[ PM L A
theories and
methodologies
Un-American:
Refugees and the
Vietnam War
yogita goyal
YOGITA GOYAL is associate professor of
African American studies and English at
the University of California, Los Ange-
les; editor of the journal Contemporary
Literature; and vice president of the As-
sociation for the Study of the Arts of the
Present. She is finishing a book on the
revival of the slave narrative as a New
World literary genre, titled “Runaway
Genres: Global Afterlives of Slavery.”
378
VIET THANH NGUYEN ALWAYS INSISTS THAT HE IS A REFUGEE, NOT AN
IMMIGRANT, AND THAT HIS NOVEL THE SYMPATHIZER IS A WAR NOVEL
rather than an immigrant story (“Viet hanh Nguyen”). In an era
when the refugee has become the epicenter of debates about extreme
nationalism and closed borders, the distinction between refugee and
immigrant demands further parsing. Nguyen states the diference
clearly when he contrasts the refugee, rendered stateless and vulner-
able by persecution or catastrophe, to the immigrant, whose mobil-
ity reairms existing narratives of bounded territories. “Immigrant
studies,” he writes, “airms the nation-states the immigrant comes
from and settles into; refugee studies brings into question the viabil-
ity of the nation-state” (“Refugee Memories” 930).
One of a growing number of writers calling for a program of
“critical refugee studies,” Nguyen challenges the perception that be-
ing a refugee is somehow “un-American” (“Viet hanh Nguyen”).
Nguyen himself became a refugee at the age of four, arriving in San
Jose, California, with his displaced family by way of Guam under a
government policy that let 150,000 South Vietnamese people into
the United States in 1975. Writing against a massively distorted nar-
rative of the Vietnam War that defends veterans from the United
States while erasing the memory of the significant Vietnamese,
Cambodian, and Laotian losses of life, Nguyen challenges the col-
lapse of Vietnam into the Vietnam War. As he reminds us in Nothing
Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, the same war is called
the “American War” in Vietnam, a diference that highlights the way
in which national memories rely on partial and prejudiced construc-
tions of past violence to enable current regimes to remake history for
their own purposes (4).
While the ethical claim of Nguyen’s revisionist project is im-
mediately apparent, it is hard to imagine how the igure of the refu-
gee might provide a kind of critique that has been the stated goal
of several critical ields, including American studies, postcolonial
studies, and ethnic studies, all of which have seemed to be in fer-
© 2018 yogita goyal
PMLA 133.2 (2018), published by the Modern Language Association of America
133.2 ] Yogita Goyal
ment in recent years. How would these ields
ofer an adequate riposte to the perpetual war
machine that characterizes the current world
order or at least generate suiciently layered
histories of past violence? These questions
are especially urgent because Nguyen’s irst
scholarly monograph, Race and Resistance:
Literature and Politics in Asian America,
forcefully argues against the claim that “con-
temporary Asian America is a place of resis-
tance to capitalist and racist exploitation” (5).
Nguyen chastised Asian American intellectu-
als for insisting on seeing themselves as “bad
subjects” when they should instead recognize
their role as “model minorities” selling racial
identity as symbolic capital (144).
Following the directive of a scholar like
Cathy Schlund-Vials, who asks us to rethink
the United States as a “country of refugees”
rather than “a de facto nation of immigrants”
(201), would open up novel forms of imagin-
ing belonging and exclusion and would avoid
the reified pattern of centering the United
States as the norm around which other na-
tions appear peripheral. Such a perspective
also challenges the commonplace that the
United States is a nation of immigrants and
asks instead for a clear diferentiation of the
various factors, including war, genocide, and
expropriation, that create forced migration
domestically and globally. As Yến Lê Espiritu
argues, much of the literature of the Vietnam
War casts Vietnamese refugees as “objects
of rescue” whose minds and bodies become
objects of care, counsel, and intervention by
the United States, objects that only serve to
reproduce militaristic and exceptionalist nar-
ratives (410). She also warns against a model-
minority narrative that embraces Vietnamese
“docile subjects” as ideal igures in the Amer-
ican dream (413). Challenging the racist view
of Asian Americans as belonging to an in-
trinsically hardworking culture and African
Americans as members of an underclass that
is to blame for its own immiseration, Espiritu
cautions against accepting the “good refugee”
379
label for the Vietnamese, asking instead that
theories and methodologies
we “imbue the term ‘refugee’ with social and
political critiques” (421).
Such eforts reverberate across Nguyen’s
troika of revisionist accounts of the Vietnam
War—Nothing Ever Dies, The Sympathizer,
and The Refugees. “A man with two coun-
tries, as well as the inheritor of two revolu-
tions” (Nothing 1), Nguyen refuses polarized
narratives of Third World helpless victim
and First World heroic savior. Arguing that
“all wars are fought twice, the irst time on
the battleield, the second time in memory”
(4), Nguyen deies the reduction of a country
and its people to a single war and lays out a
template for more complex understandings of
the communities Vietnam names.1 Blending a
personal journey through his parents’ memo-
ries and evasions, travels through Southeast
Asia, and a philosophical meditation on an
ethical practice of memory, Nguyen demon-
strates how selective retellings of the Vietnam
War continue to bolster the United States’
ongoing extraterritorial ambitions, as well as
repression within its borders. He exposes the
doublespeak of recuperative histories, trou-
bling the binary of World War II as the “Good
War” and the Vietnam War as the “bad war,
a syndrome, a quagmire, a stinging loss in
need of healing and recuperation” (5). Show-
ing how the long twentieth century—book-
ended by the United States’ seizure of Cuba,
the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawai‘i in
1898 and the current wars in the Middle East
that began in the atermath of 9/11—normal-
ized a state of endless war, Nguyen insists on
a “just memory” about Vietnam that may
refract other, ongoing conlicts (12). Placing
Vietnam itself—and not merely a synecdoche
for a lost war—at the center of debates about
representation, loss, and healing, Nguyen
highlights the work of the imagination, across
landscapes of iction, poetry, documentary,
visual art, and memorial sculpture.
Even in Race and Resistance, while he
censured Asian American criticism, Nguyen
 380 Un-American: Refugees and the Vietnam War
valued the work of the ethnic writer as a hu-
theories and methodologies
manist project of surfacing hidden histories
and experiences to open up avenues for pos-
sible reconciliation. his latter tendency ex-
pands and intensiies in Nothing Ever Dies,
where Nguyen centers the work of the arts on
challenging oicial memories of the Vietnam
War that distort as much as they memorial-
ize. To do so, he returns to some of his ear-
lier critiques of ethnic studies as a ield and
theorizes both the limits of the category of
the ethnic writer and the frame of the immi-
grant story. “What the immigrant story sup-
posedly registers,” he argues, “is the diicult
but ultimately rewarding struggle to become
American, a transformation from wretch-
edness to righteousness, from victimization
to voice” (220). Unsettling this restrictively
linear movement “from silence to speech,”
Nguyen favors more circuitous wanderings,
unanticipated crossroads, even dead ends.
Speaking of Vietnamese American writing
as representing ethnic literature writ large,
Nguyen fears that reductive representation
(“to talk about only one thing, the one grief
that can be possessed, worn, and hawked”
[217]) either reairms what a liberal reader
wants to hear about the potential greatness
of the nation or incurs charges of betrayal
from the very community the writer is asked
to represent. Not interested in characteriz-
ing trauma as an efect of “cultural conlict,”
which may be resolved through the therapeu-
tic act of writing, Nguyen foregrounds “the
calamitous consequences of war, coloniza-
tion, and exploitation” (221), which will brook
no such closure without an actual revolution.
Accordingly, he notes that “the conventional
immigrant story warms the heart, but the
story of the immigrant as the collateral dam-
age of American warfare warrants anger as
much as tears” (221). He thus advocates “a
radical literature that strives against the eth-
nic” (217), that “engage[s] in comparison and
contrast across borders” and “reveal[s] the
disturbing universality of a shared inhuman-
[ PM L A
ity” rather than the sentimental notions of a
common humanity (216). Instead of a return
to old-fashioned humanism from before the
culture wars, if such a thing were even pos-
sible, Nguyen encourages more expansive
comparative endeavors, like his juxtaposition
of Vietnamese and United States government
projects of memorialization, on the one hand,
and artistic works that destabilize such eforts
in both spaces, on the other.
What Nguyen decrees as a critic, he
performs in he Refugees. His meticulously
crated short stories feature lawed characters
who achieve no closure or triumph but whose
broken relationships (romantic, filial, and
societal) disclose the damaging aftermath
of a war that continues to be misunderstood
and relitigated in memory. Because the his-
tory of the Vietnamese community in the
United States involves retreat to the “ethnic
enclave, subaltern suburb, and strategic ham-
let” (Nothing 42), Vietnamese American art
usually proceeds in a defensive heroic mode.
Searching for an antiheroic aesthetic mode,
Nguyen focuses instead on incomplete, in-
adequate masculinities, defective remem-
brances, and melancholic longings. In “he
Other Man,” Nguyen spotlights the displace-
ment, nostalgia, and dislocation that forced
mobility brings. Liem, “just one more anony-
mous young refugee” (Refugees 26), arrives in
San Francisco to be housed with a liberal gay
couple. Liem can learn to rethink his homo-
sexuality as something other than “a Western
disease” (41) and to use contractions like a
native (“I’m” instead of “I am” [36]), but, tired
of the demand to tell his story over and again,
he cannot ind a way to “recognize himself ”
(46). Nguyen suggests that the gulf between
this new world and Liem’s former self—shin-
ing the shoes of United States soldiers, liv-
ing as a refugee or in a reeducation camp—is
simply too great to bridge.
