy more souvenirs to repeat the cycle with increasing profit. Or, they act as mobile shops for soldiers who are isolated in convoys or on the countryside and cannot get their hands on these necessities. Young women monopolize this profitable business, Hayslip’s memoir suggests, because men would draw too much suspicion from both American customers and Vietnamese black marketers. With her little bucket, the author is able to provide food and shelter for her son and her mother, and also to help her family in emergencies. “For the first time in my life,” Hayslip writes, “I was truly independent—of the Vietcong and the village and the government, and even our mother and father.” More than a sign of economic self-sustenance, Hayslip’s proclaimed independence “even from [her] mother and father” indicates a change in gender relationships. While she is outside earning money to support the family, her father is the one remaining behind in the village to take care of the house. Amid the destruction of a military conflict, some Vietnamese men assume the task of caring for the home while their wives and daughters become the main actors in the daily and public battles for survival. With the death of sons and fathers on the battlefront, Vietnamese women also assume spiritual roles that are traditionally reserved for men. Even in the present day, some Vietnamese families still prize sons more than daughters because the oldest son is 108 the one who will traditionally attend to the family shrine, commemorate the dead ancestors, and lead the parents’ funeral. Yet, in Hayslip’s memoir, such traditions underwent a process of transformation when the sons left to join the armies and never came back. When her father died, it was Hayslip, her mother, and her older sister who lead his funeral. Without any of the sons present, the daughters bought the coffin and organized the processions. During one of the ceremonies, Hayslip recalls that her dead father, “using medium voice commanded [her] sister Hai to occupy the family house and tend his shrine and see to the worship of [their] ancestor.” 134 Spoken by “the wizard,” the spiritualist who ensures that the funeral follows traditions, this statement marks a symbolic acknowledgement of the change in gendered expectations, which Vietnamese society has come to accept as a result of the war. Highlighting the fluidity of traditional gender roles, Hayslip’s memoir presents a feminized memory that challenges the dominance figure of the filial, supporting Vietnamese woman, and exposes how Vietnamese women like her have to change and adapt in order to cope with the destruction of social structures caused by the war. In doing so, she also marks herself as a witness, whose story exposes alternative recollections about the war. Early in the book, the narrator recalls that her father tells her, your job is to stay alive—to keep an eye on things and keep your village safe. To find a husband and have babies and tell the story of what you have seen to your children and anyone who listens. Most of all, it is to live in peace and tend to the shrine of our ancestors. Do these things well, Bay Ly, and you will be worth more than any soldier who ever took up a sword. 135 134 Hayslip 213. 135 Hayslip 32–33. 109 In this recollection, which is Hayslip’s inspiration to write a book about her life in America, the depiction of Hayslip departs from the abstract figure of the filial, obedient Vietnamese woman, as represented by Kiêu, who sacrifices her life for her family. The Tale of Kiêu, which helped shape one of the most important traditional symbolic figures of the Vietnamese woman, is often celebrated as “the quintessential supreme masterpiece of Vietnamese literature.” 136 Critics praise the author’s use of lục bát, a traditional Vietnamese form of poetry, his ingenious application of chữ Nôm and, more importantly, his “ability to convey dominant moral and religious values.” 137 The tale recounts the life story of Kiêu, who comes from a middle-class family. Because of a false accusation, her father is arrested and their property confiscated. In order to save her family, Kiêu sells herself into prostitution. After years of suffering in brothels and at the hands of different men, Kiêu’s former lover finds her and takes her as his second wife. The accusation is lifted and the family reunited. In this tale the protagonist’s shame of prostitution is absolved by the Vietnamese man who acknowledges her sacrifice, and takes her as his wife as a symbol of forgiveness. Her honor is also restored by the male author, who serves as a witness and the teller of her story. According to Leslie Bow, the Vietnamese American community criticized Hayslip because her act of prostitution was “simultaneously a moment of national allegiance and the death of Le Ly’s [Vietnamese] national identity, and thus her betrayal 136 Mariam Lam “The Passing of Literary Traditions: The Figure of the Woman from Vietnamese Nationalism to Vietnamese American Transnationalism.” Amerasia Journal (Fall 1997/23:2), 28. 137 Lam 28. 110 of that national identity.” 138 However, as Nguyễn Giang San’s column reveals, the accusation of her betrayal took place within a tangled web of gender and ideological conflict, which used the author’s gender and sexuality as evidence of her being a communist and therefore a traitor. In other words, the accusation of betrayal takes place through the condemnation of her as a fallen woman. Hayslip’s act of prostitution, I argue, is not a symbolic act marking Hayslip’s decision to betray her Vietnamese national identity. Instead, it is one of the material pieces of evidence used by Vietnamese American critics like Nguyễn Giang San to accuse her of treason, because her sexuality entails an agency that challenges the gender dynamics, which lie at the foundation of the community’s dominant collective memory. Unlike Kiêu, whose prostitution takes place within a discourse of sacrifice, the memory about Hayslip’s father reveals that all of Hayslip’s “immoral” sexual acts result from her own “selfish” desires and her determination to survive. Her love for the employer in Saigon leads to an affair and a child out of wedlock, while her urge to leave war-torn Vietnam, “to just get the hell out and as far away as [she] could” motivates her infamous engagement in prostitution. 139 More importantly, this recollection also distinguishes Hayslip from the dominant figure of the Vietnamese woman in the Vietnamese American collective memory because it compels her to share her own stories. Unlike the women that Vo interviews, Hayslip, through the words of her father, demonstrates that for a Vietnamese woman, fulfilling the traditional expectations for a 138 Leslie Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism], Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton University Press, 2001), 122. 139 Hayslip 255. 111 woman—to find a husband and have children—is only as important as being a witness to the survival and death of the land and the people around her. Returning home, like Kiêu, after many years of struggle, Hayslip absolves herself of the shame associated with the rape, which years ago grounded her into the soil and destroyed her personhood. Unlike Kiêu, however, she becomes the author who tells the story of how Vietnamese women mitigate the consequences of war by staying alive. Critics have read both the Tale of Kiêu and Hayslip’s memoir as literary metaphors of the history of Vietnam, insinuating that the sufferings of the female protagonists represent the Vietnamese nation’s many struggles against foreign intrusions. However, as Mariam Lam asserts, such readings “inflict epistemic violence on the Vietnamese woman and the Vietnamese immigrant woman by using their bodies to represent nationalist values and endeavors, which subverts their own potential agency in both nation-states.” 140 Through the framework of feminized memory, this chapter reads Hayslip’s story as a challenge of the dominant communal and national collective memories. This challenge exposes the struggles and the alternative sexual and ideological agency of the Vietnamese woman during a time marked by changing gender dynamics. For that, her memory is refuted by and ostracized from a community, which tries to create national values to satisfy a new diasporic agenda that relies on a reiteration of traditional gender roles. 140 Lam 29. 112 In his column, Nguyễn Giang San stresses that, “nobody except Hayslip and heaven knows whether her account is true or not.” 141 More importantly, he argues, even if this memory is true, it is not worth consideration. As a fallen woman, who breached the moral code of fidelity by having an affair with a married man and allowing her body to be soiled by communists and Americans, without an excuse of sacrifice, Hayslip’s memory cannot be part of a communal collective memory built on the discourse of martyrdom and military heroism. Therefore, Nguyễn Giang San concludes, her story has no more meaning than insignificant gossip and thus has no historical significance. Consumed Memory: When Heaven and Earth Changed Places As a Minority Memoir In contrast to the hostile reception of the memoir in Nguoi Viet, numerous major U.S. newspapers – including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times – published glowing reviews of the book. Reviewers describe the book as a rare occasion for Americans to see and understand the war from the other side, and praise the author for having the courage to expose her painful past. 142 Hayslip appears in the American press as a witness who sacrifices herself in order to give a true account of the war. If the criticism of her work in Nguoi Viet exposes how her memory dissents from the collective memory of the Vietnamese American community, the overly positive reception of her memoir in American newspapers suggests that this memory is at the 141 Nguyen Giang San, A4 142 Shipler 113 same time consumable within the American imagination about the Vietnamese War because it is written in English, and takes the form of a minority discourse. The text of a speech delivered in 2004 by community activist and writer Nguyễn Thiếu Nhân, illuminates the influence of Hayslip’s rendition of the Vietnam War. Speaking as part of a community panel he asserts, the East Meets West Foundation founded by Le Ly Hayslip is a large organization that brought significant damages to the Vietnamese American refugee community, because her memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is included as a textbook in schools, is present in public libraries in all 50 states and was turned into the movie Heaven and Earth by anti-war director Oliver Stone. 143 In what follows, he re-emphasizes the accusation of Hayslip’s collaboration with the communist regime and her life story as a fallen woman. Nguyễn Thiếu Nhân’s accusation and the familiar narrative he uses to talk about Hayslip demonstrate that 15 years after its publication, Hayslip’s memoir remains as controversial as when it first came out. At the same time, however, he also admits that Hayslip’s account of the war, published by a major publisher, featured in public libraries, and adapted into a movie, is accessible and consumable in many different forms. As such, it occupies a privileged position, which many Vietnamese American writers cannot achieve, in the American imagination. The memoir’s popularity is due partly to the fact that it was one of the first books by a Vietnamese American author written in English. In his discussion of ways to deal with the “Hayslip problem,” Nguyễn Giang San points out that Hayslip’s memoir has a 143 Nguyen Thieu Nhan, “Mot So To Chuc Nhan Danh Tu Thien De Hoat Dong Tuyen Truyen Giao Luu Van Hoa Va Kinh Tai Cho Viet Cong Tai Hai Ngoai [Some organizations that use charity works to promote communist cultural and economic propaganda overseas],” speech given on 31 December 2004, in San Jose, CA, as part of a community conference organized by the Vietnamese American Representative Board in Northern California. All quotations translated from Vietnamese by author. 114 lot of power because, unlike many Vietnamese American writers of her generation, she ”manage[s] to find her way into the American media. During 14 years in the diaspora,” he writes, “Republican Vietnamese spent a lot of effort, creativity, and capital to publish books, press, research, agenda, and plans . . . about culture, politics, and society. Unfortunately, because the majority of these publications are in Vietnamese, these materials might as well not exist for the American public.” 144 This comment about Hayslip finding her way “into the American media” also sheds light on the politics governing the publishing and consumption of minority literature in the United States. Indeed, I argue that Hayslip’s memoir is so consumable because the feminized memory it represents also taps into a longer tradition of Asian American women’s literature, which started with authors such as Sui Sin Far and reached its height of popularity with the works of more contemporary writers like Maxine Hong Kingston. According to Laura Hyun Yi Kang, this body of literature is usually read within the framework of autobiography, women’s biography, or ethnic biography, in which the author functions as a particular “Other” to support the “presumed stability of the demarcation of nation, gender, and ethnicity.” 145 Implicitly criticizing Vietnamese patriarchy and exposing the violence of both Northern and Southern Vietnamese forces during the war, Hayslip’s memoir underlines a familiar binary of oppression and freedom, while wielding the discourse of forgiveness and reconciliation, which can help the American public come to terms with the controversies surrounding the Vietnam 144 Nguyen Giang San A4. 145 Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 41–48. 115 War. 146 Throughout the book, Hayslip’s account draws on this binary between Vietnam and America as symbols of oppression and freedom respectively. She returns to the homeland as a well-off and successful woman, the opposition of her image as a poor, struggling young woman in the recollections of her earlier life in Vietnam. Recalling the first conversation with her mother after arriving in Vietnam in 1986, Hayslip writes, What can I say that won’t come out like boasting? What story can I tell that won’t sound like science fiction? All I want to do now right now is take my mother back to San Diego—to take her to a shopping mall and buy her some pretty clothes and take her to a beauty salon and have her sun-brittle hair washed and set, . . . and her earth blackened nails cleaned and painted like a noble lady—like tens of thousands of noble California grandmothers. My poor mother has no idea of the marvels that I, as an American, take for granted. 147 Within this narrative, which highlights the author’s position as a middle class U.S. citizen, America emerges as a place where everybody can enjoy the economic privilege of consumption. Hayslip’s America is represented through shopping malls and beauty salons, spaces of consumerism, which seem to be devoid of people, many of them Vietnamese refugees, who do the manual work to provide such services. In addition, “the science fiction of consumption” also translates to the political marvels of democracy and justice, which marks America as the opposite of the “depressing, fearful world” that is Vietnam both during and after the war. 148 146 My discussion of diaspora as a source of freedom in opposition to the homeland/native country as a source of oppression draws from Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), and Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logistics of Transnationality (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999). 147 Hayslip 252. 148 Hayslip 252. 116 According to Viet Nguyen, Hayslip embodies the emblematic victim in American culture. “For American readers [she] has become the representative of those anonymous millions of Vietnamese in whose name the Vietnam War was fought on both sides. Through her extraordinary personal story, she not only symbolically bears the collective pain, but also bears the victim’s burden of forgiveness.” 149 Embodying a narrative of victimization, hers is a conflicted text in which she has to navigate the discourse of U.S. domestic politics to find an audience that will listen to the important issues she has to discuss. As such, Nguyen argues, her book offers a story of reconciliation aimed at both an American audience still divided over one of the most controversial wars in the nation’s history, and at Vietnamese Americans, who “are likely to perceive her as a whore and a traitor.” 150 There is no doubt that Hayslip’s memoir is a text of reconciliation. The prologue, which is subtitled “Dedicated to Peace,” ends with a reflection that resembles a prayer: “anger can teach forgiveness, hate can teach us love, and war can teach us peace.” 151 However, as Nguyen attests, Hayslip’s navigation of U.S. domestic politics also means that within the book the reconciliation takes place within a triangle of power relationships—among the United States, communist Vietnam, and the Vietnamese refugees. Yet, this unequal power relationship is not recognized in the memoir. 152 Rather, within this tangled memory about her life during the war and her return to Vietnam to deal with the aftermath of that war, the author privileges the U.S. soldiers and the United 149 Nguyen 108. 150 Nguyen 110. 151 Hayslip xv. 152 Nguyen 117. 117 States as a country by portraying them as the rescuers, whose violence can be redeemed by individual acts of charity during and after the war. The conditions for reconciliation after the war take shape within her recollections of American forces during the war. Throughout the book, Hayslip contrasts the memory of the systematic violence of both the Vietcong and the Republicans, which drives her to seek a living elsewhere, with the memory of individual acts of violence of American soldiers. On the one hand, her narrative emphasizes that the cruelty of both Vietcong and Republican Vietnamese soldiers is part of the structural violence that results from the power struggle between two regimes, which are more interested in their own dominance than in the well-being of Vietnamese people. Upon coming back from Da Nang to her village, only to see her father dying and to witness the countryside in shambles, she laments, “by tugging on their baby so brutally, both parents have wound up killing it.” 153 On the other hand, criticism of the U.S. state is utterly absent from the book. The reader does learn that before meeting Ed, the civilian who later sponsors her migration to the United States, Hayslip’s life is plagued by American lovers who hurt her physically and emotionally. She also recalls the American counselor who attempts to rape her when she tries to apply for a job. Yet, these violent encounters are always explained as exceptions. They are individual acts of violence, which are either justified through a narrative of forgiveness or through stories about acts of kindness from other Americans. After being abandoned by her third American boyfriend, who simply disappears after his tour ends, Hayslip proclaims, “certainly, I was not the first Vietnamese girl to be 153 Hayslip196. 118 abandoned by her American boyfriend, nor was I likely to be the last . . . could I blame him for trying to find peace and comfort in the middle of a war.” 154 Throughout the book, she never uses this benevolent understanding of the ways in which the trauma of war can cause soldiers to commit cruel acts to explain or justify the violence she has suffered at the hands of Vietnamese soldiers, whether from the North or the South. In another telling instance, the American MP prosecutes the counselor who tried to rape Hayslip. Dazed with victory, the author concludes: “that Americans could take the side of a poor Vietnamese girl over one of their own made that curious nation of barbarian-saints even more wondrous in my eyes. Perhaps, someplace in this cruel and dangerous world, justice was the order of the day and not just the exception.” 155 This memory about America as a place in which “justice is the norm of the day” forms the framework within which the book presents to communist Vietnam the conditions of reconciliation: Vietnam has to recognize that U.S. participation in the war was a gesture of good faith. Returning to her homeland with a plan to build a children’s hospital, Hayslip is greeted warmly by former entrepreneurs, whose life has changed dramatically since the fall of the Southern regime. Yet, the most difficult meeting is between the author and her brother, who is a high-ranking official in the communist regime. Skeptical about her plan, the brother asks how she is going to convince Americans and Vietnamese Americans to give money and help their former enemies. “It is easy,” she responds, “I will simply ask them. You see Bon Nghe, they have a choice about what they do. The people here do not. I will simply tell them. Our brothers and 154 Hayslip 325. 155 Hayslip 310. 