I. The Refugee Turned Model Minority

A. Yen Le Espiritu: narratives of success and rescue in images of "desperate turned successful" Vietnamese Americans
B. Problems with "desperate"

1. Victimization narrative seems to render Vietnamese passive
2. Shores up sense of Americans as rescuers
3. Focus on culture and assimilation
4. Reinforce perceptions of America as always a land of opportunity

C. Problems with "successful"

1. Seen as due to enduring Vietnamese cultural values
2. Implicitly blames other minority groups for their supposed lack of success

D. Category of Asian Americans erases differences of history and experience
E. Question category of "refugee"

1. Process of leaving shaped by longer history, including of US involvement
2. Explore diverse Vietnamese perspectives

 

II. Stories (Trinh T. Minh-ha)

A. Story versus history
B. Multisensory
C. Gender
D. Othering

 

III. Transnational Memory Practices in Vietnam

A. Schwenkel: remembering and representing war in Vietnam is transnational
B. Since 1990s: war memories tied to market socialism, neoliberalism, economic engagement
C. Questions

1. How are ways of talking about and commemorating the war caught up in these processes of economic engagement and supposed political reconciliation?
2. Which versions of the past come to be seen as more correct or important?
3. What happens when war becomes a motivation for tourism and money making?

D. "Recombinant history": how diverse and discrepant memories or forms of knowledge circulate transnationally

1. American and Vietnamese memories come together in places or moments
2. Reconciliation projects
3. Museum exhibits
4. War tourism
5. Debates about torture

E. Visits and reconciliation

1. Various American perspectives

a. veterans: trauma (PTSD) and healing
b. Recouping masculinity
c. Personal and moral regeneration
d. Help Vietnamese overcome communism

2. Various Vietnamese perspectives

a. The weeping, repentant veteran
b. War between governments, not people
c. About future, not past
d. Not reconciliation, but Vietnamese forgiveness

3. Missing RVN perspectives

F. War Tourism

1. Emerged in 1990s: "selective re-Americanization of the postwar landscape" (83)
2. China Beach, Khe Sanh military base, Apocalypse Now nightclub in Ho Chi Minh City
3. Zippo lighters: CBS News video
4. Cu Chi tunnels

a. 40 miles NW of HCM City
b. Enlarged and reconstructed in late 1980s-90s
c. Tours emphasize difference in size, technology: tourist video and BBC video
d. Two areas: one for foreigners, one for Vietnamese

G. Decentering celebratory narratives by both states

1. "Shifts in both the economy and historical memory thus reflect the Vietnamese state's precarious global position as it negotiates global hierarchies of power and international (especially U.S.) pressure to further implement neoliberal policies and democratic reforms" (22).
2. Power differential: US capitalism and its empire of memory ==> Vietnamese strategy of selective incorporation and recombination

 

IV. Vietnamese Americans as Bearers of Vietnamese Tradition

A. Nhi T. Lieu: beauty contests and ao dai as claims to traditional cultural identity
B. Means of disciplining young women
C. Critique communist regime for loss of culture
D. Anti-communism as claim to belong in US
E. Downplays differences of class or region within Vietnamese American community
F. Young Vietnamese American women: sexualized, yet culturally appropriate bearers of identity
G. Seeming vs. Being: speaking Vietnamese

 

V. Entrepreneurship

A. Immigrant entrepreneurship, ethnic enclave entrepreneurship, and upward mobility
B. Vietnamese immigrants own approximately 80% of $7.5 billion US nail salon industry
C. Hoang: entrepreneurship and racialization in two Vietnamese owned nail salons in majority minority neighborhoods in CA
D. Enclave export sector: when enclave entrepreneurship moves into new neighborhoods
E. Triangular system of labor relationships marked by race and class hierarchies

1. Owner and workers
2. Owner and clients
3. Workers and clients

F. Classic triangle of white/Asian/other minority
G. Owners and workers portray blacks as deviant and Latinx as passive: impact of white privilege
H. Politeness, joking, not having to do too much "talking services" (emotional labor)
I. Workers' upward mobility is limited
J. Intersectionality and racialization