Able to suspend in fiction the rigid di-
chotomy of the refugee—silent victim or
political agent—Nguyen makes visible more
133.2 ] Yogita Goyal
shadowy subjectivities. To do so, he constel-
lates a range of established metaphors in Af-
rican American literature, responding to his
own call to think comparatively across ethnic
borders. he refugee appears as a ghost (like
Toni Morrison’s Beloved), as an invisible man
(like the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s epony-
mous novel), as a igure of double conscious-
ness (reiterating W. E. B. Du Bois’s powerful
formulation), and as a critic of racial capital-
ism (echoing Martin Luther King, Jr., who
opposed the Vietnam War).
The refugee appears in ghostly form
across several texts, in the manner theorized
by Avery Gordon, as a spectral trace of unre-
solved social injustices. he irst-person nar-
rator of the framing irst story, “Black-Eyed
Women,” works, ittingly, as a ghostwriter for
people who have undergone extreme calam-
ity. Her own past—an assault by pirates in a
ishing boat when she was thirteen years old
and the death of her brother, who was killed
trying to protect her—reappears in the form
of her brother’s ghost. She decides to write “a
book of [her] own” instead of other people’s
memoirs, blending her mother’s ghost stories
with “mournful revenants” from her own
life (19). Her brother’s ghost appears as a “re-
memory” of the kind imagined by Morrison
in Beloved, a memory that has needs, long-
ings, and a material presence of its own. As
Nguyen glosses the concept in Nothing Ever
Dies, rememory clariies “the power of stories
to both dismember the living and to bring the
dead back to life” and urgently lays bare the
“trauma and malevolence” of the past (65).
The ghost thus appears as a figure for the
Vietnam War itself, echoing Morrison’s meta-
phor for the unresolved presence of slavery in
American culture: “Haunted and haunting,
human and inhuman, war remains with us
and within us, impossible to forget but dif-
icult to remember” (Nothing 19).
he refugee also appears as an invisible
man when Nguyen (who named his son El-
lison) places Ralph Ellison’s potent metaphor
381
theories and methodologies
for race in another struggle between commu-
nism and capitalism. he Sympathizer opens
dramatically with a clear reference to Invisible
Man: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man
of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am
also a man of two minds” (1). Nguyen’s char-
acters frequently evince what Du Bois called
double consciousness: a “sense of always look-
ing at one’s self through the eyes of others,” an
awareness of duality both internal and exter-
nal that becomes a kind of “second sight” (8),
and a declaration of dual allegiances and iden-
tities. Reading Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans
Memorial, a black wall in the United States
capital, as “both mirror and barrier” (Noth-
ing 52), Nguyen harnesses the lingering power
of Du Bois’s metaphor in order to emphasize
that alienation and ambivalence are the heri-
tage of the Asian American, as embodied in
Lin’s “feeling of being other,” which leads her
to see the world as “a third-person observer”
(53). But Nguyen clariies that in identifying
double consciousness as central to the Asian
American experience, he is not simply extend-
ing one formulation of racial division to an-
other minority group but rather calling on us
to recognize both the exceptional and the ex-
emplary nature of the African American ex-
perience: “what is also powerful about double
consciousness is its universal quality, one that
paradoxically arises from the particularity of
black experience” (53).
If this paradox is difficult to grasp as a
prescription, its subtlety is instantiated in the
short story “he Americans” in he Refugees.
James Carver, an African American Vietnam
War veteran from “a rural Alabama hamlet”
(125), remembers his days as a B-52 pilot in
Guam, Okinawa, and hailand with fondness
and pride, knowing that “god was his copilot”
(143). Unable to understand why his daugh-
ter, who once joined Amnesty International
and marched against the Iraq War, chooses
to live in Vietnam and atone for his sins by
teaching impoverished children, he wonders
why “she empathized with vast masses of
 382 Un-American: Refugees and the Vietnam War
theories and methodologies
people she had never met, total strangers who
regarded her as a stranger and who would
kill her without hesitation given the chance,”
while she withholds such empathy from her
father (143). Comfortable with his personal
experience of marginality (“try being a black
man in Japan”) and his wife Michiko’s (“try
being a Japanese wife at a Michigan air base
in 1973” [131]), he mocks his daughter’s claim
that she had no home until she realized that
she had a “Vietnamese soul” (134). Telling
her “You’re not a native. You’re an American”
yields no concessions from her, and she re-
minds him that he bombed the very place she
now lives, with no thought for the thousands
he helped kill (130). He pities her in response
because her “mind wasn’t complex enough to
grasp the need to strike the enemy from on
high in order to save fellow Americans be-
low,” reverting to the language used to justify
the Vietnam War, unfamiliar to a genera-
tion bred in peace (143). He also derides the
humanitarian ambitions of her boyfriend,
who is helping defuse landmines with robots
and a mongoose, suggesting that his eforts
will only be appropriated by the military-
industrial complex to use against terrorists.