119 sisters under the Communist roof are in a dark age and need a little light. We in the U.S. can give them the light they need.” 156 Within this exchange, Hayslip repeats the American national discourse about its role as a peacekeeper in the world as the precondition for the reconciliation process. If communist Vietnam wants to be redeemed, it will have to accept the narrative about “American exceptionalism” that has been, and continues to be employed as an excuse for American military, economic, and political interventions around the world. The third actor in this triangle of reconciliation, the Vietnamese American community, is absent, represented only by Hayslip, who at one point in the book refers to herself as “an American ambassador.” In the conversation with Bon Nghe, she uses the pronoun “we” not to refer to the Vietnamese refugees, but to talk about the American nation as the one to dictate the conditions for reconciliation. This absence of the community from her narrative further ostracizes Hayslip and her memory from the Vietnamese American collective memory. On December 25, 1993, in the weekly column of Nguoi Viet, Bùi Bảo Trúc, the same person who would later attack the article by Huỳnh Thuỷ Châu in 2009, writes about the movie Heaven and Earth by Oliver Stone. Although he praises the movie for its cinematic qualities and the wonderful performance of lead actress Le Thi Hiep, Bui admits that he has no sympathy for the book on which it was based. Rather, he was insulted that a book, which tells the life story of a Vietnamese woman with a past “not entirely representative for the majority of Vietnamese people, was proclaimed a representative literary work of overseas Vietnamese in a conference about Vietnamese literature shortly before the movie was 156 Hayslip 342. 120 released.” 157 Because Hayslip’s memoir is one of the first literary work authored by a Vietnamese American to gain significant popularity among American readers, the absence of the community from the book coupled with the criticism of the Southern Vietnamese forces during the war brought Hayslip’s book much criticism from a community desperate to get its own stories across the language and cultural barrier. Bùi’s criticism is also directed at the book, instead of the movie based on it, because as a memoir it is read as a testimony of a story that he deems non-representative of the community. This expectation to tell the story of the community, it is necessary to note, has diminished as more Vietnamese American writers have been published so that second-generation Vietnamese authors do not face as many criticisms, and they have relatively more freedom to explore alternative memories. In this analysis, it is important to explore the role of the co-writer, Jay Wurts, whose name is rarely mentioned in reviews of the book. Yet, he was the person who, in Hayslip’s own words, “helped [her] memories walk, live and breath again.” 158 According to Leslie Bow, in the case of Hayslip, Wurts’ co-authorship does not raise as much controversy as in the case of other books that he co-authored, because the ideological agenda of When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is less overtly expressed. 159 However, Nguyễn Giang San’s column makes clear that the co-authorship with Wurts greatly influenced the way Hayslip and her work were received by both the Vietnamese American community and the American mainstream public. According to his Web site, 157 Bùi Bảo Trúc. “Lá Thư Hoa Thịnh Đốn (Letter from Washington)” Nguoi Viet Newspaper October 4, 1996, A3. 158 Hayslip v. 159 Bow 134. 121 Jay Wurts is a journalist who has co-written a number of memoirs, which tell the life stories of women of color. It remains unclear to what extent Wurts edited the original manuscript of Hayslip’s memoir, which was typed, edited, and partly translated by her son James. 160 Yet, according to Nguyễn Giang San, the original manuscript, which was denied twice by publishers, did not contain details about her prostitution. Consequently, Jay Wurts may be responsible not only for the narrative crafting of the memoir, but also for the inclusion of particular details, such as Hayslip’s one-time engagement in prostitution, which helped the memoir gain so much sympathy from American readers. In a response to similar criticism, Hayslip relays in one of her talks that the editor actually asked her to remove details of other sexual violence she encountered, because it seemed too unbelievable that so many atrocities could happen to one woman. In this debate, the connection between rape and the truthfulness of the memoir highlights an important gender dimension of the way experiences of the war are remembered in both the Vietnamese American community and in the American society at large. Discussing the vulnerability of victims of traumatic events, Judith Herman argues that the trauma of rape is the equivalent of the post-traumatic stress disorder of combat. 161 Consequently, combat and rape should be understood as the public and private form of organized social violence. Yet, as Hayslip’s case makes clear, the experience of rape is controversial while the experience of combat is privileged as a sign of heroism within both the communal and national collective memories. Both in Nguyễn Giang San’s column and in Hayslip’s anecdote about her editor, the experiences of sexual violence 160 Bow 134. 161 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 61. 122 diminish Hayslip’s credibility as a witness. While the American editor marginalized Hayslip’s memories about sexual exploitation and excluded some of them from the narrative altogether, the Vietnamese American press discredited them as worthless gossips and used them to exile Hayslip’s work from the community’s dominant collective memory. The controversy surrounding the influence of others on the final shape of the memoir is another factor that makes Vietnamese Americans readers distrust Hayslip’s memoir. In his column, Nguyễn Giang San calls Wurts “a writing worker” [thợ viết], who would put down anything in writing in exchange for money. As such, he is part of the publishing machine that capitalizes on scandalous details and readers’ compassion to sell books for profit. This is the same publishing machine that ignored the works of many Vietnamese American writers at that time. More importantly, however, the fact that Hayslip needed a co-author further weaken her credibility, because it emphasizes her background as an illiterate peasant woman who has to rely on another person to write her narrative. Consequently, she was distrusted not only because of the gendered and sexual memories in her work, but also as a result of her class background. Yet, her status as a poor, peasant woman of color, who was raped and forced into prostitution as a consequence of poverty and war, also reinforces her image as a victim of war to American reviewers. “No one, who reads it,” proclaims a reviewer for The Washington Post, “will ever be able to think about the Vietnam War in quite the same way again.” 162 As a witness whose body is inscribed with the violence and trauma of war, 162 Arnold R. Isaacs, “Vietnam: The Sorrow and the Pity,” The Washington Post 16 July (1989). 123 these details help American readers visualize and sympathize with Hayslip’s struggles while they consume her stories. Through these acts of consumption, her memory becomes the exemplar of Vietnamese and Vietnamese American experience of the war in the American imagination and she becomes a witness, the one bearing “the collective suffering,” but also the collective forgiveness, of Vietnamese people. 163 A dissenting voice within the Vietnamese American collective memory, her memory is at the same time dominant within the American national imaginary, obscuring other voices that may be more critical of the role of the United States in the war. According to Paul Ricoeur, forgetting “remains the disturbing threat that lurks in the background of the phenomenology of memory and of the epistemology of history.” 164 Through an exposition of the controversies surrounding the reception of Hayslip and her memoir, this chapter makes clear that the formation of collective memory, whether of a nation or a diasporic community, is always contingent on the forgetting, refusal, and exile of dissenting memories. Memories of violent and traumatic events, once formed, leave traces that cannot be erased. Yet, there is an inherent difficulty in the work of memory because these exiled memories always face the danger of being incorporated, to different extents, into the discourses of communal and national collective memory. Exploring Hayslip’s memoir through the framework of feminized memory, this chapter illustrates the degree to which the project of national and diasporic communal memory fails to account for the lived experiences and gendered effects of war and dislocation. Challenging the masculinist framework of the Vietnamese American collective memory, 163 Nguyen 108. 164 Ricoeur 642. 124 this feminized memory is exiled and refuted within the community. At the same time, the analysis of the book’s reception reveals that the same memories, which are denied within a communal context can also be co-opted and appropriated within a national discourse. Because memory, as Jeffrey Olick reminds us, has no single meaning, or a clear political agenda, there is an inherent danger in the way that some memories, even the ones that in some contexts are exiled and denied, are privileged. Consequently, an understanding of exile as a tool to challenge un-freedom in the diaspora, taken outside the realm of fiction, can never be a finished narrative, but must remain within the process of being made and unmade. 125 Chapter 3 A Different Modernism: Race, Language and Colonialism in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt A language tires. A language tries to be. A language tries to be free. —Gertrude Stein, Photograph Across century, Henry James and Rushdie agree that this is ‘the high modernism of the condition,’ that the movement and mixture of peoples and their languages, dialects, and vernaculars is the defining condition of the literature of our time. —Michael North, The Dialects of Modernism Twenty-two years after the publication of Lely Hayslip’s first memoir, on April 14, 2011, an event titled “Beyond the War: Vietnamese American Film and Literature Envision a New Homeland” took place in Washington, DC. Moderated by Isabelle Pelaud, and featuring second-generation Vietnamese American writer Monique Truong, artist Truong Tran, and filmmaker Mark Tran, the panel members attempted to explore the state of Vietnamese American art and literature thirty six years after the fall of Saigon and the formation of the Vietnamese American community. For the past few decades, explained Pelaud in her opening remarks, Vietnamese American literature has often been framed within the context of the Vietnam War. While this memory is an important aspect of many Vietnamese American writers’ literary and collective identities, in the case of a growing generation of second-generation artists, for whom the Vietnam War is a distant and often handed-down memory, this focus by the public on the war as an essential part of the Vietnamese American experience can also be an obstacle. 126 Like the narrator of Thuận’s Chinatown who laments that a Vietnamese writer in France can only be a representative of war and poverty, Vietnamese American writers often find themselves confined within a narrative of war, in which they and their characters function as recognized “Others” within the American national imagination. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the recollections of the Vietnam War still play an important role in the dominant collective memory and politics of the Vietnamese American community. Consequently, writers and artists—especially those of the second generation—also face the community’s expectations to represent and retell stories of war and refuge. Vietnamese American writers and artists who actively resist such categorization in order to explore a multitude of Vietnamese American experiences— which may be informed by the war, but which may also exceed and move beyond it— engage in a constant negotiation of ambivalent relationships among the artists, the different audiences, and the publishing industry. Yet, as the panel members highlighted, in decentralizing the war and engaging with other kinds of histories, these artists and writers redefine what it means to be Vietnamese American, Asian American, and ultimately American. In this chapter I focus on of one of these works, to discuss how an exploration of an alternative Vietnamese diasporic experience might open a critical investigation of an important period in American literature and history. Moving beyond the United States, The Book of Salt, the first novel by Vietnamese American author Monique Truong, tells the story of Binh, who is forced to leave his homeland after having a love affair with the French chef-de-cuisine in the 127 Governor General’s house in Saigon. He survives by working on ships and in different French households, before being employed as a live-in cook by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas during the famous couple’s residence in Paris. Straddling his life in Saigon under colonial rule, his adventures as a galley hand at sea, and his experiences in the studio on 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, Binh’s story offers a different picture of an American modernist icon from the point of view of a queer, exiled, colonial subject. As scholars have pointed out, the character of Binh was inspired by a brief note in the Alice B. Toklas’s cookbook about two Indochinese men who cooked for Stein and Toklas while they lived in France. One of them, Truong reveals in an interview, responded to an advertisement placed by Toklas in the local newspaper. Binh’s experience as a galley on a French ocean liner going from Saigon to Marseilles is also inspired by the life of a different, much more famous Vietnamese cook in Paris, who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh. Wandering the waters between his homeland and an unknown destination, Binh follows the footsteps of the revolutionary whose quest to reunite Vietnam would lead to the exodus of millions of Vietnamese people, including Truong’s family members. Thus, Binh’s life, though it is a product of the author’s imagination, also represents an unverifiable possibility within the context of the French century- long colonial rule of Vietnam, exposing linkages that could have taken place and yet were forgotten within the official history of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris. According to David Eng, “Binh’s dim presence in the archive 128 compels Truong’s fictional narrative as a historical supplement,” challenging a version of history as “the way it really was,” to highlight the absences in this history as objects of investigation. 165 As such, The Book of Salt also functions as a counter-archive that draws from the existing archives about Gertrude Stein not only to reveal forgotten subjects like Binh, but also to urge us to reconsider two icons of American modernism in a way that brings together issues of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. In its analysis of race, this chapter builds on earlier scholarship on The Book of Salt by scholars including Anna Linzie, David Eng, and Y-Dang Troeung, who discuss Truong's portrayal of the hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality in the novel within the context of queer diaspora and historicism, food and colonialism, and postcolonial collaborative autobiography. However, the chapter focuses specifically on the issue of language, and in particular, the intersection of language, colonialism, and race, as a way to explore Binh’s life, desires, and exile, as well as his connection to Gertrude Stein. Continuing my discussion of exile as both a means of disciplining and a practice of radical freedom, I contend that because of his position as a queer, colonial subject, Binh is exiled from both colonial Vietnamese and French society. Yet, occupying the space of exile, serving employers who use languages that are foreign to him, and concealing his true desires, the protagonist also demonstrates an inventive use of his limited vocabulary and grammatical forms, which denaturalizes language, 165 David Eng, “The End(s) of Race,” PMLA (2008), 1481. 129 allowing words to proliferate and take on new meanings. This denaturalized language serves both as a means of survival and as an act of defiance for Binh and other subjects of color forced into servant positions in their colonized homeland and in the “mère-patrie.” In the novel, the complex relationship between Binh and Gertrude Stein is revealed through Stein’s fascination with Binh’s language. On the one hand, Stein mimics his elemental language, in the same way that she mimics the vernaculars of African Americans in a process of “Othering,” to differentiate herself from these subjects of color. On the other hand, Binh also notices that she studies the mutations, suggesting an act of appropriation within a colonial context. Thus, the linguistic innovation that defines Stein as an artist draws from and relies on racialized and colonized people in France and in other parts of the world. Through this analysis the chapter seeks to contribute to a larger discussion about the transnational and transcultural character of American modernism. Although scholars such as Michael North and Paul Gilroy have pointed out the important influence of African and African American culture and language on the works of the most prominent modernist writers, scholarship on modernism, as Siglinde Lemke asserts, for the most part still fails to account for the impact of the non-Western world on the shaping of the period’s aesthetics. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy writes that “the reflexive cultures and consciousness of European settlers and those of the Africans they enslaved, the ‘Indians’ they slaughtered, and the Asians they indentured were not, even in situations of the most 130 extreme brutality, sealed off hermetically from each other.” 166 Yet, these mutual influences are often forgotten and ignored in official histories. Within this context The Book of Salt offers a counter-archive, through which we can trace other possible influences that allowed modernism to be affirmed and take shape. Colonial Modernism According to Raymond Williams, the most important characteristics of modernism, such as the understanding of language as not transparent or the radical questioning of processes of representation, are the effects of the writers’ and artists’ frequent travels. From Appolinaire and Joyce to Beckett and Ionesco, writers were continuously moving to Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, meeting there exiles from the Revolution coming the other way, bringing with them the manifestos of post-revolutionary formation. Such endless border crossing at a time when with the First World War, the passport was instituted, worked to naturalize the thesis of the non-natural status of language, the experience of visual and linguistic strangeness, the broken narrative of the journey and its inevitable accompaniment of transient encounters with characters whose self-representation was bafflingly unfamiliar. 167 For Williams, the key characteristics of modernism are formed through the artists’ encounters with those who are different from themselves—linguistically, culturally, and inevitably racially—as they move to the new metropolitan centers such as London, Berlin, Paris, and New York. Such emphasis on movement, and on urban centers as transformative spaces in which modernist writers came into contact with people different from themselves, neglects the fact that the meeting 166 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 2. 167 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 2007), 34. 131 and cohabitation of spaces with those designated as “Others,” particularly in the case of American writers, is not a new phenomenon, considering the histories of African American slavery, Native American genocide, and Asian American exclusion in the United States. Many scholars have pointed out the major influence of African American culture on modernism. Discussing the frequent use of African American vernaculars, the use of blackface as masking, and the role of African American characters in major modernist literary works, North asserts, “the new voice that American culture acquired in the 1920, the decade of jazz, stage musicals, talking pictures, and aesthetic modernism, was very largely a black one.” 168 Nevertheless, Williams’s emphasis on the writers’ movement across borders and their congregation in European cities as a condition of modernism also suggests other kinds of encounters that could have influenced the aesthetics of modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein. Around the time when Stein arrived in Paris in 1903, Vietnamese people also began to immigrate to France as a result of the French colonization of Indochina dating back to 1885. The earliest migrants were a small number of Vietnamese elite, who came to France to acquire an education. During World War I, however, close to 48,000 workers and 43,000 soldiers from French Indochina arrived to serve in France and on the Mediterranean war front. 169 They joined laborers from Southern Europe and France’s 168 Michael North, Dialectics of Modernism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7. For a further discussion of the influence of African American culture and vernaculars on modernist writers see also Siglinde Lemke Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) and Fisher-Fishkin, Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African- American Voices. (New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993). 169 Tobias Rettig, “Preventing Chinese-Indochinese WWI Encounters: Spatial Imperial Policing in 132 other colonies in North Africa, Madagascar, and China, who were recruited by the French government to fulfill the need for manpower required to sustain both the army and the wartime economy. As scholars have pointed out, the experiences of this earliest wave of Vietnamese migrants were diverse. While many of them were forcibly drafted from villages and sent to Europe in chains, others were migrant workers and peasants who volunteered because the army and migration offered a way out of poverty and a chance to earn a career that would otherwise be unavailable to them in a colonial Vietnam plagued with economic crises and social disorder. 