The Asian American Experience. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017. xiv, 213 pp. (B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-252-08288-7.
The politics of rescue positions saviors and victims in fraught relation to each other, where the former’s benevolence is usually understood as an exertion of power over the latter. Phuong Tran Nguyen broadens this critical commonplace about the politics of rescue by explaining its emergence and accounting for its changing impact on the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States. In an ambitious study that spans the start of US involvement in the war in Vietnam during the 1950s to the contemporary post-Cold War period, Nguyen provides a critical description of “refugee nationalism,” a concept that denotes the refugee’s passionate attachment to two states, South Vietnam and the United States.
In Becoming Refugee American: The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon, Nguyen develops the concept of refugee nationalism to account for the complex affective lives of diasporic Vietnamese, whose loyalty to their lost nation, the Republic of Vietnam, is entangled in, and yet is also distinct from, their attachment to and gratitude for the US. As the author details with striking clarity, this vexed stripe of nationalism cannot be fully explained through the analytic of gratitude, which Mimi Thi Nguyen has influentially theorized as a powerful political emotion that binds victim to savior in a perpetual state of indebtedness. Instead, Becoming Refugee American is a book that shows the necessity of historicizing a fuller range of emotions. These emotions encompass: American guilt over having lost the war and the enduring significance of upholding a moral obligation to Vietnamese refugees as a way of salving this guilt; nostalgia as the dominant mood of Little Saigon; and the ethnic enclave’s predominantly unwavering antipathy for communism. As Phuong Tran Nguyen puts it, this form of nationalism sets in motion a process of “becoming American,” one that is neither wholly assimilation nor completely a rejection of this discourse. Instead, the process of becoming is a mode of national belonging that maintains steadfast loyalty to the Republic of Vietnam, a nation that disappeared with the fall of Saigon in 1975, and to the U.S., which for complex reasons that are no less politicized, has taken on the moral obligation of providing refuge in the wake of its military loss.
Though this book focuses on the diasporic Vietnamese living in Little Saigon in Orange County, California, its aim is more expansive: Nguyen situates the Vietnamese diaspora’s formation and evolution in the national and transnational contexts of the global Cold War and post-Cold War geopolitical realignments. Chapter 1 sets the stage for the ongoing negotiation of this attachment, by considering the ways that South Vietnamese and Americans became “accidental allies” during the war in Vietnam. Chapter 2 examines how the gratitude of diasporic Vietnamese to the US helped them relieve the grief of losing the war, by constructing a collective memory that rewrites the past. Subsequent chapters provide fascinating analyses of the ways that diasporic cultural production perform “social work” for the community of Little Saigon, which then took on ominous valence, in the 1980s to early 1990s, when freedom fighters sought through violent means to remasculinize South Vietnamese men by winning the very war against communist Vietnam that Americans had lost. The book concludes by addressing the impact of the post-Cold War era on the politics of refuge, when the diaspora’s virulent anticommunism seems ever more out of step in the wake of market liberalization in Vietnam and when the normalization of relations between Vietnam and the US has resulted in the waning of moral obligation on the part of Americans towards diasporic Vietnamese.
What distinguishes Becoming Refugee American is its careful attention to the successive periods of refugee resettlement, starting with the first group of professionals in 1975, continuing with the so-called boat people, then the beneficiaries of the Orderly Departure and Humanitarian Resettlement programs, before culminating with those who arrived after the end of the Cold War. The only group that does not receive sustained attention in this book is Amerasian children. While one can guess why this group of mixed race children were excluded—likely they resettled outside Little Saigon—readers might appreciate further explanation of the book’s scope as well as its methodology. Notably, the book draws attention to the importance of the writings of diasporic Vietnamese, and laments that these resources are seldom consulted due to language barriers. Given the value that the book places on these resources, it is striking, considering the author’s fluency in Vietnamese, that they do not feature more prominently in the study. Additionally, while Nguyen rightly focuses on Little Saigon, given that this is where the diasporic Vietnamese community is most concentrated, his decision to limit the scope prompts the question: how generalizable is the concept of “refugee Americans”? At various points in the book, Nguyen parallels and contrasts the experiences of diasporic Vietnamese with diverse refugee groups in the US, including Cubans and Hungarians, among others, but leaves intriguingly unresolved the matter of whether these other groups are refugee Americans, and how their processes of becoming might be differentiated from those that shaped the Vietnamese community in Little Saigon. These are just a few examples of where further reflection on methodology and scope might have enhanced this generative analysis.
Thy Phu
The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada