UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Bound by Water: Inquiry, Trauma, and Genre in Vietnamese American Literature a Dissertation
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Bound by Water: Inquiry, Trauma, and Genre in Vietnamese American Literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Jade Tiffany Hidle Committee in charge: Professor Shelley Streeby, Chair Professor Yen Le Espiritu Professor Jin-Kyung Lee Professor Luis Martin-Cabrera Professor Meg Wesling 2014 Copyright Jade Tiffany Hidle, 2014 All rights reserved The Dissertation of Jade Tiffany Hidle is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Chair University of California, San Diego 2014 iii DEDICATION For my mother and my siblings and in memory of Sarah Jo Mayville iv EPIGRAPH It is said that the sea is history. Saidiya Hartman v TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page....................................................................................................................iii Dedication...........................................................................................................................iv Epigraph...............................................................................................................................v Table of Contents................................................................................................................vi Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................viii Vita......................................................................................................................................ix Abstract of the Dissertation.................................................................................................x Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE Remembering in Red and Yellow: Trauma and the Comic Book Genre in GB Tran’s VIETNAMERICA..................................................................29 Part One: Arrivals and Departures........................................................................35 Part Two: Synesthesia of Trauma.........................................................................48 Part Three: Politicizing the Color Spectrum.........................................................52 Part Four: Pedagogies and Methodologies...........................................................61 CHAPTER TWO Transnational Tastes: Trauma and Survival in Diasporic Vietnamese Cookbooks.............................................................................................................73 Part One: Culinary Tours of Time and Space.......................................................87 Part Two: Serving up the “Authentic”..................................................................91 Part Three: Your Friendly Neighborhood Vietnamese Cook.............................102 Part Four: Tasting Traumas of War, Displacement, and Diaspora.....................105 Part Five: Feminizing the Motherland and the Market.......................................114 vi CHAPTER THREE Miscegenation Nation: Prostitution and Passing in Kien Nguyen’s The Unwanted, My Life Narratives, and Aimee Phan’s “We Should Never Meet”............................................................................................135 Part One: Homeland as Mother, Mother as Prostitute........................................153 Part Two: Multiracial Vietnamese Children as Born from Death......................164 Part Three: Passing as Vietnamese/American....................................................178 CHAPTER FOUR “For Our Truths Change With Time”: Queerness, Alternative Kinships, and Hauntings in Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala and lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For...................................206 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................250 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge Professor Shelley Streeby for her support and guidance as the chair of my committee. I would also like to acknowledge my other committee members—Professor Yen Le Espiritu, Professor Jin-Kyung Lee, Professor Luis Martin-Cabrera, and Professor Meg Wesling—for their invaluable feedback and encouragement. In addition, Professors Lisa Lowe and Lisa Yoneyama were instrumental in the development of my work. I must give special thanks to my cohort-mate Bernadine Hernández for her intellect and spirit that were comfort during the challenges of doctoral study; in her I have a lasting colleague, friend, and sister. UCSD has also gifted me dear friends in Lenna Odeh and Salvador Zarate, whom I thank for their vista-broadening dialogues that helped to develop the work that appears in this dissertation. Likewise, my other cohort members offered intellectual stimulation, emotional support, and friendship for which I am ineffably grateful: Yelena Bailey, Bailee Chandler, Paulina Gonzales, Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Sarika Talve-Goodman, and, in memory of, Sarah Jo Mayville. Thank you to my friends, family, and students for keeping me grounded. With boundless love, this work is for my mother, brother, and sister. And I humbly pledge my immeasurable gratitude and roaring love to Mike Buckley for your unending support and inspiration. Everything I do is dedicated to you and that rare, ineffably blessed convergence of space-time that brought us together. From here, we sail sunward, excavating the beautiful in a palmer deep flags world, building all that holds strong, and tearing open the sky for light, music, and all that words can and cannot express. Chapter 1, in part, was published in International Journal of Comic Art, Spring 2013. The dissertation author was the primary investigator and author of this paper. viii VITA 2006 Bachelor of Arts, California State University, Long Beach 2008 Master of Fine Arts, California State University, Long Beach 2014 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego PUBLICATIONS “Remembering in Red and Yellow: History, Memory, and Second-Generation Vietnamese American identity in GB Tran’s VIETNAMERICA.” International Journal of Comic Art. 15.1 (2013): 408-18. “My Grandmother Was a Vietnamese Prostitute.” Beside the City of Angels: An Anthology of Long Beach Poetry. Ed. Paul Kareem Tayyar. Huntington Beach, CA: World Parade Books, 2011. 54. “A Review of Irene Vilar’s Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict.” Ethnic Studies Review. Michigan: Albion College, 2010. 133-35. “A Review of Wenying Xu’s Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature.” Watermark. Long Beach: CSULB, 2009. 147-52. “Pass Me the Wooden Leg: The Body, the Gaze, and the Performative Nature of Gender in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People.’” Watermark. Long Beach: CSULB, 2007. 100-24. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Literatures in English Studies in Multiethnic American Literature, 1861-Present Professor Shelley Streeby Studies in Vietnamese American Cultural Productions, 1975-Present Professor Yen Le Espiritu Studies in Speculative and Supernatural Fiction Professors Shelley Streeby and Lisa Lampert-Weissig ix ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Bound by Water: Inquiry, Trauma, and Genre in Vietnamese American Literature by Jade Tiffany Hidle Doctor of Philosophy in Literature University of California, San Diego, 2014 Professor Shelley Streeby, Chair This dissertation treats contemporary Vietnamese American literature as responses to common inquiries about history and identity stemming from U.S.-centric, myopic, and racialized narratives about the U.S.-Viet Nam War that serve to assuage lingering American guilt and eclipse Vietnamese American perspectives. These inquiries include “Where are you from?” and “What was the war like?” The works studied here x represent various literary genres—comic books, cookbooks, memoirs, and novels—that offer diverse, distinct forms for negotiating ambivalent Vietnamese American identities, namely through the expression of trauma. This dissertation focuses on how each genre allows articulations of trauma by bending time and space to rewrite dominant histories of the U.S.-Viet Nam War as “over” or “ended.” As argued in the following chapters, contemporary multi-genre Vietnamese American literature stresses that the war is not over, as its traumas resurface and are inherited by the second generation; the texts discussed highlight the ebbs and flows of forming and broadening conceptions of fluid identities that are labeled and fixed as “Vietnamese American.” This dissertation, then, focuses on works that use their respective genres to negotiate identities in terms of long- standing racialized stereotypes of the model minority and, in contrast, the threatening perpetual foreigner; each chapter further examines issues of diversifying the representation of Vietnamese Americans in dialogue with the figures of the refugee, commodified culinary tour guides, multiracial children, as well as transgender and gender fluid individuals. In order, the chapters in this dissertation will focus on the following texts: