Empire’s Residuals

This chapter argues that Ho Chi Minh City (also called Saigon) manifests the contradictory historical processes that shaped the city, once the capital of South Vietnam, into the economic hub it is today. For historical context, it first gives a brief summary of urbanization and class transformation under U.S. military rule in Saigon, especially during the time of Vietnamization, and how this period arguably produced a form of “neocolonialism” as many of its critics claimed which never dissipated after the Americans left. By tracking the migration of overseas Vietnamese or Viet Kieu back to the homeland, we can view the ways global change is localized. Through a cultural geography and ethnographic lens, the chapter involves participant observation and interviews with locals and former exiles. Scholars who write about Ho Chi Minh City today tend to focalize contemporary industrialization and globalization processes as manifestations of state governmental reforms or foreign corporate encroachment. This chapter provides this same focus but make connections between current urbanizing developments to the city’s history of war.

Refugee Assets

This chapter explores the challenges of memory work for Vietnamese diasporic subjects in the face of postwar historical amnesia and trauma. It analyzes Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, which tells the story of two families that fled from the Vietnam War still grappling with the messiness of their war-torn past. Offering a powerful analytic for situating gendered practices of remembering and forgetting by mostly women, the term “reeducation” suggests that refugee memory work never simply takes the form of nostalgia or denial of the past but is a constant negotiation of history as interpreted through past wrongs or obligations. As a hermeneutic for critically reading the refugee as a figure of debt, “reeducation” links the programmatic indoctrination of South Vietnamese political prisoners by communists to the Western pedagogical program to civilize refugees from South Vietnam, recognizing the psychic and material debt survivors of war owe to the sacrifices and suffering of others, and the political agency found in that recognition.

Introduction

The introduction presents the book’s main argument, theoretical framework, and primary research questions. It provides a brief summary of the second Indochinese War or the Vietnam War and how the Republic of Vietnam came into being. It then discusses the Nixon strategy to “Vietnamize” the war in 1969, arguing that the term Vietnamization provides a productive term to interrogate the gendered racial logics of U.S. imperialism during the Cold War in Southeast Asia and its relationship with foreign allies. The chapter first begins with how the twenty-first century offers a generational lapse and new historical occasion to reflect upon the Vietnam War. It then offers a theorization of Vietnamization as a heuristic device to elaborate why cultural memory and discourse surrounding the Vietnam War remain conflicted as tied to the collapse of South Vietnam and its inability to protect and save itself. Vietnamization serves as a critical vocabulary for imagining the “arrested future” or delayed moment of freedom/liberation for American allies, shaping postwar ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and emancipation. As a critical refugee studies project, the book is situated and contextualized within larger debates in Asian American cultural studies and criticism over war. Finally, the introduction provides an elaboration of relevant scholarship under way in this field of history and memory. It explains why it is important to conduct research in the United States, Vietnam, and the Vietnamese American community discussing the geopolitical dimensions of refugee culture and consciousness.

Dismembered Lives

This chapter uses the twin concepts of dismemberment and rememberment to investigate the media discourse surrounding a controversial art exhibit held in 2009 in Orange County, California involving mass protests by hundreds of people demonstrating against a community-based art exhibit for showcasing creative reinterpretations of the South Vietnamese national flag and Vietnamese women’s role, as proper gendered national subjects fueled a public outcry against the exhibit as profane, pro-communist trash. The chapter concludes by discussing the ban on LGBT people from the community’s annual new year TET parade, and how this had to do with more than homophobia, but South Vietnamese nationalism, which allows for no alternative identities within the diasporic family. This chapter ultimately aims to broaden the scope for studying Vietnamese American “homeland politics” by venturing to speak to the puzzling ways the overseas communities and identities formed by refugees from South Vietnam are shaped, circumscribed, and policed in the current day by the politics of anti-communism.

Militarized Freedoms

This chapter explores stories of Vietnamese Americans who came of age after the Vietnam War and currently serve in the U.S. armed forces during the War on Terror in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. These soldiers not only wanted to give back to their adopted country for their free lives as refugees fleeing the war but also to make up for America’s loss of Vietnam as well as the defeat of South Vietnam. From the oral histories, the chapter moves on to a major published literary memoir from U.S. Marine Quang X. Pham. Pham, a well-known public figure, talks about his confused life through losing his father, a South Vietnamese former pilot. From these oral and written texts, the chapter analyzes the thoughts of these “children of war” on wide-ranging issues such as migration, nation, family, and citizenship through the concept of “militarized freedom”—defined for these professionals as the sense of freedom (both political and personal) as shaped through their experiences and trauma with militarism. The Vietnamese American soldier encounters a moral dilemma that moves beyond a “Vietnam Syndrome,” an “American Syndrome,” where their professional obligations to American nation-building projects pulsate through their personal status as the living embodiment and physical reminders of America’s loss in South Vietnam.

Archival Others

This chapter examines the Vietnam War Center and Archive located at Texas Tech University, the largest collection of personal artifacts and materials related to the Vietnam War in the United States. This major historical institution is keen on documenting all narratives and artifacts as a living memorial related to the war, including those of former South Vietnamese refugees who are often denied a voice a “archival others.” The chapter explains the origins of this archive, using historical documents and interviews with its staff. This is followed by an analysis of the archive’s newsletters to demonstrate the type of public image this archive promotes. Third, it interrogates the type of oral histories contained in the archive, recognizing the stories mostly of American GIs and their problematic view of Vietnamese people. The chapter also reviews the largest collection of Vietnamese materials in the center like the Orderly Departure Program, the visa application files from South Vietnamese refugees seeking asylum in the United States. It problematizes the archive’s growing relations with Vietnamese Americans and the Vietnamese socialist state and the ways the archive tries to maintain relations with the socialist government despite the animosity of Vietnamese Americans toward the regime. It ends with the anticipation of a newly conceived “Archive for War and Diplomacy in the Post-Vietnam War Era” to expose the limits and potentials of archives about the Vietnam War.

Epilogue

This epilogue discusses how the push for Vietnam to be a trade partner with the United States introduces questions and independence that harken back to the failed U.S. project to protect and leave South Vietnam on its own. It analyses a speech by Bill Clinton, where he suggests that the Vietnamese in Vietnam should follow the lead of Vietnamese overseas. The push for a capitalist pro-American socialist regime cannot be divorced from the prior attempts to institute a puppet regime in South Vietnam that had little hopes of achieving its dream of prosperity and progress. Here, the forces of diplomacy echo the demands of empire, and history moves in a confusing circle.