Displacing kinship

This week in North Philly Notes, Linh Thủy Nguyễn, author of Displacing Kinship, write about family history in the aftermath of the Vietnam war.

I have a clear memory of the day that, at 18, I realized that my parents were refugees from the Vietnam War. Struggling to order more rice at a Chinese restaurant, confusing the waiter as I spoke mixed Chinese (mom) and Vietnamese (dad), my sister laid out the details. She had for several years been taking college courses about the history of the region and the war. It sounds like a ridiculous thing, to be so detached from family and national history, but mine is a typical second-generation immigrant story about children not knowing about their parents’ pasts. This version is now, perhaps, difficult to imagine for the generations having grown up consuming Vietnamese American cultural productions, as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ocean Vuong, and Thao Nguyen have reached mainstream popularity.

What I encountered about the history of this instance of forced displacement and the US response to it was a vast gulf in what the children of refugees, the second generation, knew about their parents and their pasts and what policymakers and social scientists knew about them. When the first cohort of 130,000 mostly Vietnamese refugees arrived in 1975, few expected a diaspora that would amount to over 2.2  million Vietnamese Americans. Policy makers and scientists made quick work of predicting their successful assimilation into the country, speculating that their ties with the US government, projected model minority status, and proximity to white values would spare them the “downward assimilation” faced by their Black and brown neighbors. This inclusion, of course, came at the cost of their own histories and relations.

Why does it seem that so much of the art and writing of children of Vietnamese refugees is singularly focused on searching for origins and longing for parental affection? Social science and policy framings of refugee successes in America are matched in volume by narratives of familial discord and trauma by the second generation. Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production is my response to emerging dominant narratives about family history and that war. The book was inspired by seemingly constant popular culture evocations and my students’ comments about what they called the intergenerational trauma of the war – an idea that seemed to do more to mask than explain the alienation they experienced from their parents. It is my attempt to contextualize for the children of refugees from the wars in Vietnam, but also for all children of immigrants, that the reasons for our disconnect from our histories is structural, though it is experienced interpersonally.

Second-generation texts situate themselves in relation to the past and their family history, and squarely in the war. My close readings of Vietnamese American art, music, and writing revealed that behind the emotional weight and heaviness of the texts was a sense of mourning for the family relationships that were destroyed. These were destroyed not only by the specificities of the war and its aftermath, including environmental destruction and economic embargoes, but also, as I emphasize, the larger systems of white supremacy and racial capital that shape U.S. interventions and the day-to-day lives of refugees after they have been resettled. Much of the pain and suffering described in the texts I analyze was much more about everyday experiences of fighting to make it in the U.S., stories of parents struggling to make ends meet, scenes of watching white neighbors yell racist vitriol, in short, the experiences of poverty and racism.

In Displacing Kinship, I explore the reasons the Vietnamese diaspora feels separated from family histories and ultimately call for new ways to relate to ourselves and our own communities. It is my hope that once we can identify the conditions that have alienated us from these histories, we can forge new liberatory cultural politics rooted in connection and attachment to radical possibilities, rather than increasingly conservative identity politics.