Becoming Refugee American: The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon

Abstract

In Nothing Ever Dies (2016), the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen highlights the afterlife of war. The so-called Viet Nam War did not end with the 1973 Paris Peace Accord or the 1975 reunification of the North and South. The conflict continues to haunt the lives of those who survived. Phuong Tran Nguyen explores this insight by analyzing the political formation of the Vietnamese diasporic community in the United States. The title of his book, Becoming Refugee American: The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon, foregrounds its central arguments. The identification of Vietnamese Americans as refugees resonated as a political project on multiple levels. The arrival of successive waves of Southeast Asians forced the United States to codify its policies regarding refugee admissions and practices regarding resettlement. In addition, the refugee identity of the Vietnamese allowed community members and the U.S. nation-state to win an ideological war against communism. In fact, Vietnamese people gained visibility, access to economic resources, and a degree of acceptance in their new home country as escapees of communism. However, the politics of rescue exacted a price as well, since “good” refugees are expected to perform eternal gratitude for their rescue, even if the country that rescued them also created their refugee status. Nguyen introduces the concept of “refugee nationalism” to capture these tensions. He points out how the exilic clinging to a no-longer-existing nation provides the key to understanding how Vietnamese became Americans. As he states, “refugee nationalism has represented not so much a refusal to assimilate but rather a particular mode of becoming American” (p. 2). In other words, Becoming Refugee American illuminates how war and militarism in Southeast Asia generated refugee migration and a particular politics of trans/national belonging in the United States.