When the veteran memorialized on Lin’s
black wall becomes an African American
who can see that his daughter’s Vietnamese
students are “as poor as the dirt farmers and
sharecroppers of his childhood” but who still
insists on his American righteousness, the
enduring complexity of the war’s challenge to
conventional racial binaries becomes evident
(132). hat Carver’s son also becomes a pilot,
refueling planes for other wars, in Iraq and
Afghanistan, further underscores Nguyen’s
investment in interweaving the experience of
racial marginality with the hegemonic power
of the United States military. he Americans
of this story have no simple relation to the
concept of the refugee, though they all also
lee haunting pasts and reckon with the vio-
lence of current wars. he vocabularies devel-
oped by paciist and humanitarian groups are
[ PM L A
at odds with the absolute certainty of Carver,
the religious warrior and patriot. Although
the concern his daughter feels for his vulner-
able and aging body can temporarily connect
her to him, no larger reconciliation emerges.
Nguyen creates complex and oten volatile
links between the imperialist violence of the
United States abroad and the racism experi-
enced by minority groups within the nation’s
borders, asserting that current asymmetries of
power should be understood through a trans-
national lens. Elsewhere he ruminates on the
diferent valences of local and global horizons
named by such terms as Asian American and
Paciic Rim, viewing the former as national in
focus and the latter as explicitly transnational
and defined by movement (“Pacific Rim”).
Instead of presenting one as preferable to the
other, Nguyen recalls the history of the cat-
egory of the Asian American literature, devel-
oped in the 1970s in response to new social
movements as a politicized identity, the work
of “claiming America” its stated goal (190).
“Claiming America,” Nguyen argues, “while
it does not preclude claiming the world, does
discourage it, adopting almost inevitably the
American tendency toward national insular-
ity and American exceptionalism” (192). In
contrast, Paciic Rim as a category came into
being in tandem with the economics of late
capitalism, and Pacific Rim literature may
either simply mimic the flow of capital (as
Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians shows [2013])
or illuminate a critique of the underpinnings
of a globalized world (as Karen Tei Yamashi-
ta’s I Hotel achieves [2010]). While Nguyen is
reluctant to jettison the politicized frame of
the Asian American, he endorses a Pacific
Rim framework as one more likely to enable
connections across national borders and draw
equal attention to Asian populations in addi-
tion to Asian American ones.
Such a diferentiation annotates the dis-
tinction between refugee and immigrant this
essay started with, inasmuch as Nguyen’s igu-
ration of the refugee enables a range of com-
133.2 ] Yogita Goyal
parative projects (across Vietnam and Asian
America, for example, or African America
and Asian America) while insisting that his
readers develop more capacious understand-
ings of the wars whose impact cuts across na-
tions, oceans, and continents. Recent years
have seen an unprecedented increase in
the number of refugees and asylum seekers
around the world. The Office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
estimates that there are 65.6 million forcibly
displaced people in the world today, 22.5 mil-
lion of whom are refugees and half of whom
are under the age of eighteen (“Figures”). Fu-
ture cultural analysis will have to reckon with
this reality and learn to theorize the refugee
as a political subject in more than one geo-
political context. he so-called migrant crisis
in Europe has all too oten been assessed by
using the precedent of Auschwitz and Gior-
gio Agamben’s notion of “bare life” to think
about exclusion and abjection. But this kind of
assessment does not exhaust the critical pos-
sibilities; the figure of the refugee demands
new paradigms for conceptualizing rela-
tion both historically and spatially. Nguyen’s
work on Vietnam insists on distinguishing
the Vietnamese person who stayed at home
in Vietnam from the refugee who became
an Asian American—refusing to metonymi-
cally substitute one for the other or to erase
the hird World igure and inscribe the First
World one in its place. In restoring the un-
resolved place of Vietnam in the American
unconscious, Nguyen makes it newly possible
to think about war as a central concern for
literary and cultural analysis. In what ways
might scholars glean a refugee aesthetic that
would distinguish it from existing models of
racial disposability and infrahumanity? Must
all immigrant writing airm the nation, and
can the political potential of the category of
immigrant be said to be exhausted in an era
of unchecked anti-immigrant sentiment? How
might centering the refugee reframe existing
383
theories and methodologies
classiications of ethnicity, race, and national
origin and serve as the ethical optic through
which current worlds become legible?
NOTE
1. As Trinh puts it, “for a general Western spectator-
ship, Vietnam does not exist outside of the war” (100).
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