170 During the war, while the soldiers participated in various battles, the laborers took part in different segments of the French wartime economy. Many were members of labor battalions, which accompanied troops to repair roads, carry ammunitions, and take care of the sick and wounded. They were also employed in food and weapons production, construction, and maintenance. Considered a cheaper and more docile labor force, these workers were sometimes strategically employed to break the strikes of French laborers, although historical sources have shown that they also participated in the labor movement, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. 171 The end of the war brought an end to this labor collaboration between colonial Metropolitan France,” unpublished book chapter, 41. Rettig notes that this number varies significantly among different scholars. “According to Kimloan Hill, ‘about ninety-nine thousand men from Indochina were recruited,’ much higher than the 91,747 put forward by Mireille Le Van Ho (née Favre) as having served, or the total of 92,411 made up of 48,981 colonial workers [travailleurs coloniaux] and 43,430 soldier-workers [soldats-travailleurs] as put forward by Bouhier. The discrepancy between the higher and lower numbers is largely due to the fact, as presented by Jacques Frémeaux, that 5,492 of the initially 48,922 recruited soldiers eventually did not come to Europe.” 170 Kim Loan Hill, “Strangers in a Foreign Land: Vietnamese Soldiers and Workers in Vietnam During World War I,” in Viet Nam: Borderless Histories, ed. Nhung Tuyet Tran (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 258. 171 Hill 274. 133 recruits and French workers. The majority of the surviving soldiers and workers left France as the French soldiers returned to reclaim their work in the cities. Out of more than 90,000 recruits, only close to 3,000 were able to remain in France. Half of those who remained were students and sailors and a small number were allowed to stay because they married French citizens. The rest were employed as domestic servants and manual laborers. 172 While there have been some studies about the Indochinese soldiers and workers in France, little if anything is known about those who toiled in the backrooms and kitchens of French cities, cooking and cleaning. We know, however, that they, together with the sailors and students, form the earliest Indochinese colony in France. Though small, this population paved the way for more migrants to arrive in the postwar period. Consequently, the movement of modernist artists to the European metropolitan centers, including Paris, coincided with the movement of Indochinese and African colonial subjects to major French cities that came about as a direct result of French rule over their homelands. Binh’s arrival at 27 rue de Fleurus, thus, takes place within the context of a colonial relationship. Looking at the call for help, which starts out with, “Two American Ladies wish . . .” Binh thinks to himself, What a fine household we would make, hand movement and crude drawing to supplement our mutual use of a second hand language. Though contrary to what the Old Man would have me believe, the vocabulary of servitude is not built on my knowledge of foreign words but rather on my ability to swallow them. Not my own of course, but Monsieur and Madame’s.” 173 172 Hill 276. 173 Monique Truong, The Book of Salt (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003),13. 134 This first lesson about the language of servitude, which Binh has learnt at the Governor- General’s house in colonial Vietnam, accompanies him throughout his life in France and will continue to guide him in the house of Stein and Toklas. Even before he meets his new “Madame and Madame,” the relationship—which mirrors the hierarchy he grew up with in colonial Vietnam— is established. The fact that the two American ladies might not be more fluent in French than Binh has little significance, because, ultimately, as a servant, he will have to swallow a language that is foreign to him. Talking about his daily routine in the Stein/Toklas house, Binh explains, Miss Toklas inspects my hand every day. First she checks my nails to see if they are cut and clean . . . then she turns my hands palms up, a step she had added just for me her “Little Indochinese.” I know, GertrudeStein, that that is what Miss Toklass call me when anger gets the better of her. Her Little Indochinese? Madame, we Indochinese belong to the French. You two may live in France, but you are still Americans, after all. Little Indochinese, indeed. 174 Toklas referring to Binh as “her Little Indochinese” and the cook’s ironic protest that he “belongs” to the French invokes a complicated relationship between the colonial subjects in Paris and the American expatriates. This relationship is closely connected to the ambivalent position of these expatriates in French society. As much as Parisians profited from the presence of Americans swarming their city during the period of prohibition, the onset of the depression in 1929, which forced many expatriates to go home, was also a reason to rejoice for many French. As Binh comments, “the Parisians missed the money alright, but no one missed the Americans.” 175 Money, however, allowed Americans, even “the cocky, overwhelming of pride,” to occupy a respectable space in French society, 174 Truong 142. 175 Truong 6. 135 known for its nationalistic pride and its distrust of foreigners. Money, and the class position that accompanies it, also allow these expatriates to adopt a French colonizer’s mentality toward the “Little Indochinese” who found themselves in the mère patrie. Although Binh protests that he is a French colonial subject and therefore does not “belong” to the Americans, who are, after all, only guests in French society, at 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas take the place of the succession of Monsieurs and Madames, the true colons in the Governor-General’s house, and the French elite, who profit directly and indirectly from France’s colonial quest even when they remain in the comfort of the City of Light. Ultimately, this power relationship is granted less by Stein’s nationality, than by her class position. As John Carlos Rowe makes clear, “Gertrude Stein hardly deserved the lost generation tag given to so many of her expatriate U.S. friends in Europe.” 176 The family trust, managed by her brother Michael, afforded her a comfortable, upper-middle- class life in Paris from the beginning. During World War I, the profits Stein obtained from selling artworks she had procured while living with her brother Leo insulated her and Toklas from the devastation of the war. Even after the depression compelled many U.S. expatriates to return home, Stein’s little fortune allowed her to continue her indulgence in paintings, haute cuisine, and literary creation. This lifestyle was also enabled through the colonial rule of France, which provided the upper class in France with cheap colonial labor in their own cities. Within this context, both Binh’s anecdote about Toklas claiming him as “her Little Indochinese” and his association of the job 176 John Carlos Rowe, “Naming What’s Inside: Gertrude Stein’s Use of Names in Three Lives,” unpublished article, 47. 136 announcement with the language of servitude invoke a colonial relationship between him and his Madames, which suggests that the presence of American modernist artists like Gertrude Stein in France is intricately linked to and profits from French colonialism. A Language of Exile Yet the contours of the language of servitude are not adequate to describe Binh’s language, which has developed as a means for him, as a queer, colonial subject, to survive and to defy both in the homeland and in the diaspora. In postcolonial scholarship language is often discussed as one of the colonizer’s most important tools to dominate. According to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, although the ultimate aim of colonialism is to control people’s wealth, that goal cannot be achieved merely through economic and political control. A complete and effective domination can only be achieved with mental control, which dictates, though culture, how people perceive themselves and the world around them. Within this process, “the domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonizing nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonized.” 177 Yet, as Ngũgĩ and other scholars make clear, because of its intimate connection to culture and the way people perceive themselves, language has also been an important weapon in the process of decolonization, an instrument for the colonized to challenge those who attempt to control them and the world around them. 177 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing The Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1981), 16. 137 In the novel, the act of defiance takes place through a refusal to learn the colonizer’s language. Continuing his musings on the language of servitude, Binh explains, The first thing that I learned at the Governor-General’s house was that when Monsieur and Madame were consumed by their lunatic displeasure at how the floors had been waxed, how the silver had been polished, or how the poulet had been stewed, they would berate the household staff, all fifteen of us, in French. . . . Of course, we would all bow our heads and act repentant, just as the catholic priest had taught us. Of course we would all stand there, blissful in our ignorance of the nuances, wordplay, and double-entendres of that language that was seeking so desperately to assault us. Naturally, some words would slip through, but for the most part we were all rather skilled in our refusal and rejection of all but the most necessary. 178 If, as Binh claims, the vocabulary of servitude depends on the ability of the servant to accept the orders and insults from Madames and Monsieurs, then the refusal to understand anything more than necessary to complete his daily tasks becomes a way for Binh to survive and retain his personhood. Refusing to understand, he protects himself from being hurt by the words that are meant to wound. However, such rejection is also a silent challenge. Within the colonial context, the rebuke by the colonizers in their own language exceeds a desire to express their displeasure with the mistakes the servants have made and functions as a justification for the process of colonization. It is meant to belittle those against whom the words are directed and to allow the colonizers to convince themselves that they are there to educate and “rescue” these lesser human beings from their own ignorance. Thus, when Binh and the other servants consciously reject the insults thrown at them, the power of the language to uphold the logic of colonization 178 Truong 13. 138 loses its meaning. The act of repentance becomes an irony the Madames and Monsieurs are not aware of when the servants, who are supposed to show remorse and regret their failure to please, stand in “blissful ignorance” of the faults they are accused of. The lack of understanding gains a new meaning, comprehensible only to those who consciously refuse to believe in the power of the colonizer’s language. M. Rodier, the former lieutenant governor of the colony, in an indictment of the state of education in Indochina in 1907, laments, “Some hundred Annamites speak French, and some thousand murder the language—domestic servants, cooks, coolies and rickshaw bearers.” 179 This sentiment is echoed by Binh’s brother, Minh, who tells the other servants that “the French never tired of debating why the Indochinese of a certain class are never able to master the difficulties, the subtleties, the winged eloquence of the French language.” 180 These comments on the inability of colonized subjects to master the language of their colonizers, reflects again the colonial logic in which the colonized subject is deemed inferior. Consequently, colonization is justified as a benevolent project to save the Indochinese from themselves. At the same time, Rodier’s lament about the murder of the French language at the hand of “domestic servants, cooks, coolies and rickshaw bearers,” ironically reveals the agency of these laborers. Consciously refusing to learn the language, Binh and other colonized subjects like him “murder” the French language by preventing its proliferation in the colony. Rejecting all but the most necessary, they castrate the language; taking only pieces that can help them survive while 179 Scott McConnel, Leftward Journey: The Education of Vietnamese Students in France, 1919–1939 (News Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publisher, 1989), 5. 180 Truong 13. 139 leaving others untouched. In so doing they refuse to let the Madames and Monsieurs take complete control over the connection to their own culture and the world around them. This act of defiance, however, leaves Binh with a truncated language, a limited vocabulary to speak and not to swallow, which he is forced to reinvent in order to survive and express his desires. While the conscious selective learning of French might have saved his personhood in his homeland, in the diaspora it becomes another sign marking him as an outsider. “For every coarse, misshapen phrase, for every blundered, dislocated word, [he pays] a fee.” 181 And yet, Binh also asserts, “language is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the key. But when I infiltrate their words, take a stab at their meanings, I create the trapdoors that will allow me in when the night outside is too cold and dark.” 182 Comparing language to a house to which he has no access, he highlights his exile in France, which is the result of both his sexuality and his position as a colonial subject. In the diaspora, however, language again becomes his tool of defiance. Where communication fails he creates understanding, redesigning the language to serve his own purpose and feed his own longing instead of using it merely to please others. Reinventing a language that is foreign to him, and which is often used to alienate him, Binh creates a place for himself in a world that is seeking to exclude him. This language of exile takes many different forms, each of which directly challenges the nature of language as a way to ease communication as well as to transmit culture and conventions. When Binh starts work at a new house, his new Madames and 181 Truong 18. 182 Truong 155. 140 Monsieurs often accompany him to the market to make sure that he can differentiate between “a poularde and a poullette.” “I rarely fail them,” Binh claims, Of course I have never been able to memorize or keep an accurate tally of the obsessive assortment of words that the French have devised for this animal . . . . Fat chickens, young chickens, newly hatched chickens, old wiry chickens, all are awarded their very own name, a noble title of sorts in this language that can afford to be so drunk and extravagant toward what lies on the dinner table. “A chicken” and “not this chicken” these are the only words I need to navigate the poultry market of this city. 183 Lacking the rich vocabulary to express his need for a specific type of ingredient, Binh resorts to communicating in the negative. An affirmative followed by a rejection forms the winding road that leads him to meanings and what he needs to feed those who pay his salary. Wandering between names unknown to him, he breaks the few words he has to spare into a binary system of “what is” and “what is not” in order to be understood. Yet, ignoring all other words except for the ones he absolutely needs, Binh also poses a challenge to the language prized by its native speakers for its extravagance of food names. Wielding his limited vocabulary, he makes clear that the many names are futile. They are excessive decorations meant to satisfy the pride of the speakers, rather than to serve as essential tools for communication. Rejecting “the noble titles” one by one as they are offered to him, he also puts the burden of guessing the meaning on the people selling him the “precise specimen that will grace tonight’s pot,” Frenchmen and women who will have to find out what he, a second-hand user of language, means by “not this chicken.” 184 183 Truong 18. 184 Truong 18. 141 At times, the infiltration of the language takes place by imbuing unknown words with his own meanings. Commenting on Stein and Toklas’s many pet names for each other, Binh sniggers, “I have heard them all. I do not have a favorite. I do not know what they mean. Though ‘Cake’ sounds to me like the English name ‘Kate.’ A ‘Kate’ who is good enough for Gertrude Stein to eat is a ‘Cake.’” 185 Slipping his own definition into a word he does not understand, Binh creates a different set of references that only he can recognize. His stolen meaning blurs linguistic categories, crossing between proper and improper nouns, between subject and object, the person eating becomes the thing being eaten. It is a different door opening onto an understanding of the relationship between Stein and Toklas, known solely to the one loitering six days of the week in the back of the room, unnoticed. Like the servants at the Governor-General’s house who turn the colonizer’s language into a string of incomprehensible sounds in an ironic act of blissful ignorance, Binh adopts the words that are not meant for him and transforms them into his own private irony that allows him to “catch his breath and smile.” In an interview, Truong explains that “Binh's stories are told via his internal voice, one which is far richer, far more agile—in fact, it is a stark contrast to the voice that comes out of his mouth.” 186 As he explains at the beginning of the book, after years of serving French people in his homeland and in their homeland he has acquired “just enough cheap serviceable words to fuel [his] desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed it.” 187 Consequently, he devises his own language when forced to 185 Truong 155. 186 Truong, “An Interview with Monique Truong,” press release, Houghton Mifflin Web site, http://www.hmhbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/truong/ (accessed Feb 23, 2012). 187 Truong 11. 142 express the richness of his desires and experiences with his limited knowledge of French. Indeed, Binh’s language is most imaginative when he tries to communicate his desires. Remembering the time he spends with his American lover, Sweet Sunday Man, Binh relates, “we will throw all our words onto the table and find those saturated with meaning. Like the nights we have had together, there will be few. We will attempt to tell stories to each other with just one word.” 188 Shut out from the languages of his object of desire, Binh invents his own language by infusing the words he has at hand with more and more meanings. In the same way that “not this chicken” stands in for a plethora of poultry specimens, a word spoken to his lover can be a question and a response, a request, and a wish fulfilled. His comprehension comes from a trained ability to look for signs and signals that linger and hide in between and behind words that too often limit and deny him entry into their meanings. Therefore, when he listens to Sweet Sunday Man talk about his own life in an unfamiliar language, Binh admits, “I free myself from the direct translation of your words into understandable feelings and recognizable acts. I leave your words raw, allow myself to experience your language as a medium of songs, improvising and in flux.” 189 Not only saturating his own vocabulary with meanings, so he can tell a story with just one word, Binh frees the words he hears from their associations to treat them as signs that can be interpreted in multiple ways, through his body and mind. He accepts the fluidity of meaning and creates comprehension out of the way words are said and the things that 188 Truong 111. The name of Sweet Sunday Man is Marcus Lattimore. He is one of the young American scholars and artists who frequented Stein and Toklas’ studio. In the book, he is also identified as an African American trying to pass for white in Paris. 189 Truong 111. 143 remain silent and unspoken. Unbound by the rules of grammar and habitual references, this language of exile and desire is constantly made and unmade in a process of improvisation and revision until it can carry the richness of his longing. A Gift or a Theft The first encounter between Binh, the cook, and Gertrude Stein, the modernist writer, takes place through this language of exile. Discussing the menu of the week for the first time with Toklas, Binh notices that Gertrude Stein has taken interest in his interpretation of French. “She is affirmed by my use of negatives and repetitions,” he recalls, “she is inspired by witnessing such an elemental, bare-knuckled breakdown of a language. . . . My Madame was amusing herself with my French.” 190 This fascination with Binh’s inventive language may be the result of Stein’s own limited knowledge of French. As Binh explains, “her French, like mine, has its limits. It denies her. It forces her to be short if not precise. In French, Gertrude Stein finds herself wholly dependent on simple sentences.” 191 Forced to rely on a foreign language on a day-to-day basis, Stein, like Binh, has to resort to less effective ways of communicating, such as using negatives, or a series of short, simple sentences that form a roundabout way to convey a straightforward message. Unable to draw at will on the words and phrases when she needs them, Stein is perhaps fascinated with the way someone who is even more limited than she is—because he lacks the power of class and nationality to command attention— can make himself understood. 190 Truong 34. 191 Truong 34. 