coming home

Abstract

Following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, more than a million Vietnamese people left Vietnam for the United States. After resettling in the US, they have had to rebuild a home away from home. The Vietnamese American family, then, is not something that just exists or is inherited; rather, it is an ongoing project that is built within and through imperialism, capitalism, and empire.

My project asks how Vietnamese American children make sense of their positionality within the United States. It also asks about the duality within Vietnamese American spaces: how family and community can be sources of both deep intimacy and violence. I wonder how reconciling this complexity might be necessary in the process of reimagining family, home, and liberation.

I closely read Susan Lieu’s The Manicurist's Daughter, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, and lê thị diễm thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For to identify and analyze the presence and absence of water, the duality of the mother-daughter relationship, and the liberatory potential within sibling relationships. My analysis examines narration, dialogue, setting, and aesthetic writing choices, including the use of figurative language and nonlinear time. In understanding these works and their grappling of the contradictions within the Vietnamese American family and its formation, Vietnamese America may soon begin to collectively work toward more liberatory systems of care.

Read Honors Thesis here.