Thematic Shifts in Contemporary Vietnamese American Novels

This article examines the thematic shifts in three contemporary Vietnamese American novels published since 2003: Monique Truong\u27s The Book of Salt, Dao Strom\u27s Grass Roof, Tin Roof, and Bich Minh Nguyen\u27s Short Girls. I argue that by concentrating on the themes of inferiority and invisibility and issues related to ethnic and racial relationships in U.S. culture (instead of concentrating on the Vietnam War and the refugee experiences), some contemporary Vietnamese American authors are attempting to merge their voices into the corpus of ethnic American literature, which usually is thematically characterized by identity, displacement, alienation, and cultural conflict, etc. Each author explores the problems confronted by individuals caught up in various phases of the Vietnamese diaspora of the twentieth century. These important works are treated primarily thematically, even as the theoretical approaches of various critics are employed to examine those themes. All three novels take Vietnamese American literature in new thematic directions, which signals great promise for future developments. Key words: contemporary Vietnamese American novels, Monique Truong\u27s The Book of Salt, Dao Strom\u27s Grass Roof, Tin Roof, Bich Minh Nguyen\u27s Short Girls, invisible identity

Domestic Violence in Lac Su’s I Love Yous Are for White People: A Sociological Criticism Approach

This article employs sociological criticism to examine domestic violence, parenting, and communication behavior in Lac Su’s Vietnamese American memoir. The book debunks the seemingly positive myth of Asian Americans as a model minority, substantiates certain negative stereotypes of Asian men, and challenges some of the classic Asian values that apparently have shaped the Asian American identity. I argue that Su’s memoir is a critique of structural inequalities, urban poverty, unemployment, inaccessibility to a support network, and the intersection between class, gender, and race in the contexts of war and its aftermath

Review of Pioneer Girl, by Bich Minh Nguyen

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[Review of] The Vietnamese-American 1.5 Generation. Ed. Sucheng Chan

The Vietnamese-American 1.5 Generation is divided into two parts. Part I offers an overview of Vietnamese history, focusing on Vietnam under French colonial rule, the First Indochina War, American involvement in Vietnam, the Fall of Saigon and its aftermath, and refugee exoduses. Part Il comprises narratives written by Vietnamese-American students enrolled at the University of California system

Trey Ellis\u27s Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. The New Black Aesthetic, an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on the future of African American artistic expression in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis\u27s novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis\u27s primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay

It\u27s oil and water : Race, Gender, Power, and Trauma in Vu Tran\u27s Dragonfish

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes in-depth the interplay between race, gender, power, and trauma in Vu Tran’s debut novel, Dragonfish. We argue that Dragonfish focuses on the relationships, desires, and conflicts among its three protagonists—Robert, Suzy, and Sonny—to highlight how their postwar interactions complicate race, gender, trauma, and remembrance. The three protagonists engage in an intense socio-political struggle for dominance and control, which is riddled with irony, heart-wrenching pain, and misleading appearances. They experience hardship and loss, but they rely on each other for recovery from past and present trauma, and to advance their own varying personal priorities and agendas: while both of the male characters, Robert and Sonny, attempt individually to exercise control over Suzy, she in fact embodies the femme fatale archetype who subverts their dominance in order to act independently of their wills

Translations from the Vietnamese: 'The Blood Lily' by Vuong Tam

Vuong Tam was born in 1946, in Hanoi. He graduated from Hanoi University of Polytechnic and started to write fiction as a child. He is a member of the Vietnam Writers’ Association and currently is a news reporter for the New Hanoi. He is a prolific writer and has published both poetry and fiction for which he has won several awards. This short story is anthologized in Chien tranh cung mang khuon mat dan ba (Women’s Faces in War), published by Literature Press, Hanoi, in 2014. “The Blood Lily” is both romantic and traumatic: the female protagonist romanticizes her memories of the Vietnam War, although it causes her traumatic scars. The flowers she plants represent her bitter-sweet memories of the past

Book Review of Caught Dead by Andrew Lanh

Book review of Caught Dead by Andrew Lan

Conspiracy of Silence and New Subjectivity in Monkey Bridge and The Gangster We Are All Looking For

This article analyzes the memories of traumatic experiences held by major characters in two contemporary Vietnamese American novels: Lan Caos Monkey Bridge and Le Thi Diem Thuys The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Because the parents who experienced trauma during the Vietnam War refuse to share their haunting pasts with the coming-of-age narrators who are maturing in the United States, both narrators feel suffocated by a very palpable conspiracy of silence, and eventually they must find release from their parents traumatic and haunting pasts in order to create a new subjectivity for themselves in a new homelanda subjectivity that characterizes the 1.5 generation Vietnamese American consciousness. Both narrators possess memories and experiences of childhood, very early in Vietnam and then later in the United States. This combination of influences significantly informs their self-perception and their on-going construction of personal identity. This personal identity must be forged out of a sense of uncertainty, disorientation, confusion, and alienation felt during childhood and adolescence spent with parents who themselves were making the painful transition from a heartbreaking war to its trying aftermath. The narrators new identity, achieved at the end of both novels, suggests optimism for the development of both personal, or individual, and collective, or community, identity, which is taking shape at the cultural crossroads between Vietnam and America and the historical crossroads between war and postwar eras