Southeast Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Dan Duffy, University of North Carolina
Chair: Nancy K. Florida, University of Michigan
Discussant: Laurie J. Sears, University of Washington
In Boston Public Library there are seventy-five feet of imaginative works in Vietnamese written in the United States. The year 1997 has seen the publication in New York and New Haven of two hefty collections in English by dozens of Vietnamese American authors. Francophone Vietnamese around the world are also creating fiction and poetry.
These literatures are of current interest in Asian American Studies, as that field embraces Southeast Asians and faces transnationalism; in American Studies, with increasing interest in ethnicity and immigration; in departments of French, where Francophone literature offers cases for post-colonial theory; and in Comparative Literature, where the question of American literatures in languages other than English is a new focus for comparatist concerns.
But these literatures from Vietnamese people are as little known in Vietnamese Studies as they are in Viet Nam. The best recent work on Vietnamese literature has come from historians, who focus on texts that address questions of the nation, whether in colonial times or in the recent period of social renovation. Academic professionals outside Viet Nam write about the same texts that Ha Noi’s Literature Publishing House prepares for its canons.
This panel will call into question a tacit reading list for Vietnamese literature that has been little problematized. By bringing interdisciplinary critics of the emerging literatures to a panel of the Vietnamese Studies Group, and asking for a formal response from a critic of Southeast Asian literature, we plan to make the question, "What is Vietnamese literature?" of interest to wider disciplinary circles.
Qui-Phiet Tran, Schreiner College
The discourse of home and exile, which is common in Asian immigrant literature, is presented as a confining notion in the works of Tran and Mukherjee. These two authors’ female protagonists, in order to cope with the problematics of displacement, develop numerous strategies: re-defining themselves as new Americans, coming to terms with their new lives in America, and viewing their relocation as a positive act. But whereas Mukherjee’s Indian women tend to see their American experience as a transformation, a rebirth, a will to power—in brief, a way of re-defining the postcolonial female subaltern that the critic Gayatri Spivak speaks of, Tran’s Vietnamese women assert themselves as refugees of the postmodern age who seek to connect the Western and Eastern worlds and transcend their condition as victims of oppression and discrimination through creative acts of re-invention and love.
Karl Ashoka Britto, University of California, Berkeley
In 1964, three years after winning the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Academie francaise, Pham Van Ky published his sixth novel: Des femmes assises ça et là. An intricate interior monologue related by a Vietnamese man living in Paris, this novel explores the ambiguous and often unsettling condition of the immigrant intellectual. The unnamed narrator finds himself caught between two cultures, between his obsessive attachments to three French women (one of whom, the young Eliane, is dying of leukemia), and his filial duty toward his mother, who near the beginning of the novel sends him a telegram from Viet Nam stating simply, "j’attends pour mourir." Pham Van Ky’s text raises a number of troubling questions, many of which are left unanswered as the narrator’s voice gradually gives way to that of the dead Eliane, whose letters—unfinished as they are—close the novel.
In this paper, I will examine Des femmes assises ça et là closely, exploring the ways in which Pham Van Ky seeks to represent the "conscience hybride, mi-asiatique, mi-occidentale" of his narrator. At the heart of the novel is a complex network of insights into the relationships between homeland, culture, identity, language, and writing; my paper will attempt to map out some of these insights while arguing that Pham Van Ky’s text ultimately demonstrates the impossibility of choosing between cultures, and the hazards of constructing an immigrant identity around the desire for an intact, pre-colonial Viet Nam.
Renny Christopher, California State University, Stanislaus
Vietnamese American writing has tended to be somber, if not grim, in treating the war and exile. Recently, however, some younger generation Vietnamese American writers have introduced a new element into their works: humor.
When Andrew Lam read "Grandma’s Tales" at the "Vietnam: Twenty Years After" conference in Davis, California in 1995, the scholarly audience laughed so hard Lam could hardly finish reading his story. This was a remarkable moment, since the conference as a whole had tended toward the grim: anti-communist elements of the local Vietnamese American community had picketed and protested the conference because of the presence of government representatives from the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. But Lam delivered his story almost like a standup comic, broke through the tension, and fomented a spirit of communality through laughter.
Paula Gunn Allen writes that "Native people have long known and American humorists have recently discovered: the way to liberation from oppression and injustice is to focus on one’s own interest, creativity, concerns, and community." Both Lam and another young author, Khoi Luu, attempt to use humor to break down boundaries of culture, of history, of family tradition, in order to create a new, syncretic literature that reflects the cultures they come from, the cultures they’ve entered into, and the hybrid culture they have created out of the old and the new. At least one strand of Vietnamese diaspora literature is poised to enter the twenty-first century not on tears, but on laughter.
Dan Duffy, University of North Carolina
After 1975 the literary publishing industry of the Republic of Viet Nam moved to the U.S. Twenty years later, the émigré Vietnamese-language authors and editors are producing more books than ever, while younger, immigrant Vietnamese authors are making their way in the English mainstream. What is the relation of these literatures to the tradition of modern literature in Viet Nam? For this paper, I will examine two transitional texts that have readily discernible links to the old country and the previous tradition. An examination of the American novel Nguyen Ven (Intact) by the exemplary Vietnamese exile man of letters Vo Phien bears out the following observation: where modern literature in Viet Nam narrates and examines national history as if for a reader who is an actor in the great events of the day, Vietnamese writing in North America shows confusion and nostalgia about the nation and the past of Viet Nam. Two Shores/Deux Rives, a trilingual book of poems by a Canadian woman, Thuong Vuong-Riddick, who first emerged as an author in the New World, manifests a tacit acceptance of her exile from Viet Nam and her marginal status in Canada, by sampling and revising well-known texts of international Modernism alongside popular songs from wartime Saigon, to demonstrate the poet’s distance from the national culture to which she still feels continuing ties.