“She’s going crazy.
She’s clearly losing it.”
The first
time I taught le thi diem thuy’s novel the
gangster we are all looking for, a novel about a young Vietnamese girl and
her family’s flight from Vietnam and their resettlement in the United States,
my undergraduates struggled with the novel.
We had extensively discussed the history of the Vietnam War and the
refugee crisis it created, the US response to that crisis through policy and
rhetoric, as well as trauma theory to provide a foundation for discussing the
narrative structure le uses. They, on
some level, acknowledged the complicated relationship between the US and
Vietnam and could explain how that relationship plays a significant role in
le’s and other Vietnamese refugee narratives they were reading. At the same time, their insistence that le’s
protagonist, the young girl at the heart of the novel, was “going crazy”
largely referred to how she moved around and experienced the site of her
resettlement – the San Diego area – and how the narrative increasingly relied
on fragmentation, ekphrasis, and palimpsest to more effectively illustrate the
trauma of flight and resettlement.
References to “craziness” became their shorthand way of expressing
frustration at the texts. They had
expected that the arrival of refugees to the US signaled a more positive
outcome that would affirm the US as the “hero” – the rescuer – in the larger story. They expected what Mimi Thi Nguyen describes
as the US “rescue[ing] [one] from [a] psychic death through the gift of freedom
as a promise of care [that] encodes a benign, rational story about the United
States as the contested superpower on the world stage” (2). But le’s novel, and many other refugee
narratives focused on resettlement, resist that tidy relationship as refugees
face significant systemic barriers to that “promise of care.”
Just as my
students expect that those refugees arrive in a place that is stable and safe,
refugees flee hellish landscapes with faith that where they end up will be
significantly better. And sadly, as
Central American families fleeing violence have experienced, the US is not a
safe haven. Southeast Asian refugees
fleeing wars and genocide in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam in the late
1970s/1980s arrived in the US and faced many systemic issues that affect so
many disenfranchised Americans. This
contradiction adds to the trauma of flight as well as shapes the ways that
refugees move through and engage with their new surroundings. Even today, resettlement agencies in some
areas have failed to provide adequate housing for
refugees.
Camp Talega: Quonsets at Camp
Pendleton -- makeshift housing originally set up to house incoming Southeast
Asian refugees. Photo Credit: Megan
Burks
Trinh T.
Minh-ha, in writing about hers and other refugee experiences, emphasizes that
“the state of indeterminateness and of indefinite unsettlement” goes beyond
transit; in fact, it persists in resettlement and as such, we need to be
attuned to critical engagement with the very systems involved in practical
coordination and development of resettlement resources. In thinking through how to discuss texts like
le’s, we need to not only discuss the experience of fleeing one’s home, but
also the traumas the US forces on third world populations, as well as how
refugees shape their new home in response to that experience. As Yen Le Espiritu suggests, we must “look
for the places where Vietnamese refugees have managed to conjure up social,
public, and collective remembering” (3); the home, in particular, is a space
where public, private, political, and collective memories and lives structure
the rituals of domestic space.
For
instance, le’s novel confronts not just the difficulties of flight and war, but
also the realities of the disenfranchised of the US. From economic instability to affordable
housing barriers, the world that le’s protagonist lives in is not one created
to provide safety and stability for refugees to thrive; it is a world created
by decades of policies implicitly designed to continue to disenfranchise
minorities and the poor. le’s family
moves between multiple housing complexes – makeshift housing on base, a
sponsor’s house, converted military barracks, apartment complexes that look
prisons, buildings falling apart from neglect, and residences forcibly vacated
through mechanisms like imminent domain – each a less stable place than
before. As le moves, the complexes bleed
together; each poorly maintained property is indistinguishable from the next,
much like the residents who live there.
However, le takes care to pay attention to those residents; her
description of those complexes is imbued with the remnants of lives destroyed
by poverty. The
“empty chest of drawers, a dusty mattress with broken
springs, eight bent spoons, a dead
lamp with a melted cord, ashy paper, two chairs with missing
legs, one chair with a
broken leg, smoke-stained curtains and scattered across the
floor stuffing from the torn
cushions of an orange plaid couch” (56)
and intimate
pictures left behind of unhappy, sick, and destitute couples. The presence of photographs and remnants of
lives – rather than the presence of people – allows le to make their presence
felt while also emphasizing their disposability to corporate and government
interests. Much like le’s family, these
absent people are too easily co opted or erased for property owners’
profit. The physical detritus of these
forgotten lives mixes with evidence of current residents to produce a cacophony
of sounds that are distinguishably separate from the lives of those behind
manicured lawns.
Certainly,
there are many systemic issues to tackle when examining Vietnamese refugee
resettlement literature; but housing holds such a significant place in American
identity that it demands careful attention.
Home ownership allowed a large portion of whites to establish economic
stability in the postwar years and, even after the housing crisis, it still
remains an important marker of the nation’s economic strength. From the forced removal of native peoples, the
Homestead Act, to redlining practices, home ownership has functioned as a
necessary goal to achieve (symbolic) status as a fully accepted American
citizen. And yet, lack of affordable and
safe housing, as well as discriminatory policies, contradicted the picture
Ronald Reagan painted at the 1980 Republican National Convention of Southeast Asian refugees as
ideological descendents of (white and assimilated) immigrants. Housing -- and the private space it holds --
provides a picture of stability, safety, and security – that “promise of care”
-- that refugees hope to see.
Aguilar-San
Juan, Karin. Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America. Minneapolis:
U
of Minnesota P, 2009.
Espiritu,
Yen Le. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es). Oakland: U of
California Press, 2014.
le thi diem
thuy. the gangster we are all looking for. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.
Nguyen, Bich
Minh. Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.
New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
Nguyen, Mimi
Thi. The
Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham:
Duke UP, 2012.
Trinh T.
Minh-ha. Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event.
New York: Routledge, 2010.
[Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think?]
