Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community, and Memory

When I learned that this volume would go to press with the phrase “Toward a Framework,” I began to worry: did this phrase insinuate that decades of Vietnamese American studies scholars did not have a framework? And would Vietnamese American studies scholars, as defined as those trained in ethnic studies or now based in an ethnic/Asian American studies department/program, accept the proposed framework of a group of scholars trained (and based) primarily in the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology and political science? As the contributors’ biographies indicate, only one scholar received graduate training in ethnic studies (Dang) and another in American studies (Tran, now based in ethnicity, race, and migration and American studies). Another is based in an American studies department (Huynh).Indeed, my worries were because of my professional relationships to both groups. As an undergraduate student of both history and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), I took classes and wrote an honors thesis directed by Nguyễn-võ Thu-Hương, who holds a split appointment in both Asian American studies and Asian languages and cultures. Because of this and my coursework across three departments, my methodology (un)knowingly linked area studies and ethnic studies approaches in ways that my graduate-level training in history and Asian studies would try to discipline.This tension between disciplinary and interdisciplinary training is one of which young scholars are hyper-aware as they are told varying advice from “pick a discipline” to the “value of interdisciplinary training” from scholars trained in one way or the other. More broadly, can there really be one framework for a field of study ultimately hosted in an interdisciplinary department/program?Nguyễn-võ’s UCLA course on the “Vietnamese American Experience” is titled “Vietnamese America: Race, History, Community.” Two of the three words that make up the subtitle of the course also comprise the subtitle of the volume under review. Though the difference in the third word (“race” vs. “memory”) points to sociological versus historical frameworks utilized, Nguyễn-võ’s class ultimately ended with a unit on memory. Such an arc suggests that a contribution to this volume that explores the syllabi of “Vietnamese American Experience” courses offered at UCLA, University of California, Irvine, California State University, Long Beach, and other institutions could help illuminate whether framework(s) already exist for Vietnamese American studies.Nevertheless, I see this volume's primary contribution as the linking of Vietnamese American studies and historiographies not to US-centric Vietnam War literature but rather (“South” [RVN]) Vietnamese history. This is most clear in Y Thien Nguyen's contribution to Part 1 of the volume, which I consider the volume's second introduction. Nguyen argues that Vietnamese American studies must see “historical continuity” between “national formation” in South Vietnam as “the foundation for ‘community formation’ in Vietnamese America.”While space does not allow me to comment on all the contributions, I will highlight one chapter in each of the two remaining parts that has especially shaped my research interests and frameworks.In Part 2, Elwing Suong Gonzalez's chapter on “Vietnamese Refugee Community Creation” in Los Angeles documents the historical processes through which Los Angeles was initially the area with the most Vietnamese refugees in the first decade after the Fall of Saigon, and then was eventually displaced by Orange County and San Jose. As Gonzalez argues elsewhere, “no ‘Little Saigon’ emerged [in Los Angeles]” (“No ‘Little Saigon’ in LA: Vietnamese Refugees in a Multicultural Los Angeles, 1975–1990,” California History 98, no. 4 [2021]: 30–58), yet it is still home to the third largest population of Vietnamese Americans and largest population of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, (Gonzalez, “Creating and Contesting Refugee Spaces: Federal Policy and Early Vietnamese Resettlement in Los Angeles,” Southern California Quarterly 103, no. 1 [2021]: 99–137) pointing to its salience as a site for understanding the diverging and converging histories of multiple (and non-Vietnamese) ethnic diasporas from Vietnam.Quan Tue Tran's contribution maps the “contours of diasporic Vietnamese memoryscapes.” Tran's section on how diasporic Vietnamese “grapple with the past in digital spaces” such as Facebook animates my own interests in the digital interaction between diasporas from Vietnam and their homeland. Even more acute is Tran's first footnote, which emphasizes that there are multiple Vietnamese diasporas, each with distinctive historical formations. In fact, Tran's is the only contribution in the volume that brings up “multiple diasporas” from Vietnam and fortifies my own interactions with Vietnamese American and ethnic studies in my study of the ethnic Chinese diaspora from Vietnam.As new late/post-socialist diasporas from Vietnam make their way overseas to the United States (and other countries) to meet second- and third-generation diasporic Vietnamese descended from those with ties to South Vietnam, Vietnamese American/diaspora studies will come to the same crossroads that Chinese diaspora studies have faced. Should the concept of a “Vietnamese diaspora” have an “expiration date” because “everyone should be given a chance to become a local” (Shu-mei Shih, “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production,” in Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays [Leiden: Brill: 2010])? Or should the ongoing history of racialization of Asians in the United States that is central to Asian American studies be the basis for another framework for Vietnamese American/diaspora studies?Multiple contributors’ cross-references to other chapters in the volume suggest a highly collaborative process in the making of this volume, with multiple readings of each other's work to situate themselves as a cohesive whole. I highly recommend that scholars of Vietnamese American, Vietnamese diaspora and Vietnam studies read Toward a Framework and consider how it fits and links the seminal works of those fields.