144 It is also possible that Stein finds Binh’s language inspiring because she sees in him a fellow exile. In her study of Stein’s language, Ulla E. Dydo writes, “anyone reading Stein must understand what it was like for an artist to live under incessant, condescending assaults upon her as a writer, a person and woman.” 192 Even among artists, Stein’s public declaration of her lesbian sexual identity and her well-publicized life with Toklas were considered radical moves. More importantly, as a writer, she experienced rejection for a many years before achieving literary recognition. Yet, in the novel, Stein’s fascination with Binh’s language takes a special form, which suggests that Stein might recognize Binh’s exile, but she does not see him as an equal subject. Referring to the first time his Madame shows interest in his language, Binh relates, “she was wrapping my words around her tongue, saving them for a later, more careful study of their mutations.” 193 The initial curiosity is followed by a systematic analysis. Everyday, Binh reminds us, he becomes the main attraction in an after-dinner activity, in which Stein tests his skill to resourcefully define things, the names of which he does not know in French. “She devotes no more than half an hour to it, a diversion before she cracks open a broad-spine book for the remainder of the night.” 194 This daily spectacle resembles a one-man freak show, in which the Indochinese cook is the oddity to be exhibited. Forced to demonstrate his rare ability to invent ever- new names, Binh and his language become a source of entertainment for his Madames, though what makes him the center of the show is more than language. When Gertrude 192 Ulla E. Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 13. 193 Truong 35. 194 Truong 35. 145 Stein, “in a classic move from the material to the spiritual,” asks him to define love, Binh remarks bitterly, “GertrudeStein, like the collectors who have preceded her, wants to see the stretch marks on my tongue.” 195 Demonstrating the language he has developed through his struggles as an exile, the activity forces him to expose parts of his life with every word and phrase; scars left from the many attacks on his sexuality, nationality, and social positions. In this spectacle, Stein is both the spectator and the commissioner. She decides when it will start and when Binh can be dismissed because her curiosity has been satisfied for the night. Making him recall his life stories on her command, Stein sets Binh apart from herself through a colonial gaze. In her fascination with Binh’s language, Stein is also a collector: “She was wrapping [his] words around her tongue, saving them for a later, more careful study of their mutations.” 196 The metaphor of eating, the image of Stein wrapping her tongue around Binh’s inventive words, the same way that she tastes the dishes that he has served for dinner, makes clear that the author is not merely satisfied with being the spectator. Devouring Binh’s language and the stories they carry, she retains them, look inside them for the secret ingredients, the rules that have been discarded and defied in order for them to take place. Saving them on her tongue, she waits for when she can use them, his words and his story. In the novel, Binh is not the only one whose language is used to mark him as an “Other.” In his article Eng discusses Binh’s relationship to Lattimore and Stein’s interest in the latter’s racial identity as an instance in which Truong demonstrates how the high 195 Truong 36. 196 Truong 35. 146 modernism represented by Stein not only helped manage and efface questions of race, but was also enabled through the forgetting of racial “Others” from Africa and Asia. 197 Stein’s curiosity about Sweet Sunday Man’s racial identity, however, is preceded by an act of linguistic mimicry, which serves to racialize another “Negro.” Recalling Lattimore’s first visit to the studio, Stein notes that he walked away in the middle of a fascinating discussion on music she was having with Robeson. 198 “I asked him why he insisted on singing Negro spirituals when he could be performing requiem and oratorios,” Stein relates to Toklas, “Do you know what that curiosity in a suit said? In that basso profundo voice of his, he replied, ‘the spirituals, theys a belong to me, Missa Stein.” 199 Stein’s referring to Robeson as the “curiosity in a suit” insinuates a similarity in the way she perceives Robeson and Binh. Like the cook who must showcase his difference in the daily spectacle after dinner, Robeson is also forced to perform his difference while Stein holds him in a racialized gaze. Mimicking the African American vernaculars, which, according to Lattimore, Robeson did not use, Stein assigns him the marking of his race and designates him as a racial “Other.” This act of mimicry is significant because Stein, like many other modernist writers, draws on the stories and languages of African Americans in her works. 200 As North explains, “linguistic imitation and racial masquerade are so important to 197 Eng 1490. 198 The character is identified as Paul Robeson, an American concert singer, recording artist, actor, athlete, and scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century. 199 Truong 188. 200 An example would be Three Lives and the story of Melanctha, which has been discussed by John Carlos Rowe and Michael North. 147 transatlantic modernism because they allow the writer to play at self-fashioning.” 201 Slipping in and out of a “Black identity” through mimicry of African American vernaculars, using blackface and passing both in writing and in person, the white American modernist writers afford themselves an unfixed identity, which frees their artistic self-creation. 202 Through racial ventriloquism, these authors stage a rebellion against the standardization of the English language and other social constraints that push them to look for their freedom of expression across the Atlantic. Paradoxically, the same vernacular that affords white modernist writers their freedom functions as a chain for African American poets of the same generation. “In the version created by the white minstrel tradition,” North asserts, “it is a constant reminder of the literal unfreedom of slavery and the political and cultural repression that follow emancipation.” 203 Instead of bringing about a re-evaluation of African American culture, the modernist mimicry of a “Black language” only reinforces a racial hierarchy, which has been used to exclude works by African American authors from the national canon. If being modern means challenging the norms and the standard, of language and society, then the Blackness that American modernist artists use in this struggle is defined as an abnormality, which only some have the power to choose to wear like a mask. Blackness is a useful artistic tool only when it remains a deviation from what is considered the norm. Within this context Stein’s study of Binh’s language in a double process of “Othering” and appropriation is symptomatic of the way American modernism feeds on 201 North 11. 202 North 7. 203 North 11. 148 the racial difference that it helps to maintain. Through the daily spectacle that designates Binh as an “Other,” Stein learns his story and his language, which then become her manuscript. Binh’s story becomes Stein’s property, which he has to steal to give to Sweet Sunday Man. The unpublished book, ironically called The Book of Salt, is Truong’s invention, although the implication that Stein would write about her cook is not a far- fetched idea. Two of the characters in Three Lives are servants, while a piece called “B. B. or the Birthplace of Bonnes” in Portraits and Prayers tells the stories of all the women from Brittany who had worked in the Stein and Toklas household. The actual proxies of Binh also appear briefly in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Moving beyond Stein’s authorial power to adopt the stories she encounters in her life, however, the image of Stein wrapping her tongue around Binh’s words, savoring them and saving them for later, suggests an act of linguistic appropriation that directly challenges her literary identity. There are many similarities between Stein’s literary language and Binh’s language of exile, most notably her experiment to free words from their habitual associations, conventions, and meanings to use them in new forms. This attempt to create what Bravig Imbs refers to as a naked language turns every word into a source of unexpected possibilities, in the same way that Binh, unfamiliar with the meanings of the words he hears, treats them as a repository of possible ideas. For both of them, such language recognizes no boundaries, a word in English can resemble a word in French, a noun can function like a verb. One discards the rules of grammar because it is a luxury that he cannot afford, while the other ignores it because she is creating an anarchistic language that attacks language itself. 149 In her monumental study of Gertrude Stein’s language, Dydo writes, “her meditations, whose verbal genesis can be traced, arise from the vocabulary that daily life offered her, in the scraps of manuscript notes, in overheard talk.” 204 According to Dydo, to understand Stein’s identity, her literary voice and her life-long dedication to being a writer, we must look not in her many biographies, but in her manuscripts, which bear the traces of her process of writing, words written then erased to be re-formed. This process is in flux because it arises from life. “Over and over,” Dydo remarks, “Stein said that she composed what she saw; she did not invent. All her work arises from the world in which she lived,” from the liveliness of spoken words in different languages, which she encounters on the streets of Paris, in overheard conversations floating around her. 205 The story of Binh, however, suggests that the rising of this language takes place within an unequal power relationship informed by colonialism and race, in which the difference between a theft and a gift depends on the one with the power to hold the pen. In this chapter I have treated Truong’s The Book of Salt as a counter-archive, which both draws from and complements the existing archives about Gertrude Stein as an icon of American modernism. Through the story of Binh, whose exile from his homeland because of his sexuality continues in the diaspora because of his race and his position as a colonial subject, the book also reveals a different history of Stein, which highlights the importance of race in understanding her work and her aesthetics. Focusing specifically on the issue of language, I discuss how Stein’s identity as a writer is affirmed through the racialization of subjects of color in the United States and France. Specifically, she 204 Dydo 10. 205 Dydo 17. 150 appropriates Binh’s stories and his inventive language, which has developed through his own struggles to challenge the many ways he has been excluded both in colonial Vietnam and in France. At the same time, she uses this language to mark him as a racial other. Through this analysis, the chapter makes clear that a study of exilic subjectivities does not only highlight the multiplicity of experiences in the Vietnamese diaspora, but also helps shed light on how a longer history of transnational, imperial, and colonial linkages informed and shaped American culture. 151 Chapter 4 The Tale of Quyên: The Undocumented Vietnamese Woman in Nguyễn Văn Thọ’s Novel Quyên In early November 2009, a notification appeared in several Asian supermarkets in Berlin, Germany. “Phượng Disappeared” announced the one-page-long poster in German and Vietnamese, above three pictures of a young woman with a still childish smile. Also included were descriptions of her weight and height, as well as a promise of 200 euros as reward money for any information that could lead to Phượng’s whereabouts. According to the daily Neues Deutschland, the contact phone number belonged to a private detective hired by the girl’s aunt. 206 It took the police nearly a month to react to the missing-person report, because a search could not begin if there was no evidence that Phượng had ever existed. Only a few weeks before her disappearance, Phượng had applied for asylum with a different name and a false place of birth. Officially, she didn’t exist. Yet, even if the police had reacted faster, no one who knew Phượng in person would have spoken to them for fear of being charged with harboring an undocumented immigrant. Her aunt, for instance, received warnings from the office of immigration after she filed the missing- person report. Amid the community’s silence, Phượng might have died, or escaped. However, if the police found her she would face immediate deportation and those who sheltered her would be accused of human smuggling. 206 Marina Mai, “Eine Frau Gesucht Die Es Nicht Gibt [Looking for a Woman Who Does Not Exist],” Neues Deutschland [New Germany] 2 February 2010, http://www.neues- deutschland.de/artikel/164271.eine-frau-gesucht-die-es-nicht-gibt.html. All quotations translated from German by author. 152 According to the article, the private detective decided to put up the posters after he had checked all hospitals and deportation centers but could not find any sign of either her death or arrest. At the time of the article’s publication, the notices had yielded several possible explanations for Phượng’s disappearance. One woman, who insisted on remaining anonymous, implied that Phượng might have left for France or the United Kingdom, popular destinations for many undocumented Vietnamese immigrants. Vietnamese businesses have blossomed there in recent years and provide a constant source of jobs to undocumented immigrants. Yet another informant recommended that the detective look in the many underground brothels in Berlin. Perhaps, the man told the detective, Phượng, who had only just arrived in Germany, had not come up with the money she owed to smugglers, so they took her away to work off her debt. The most intriguing response came from a scribble in Vietnamese on one of the posters. “I found her, but I won’t say anything so I can use her longer.” Below the message were the words “Hải Dương, Tử Kỳ.” These final words referred to Phượng’s real birthplace, which no one but her aunt knew. Reacting to the information about forced prostitution, the police raided two underground brothels and arrested several undocumented women, one of who admitted to being Vietnamese. No information came from the police investigation of the message on the poster. Even today, Phượng still has not been found. I have chosen Phượng’s story as a starting point for two reasons. First, the article is one of the few written sources that expose the complex power relationships governing the life of a community that is rarely mentioned within scholarship about the Vietnamese Diaspora. In Chapter one I have discussed how the Vietnamese Diaspora is often 153 conceived within the framework of the anti-communist exodus that followed the Vietnam War, a conception that disregards other historical events such as the French colonization of Vietnam or the Sino-Vietnamese War, which also led to the dislocation of many Vietnamese people. In this chapter, I return to Europe, to discuss the diasporic Vietnamese communities in Germany that so far have remained understudied. However, as the story of Phượng reveals, these communities, though smaller, are also marked by multiplicity, and some subjects, such as the undocumented Vietnamese immigrant woman, face more danger because they are exiled from both the mainstream host society and the diasporic communities. Second, the story about Phượng received little attention from Vietnamese diasporic media in Germany. Most news sources in Vietnamese provided a brief translation of the Neues Deutschland article, which appeared several months after the incident. None of them attempted an independent investigation, even though the story took place in the middle of the Vietnamese community in Berlin. Consequently, the article got buried quickly under other information about community activities and achievements. Thus, several layers of silence surround the story—the community that refuses to talk about her for fear of incriminating itself, the police for whom she does not exist, the media (both German and Vietnamese German) that ignores or quickly forgets about her, and the scholars who so far have not paid attention to the experiences of people like her. As such, the case of Phượng exposes the impossibility of representing a subject who does not exist legally and is exiled socially and culturally. 154 In this chapter I examine the novel Quyên by Vietnamese German author Nguyễn Văn Thọ to explore how this impossibility is reinforced through cultural productions of the diasporic community, as well as to investigate the social conditions leading to such impossibility. In the novel, Quyên, a beautiful young woman from Hanoi, leaves Vietnam to go to Germany in search of a better life. On the way she is separated from her husband and detained by one of the smugglers, Hung, who rapes her until she becomes pregnant. From this moment on, Quyên’s life becomes a journey full of suffering, as she is loved, violated, and saved by different men. As the first novel featuring a Vietnamese undocumented woman as a protagonist, Quyên rewrites the famous Tale of Kiêu within a diasporic framework. Replicating The Tale of Kiêu’s discourse of exaggerated victimization, the novel uses a gendered discourse to construct the main character’s life as an allegory of the experiences of Vietnamese people in the diaspora in general and the Vietnamese guest-worker community in East Germany specifically. 207 Constructed like Kiêu as both a national symbol and a female model, Quyên serves as a vessel for the story of Vietnamese guest workers, whose “Vietnamese essence” is being challenged and restored outside of Vietnam. Yet, this discourse privileges the experiences of the male contract workers, who, in the novel, have to deal with both the trauma of displacement and the corruption of Vietnamese female workers who fail to maintain the virtues that 207 The term guest worker refers to Vietnamese workers who came to Eastern Europe as part of a labor program between Vietnam and other countries in the communist bloc. In Germany, they are officially referred to as Vertragsarbeiter [contract workers] based on the fact that each worker is given a five-year contract and is expected to return to his or her home country when the contract ends. However, German people also refer to them and other contract workers both in East and West Germany as Gastarbeiter [guest workers], a term that has acquired a negative connotation. In Vietnam, they are known as exported labor. This term has been criticized as a commodification of the workers, who are seen by both the Vietnamese and German government only as units of labor and thus are bound by inhumane rules and relegated to substandard living conditions. 155 would mark them as Vietnamese women. By suggesting that the female worker is to blame for the results of structural conditions of gendered, classed, and racialized exploitation, Quyên ignores the many power dynamics that mark certain diasporic subjects as more vulnerable than others. At the same time, the novel also evokes a narrative of ultimate return, within which the protagonist, an undocumented Vietnamese woman, can only find peace if she returns to the homeland. This narrative, I contend, is informed by the socio-historical context of the formation of the Vietnamese diasporic communities in East Germany. With the unification of Germany, Western European countries watch East Germany, and specifically East Berlin closely as the last fortress against Eastern European immigration. This surveillance forces the former Vietnamese guest workers to reinvent their story to fit into the new German national discourse. Continuing my discussion from Chapter one, in which I identify the homeland as the pathology of diaspora and the classic notion of exile, in this chapter I analyze how and why the homeland is evoked as a way for the diasporic community to exile the undocumented Vietnamese subjects who do not fit into the two dominant discourses about Vietnamese people in Germany. The Tale of Two People: The Vietnamese Diaspora in Germany The formation of the diasporic Vietnamese communities in Germany, more than anywhere else, is determined not only by historical events in Vietnam, but also by the turbulent socio-historical context in the host-country. Between 1975 and 1989, both East 156 and West Germany received a number of Vietnamese people as part of two separate movements. Although a few thousand Vietnamese nationals had already come to the East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR) to study before 1975, it was not until April 1980 that a large number of Vietnamese contract workers began to arrive as part of a bilateral agreement between the two governments. The program increased steadily, peaking at more than 30,000 participants in 1988. By the time of the German reunification in 1989, around 60,000 Vietnamese contract workers lived in different parts of East Germany. At the same time, between 1975 and 1986 West Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland or BRD) hosted around 38,000 Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees who fled the communist regimes. 208 This number dropped dramatically after 1984, although a small number of Vietnamese people continued to come through the family reunification process. As a result of that history, two narratives about Vietnamese people in Germany emerged and were adjusted to complement each other after the German unification: these narratives are distilled in the terms “guest worker” and “boat people.” While enabling Vietnamese people to carve out a space within the new Germany, these narratives marginalize the stories of other potential immigrants from Vietnam and make it more difficult for them to be recognized culturally and legally. 208 Known in English-speaking countries (and later also in non-English-speaking countries as boat people, these refugees are referred to in German as Bootsflüchtlinge [boat refugees] or Kontingentflüchtlinge [contingent refugees]. Kontingentflüchtlinge are refugees who have been picked up as part of rescue missions. They are automatically recognized as refugees without having to go through a recognition process and thus enjoy certain social and economic aids not available to other immigrants and applicants for asylum status. 157 In a study from 2007, Bern Wolf assesses that the case of the Vietnamese boat people is considered one of the most successful integration projects in the history of Germany. This success is attributed to both the refugees’ own desire to find a new home and the effort of the German government to assimilate them as fast as possible. The refugees were divided evenly among the different West German states, and given automatic residency permits. They were provided with free language classes, free training for jobs, and social welfare services to help them transition into a new life. Professionals wanting to stay in their line of profession could attend accelerated courses in local universities to gain necessary credentials. As a result, the study claims, the Vietnamese boat people quickly become a part of the German society, joining the labor force, attending universities, and forming friendships as well as matrimonial unions with German citizens. 209 The story of the Vietnamese guest workers in the DDR is much different. Pipo Bui points out that, not until 1990, a year after the guest-worker program ended due to the reunification of Germany, was there an extensive discussion about the exploitative practices of the program and the experiences of Vietnamese contract workers. 210 According to Wolf, all aspects of life of the guest workers were controlled by different organizations within the Vietnamese communist party, which functioned under the umbrella of the Vietnamese embassy, in conjunction with the DDR’s police and safety 209 Bernd Wolf, Die Vietnamesische Diaspora in Deutschland: Struktur und Kooperationspotenzial mit Schwerpunkt auf Berlin und Hessen [The Vietnamese Diaspora in Germany: Potential for Structure and Cooperation with Focus on Berlin and Hessen] (Eschbon: Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit, 2007), 4. All quotations translated from German by author. 210 Pipo Bui, Envisioning Vietnamese Migrants in Germany: Ethnic Stigma, Immigrant Origin Narratives and Partial Masking (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2001), 128. 158 patrols of the hiring companies. 211 The workers received minimal language training, forcing them to rely on translators provided by the embassy. The two governments deducted part of their salaries to maintain the program and the workers had no option to choose the type of work they were employed in. Their living space was limited to the factories and dormitories, and any contact between male and female workers or between Vietnamese and German coworkers outside the work place was strongly discouraged through threats of deportation and fines. After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the contract workers’ situation became worse. In an effort to make their businesses more suitable for the market economy, many factories in East Germany underwent intensive restructuring, which included mass firing of Vietnamese guest workers. As compensation for the broken contract, the new German government offered each worker 3,000 Deutschmark and a one-way ticket to Vietnam. Only half of the workers accepted the offer. The remaining 30,000 workers stayed in Germany without jobs and often without legal papers, which were contingent on their employment in the assigned enterprises. Some applied for asylum status, but were quickly denied. Barred from legal employment, many of them engaged in selling smuggled cigarettes and lived in dilapidated dormitories, which were converted into cheap housing. As a result, the mainstream German media at the time typically depicted Vietnamese immigrants as cigarette smugglers who lived in ghettoized former dormitories forming secret and criminal communities. The 1990s marked a turbulent time 211 Wolf 6. 159 period for Vietnamese guest workers. In 1993, a “Right to Stay” agreement was reached between the minister presidents of the German states, which allowed the former contract workers to obtain special work permits and residency permits if they showed proof of adequate income and living conditions, as well as a clean criminal record. These requirements, as advocates for Vietnamese guest workers pointed out, were out of reach for former workers, especially when being caught selling smuggled cigarettes was usually enough grounds for deportation. The planned repatriation program, however, never came to fruition, because the Vietnamese government, already unable to deal with the return of more than 100,000 people from refugee camps in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia as part of a UN–monitored program, refused to accept any person who did not return voluntarily. Pushed by both the advocates for the Vietnamese guest workers and the need to resolve the problem once and for all, the German Federal Assembly finally voted to allow the years spent in Germany prior to 1993 (whether as guest workers under the DDR or unemployed after the unification) to be counted as part of the eight years required for a permanent residency permit, thus allowing the majority of the former workers who decided to stay in Germany to gain legal rights to live and work. Media depictions of Vietnamese people during the early 1990s, appearing in the midst of German lawmakers’ heated discussions about the “Vietnamese problem,” had a detrimental effect on former guest workers’ efforts to pass a law that would allow them to remain in Germany. These depictions reinforced an image of Vietnamese in East Germany as criminals whose deportation was a matter of national security. Therefore, an important part of the guest workers’ struggle for the right to remain in Germany legally 160 was the effort to create a counter-image to the German media’s depiction of this population as undocumented criminals. On the one hand, this process involved building a narrative about Vietnamese guest workers in East Germany as complementary to the Vietnamese boat people in West Germany, who had gained a place within German society. 212 On the other hand, this effort also relied on an appropriation of the criminalizing discourses in the media in order to differentiate the guest workers from a new wave of undocumented Vietnamese immigrants—former contract workers from Eastern European countries and Vietnamese people from Vietnam. By the end of 1990s, Bui writes, “Vietnamese migrant advocates had managed to push through the point that most of the cigarettes seller were no longer former DDR contract workers, but rather asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.” 213 Within this context, the narrative of return, used to tell Quyên’s story in the novel, is a cultural manifestation of the former guest workers’ efforts to counter the discriminatory legal and cultural practices they faced in Germany through the marginalization of another group of Vietnamese immigrants. Exiling other Vietnamese diasporic subjects, the workers distinguished themselves as worthy immigrants, whose exploitation under the socialist regime has earned them a place in the new, unified Germany. More importantly, the German media’s criminalizing discourse and the Vietnamese guest workers’ response, I argue, must also be understood within a larger 212 This is not to say that the Vietnamese community in West Germany has not faced discrimination. As Fatima El-Tayeb points out, “Europeans of color,” have been and continue to be racialized as foreign even after they have been naturalized. Nevertheless, the community of Vietnamese boat people in Germany, because of their original status as refugees, enjoyed certain legal and economic privileges that the guest workers did not have. More importantly, they have also been held up as a model to criticize and criminalize the guest-worker community. See Bui 174. 213 Bui 63. 161 discourse about race and ethnicity in Europe, which became more complicated with the expansion of the European Union. The reports from early 1990s, many of which hailed from West German news sources, cast the criminal activities of Vietnamese former guest workers as a problem confined in East Germany, and specifically East Berlin. Furthermore, the Vietnamese seller of smuggled cigarettes are described as a link in a criminal chain that includes unruly Russian, Polish, and Eastern German gangs. 214 Within this narrative, East Germany is represented as a porous border between Germany and Eastern European countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic, which are perceived as “safe havens” for a criminal mob threatening to infiltrate Germany and the rest of Western Europe. This connection between the former Vietnamese guest workers and Eastern Europe within a criminalizing discourse highlights a longer history of racialization and ethnicization in Europe, in which Eastern and Southern Europe was and still is, to a certain extent, conceived as the “Other” of Northwest Europe. According to Fatima El- Tayeb, “all parts of Europe are arguably invested in “whiteness” as the norm against which ethnicization is read as a tool of differentiation between insiders and outsiders. . . . It is obvious nonetheless that both Eastern and Southern Europe’s claim to this whiteness is more ambiguous than that of the Northwest of the continent.” 215 Although El Tayeb also emphasizes that contemporary negative discourses on migration target largely “visible minorities,” who are defined as non-European through a racialized cultural 214 Bui 63. 215 Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 66. Kindle version. 162 difference, the ethnicization of Eastern Europeans has deep roots in German history and culminated under Fascist rule, when an anti-Slavic discourse justified the occupation of Poland and a plan for the genocide of the Slavic population. 216 With the defeat of Fascism and the inauguration of the European Union with its pan-European identity, the ethnicization of Eastern Europeans took on a more subtle form, but certainly did not disappear, especially because Central and Eastern Europeans form the largest migrant group in Western Europe since the end of state socialism. 217 As the attack on Vietnamese former guest workers in German media made clear, Western Germans’ initial exhilaration regarding the defeat of communism was quickly dampened by the fear that a dangerous mob from the East would enter Germany through its porous Eastern border. This digression about the ethnicization of Eastern Europe is important because it helps highlight the importance of Quyên as a response to a socio-historical condition that has significant impact on the Vietnamese diasporic community not only in Germany, but also in Eastern Europe. Despite the legal victory of the former guest workers, their image as undocumented criminals remains etched within the German imaginary. Furthermore, with the expansion of the European Union, this discourses has been replicated in Eastern European countries, although the link between Vietnamese criminals and their Eastern European collaborators has been removed. Between 2001 and 2003, for example, a series of reports in Polish media solidified an image of Vietnamese migrants as undocumented 216 Joseph Bendersky, A Concise History of Nazi Germany (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 161–162. 217 El-Tayeb 70. 163 criminals. This depiction, appearing at a moment when Poland was lobbying to become a member of the European Union, differs sharply from an earlier image of the studious, hardworking, and quiet Vietnamese migrant in Poland. Instead the articles use the same tropes of lack of hygiene, illegality, and criminality that defined the German media reports about Vietnamese guest workers in the early 1990s. In a paper presented at the conference on critical refugee studies in 2011, I argued that this discourse about Vietnamese people in Poland resulted from a changing image of Poland as the new frontier of the European Union, a fortress against an invasion of migrants from the East. This discourse allows the Poles to disassociate from an earlier image of themselves as the “Other” of Europe by highlighting a more visible minority group as the subject to be disciplined. 218 Within the context of this chapter, it is important to ask how the Vietnamese diasporic community has been and will react to this new condition, as the expansion of the European Union strengthens the xenophobia against visible minorities. The popularity of Quyên not only in Germany but also among Vietnamese former guest workers and intellectuals in other Eastern European countries, I argue, is symptomatic of how the exile of the undocumented Vietnamese is used as a tool for the community to deal with discrimination in the host country. 218 For a further discussion of Vietnamese people in Poland, see Teresa Halik Migrancka spolecznosc Wietnamczykow w Polsce w swietle polityki panstwa i ocen spolecznych (The Migrant Community of the Vietnamese in Poland in the Light of State Policy and Social Assessment); and Anh Thang Dao, “’Vietnamese People Don’t Die’: Discourses about Vietnamese Undocumented Immigrants in Germany and Poland,” paper presented at the Conference on Critical Refugee Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2011. 164 “A Debt That Needs to Be Repaid”: Nguyễn Văn Thọ Writing Quyên Nguyễn Văn Thọ’s life and his literary career are closely linked to the story of the Vietnamese contract workers in Germany. Born in 1948, like many men of his generation, he joined the Northern Vietnamese army at seventeen and spent the next ten years as a soldier during the Vietnam War. After 1975, he returned to Hanoi to realize that the city had no jobs to offer to its 5,000 veterans, whose experience of fighting and surviving had no value to a country straining to survive the postwar economic turmoil. After much searching he found a job as a security person and janitor at a state-owned company. The author does not reveal much about this time of his life, between his return to Hanoi from the war and his departure to Germany, as an “exported labor” in the early 1980s, except that he wrote a few short stories, which were published in literary journals. Yet, this short spurt of literary work stopped, partly because of the financial struggle of daily life and partly because the short stories could not reflect the reality he was living. The decision to leave Vietnam, the author claims, was less a search for a better material life, than an escape from an intellectual and a cultural impasse. He started writing again after living for nearly ten years in Germany, around the time when the reunification of Germany forced guest workers from Vietnam and other countries in the former communist bloc to find ways to survive the en-mass lay-offs, threats of deportations, and the violence associated with the rise of neo-Nazis in Eastern Europe. 219 His first collection of short stories, Cold Wind, was published in Vietnam in 1991. Since 219 The contract workers came from different countries within the communist bloc besides Vietnam, most notably Cuba, Mozambique, and Angola. 165 then, he has published three more short–story collections and a number of short stories have appeared in both Vietnamese and diasporic literary journals. Yet, it was not until the publication of Quyên that he gained national and diasporic recognition. The novel starts with the rape of the protagonist, Quyên. Dreaming of a better life, Quyên’s husband Dũng convinces her to leave Vietnam to go to Germany. They join other hopeful migrants who pay smugglers several thousand dollars for a flight to Russia, from where they will be smuggled through Poland or the Czech Republic to Germany. While crossing the German border, Quyên is separated from her husband. One of the smugglers, Hùng, rapes her and keeps her in a house in the woods for a few months, until she is pregnant. Hung falls in love with her, and offers to take her to the city, so they can get married and Quyên can give birth to the child in a hospital. Yet, Quyên, despite having developed some feelings for Hùng, insists on finding her husband. Out of love, Hung agrees. On the way to the city, however, he gets into an accident trying to distract the police from pursuing the car carrying Quyên. Quyên arrives at the refugee camp Goldberg where her husband is waiting for the decision of his asylum application. Seeing Quyên pregnant Dũng feels betrayed. One night, drunk, he chases her away from the room. Quyên attempts suicide in the broom cupboard of the camp and is saved by Kumar, a Sri Lankan asylum seeker who also lives in Goldberg. At the hospital, she falls into a coma after the doctors conduct an operation to save her child. Kumar takes care of both her and the baby, whom he gives a Vietnamese name, Thanh Vân. Quyên wakes up after a few weeks. The presence of Kumar scares her so she runs away from the hospital. Wandering around at night, she is 166 taken in by Phi, a Vietnamese man who runs a Vietnamese snack bar on the outskirt of the city. Phi is married, but his wife, who came to Germany earlier, had an affair with another man and sent Phi to work far away from where she lives with her lover. Phi asks Quyên to be his helper in exchange for a monthly salary and shelter. He helps her file an asylum application with false personal information so she cannot be deported. Realizing that Phi is falling in love with her, Quyên secretly prepares to leave. On the night she says goodbye, however, Phi breaks down crying. Sympathetic with his pain, Quyên kisses him and decides to make love to him as a gesture of appreciation. At that moment, Phi’s wife appears with her lover. They tie Quyên up and hit her. Enraged, Phi takes a kitchen knife and kills his wife. Then he tells Quyên to run away. Fleeing the murder scene, Quyên meets Kumar again, who takes her and Vân back to his apartment. He then helps translate for her at the police station, where Quyên becomes a witness in Phi’s trial. Phi is sentenced to 2 years in prison for manslaughter. Quyên continues to live with Kumar and develops affection for the man who cares for her daughter as if she was his own child. Together, they open a small snack bar and Quyên receives permission of residence in Germany. One day, one of Hùng’s friends finds Quyên and gives her a letter from Hùng, who lost a leg during the accident. Unable and unwilling to continue his work as a smuggler, Hùng has moved to Budapest and opened a shop selling clothing. The doctors discover that he has liver cancer, however, and Hùng’s last wish before he dies is to see Quyên and his daughter. 167 Shortly after Quyên receives Hùng’s letter, Kumar’s mother writes him that she is coming for a visit from the United Kingdom. Because he has not told his mother about Quyên, Kumar asks Quyên and Thanh Vân to stay at a hotel for a few days until he breaks the news to his mother. Hung’s friend offers to take Quyên and Vân to visit Hùng in Budapest, yet they arrive only in time to see Hung die. Unwilling to let him rest in a foreign land, and burning with the desire to go back home, Quyên decides to carry his ashes back to Vietnam, to bury him in her family’s graveyard, because she doesn’t know where he comes from. Kumar arrives at the Budapest airport just as the plane departs for Vietnam. The result of Nguyễn Văn Thọ’s first attempt at writing novels, Quyên won the second prize in the 2010 national novel competition organized by the Vietnamese National Writers Association and has been reprinted four times since its publication. Yet, the significance of Quyên lies beyond the critical praises it has received in Vietnam. Before the book’s official publication in 2009, the Vietnamese Hungarian magazine Nhịp Cầu Thế Giới and the online forum Trúc Sơn Trang introduced most of the chapters to their readers in a weekly series. The surprisingly large number of responses, both positive and negative, on both venues, Nguyễn Văn Thọ admits, helped him revise the book for its publication. In its final form, Quyên has surpassed in readership and popularity the national borders of Vietnam, where it was published. The book has been featured in many Vietnamese community newspapers and magazines throughout Eastern Europe and, according to the publisher, more than 50 percent of the published books are sold outside of Vietnam. 168 Critics attribute Quyên’s tremendous success mostly to its content. Often referred to as a “classic novel,” Quyên contains eighteen chronologically organized chapters, with some flashbacks and streams of consciousness of different characters. In terms of form, it has been noted that the novel does not contribute much to contemporary Vietnamese literature. 220 Yet, the focus on the Vietnamese former guest workers in Germany raises interest in Vietnam, where the details of the labor export after the war remains largely unknown. For many Vietnamese people in Germany and Eastern Europe, the book is one of the few cultural sources that explore many aspects of their daily life. 221 The decision to privilege content over form, Nguyễn Văn Thọ confesses in an interview after the publication of Quyên, has a pragmatic reason. “In the case of Quyên, he explains, “the audience I am aiming at are the guest workers and their family who remain in the country [Vietnam] . . . The form of the novel allows the ordinary reader to access it right away.