Anatomy of a Springroll by
Social aspects of cooking among Vietnamese immigrants in San Francisco, exploring cultural assimilation and keeping one's ethnic identity.
Saigon, U.S.A. by
Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees have nurtured a community known as Little Saigon in Orange County, California. Little Saigon burst onto the national stage in 1999 when a Vietnamese American hung a flag of Communist Vietnam and a poster of Ho Chi Minh in his video store. The display triggered 52 days of protests by Vietnamese Americans struggling to reconcile the demons of their past with their present life in America.
A Different Pond by
A 2018 Caldecott Honor Book that Kirkus Reviews calls "a must-read for our times," A Different Pond is an unforgettable story about a simple event - a long-ago fishing trip. Graphic novelist Thi Bui and acclaimed poet Bao Phi deliver a powerful, honest glimpse into a relationship between father and son - and between cultures, old and new. As a young boy, Bao and his father awoke early, hours before his father's long workday began, to fish on the shores of a small pond in Minneapolis. Unlike many other anglers, Bao and his father fished for food, not recreation. A successful catch meant a fed family. Between hope-filled casts, Bao's father told him about a different pond in their homeland of Vietnam. Thi Bui's striking, evocative art paired with Phi's expertly crafted prose has earned this powerful picture books six starred reviews and numerous awards.
Dan Thuy's New Life in America by
In this collection of poetry by Glen Sorestad, a once-comfortable world takes on a startling and dreamlike quality when removed from the usual surroundings of home. These are poems about places encountered, from the oil donkeys rocking by the runway in Calgary to the fields of France seen through a train window. They are also about people observed and the nature of travelling. They move from his silent reflections on the nighttime street sweepers of Frankfurt to raucous encounters in the beer halls of Amsterdam, from airport departure lounges to secrets offered en route by anonymous strangers. In these poems, the foreign world encountered is filtered through the perspective of home. Distances are measured in prairie miles; an Austrian hayfield is felt through the itch of Saskatchewan foxtail. The traveller arrives at unexpected destinations, and home is seen in a new and unfamiliar light upon return.
Many Vietnamese Americans trace their heritage to those who left South Vietnam in the wake of the communist victory reunifying the country at the end of the Vietnam War (Bankston, 2014).
Collected here are fifteen first-person narratives written by refugees who left Vietnam as children and later enrolled as students at the University of California, where they studied with the well-known scholar and teacher Sucheng Chan. She has provided a comprehensive introduction to their autobiographical accounts, which succinctly encompasses more than a thousand years of Vietnamese history. The volume concludes with a thorough bibliography and videography compiled by the editor.While the volume is designed specifically for today's college students, its compelling stories and useful history will appeal to all readers who want to know more about Vietnam and especially about the fates of children who emigrated to the U.S.
Read The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation ebook via ProQuest.
With a comparative and race-cognizant approach, Karin Aguilar-San Juan shows how places like Little Saigon and Fields Corner are sites for the simultaneous preservation and redefinition of Vietnamese identity. Intervening in debates about race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, and suburbanization as a form of assimilation, she elaborates on the significance of place as an integral element of community building and its role in defining Vietnamese American-ness.
Read the Little Saigons ebook via ProQuest.
Print book available in the library, call number: Main E184 .V53 A35 2009
This powerful narrative, winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs award for the novel, focuses on Galveston, Texas, and a community of newly arrived Vietnamese. Struggling to maintain a balance between Vietnam and America, they live with one foot in each world. Close-knit families, now fragmented, dream of the "kingdom of elders left behind"; young girls shoulder responsibility far beyond their years; and homesick professionals, puzzled by American customs, strive to belong while clinging to the rituals that sustain them. Seared by memories of escape and loss, these people are tough and funny too. There's Trang, obsessed by her mixed parentage and the quest for her American father; spunky little Xan, who acts out with Kung Fu; Linh, whose mother is hospitalized because of "the ghost husband in her head"; and Dr. Nguyen, savvy first-year medical resident but still a stranger. As this deeply felt novel examines the difficulties and possibilities for connection in a triracial culture--Vietnamese, Black, and American--it brims with memorable characters finding their way or easing the way for others.
Print book available in the library, call number: Main PS3557 .A7142 B63 1995
Boat People by
This powerful narrative, winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs award for the novel, focuses on Galveston, Texas, and a community of newly arrived Vietnamese. Struggling to maintain a balance between Vietnam and America, they live with one foot in each world. Close-knit families, now fragmented, dream of the "kingdom of elders left behind"; young girls shoulder responsibility far beyond their years; and homesick professionals, puzzled by American customs, strive to belong while clinging to the rituals that sustain them. Seared by memories of escape and loss, these people are tough and funny too. There's Trang, obsessed by her mixed parentage and the quest for her American father; spunky little Xan, who acts out with Kung Fu; Linh, whose mother is hospitalized because of "the ghost husband in her head"; and Dr. Nguyen, savvy first-year medical resident but still a stranger. As this deeply felt novel examines the difficulties and possibilities for connection in a triracial culture--Vietnamese, Black, and American--it brims with memorable characters finding their way or easing the way for others.
Monkey Bridge by
"For the first time in fiction, the unmapped territory of the Vietnamese immigrant experience is examined in this tale of a young girl's coming-of-age in the United States in the aftermath of war." "Mai Nguyen's journey begins when she leaves Vietnam in February 1975, just before the withdrawal of American troops from Saigon. She enters the world of Falls Church, Virginia, a "Little Saigon" community that encompasses refugees and veterans, reinvented lives and entrepreneurial schemes, secrets and lies about a war-torn and conflicted past, and Mai's dreams for a newly minted American future." "But the secrets, and what is both hidden and revealed in diaries found buried in her mother's dresser drawer, pull Mai inexorably back to Vietnam. Within these diaries, Mai retraces not only her own earliest experiences, but also her mother's and grandmother's histories - and the story that began to unfold a generation past in the rice fields of the Mekong Delta." "Past and present, east and west, Vietnamese myth and American-style reality intertwine and, ultimately, the legacy of long-simmering hatreds and what occurred late one afternoon in a burial ground near the banks of the Mekong River is revealed."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Distant Shores of Freedom : Vietnamese American Memoirs and Fiction by
The Distant Shores of Freedom analyses literary works in English written by Vietnamese refugees in the US. Fiction and memoirs by Vietnamese Americans recover stories and memories that are often different from mainstream American ones and that difference enables readers to think of the US war in Vietnam from perspectives that are missing in mainstream representations.
The American Dream in Vietnamese by
In her research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, Nhi T. Lieu explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ideals and consumer capitalism prior to arriving in the United States, postwar Vietnamese refugees endeavored to assimilate and live the American Dream. In The American Dream in Vietnamese, she claims that nowhere are these fantasies played out more vividly than in the Vietnamese American entertainment industry. Lieu examines how live music variety shows and videos, beauty pageants, and Web sites created by and for Vietnamese Americans contributed to the shaping of their cultural identity. She shows how popular culture forms repositories for conflicting expectations of assimilation, cultural preservation, and invention, alongside gendered and classed dimensions of ethnic and diasporic identity. The American Dream in Vietnamese demonstrates how the circulation of images manufactured by both Americans and Vietnamese immigrants serves to produce these immigrants' paradoxical desires. Within these desires and their representations, Lieu finds the dramatization of the community's struggle to define itself against the legacy of the refugee label, a classification that continues to pathologize their experiences in American society.
Becoming Refugee American by
Vietnamese refugees fleeing the fall of South Vietnam faced a paradox. The same guilt-ridden America that only reluctantly accepted them expected, and rewarded, expressions of gratitude for their rescue. Meanwhile, their status as refugees--as opposed to willing immigrants--profoundly influenced their cultural identity. Phuong Tran Nguyen examines the phenomenon of refugee nationalism among Vietnamese Americans in Southern California. Here, the residents of Little Saigon keep alive nostalgia for the old regime and, by extension, their claim to a lost statehood. Their refugee nationalism is less a refusal to assimilate than a mode of becoming, in essence, a distinct group of refugee Americans. Nguyen examines the factors that encouraged them to adopt this identity. His analysis also moves beyond the familiar rescue narrative to chart the intimate yet contentious relationship these Vietnamese Americans have with their adopted homeland. Nguyen sets their plight within the context of the Cold War, an era when Americans sought to atone for broken promises but also saw themselves as providing a sanctuary for people everywhere fleeing communism.