“ 222 This accessibility is achieved not only through the “classic novel form,” which, to a certain extent, helps Quyên stand apart from the works of other contemporary Vietnamese diasporic writers in Europe such as Linda Lê, Thuận, Lê Thị Hoài or Trần Vũ. In an interview, Nguyễn Văn Thọ implicitly criticizes these authors’ frequent use of the fragmentary form as an attempt to make “stories of life, which are simple, into 220 Phan Thanh Phong, “Nguyễn Văn Thọ: Viết Quyên Như Món Nợ Cần Trả (Nguyễn Văn Thọ Writes Quyên Like a Debt that Needs to be Repaid)” Evan 27 April 2009, http://evan.vnexpress.net/news/chan- dung/2009/04/3b9ae44e/ (accessed 20 February 2012). All quotations translated from Vietnamese by author. 221 Nguyen The Anh from Nguoiviet.de, a popular online newspaper based in Germany, thanks Nguyễn Văn Thọ in the preface to his interview with the author after Quyên was rewarded for introducing the attention of Vietnamese all over the world to the story of Vietnamese people in Germany. http://nguoiviet.de/nv/modules.php?name=News&op=viewst&sid=13131 (accessed 20 February 2012). 222 Phan Thanh Phong. 169 something not understandable.” 223 To many Vietnamese readers Quyên is also familiar because it resembles in many ways the Tale of Kiêu by Nguyễn Du, which is arguably one of the most renowned classics of Vietnamese literature. A Cursed Life: Quyên As a Diasporic Rendition of The Tale of Kiêu Written in the early nineteenth century, The Tale of Kiêu is a rewriting of a Chinese story from the Chi’ng Dynasty, which recounts the turbulent life story of Kiêu, a beautiful, virtuous and well-born young woman. When her family is falsely accused of a crime and the officials threaten to arrest her father and brother, Kiêu sells herself as a concubine to Ma Giam Sinh for 300 liang of silver, the price required to buy her father’s and brother’s freedom. Yet, Ma turns out to be a pimp and Kiêu is swept into a life of vicissitude. She ends up twice in brothels, both times being sold by people who she believed would rescue her. She is taken as a concubine by Thuc Sinh, yet ends up as a maid in his house, enduring the wrath of his jealous wife. She finds brief happiness with a rebel, Tu Hai, who fights the court to build his own country. However, the court uses Kiêu to convince Tu Hai to surrender in exchange for a mandarin post. They then ambush and kill him. Kiêu is captured and sold to a foreigner. Full of guilt and shame, she jumps into the Tien Duong River to commit suicide and is rescued by Giac Duyen, a female monk. In the end, Kiêu is reunited with her family and her first love, Kim Trong, who takes her as a platonic wife. 223 Phan Thanh Phong. 170 In Quyên’s afterword, Đỗ Quyên writes, “anybody can insinuate that Quyên is another name of Kiêu.” There are two direct quotations from The Tale of Kiêu in the novel, both of which are regularly used in everyday Vietnamese language as a kind of idiom. The first quotation, “talent and destiny are apt to feud,” illustrates the irony of Phi’s wife’s jealousy of Quyên; the second quote, “when you feel grief, can what you see give joy,” refers to Quyên’s sentiment when she meets a dying Hùng in Budapest. 224 There are also many similarities in the ways the authors develop the main characters. To describe the beauty of their protagonists, both Nguyễn Du and Nguyễn Văn Thọ use images of nature. If Kiêu’s eyes are compared to autumn streams and her brows to spring hills, Quyên’s lips are referred to as a “half open flower bud full of morning dew.” Both women are also praised for their talents and intelligence. Kiêu was “by heaven blessed with wit, she knew all skills, she could write verse and paint, could sing and chant. Of music she has mastered all five tones.” 225 Quyên, on the other hand, was born in Ha Noi, which for many Vietnamese people means that she is graceful and elegant. 226 She also graduated from the department of literature at Hanoi University and is “known to be both beautiful and smart.” 227 224 All the English quotations from The Tale of Kiêu come from the bilingual edition by Nguyen Du, trans. Huynh Sanh Thong (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 225 Nguyen Du, The Tale of Kiêu, trans. Huynh Sanh Thong (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 3. 226 Within the post–1975 sentiments of southern Vietnamese and Vietnamese refugees, Ha Noi has a negative connotation as the capital of communist Vietnam. However, in Vietnamese literature and in the popular imagination of Vietnamese immigrants in Eastern Europe, most of whom come from the North, Hanoi is still celebrated as the cultural capital of Vietnam, and its inhabitants known for their grace, as reflected in the idiom “Chẳng thơm cũng thể hoa nhài, không thanh lịch cũng là người Tràng An (even if it doesn’t smell good, it’s jasmine, even if it’s not elegance, it’s a person from Trang An),” in which Tràng An refers to Hanoi’s old name. 227 Nguyễn Văn Thọ, Quyên (Ha Noi: Nha Xuat Ban Hoi Nha Van, 2009), 15. All quotations from the book translated from Vietnamese by author. 171 More importantly, both Quyên and Kiêu appear throughout the literary works as victims of circumstances and men, who love, violate, and rescue them only to throw them back into the circle of vicissitude again. Indeed, it is not difficult to trace important characters and significant places from The Tale of Kiêu in Quyên. Claiming that “nobody would say that I am comparing this novel by Nguyễn Văn Thọ with The Tale of Kiêu by Nguyễn Du!” Đỗ Quyên nevertheless points out that “Quyên also has her Tien Duong River (the refugee camp Goldberg), also meets her Thuc Sinh (Phi), suffers a life threatening beating by her Tu Ba (Phi’s wife) and also finds happiness with her Tu Hai (Kumar). 228 Đỗ may have made a mistake in comparing Phi’s wife to Tu Ba, the woman who first bought Kiêu and forced her into a life of prostitution, because she is more comparable to Hoan Thu, Thuc Sinh’s wife whose revenge on Kiêu for stealing the heart of her husband is so infamous her name has become a synonym of jealousy in Vietnamese popular understandings. Nevertheless, his comment illustrates the clear parallel between the characters and life events that take place in Quyên and in The Tale of Kiêu. According to Nathalie Nguyen, although The Tale of Kiêu is also celebrated for Nguyễn Du’s masterful use of chữ Nôm and the lục bát form, the enduring prominence of the epic, both in Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora, must be attributed to three features: the idea of fate, the historical reading of Kiêu’s life as an allegory of the history 228 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 435. 172 of the Vietnamese nation, and the function fulfilled by Kiêu through her status as a Vietnamese woman. 229 The notion of fate is closely connected to the Vietnamese concept of oan that Huynh Sanh Thong defines as injustice, punishments for crimes not committed, or “misfortunes wreaked on men by more powerful men.” 230 As a result of geography and history, Huynh writes, “the Vietnamese have known a history marked by turbulence and torment, by natural or human forces unleashed against helpless victims” and they use the notion of fate, karma, or Heaven’s will to explain these misfortunes. 231 Thus, Kiêu functions as a folk symbol, who “stands for the victim’s struggle to survive by drawing comfort and sustenance” from these concepts of fatalism. 232 As such she also functions as a political allegory. “Beyond its literal meaning,” Huynh explains, “Kiêu’s prostitution is interpreted as a metaphor for the betrayal of principles under duress, the submission to force of circumstances.” 233 As many scholars have pointed out, her story stands in for both Nguyễn Du’s own political life and the Vietnamese nation’s history. Born into a Northern clan, which has served the Lê dynasty, the Trinh lords, and the House of Tay Son, Nguyễn Du joined the southern Nguyên house when Nguyen Anh won the civil war with the help of the French in 1802. 234 Nguyen Sanh Thong suggests that this move might have been out of a desire to protect his family, which had been so close to the Nguyen dynasty’s enemies. Despite his success, both as a 229 Nathalie Nguyen, “A Classical Heroine and Her Modern Manifestation: The Tale of Kiêu and Its Modern Parallels in Printemps inachevé,” The French Review 73.3 (2000): 455. 230 Huynh Sanh Thong, Introduction, The Tale of Kiêu (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), xxxii. 231 Huynh xxxii. 232 Huynh xxxiv. 233 Huynh xl. 234 Huynh xxxvi. 173 literary man and a mandarin, Nguyễn Du was never comfortable with the stifling rule of the new emperor. In a similar way, the Vietnamese nation, with its thousand years under Chinese rule and successive rise and fall of new rulers, both domestic and foreign, is often submitted to the rule of powers that it does not recognize. Ultimately, however, as Huynh Sanh Thong explains, “Kiêu ’s story conveys a message of hope for both the individual and the country: if like Kiêu the Vietnamese accept and endure with fortitude whatever happens to them, someday they will have paid the cost of their evil karma and will achieve both personal and national salvation.” 235 In Quyên, the tropes of fate, heaven’s will, and unfortunate circumstances are also included to explain and illustrate the ebbs and flows in the life of the protagonist. Early on in the novel, when Hùng detains her in the little house in the woods, Quyên looks at the image of the beautiful girl on the moisturizer container he has bought for her. “She shivers! Quyên, you are beautiful too, but what a cursed life you have?!” 236 Quyên’s lament about a cursed life echoes a famous moment in The Tale of Kiêu, when the protagonist, finding herself for a second time in a brothel, cries, “The fate of a peach blossom—what a curse!” 237 In both cases, the woman’s suffering is explained as the result of the irony of fate, a curse placed on her life by a higher power. Consequently, the violator, Hùng in the case of Quyên, is displaced and absolved of responsibility. If what happens to Quyên—her rape and imprisonment—is a work of fate, then Hùng is merely an instrument, and it would be impossible for her to escape that life. 235 Huynh xl. 236 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 14. 237 Nguyễn Du 111. 174 In another crucial moment in the book, when Quyên escapes from Phi’s house after he has killed his wife, she meets Kumar and goes with him back to his apartment. Lying in bed, Kumar, a Sri Lankan Buddhist, wonders whether his meeting with Quyên and her child was “part of a chain of karma that the Buddha has set up.” 238 Remembering Quyên’s face when she lies for two months in a coma after giving birth to her daughter, he thinks, “How can there be such peculiar situations in one’s life? And why do all these things keep happening to Quyên?” 239 Shrouded in Buddhist vocabulary, what Quyên has suffered since she left the little house in the woods—her psychological and physical torment by the husband who does not recognize her because she is pregnant with another man’s child; her unsuccessful suicide, which resulted in the premature birth of her child and her two-month hospitalization; as well as her humiliation and experience of physical violence at the hands of Phi’s wife—are again explained in terms of fatalism. As parts of a chain of karma that lead her back to Kumar, who saves her for a second time, these sufferings and struggles are described as “peculiar situations,” which “happen to her” without a culprit. Significantly, these struggles are necessary if she wants to achieve happiness. Discussing the significance of The Tale of Kiêu among Vietnamese refugees all over the world, Huynh Sanh Thong explains, “To the extent that the poem implies something at the very core of the Vietnamese experience, it addresses them intimately as victims, as refugees, as survivors.” 240 In Quyên, the suffering of the protagonist is also interpreted as 238 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 207. 239 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 208. 240 Huynh xl. 175 a necessary precondition, which she must fulfill in order to find personal happiness. This necessity is explained through the vocabulary of Buddhism when Kumar explains that he “always believes that Buddha might be impersonating everything, is present everywhere, in different shapes and forms, creating chances and opportunities to test the patience of men and things, helping them realize their own selves to escape from reincarnation.” 241 Within this context, all the vicissitudes that happen to Quyên after she leaves Vietnam are perceived as tests of her patience, fortitude, and endurance, which Quyên passes. Consequently, she is rewarded with the timely appearance of Kumar, who helps her get out of trouble after Phi murders his wife to protect her, and with a short, peaceful life with the Sri Lankan man. In terms of her personal life, Quyên’s second meeting with Kumar and their years of living together can be read as a kind of reward, after she has paid the cost of the evil karma. Early on in the book, however, the author makes clear that Quyên’s cursed life is only an example illustrating the fate that befalls all Vietnamese people who have been displaced from their homeland. Hùng, the smuggler, in a moment of reflection, tells Quyên that she is not the only one who is being imprisoned. He and many other people are also being imprisoned. . . . Cursed is the one, born in one place, his childhood and life soaked with the wind, rain, sunshine, even air, family, friends…call it the land of memory, who has to leave it, lose it forever to go to another land, where the soil, the climate, the culture could not have given birth to someone like him.… Life of a dog! 242 241 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 207. 242 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 24. 176 Uttered in the first chapter of the book, this statement suggests a symbolic reading of the tragedies that Quyên faces throughout her life. Comparing her physical imprisonment with his own sense of social impasse, living as a smuggler and criminal on the borders between Poland and Germany, and the lives of others who have left the homeland, Hùng essentializes the experience of Vietnamese people living abroad, disregarding the power dynamics that necessarily distinguish the experience of men and women, rich and poor, documented and undocumented Vietnamese migrants. Suggesting that whatever happens to Quyên also happens to other Vietnamese people living abroad, his musings turn Quyên’s individual and physical sufferings into a metaphoric trauma of displacement, a karma they all have to pay, in one way or another. As a metaphor, Quyên and her victimization serves to expose the cursed life of other Vietnamese abroad and how they overcome successfully or unsuccessfully the struggles of life in a foreign country. “A Traditional Vietnamese Beauty”: Quyên As a Female Model As in The Tale of Kiêu, the function of Quyên’s story as an allegory of the Vietnamese nation’s history is closely related to her status as a woman. Discussing the connection between nationalism and sexuality in modern Europe, George Mosse writes, “Woman as a national symbol was the guardian of the continuity and immutability of the nation, the embodiment of its respectability.” 243 As a symbol of the nation’s continuity and respectability, the “woman as nation” defines the female subject through her role as a 243 George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 18. 177 mother, who ensures the physical survival and purity of the nation, and presupposes certain characteristics as inherently feminine. Virtues such as “self-sacrifice, benevolence, devotion,” Partha Chatterjee explains in his analysis of the “new woman” as the symbol of mid-nineteenth-century Indian nationalism, are constructed as dominant characteristics of femininity through art and literature. 244 Informed by these theories, I argue that a reading of Kiêu as the Vietnamese nation, or Quyên as the Vietnamese diaspora, not only essentializes Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, but also conceals the gender inequality underlying the construct of femininity maintained by such symbolism. Scholars such as David Marr and Nathalie Huynh Nguyen have pointed out that the timeless popularity of The Tale of Kiêu upheld and even enhanced "the basic tenets of female passivity, of a daughter's piety toward her parents, of fidelity to one's mate.” 245 Within a contemporary and diasporic context, Quyên may not literally represent The Three Submissions and The Four Virtues, which have been and are still used to justify the submission of many Vietnamese women both in Vietnam and abroad. Nevertheless, she does function as a female model, against who the author compares and judges Vietnamese women abroad in general and the Vietnamese female guest worker in particular. In an interview, Nguyễn Văn Thọ explains that Quyên is not based on any 244 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 137. 245 David. G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 195. 178 person in real life. 246 Instead, she is constructed as “a traditional Vietnamese beauty,” who is desired by the men and envied by the women she meets in her life not only because of her physical beauty, but also because she is constructed as a repository for all the characteristics celebrated in a traditional Vietnamese woman, such as forgiveness, endurance, and caring. As such, she is perceived and admired by the men she encounters in her life in different traditional female roles—as a nurturing mother or sister and as a faithful wife. One day, during Quyên’s imprisonment in the woods, Hùng catches a bad cold. Thinking about a time in the past when her own brother was ill, Quyên nurtures him back to health even when “she is unable to explain to herself the pity she feels for the man who violated her.” 247 In a bout of fever Hùng mumbles, “‘you are so good. So much like my mother!’” Hùng is not the only one who sees a mother figure in Quyên. When they stay up together one night during their time living together to take care of Quyên’s sick daughter, Phi tries to rape Quyên. When she manages to push him away he breaks down and begs her to kill him, to end his miserable life. Upon seeing the man cry, “Quyên’s eyes soften, she pulls him up . . . Her voice gentle, quite and calm. The woman at any age seems to always have an instinct of a woman to be a mother, a sister, and at this moment Quyên’s voice, sounding like the voice of a mother, or a sister speaking to a brother calms him down.” 248 246 Thái Anh, “Quyên Được Viết Với Không Ít Nước Mắt Của Tôi Và Bạn Bè” (Quyen has been written with many tears from me and my friends) Lao Dong Online 24 December 2010, http://laodong.com.vn/Tin- Tuc/Quyen-duoc-viet-voi-khong-it-nuoc-mat-cua-toi-va-ban-be/26496 (accessed 20 February 2012). 247 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 28. 248 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 158. 179 In both instances, the men first desire Quyên as a beautiful woman whom they want to own as a lover, only to admire her later as a “good woman” who reminds them of their own mothers and sisters. More importantly, this change takes place because she nurtures and forgives them in spite of the harm they have inflicted upon her. Like a mother who does not blame the misdeeds of her children because of her unconditional love for them, Quyên forgives Hùng and Phi for the violence they committed against her. She is unable to see them suffer and chooses instead to suffer herself by caring for them even if such action leads to the continuation of the source of domination and danger in her life. In so doing, as the novel makes clear, she exposes the goodness inherent in them. Crying, Phi asks Quyên to run away with him and become his wife. After he recovers from his illness, Hùng offers to take Quyên to a nearby city and promises to take care of her and their child, thus ending her imprisonment. This celebration of Quyên’s power to bring out the best characteristics of Vietnamese men must be understood within the context of the Vietnamese mass migration to Eastern Europe as part of the labor export that forms the background of the novel. The strict guidelines governing the life of the guest workers that I discussed at the beginning of the chapter, which regard them “not as individuals, but strictly in terms of labor power,” affect the female workers even more than their male counterparts. 249 None of the workers were allowed to choose a specific kind of work and had to stay in the factories to which they were assigned, even though it has been noted that factory machinery is often unsuited to the small stature of Vietnamese women. Their 249 Mai Xuan, “Situationen der Vietnamesen in der DDR,” Doi Thoai 1 (1991), 81. 180 confinement to dormitories and factories with communal bathrooms ignored their need for privacy, and because any contact beyond the work place between male and female workers was prohibited, in case of pregnancy they had to undergo forced abortion or face a fine and deportation. Within the novel, however, the consequences of these gendered disciplining practices are explained in terms of the loss of traditional Vietnamese values. One of the most important side effects of the labor-export program emphasized in the book is the destruction of family structure. More importantly, this destruction, as seen through the stories of Hùng’s and Phi’s wives, is attributed to the weakness of the Vietnamese female guest workers, who are unable to live according to Vietnamese traditional values once they are no longer bound by the social contracts of Vietnamese society. Both women are exported laborers who betray their husbands with other men after leaving Vietnam. Telling Quyên about his family, Hung explains, “Women who left for a foreign land to earn a living and send money back home for their family, the majority of them have to connect to someone to live, to look for merchandise, to buy and sell, to exchange for more merchandises … Cultural values, ethics, traditions formed through so many years suddenly crack, fall apart, rot away within a day or two. . .” 250 In a similar way, Phi explains that, had he and his wife remained in Vietnam, “they might still have a family. They might not be happy, but the public opinion, the thousand years long linkages, bounded by unwritten rules,” may have prevented their marriage from falling apart. 251 250 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 38. 251 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 161. 181 Talking about temporary relationships between Vietnamese married men and women in the foreign land as a part of an economic calculation that forces them to leave the homeland in the first place, Hùng nevertheless blames the female workers for the destruction of the cultural values represented by the institution of marriage. The Vietnamese woman, struggling to earn a living on her own in a foreign land, voluntarily enters into illegitimate relationships, thereby obliterating the family structures underlying the Vietnamese traditions. When Quyên asks why he doesn’t blame the men, Hùng responds, “Have you forgotten that men are also humans. We eat so much butter, milk and meat, we are full of life and yet we lack the love of women.” 252 While Hung explains the participation of Vietnamese men in the illegitimate relationships as a desire for love and part of being human, the Vietnamese women who engage in the same kind of relationships are judged in terms of ethics and cultural values. In Quyên, the corruption of the Vietnamese woman in the foreign land not only leads to the destruction of Vietnamese values, but also distorts the Vietnamese man. The betrayal comes as a shock to both Hùng and Phi and changes them. Hùng, filled with hate, rage, and a feeling of disgrace drifts “to the borders of Germany, and, despite the inherent dangers, appears in this middle of no-where as the leader of a band of transnational robbers, with the sole intention of earning a lot of money, to erase the disgrace, not only in economic terms.” 253 Phi, in the mean time, becomes a coward who 252 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 39. 253 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 41. 182 secretly punches his own chest in an attempt to release the burden that builds up from his inability to do anything against his wife’s promiscuity. 254 It is within the context of broken families as an unspoken truth of everyday life in the foreign land that Quyên’s function as an allegory of the Vietnamese diaspora and her status as a woman come together to produce a female model against whom the Vietnamese female guest workers are measured to be condemned. 255 The contrast between Quyên and the wives of Phi and Hung can be seen in the ways they are referred to in the book. Hùng’s wife is unnamed, called by him as “my wife,” or “she,” while Phi’s wife is mentioned only with the nickname Thị, a derogatory Vietnamese term that refers to a woman in third person. 256 What further differentiates these women from Quyên is their sexuality. While Quyên, from the beginning of the book, declares that “she knows she is a not a sexual woman,” who would scratch her own legs until they bleed in order to prevent herself from having any pleasure with a man other than her husband, both Hung’s wife and Thị are defined by their extramarital sexual desires. The list of Thị’s lovers, whom she gets rid of quickly when they are no longer economically useful, serves as an illustration of the diasporic Vietnamese woman’s disregard for traditional values, which Hùng points out at the beginning of the novel. Thị is also described by the narrator as most beautiful “when she is on top, her loose hair wavering, the black eyes deep and full of secrets, rippling like darkness,” while Hùng’s wife, as he recounts 254 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 132. 255 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 39. Talking about the prominence of broken families, Hung tells Quyên, “My truth, the truth of many families displaying itself everyday in front of my eyes.” 256 Thi also used to be the pronoun to call a lower-class woman. 183 bitterly, kisses her lover as intensely as she makes love to her own husband. 257 These women are the opposite of Quyên, whose beauty “makes the man who encounters her want to be good, to be more careful, more refined and sophisticated.” 258 As sexual, promiscuous women, Thị and Hùng’s wife, the female guest workers, are everything that Quyên is not. Giving a background to Thị’s promiscuity, the author writes, “within a year, the majority of women and girls [who come to Germany as contract workers] have lovers. They also refuse to find out how to use the daily contraception pills that the German caretakers give to them, so that there are numerous abortions every month.” 259 Placing the responsibility of the high number of abortions on the female workers, who allegedly refuse to inquire about contraceptive pills, the novel disregards the limited language skills preventing workers from communicating with German caretakers, or the fact that such inquiries could lead to disciplining or even deportation. Moreover, the responsibility of the male workers in such unwanted pregnancies is not mentioned, nor is the pressure the authorities place on the female workers to give up their unborn children. Similar to the way in which Hùng’s responsibility for Quyên’s sexual exploitation is explained away through fatalism, the partial responsibility of Vietnamese men for the violence that Vietnamese female workers face is displaced through a discourse of victimization and female morality. As the author concludes, “Vietnamese women, known to be enduring, now fallen like rain drops in a foreign land, are even more enduring and lose their morals 257 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 118. 258 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 135. 259 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 139. 184 when forced into difficult or sensitive situations.” 260 Evoking a familiar Vietnamese idiom about the Vietnamese women as victims of circumstances, who like rain drops cannot decide where they will fall, the author nevertheless emphasizes that their sufferings also result from their own weaknesses. 261 The emphasis on endurance, when combined with loose morals, becomes an irony expressing a criticism that these women who take on lovers in fact lack the kind of endurance that a proper Vietnamese woman like Quyên demonstrates. Consequently, their betrayal is seen as the result of their own disregard for the traditional values that characterize the “traditional Vietnamese beauty.” Quyên’s description as a nonsexual person is thus inherently linked to her chastity and faithfulness to her husband, which leads her to refuse the economic comfort offered by Hùng and Phi even if such decision contributes much to her sufferings. After recovering from his sickness and upon finding out about Quyên’s pregnancy with his child, Hung offers to take her to the nearby city. “I want you to be my wife! We must start all over again,” he says. “Quyên wanted to cry. But she should not cry now. She must be honest with him. ‘Sincerity can convert even the devils and gods,’” she thinks, and ask Hùng to let her go look for her husband. 262 Hùng was taken aback. She is not like his wife, or even like him. Heaven, she is not only physically beautiful. The beauty inside of her, which he discovers tonight, hurts him but it also moves him. . . . He wishes . . . to have a woman by him with the love like Quyên’s. To have a woman like Quyên to marry, to love and to be loved unconditionally. His whole life. 263 260 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 139–140. 261 The Vietnamese proverb says, “Thân em như hạt mưa sa, hạt rơi giếng ngọc hạt ra ruộng cầy” (My body is like falling rain drops, some fall in jaded wells, others go to the field). 262 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 44. 263 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 46 185 Within this passage, Quyên is set apart—through her unconditional devotion and loyalty to her husband—from Hung’s wife and other Vietnamese women, whom he talks about earlier, who “connect” to men in a foreign land in order to survive. If, with her caring and nurturing, Quyên embodies the role of a selfless mother, then, with this unwavering faithfulness to her husband, she turns from being an object of sexual desire in Hùng’s eyes into a model of a wife. The insinuation is clear—if only his wife had Quyên’s inner beauty, if only she had been a good mother and wife, Hùng would have remained a good man, a good husband, his whole life. The corruption of Vietnamese men in the diaspora is attributed to the lack of traditional virtues in the women who have been displaced from the homeland. What is more important, the encounter with Quyên as a female model “converts” Hung, making him believe in the idea of a family again. Hung’s sacrifice of himself in order for Quyên to find her husband thus can be read as an attempt by the Vietnamese man to save the institution of marriage as an inherent part of Vietnamese culture that women Thị have destroyed. At the same time, the disappearance of Hung’s wife, just like the act of un-naming her and Thị’s tragic death at the hand of her own husband, constitute the punishments for the female contract workers who, upon finding themselves in a foreign land, fall short of the model of “the Vietnamese traditional beauty” that Quyên represents. 186 Disappeared! The Undocumented Vietnamese Subject within the Narrative of Ultimate Return Yet the Vietnamese female contract worker is not the only subject whose experience is undermined within the book. As the first published novel featuring an undocumented Vietnamese woman as the protagonist, Quyên also displaces the stories of undocumented Vietnamese people in Germany in two ways. First, the novel differentiates Quyên, the female symbol and the allegory of the Vietnamese Diaspora, from other undocumented Vietnamese people represented by the residents of the asylum camp Goldberg. And second, it ends the story of her life, as an undocumented Vietnamese woman, within a narrative of ultimate return to the homeland. This dual process marks the undocumented Vietnamese subjects as sojourners who have no place within the Vietnamese communities in Germany, which only recently managed to carve a place for themselves within German society through the complementary “immigrant origin narratives” of guest workers and boat people. 264 Arriving at the camp, Quyên, her pregnancy now visible, is shunned both by her husband, who cannot forgive her for betraying him, and by the other Vietnamese inhabitants of Goldberg, women and men who are jealous of her beauty and envy her husband for having her. Isolated from all the people surrounding her, Quyên thinks about 264 Bui defines “immigrant origin narratives” as “strategic recapitulations of migrants’ collective history,” which “inscribed Vietnamese migrants within the German national framework against a dominant discourse that showed Vietnamese people as roving Mafiosi outlaws and marginalized petty criminals,” 19. 187 a day in Vietnam when someone asked her what her name meant. Looking it up in the dictionary, she found out that Quyên could be the name of a flower, đỗ quyên, which can be crimson red, pastel pink … In whatever color it exudes a feeling of calmness, elegance, and sophistication among all the flowers that her grandfather grows. Then, there is a type of bird called quyên, which is also called tử quy, or cuốc. ‘The tử quy bird flies over the South, but turns its head towards the North and cries cuốc cuốc.’ Her mom read her a quotation from somewhere. When she was younger, she thought she was like the flower. Now, thinking back, she doesn’t think the name of the flower properly reflects her life. She is the cuốc bird, black body, pink feet, mingling among the domesticated chicken?! 265 Quyên’s reflection on her name early in the novel highlights her difference from the other inhabitants of the camp. Like the đỗ quyên flower, which dominates the other common flowers through its elegance and sophistication, Quyên, though undocumented, is separated from the people surrounding her in the camp, especially the women, because of her physical and inner beauty. The metaphor of both the flower and the bird also suggests Quyên’s superiority to the other undocumented immigrants. Like the cuốc bird trapped among domesticated chicken, Quyên finds herself among “selfish,” and “close-minded” and “jealous” people, who do everything to “find a weakness to dethrone, belittle, degrade and stain the image of the beautiful woman who is better than them in every way.” 266 Out of all the places she finds herself in, Goldberg is where her stay is the shortest and where she experiences such malevolence and jealousy from the other undocumented immigrants that she attempts suicide. Thus, Quyên, though she is legally a part of this population, does not belong to it. 265 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 92. 266 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 90. 188 This passage is preceded by six pages about life in Goldberg, which is described as “no different from the situation in other asylum camps inhabited by Vietnamese people all over Germany.” 267 In this description the asylum camp is characterized by a lack of hygiene and the prevalent lawlessness of its inhabitants. As the author explains, “a renters’ sentiment, living in another’s house, eating another’s food, with the sole intention of making some money and then take off, seems to be ever-present in the life- style of those who don’t know a word in German to recognize local laws. . . . The Vietnamese community in Goldberg is like a small island, standing apart in the middle of Europe. Self-contained and shut-out from the world.” 268 This description is followed by anecdotes about undocumented Vietnamese immigrants stealing fish from public lakes, selling smuggled cigarettes, and committing bloody murders within the community as reported by German media. It is significant that these anecdotes are used to illustrate the inhabitants of Goldberg, which stands in for the community of undocumented Vietnamese immigrants in Germany, because they draw on the depiction of Vietnamese guest workers in German media in the early 1990s. According to Pipo Bui and Sabine Am Order, between 1990 and 1995, newspapers in Berlin were filled with images of Vietnamese people selling smuggled cigarettes and engaging in gang violence. The tropes of lack of hygiene and secrecy surrounding the community—a secrecy that purportedly allows criminal activities to corrupt an innocent native society—accompany the criminalizing discourse. An article in 267 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 88. 268 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 84. 189 the Tagesspiegel from May 1995, for example, describes a building where Vietnamese people live using words like dirty, moldy, run-down, and overcrowded. “Almost everything here is illegal,” the reporter writes, “no one knows how many people live in these three blocks. Only the fewest have valid papers.” 269 As Bui points out, “Berlin newspapers’ focus on the black market and violent crime reporting in connection with Vietnamese migrants, coupled with the persistent practice of identifying ethno-national label […] edged out any alternative portrayal of Vietnamese migrants in the daily press.” 270 Using the same language as these media reports to describe the inhabitants of Goldberg, the novel differentiates these undocumented immigrants from the former guest workers. Depicted as lawless criminals and sojourners who see Germany merely as a place to earn quick money, these newcomers become the opposite of the workers, who may have engaged in minor illegal activities in order to survive, but who in the end manage to gain a place in the German society through legal measures. Constructed as an allegorical figure for the nation’s history and as a female model, whose sufferings expose the obscure story of the Vietnamese contract workers in Germany, Quyên’s musings about her name, on the one hand, set her apart from this population, whose arrival is a threat to the former guest workers’ position in German society, which they have just managed to achieve. On the other hand, however, coming from an undocumented Vietnamese woman, these reflections also emphasize a narrative of ultimate return, which further displaces the undocumented Vietnamese subject. The 269 Bui 59. 270 Bui 52. 190 story of the cuốc bird is a familiar story in Vietnamese culture, which is evoked often to talk about the pain of losing one’s homeland. 271 The bird’s name, cuốc, which refers to the sound it makes, and the term quốc, which means country, are homophones. Thus, the bird is believed to be calling out to a lost country. The quotation that Quyên’s mother reads out to her, “The tử quy bird flies over the South, but turns its head towards the North and cries cuốc cuốc,” comes from a Chinese story about a king who lost his kingdom and turns into the bird upon his death to forever call for his homeland. Comparing herself to the bird, Quyên not only differentiates herself from the other inhabitants of Goldberg, but also makes clear that she too will forever long to return to her homeland. Her desire to return is expressed several times in the novel. Shortly before she attempts suicide, when the talk of the inhabitants of Goldberg lead Dũng, her husband, to chase her out of the room they share in the middle of the night, Quyên finds refuge in the storage room of the camp. “Why is her life so cursed? She bites her lips until they bleed. Why did she leave her homeland, her family . . . to find a fate like today. . . . If only she has money to leave this place right away, to go back to her country. Go back home!” 272 Trapped in a situation with no solution, Quyên believes that her problems will end if only she can return to Vietnam. Her thoughts echo Hùng’s belief, expressed earlier in the novel, that the curse Vietnamese people face in a foreign land comes from their decision 271 Ba Huyen Thanh Quan (1805-1848), a famous Vietnamese poet, writes in one of her best known works, “Nho nuoc dau long con cuoc cuoc, thuong nha moi mieng cai gia gia,” which means the cuoc bird is burdened with pain from longing for his country, the gia bird’s voice is weakened from calling for home. 272 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 98. 191 to leave their homeland to go to a place in which they can never find home. Consequently, the curse will be lifted if she goes back. More importantly, Quyên also demonstrates that she can never feel at home in Germany. While she is living with Kumar, she admits, The feelings of an expatriate with a sensitive soul like Quyên is peculiar. No matter how fresh the scenery, no matter how beautiful the surroundings, they would only bring her a momentary joy, wandering thoughts will soon follow and an intense longing for the place where she grew up, where she used to live, although that place, in the familiar homeland has none of the material advantages of the place in which she is living now. 273 Quyên’s life with Kumar is the happiest time of her life in Germany. Out of all the men she encounters in the novel, Kumar is the only one whose love for Quyên does not manifest through violence. He is also the only person with whom Quyên, after being abandoned by her husband, decides to stay out of love, not because of pity, fear, or duty. With him she has finally found a family and a partner in life in the foreign land. However, even at this happiest moment in her life, Quyên is plagued by a longing for the homeland that nothing, neither the love for Kumar, nor a comfortable life, can assuage. In the end, she leaves Kumar behind, boards a plan, and goes back with Thanh Vân, her daughter, to “Quyên’s mother opening her arms widely to receive the vase with Hung’s remains.” 274 If Quyên is an allegorical figure for the Vietnamese diasporic community in Germany and Eastern Europe, then her mother, who welcomes not only her but also Hùng back with open arms, functions as a symbol of the Vietnamese nation taking back 273 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 220. 274 Nguyễn Văn Thọ 414. 192 her children, dead or alive, good or bad, and forgives them for running away. If we continue the parallel between The Tale of Kiêu and Nguyễn Văn Thọ’s novel, then Quyên’s return is the message of hope that Huynh Sanh Thong mentions. Only by returning can she find happiness because she has paid off the evil karma that comes with the displacement process. Within the socio-historical context of the formation of the Vietnamese diasporic communities in Germany, however, this motive of ultimate return to the homeland can also be read as a way to exile the undocumented Vietnamese subject. By the time the book ends, Quyên has fulfilled her allegorical role as a vessel to tell the story of the guest workers. Through the different ebbs and flows of Quyên’s life in Germany, Hùng is converted back from being a criminal to being a good man who believes again in the sacredness of the marriage institution, Phi regains control of his life to find happiness with another woman who respects him, and Thị and other female guest workers who fail to live up to the Vietnamese traditions are punished through disappearance and death. Yet, Quyên remains an undocumented subject and as such she has no place in Germany. The immigrant origin narrative of the guest workers relies on the established narrative about the boat people, whose successful integration into German society is explained as the result of their own desire to build a new home and find a new homeland in Germany. The guest workers, however, as their name suggests, are perceived as temporary visitors, who will eventually leave. In order to counter that assumption, the guest workers must create a complementary narrative to the boat-people narrative in which their displacement also takes place out of a desire to find a new home in Germany. 193 This narrative relies on a double North/South axis when referring to their origin and an East/West axis when talking about their destination. Boat people are assumed to have all come from the South of Vietnam to West Germany, while guest workers are presumed to have come from the North to East Germany. As Pipo Bui points out, this binary does not fully reflect the situation of the two groups. Although the majority of the guest workers came from the North, a number of them also hailed from the South and Central Vietnam. They also did not remain only in East Germany. Even before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, a number of contract workers (not only Vietnamese) joined thousands of DDR citizens every year in their escape to West Germany in a movement often called wall refugees. However, this East-West, North-South paradigm allows the former guest workers to claim East Germany, in the same way the boat people can claim West Germany. 275 Through their legal struggles and by designing an image of themselves as complementary to the boat people, the guest workers make clear that they can also integrate into and become part of the German society. Such a narrative, however, edges out any possibility for other Vietnamese immigrants, who are conveniently grouped under the labels of undocumented migrants and criminals; these labels were used by advocates for the contract workers to create a counter-image to the negative depiction of the guest workers in the media in the early 1990s. The novel’s description of the inhabitants of Goldberg, using the same terms that were used to criminalize the contract workers, functions to differentiate the guest workers as worthy immigrants from the undocumented Vietnamese subjects as unworthy 275 Bui 172. 194 immigrants, whose arrival functions as a threat to the newly established position of the guest workers as complementary to the boat people. At the same time, the narrative’s emphasis on return also makes clear that unlike the guest workers and the boat people, these new immigrants are sojourners who do not see Germany as a new home. Instead, like Quyên, they will always long, and eventually will to go back, to their homeland. Quyên’s journey back to Vietnam at the end of the book, and her belief in the ultimate return to the homeland as a solution to all of the problems she faces in the foreign land, not only emphasizes the impossibility of undocumented immigrants finding a home in Germany, but also disregards the many socio-economic reasons that still force many people to risk their lives and families to find a livelihood in a foreign land. Within this narrative, their struggles become invisible, either explained within a metaphorical trauma of displacement, or attributed to the sojourner mentality that leads the undocumented immigrants to hurt each other in an effort to earn quick money. Without a chance to be part of the German society, these immigrants are also not part of the diasporic Vietnamese communities because they do not fit within the narrative of either the guest worker or the boat people. Like Phượng, who disappears among the many silences of the community and the host society, the undocumented Vietnamese subjects in Germany and their experiences disappear within a narrative of ultimate return. This chapter traces how the novel Quyên by Nguyễn Văn Thọ rewrites the Vietnamese epic The Tale of Kiêu within a diasporic framework. Focusing on three parallel features between the two works—fatalism, the function of the protagonist’s story 195 as an allegory for national history, and the implication of their status as women—the chapter demonstrates that Quyên functions as an allegorical figure for the Vietnamese diaspora in general and in Germany specifically. The protagonist’s tragic life, told within a discourse of exaggerated victimization, exposes how the best and the worst characteristics in a Vietnamese person are revealed when they find themselves fighting for survival in a foreign land. However, this construction of Quyên as an allegory of the Vietnamese diaspora, leads to an epistemic violence that masks the material struggles of many members of the diaspora, specifically the female Vietnamese guest worker and the undocumented Vietnamese immigrants. Like Kiêu, who is “brutalized and ravaged in one brothel to the next, by one corrupt official to another in order to highlight the immorality and ambivalence at times of upheaval,” the rape, abandonment, exploitation, and physical violence that Quyên faces illustrate how the Vietnamese masculinity of the Vietnamese male contract worker is challenged and restored in the diaspora. 276 In the novel, Quyên also stands apart from other undocumented Vietnamese immigrants like her, whose experiences are trivialized within this allegorical narrative about Vietnamese abroad. At the same time, she is also constructed as a female model imbued with traditional feminine virtues, against who other Vietnamese women in the diaspora are measured to be condemned. Nguyễn Văn Thọ’s treatment of Quyên, I contend, is informed by the social conditions that led to the dominance of the two discourses about Vietnamese people in Germany; these discourses make it impossible for other types of migrants to establish 276 Mariam Lam, “The Passing of Literary Traditions: The Figure of the Woman from Vietnamese Nationalism to Vietnamese American Nationalism,” Amerasia Journal 23.2 (1997), 30. 196 their own narratives. In order to highlight the histories of the guest workers, which remain largely unknown, the author not only constructs the undocumented Vietnamese woman as an abstract figure who embodies the sufferings of the Vietnamese diaspora, but also ends her story with her return to the homeland. As neither a guest worker, nor a boat person, Quyên has no place in Germany. Therefore her life can only be told within a narrative of ultimate return. Within the context of the eastward expansion of the European Union, an analysis of the discriminatory nature of this narrative is important because the exile of undocumented Vietnamese from a diasporic Vietnamese community in Germany might be symptomatic of the way this population is perceived in other communities in Eastern European countries. As seen in the case of Germany, the consequences of this practice of exile exceeds the literary realm, as the legal victory of the guest workers also seals the German borders to newcomers because it leaves no room for other collective histories that could become the basis for a legal struggle. Thus Quyên, like Phượng, will continue to disappear, not allowed to exist legally and unable to be represented culturally in the diasporic space, because their stories expose what must be forgotten in order for the diasporic community to be built. 197 Conclusion: An Incomplete Story Between February and June 2008, a series of six articles appeared in Gazeta Wyborcza, the largest daily newspaper in Poland, drawing new attention to the presence of a growing number of undocumented Vietnamese immigrants in Poland. The series was prompted by an agreement between the Polish and Vietnamese governments about mutual readmission of citizens that had been in the works since 2004. According to the pact, the Vietnamese government agreed to take part in interviewing undocumented Vietnamese migrants—who regularly come up with new personal data in their applications for asylum and who deny any national affiliation in an effort to avoid deportation—and readmit any person who they positively identify as Vietnamese. Quoting a small group of activists advocating for the legalization of undocumented Vietnamese migrants, the editors of Gazeta Wyborcza criticize the Polish government for providing communist Vietnam with a tool to continue the repression of its citizens beyond Vietnamese borders. In the reports, as well as other articles and public debates that have appeared in the press since 2008, an image emerges of undocumented Vietnamese immigrants as victims of a repressive regime that seeks to control them even in the diaspora. The narrative usually contains four thematic threads: communist repression in Vietnam, the escape from Vietnam, continued repression by communist Vietnam in Poland, and the characterization of Poland as a country of freedom with a history of fighting against communism. Consequently, the activists assert, Poland has an obligation to help Vietnamese refugees who are escaping from a totalitarian regime. 198 In one of the articles, a Vietnamese immigrant with the pseudonym Nguyen Lam explains that he has been thrown in prison two times in Vietnam. 277 The first time he was held in military prison for refusing to shoot at ethnic Chinese villagers during the Sino- Vietnamese war in 1979. After trying to escape Vietnam on a boat, he was thrown into a “prison-camp.” Another Vietnamese immigrant, “Viet Anh” also reveals that he tried to escape from Vietnam on a boat in the 1980s. He explains that he was forced to return to Vietnam, after waiting in the intermediate camp in Indonesia for seven years, as a result of the repatriation act signed by the United Nations and Vietnam in 1994. None of the escape stories gives details about how Lam or Viet Anh came to Poland. All characters identify themselves as Southerners and the stories about them focus on their previous attempts to leave Vietnam and the repression they experienced in Vietnam, using terms such as prison camps or boat escape. Within a U.S. context, the story of Lam and Viet Anh sounds familiar. Popular Vietnamese American displacement narratives, both the ones circulating in Vietnamese community news sources and those that reach the mainstream American audience through scholarly studies and English-language literature, often emphasize postwar imprisonment as an important reason forcing Vietnamese people to seek their freedom in other countries. The story of Vietnamese boat people has gained worldwide attention and is often perceived as the prototypical experience of Vietnamese people in the United States and other countries such as France or Australia. Within a Polish context, however, this is a new narrative. 277 In all of the articles, the reporters indicate that the names and personal data of the immigrants are replaced with pseudonyms to protect them from the repercussion of the Vietnamese regime. 199 Unlike many Western European countries, Poland has no history of sponsoring Vietnamese refugees. As Teresa Halik makes clear in her research, between the 1950s and mid- 1980s, Vietnamese people came to Poland as part of the solidarity and cooperation within the communist bloc. 278 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Northwestern European countries such as France and West Germany sponsored thousands of Vietnamese boat people, Poland still accepted about 200 Vietnamese students and professionals each year, as part of an agreement between the two governments. Poland also has little experience in dealing with large refugee populations, partly because it has never been seen as an attractive destination, politically and economically, for refugee communities. After the fall of communism in Poland, the country did experience an influx of people from the Soviet Union, including Vietnamese people, yet the majority of those people moved further West, and those who stayed managed to gain residency status quickly due to the fairly unrestricted immigration policies. In 1992, when my family came to Poland, any Polish citizen who was employed and owned an apartment could sponsor a family of four, like mine. Poland also had special agreements with Eastern neighbors such as Ukraine or Belarus that allowed citizens from those countries to remain and work in Poland for six months at a time without a visa. Until the tightening of immigration policies in the mid-1990s as part of the country’s preparation to join the 278 Teresa Halik. Migrancka społeczność Wietnamczyków w Polsce w świetle polityki państwa i ocen społecznych (The Migrant Community of the Vietnamese in Poland in the Light of State Policy and Social Assessment). Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2006. 200 European Union, there were few undocumented immigrants in Poland who had to rely on refugee status to stay in Poland if they wanted to. Consequently, when activists started advocating for undocumented Vietnamese migrants in Poland, they drew from an internationally recognized narrative about Vietnamese refugees, which was modified to feature Poland within the imagination of many Vietnamese diasporic communities—not as a country with a history of cooperation with communist Vietnam, but as a country that fought against communism. This new discourse often relies on a U.S.-centric narrative of anti-communism in which the term communist is used as a punishment for people with dissenting voices in the community. In the same article, interviewee “Nguyen Ngoc Thanh” laments that, “Vietnamese, even in Poland, when met with Vietnamese officials, put their heads down out of fear and do what they are told. Here, like in the Czech Republic, or in Hungary, the majority of Vietnamese people are from the North. In France, in the United States, or in Australia, they are Southerners, who escaped after the Americans lost the war and openly criticize communism.” 279 This sentiment is repeated often. Father Osiecki, a long-time activist advocating for the legalization of undocumented Vietnamese, explains in an interview, that “the [Vietnamese] embassy categorically refuses to confirm personal data, when a person is OK according to the embassy—meaning they don’t take part in the migrant opposition groups, don’t distribute flyers, don’t work against the communist regime. The police, weirdly, always find those who raise their voices against the regime, 279 Aleksandra Krzyzaniak-Gumowska, “Zakadnicy Ambasady Wietnamu [Hostages of the Vietnamese Embassy],” Gazeta Wyborcza 28 June 2008, http://wyborcza.pl/1,76842,5404673,Zakladnicy_ambasady_Wietnamu.html, (accessed 20 February, 2012). All quotations are translated from Polish by the author. 201 and the embassy immediately confirms their identities. Then Polish border patrol can deport them.” 280 This narrative, propagated by the media and the activists in other cultural venues, has grave consequences. Because activists like Osiecki advocate legalization only for political dissidents through refugee status, such accusation of collaboration with the regime in exchange for the regime’s silence on one’s identity makes clear that only some undocumented immigrants are “real” victims who should be rescued. More importantly, those who do not openly denounce the communist regime are seen as part of the communist repression that continues to plague Vietnamese people even outside of Vietnamese borders. Focusing on the narrative of communist oppression, this discourse differentiates between those worthy of legalization through refugee status because their flight results from political persecution, and those supposedly unworthy of refugee status, who merely left to find a better life. Migrants who belong to this second group are also seen as tools of the communist regime, those who “put their head down out of fear.” At the same time, the stories related in Gazeta also highlight the moral obligation of Poland, as a country of freedom, to help and accept this new wave of communist victims. In a public debate about the state of immigrants in Poland in February 2011, Ton Van Anh, a known Vietnamese activist and dissident, claims, “We talk about what happens to immigrants in Poland, but not what happens to them when they leave Poland. After deportation repression awaits them and even death. Polish people know from their own experience what problems result from leaving a totalitarian country. Now, Poland is 280 Krzyzaniak-Gumowska. 202 the first stop of the free world, in which everyone should get protection.” 281 By insisting that the debate focus on what happens after deportation, and calling Poland the first stop of the free world, Ton insinuates that undocumented Vietnamese migrants suffer only at the hand of the Vietnamese government, without discussing the restrictive policies that have been adopted since Poland became the European Union’s new “frontier against the East,” which has resulted in the illegal status of many Vietnamese immigrants. She also does not address the violence of Polish police forces and border patrols, who regularly rob Vietnamese migrants or treat them brutally in and out of arrest. Drawing on Polish past struggles against communism, this narrative paints Poland, the host country, as the opposite of Vietnam, the homeland, and ignores hierarchies of race, ethnicity, and gender that often produce xenophobic reactions to undocumented Vietnamese people in Poland and other parts of Europe. The story of Vietnamese people, both documented and undocumented, in Poland remains largely unknown not only for scholars of the Vietnamese diaspora, but also for the larger Polish society, in which a fading recollection of the quiet Vietnamese student from the past competes with more popular images of Vietnamese people in Hollywood movies. Where do the new immigrants who are still crossing the borders of Europe everyday fit in? What memories are lost, hidden, and changed when diasporic communities struggle to find their place in a diaspora, which is not as free as scholars often proclaim it to be. 281 Ton Van Anh, “Polska Przystanek Wolnosci” (Poland: The Station of Freedom). Gazeta Wyborcza 22 February 2011, http://wyborcza.pl/1,75515,9148787,Polska__przystanek_wolnosci.html, (accessed 20 February, 2012). 203 This is where this project started, at the borders of Poland, in between the homeland and the Vietnamese Diaspora as we know it. Yet, like the narrators in Thuận’s Chinatown, I have already began to rewrite, because there was nowhere in this narrative where I could comfortably fit the stories of the undocumented Vietnamese migrants in Poland, except as an attachment at the end of an account about other people who have also been marginalized. In their untold stories, everything that this dissertation is about comes together: the conflicting histories shaping the Vietnamese diaspora, the politics and consumption of memory, and what the silences can tell us about history, nations, and communities. 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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
In Writing Exile I re-conceptualize the notion exile as a framework to discuss the limitations and potential of diasporic cultural and literary productions. Departing from a traditional understanding of exile as being cast out from a nation-state or native country, the project highlights a concept of exile as a process that encompasses multiple moments of geographical and ideological displacement. This process starts in the homeland and continues beyond its borders, linking histories of colonialism and imperialism with current power regimes governing relationships of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the diaspora. Within this framework, the project examines the multilingual literary and cultural productions of Vietnamese diasporic communities in the United States, France, and Germany, which are informed by histories of ethnic conflicts, French colonization, American military intervention, and global Cold War politics. Locating this literature at the intersection of many national, imperial, and colonial aspirations, I suggest that a reconceptualization of exile is helpful in understanding how the multiple histories and social conditions leading to exile continue to characterize the lived experience of diasporic subjects. At the same time, this notion of exile questions claims of origin and authenticity to present a series of choices and opportunities for diasporic cultural productions to challenge the constraints of the diaspora, which cannot be contained within the trajectory of the homeland and the diaspora as respective openings and endpoints. Within this struggle, which reveals rather than conceals the multiplicities and conflicts shaping diasporic communities, our understanding of diaspora is constantly questioned and remade at the same time.
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Dao, Anh Thang
(author)
Core Title
Writing exile: Vietnamese literature in the diaspora
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
American Studies and Ethnicity
Publication Date
07/31/2014
Defense Date
03/09/2012
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Asian American literature,diaspora,ethnic Chinese,exile,Freedom,Lely Hayslip,Linda Le,modernism,Monique Truong,OAI-PMH Harvest,Vietnamese American literature,Vietnamese diaspora
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Nguyen, Viet Thanh (
committee chair
), Gómez-Barris, Macarena (
committee member
), Norindr, Panivong (
committee member
), Rowe, John Carlos (
committee member
)
Creator Email
minako.dao@gmail.com,thangdao@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-81407
Unique identifier
UC11289001
Identifier
usctheses-c3-81407 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-DaoAnhThan-1097.pdf
Dmrecord
81407
Document Type
Dissertation
Rights
Dao, Anh Thang
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
Asian American literature
ethnic Chinese
Lely Hayslip
Linda Le
modernism
Monique Truong
Vietnamese American literature
Vietnamese diaspora