Linh Thuy Nguyen, "Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production" (Temple UP, 2024)
01:32:23 Share

Dear old work platform, it's not you, it's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new.

They're called Monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding. They're beautiful dashboards. They're customizable workflows that is floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

Your data is like gold to hackers. They'll sell it to the highest bidder. Are you protected? McAfee helps shield you, blocking suspicious texts, malicious emails, and fraudulent websites. McAfee's secure VPN lets you browse safely, and its AI-powered text scam detector spots threats instantly. You'll also get up to $2 million of award-winning antivirus and identity theft protection, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com. Cancel any time. Terms apply.

Have I Got News For You is back for another season. Roy Wood Jr., Amber Ruffin, and Michael Ian Black are finding the funny in the week's biggest stories. Have I Got News For You, Saturday at 9 on CNN and streamed next day on Max. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everyone and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Camilia Pham, a student at Harvard and one of the hosts here on the network.

In today's episode, I am thrilled and extremely honored to be joined by Professor Lin-Pui Nguyen, Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. Her research spans Asian American and Southeast Asian American cultural studies, immigration and refugee studies, and the intersections of U.S. militarism and race.

She is here to discuss her groundbreaking first monograph, Displacing Kinship, the Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production, published in 2024 by Temple University Press.

This remarkable work has already garnered significant recognition, earning an honorable mention for the 2024 Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. Nearly 50 years after the end of the war in Vietnam, American children of Vietnamese refugees continue to process the meanings of the war and its consequences through creative work.

Displacing Kinship examines how Vietnamese-American cultural production register lived experiences of racism in their depictions of family life and marginalization. Second Generation Texts illustrate how children of refugees from Vietnam are haunted by trauma in a violent, ever-present, but mostly unarticulated past.

Lin Tuan Nguyen's analysis reveals that present experiences of economic insecurity and racism also shape these narratives of familial loss. Developing a theory of intergenerational trauma, Nguyen rethinks how U.S. imperialism, the discourse of communism, and assimilation impacted families across generations.

Through ethnic studies and feminist and queer of color critique, displacing kinship offers a critical approach for reading family tensions and interpersonal conflict as affected investments informed by the material, structural conditions of white supremacy and racial capitalism. We will delve deeper into displacing kinship with Professor Lin Tui Nguyen.

Professor Lin Ping-Wen, thank you so much for joining me on this episode to discuss your remarkable debut monograph. Hi, Cam. Thank you so much for having me today.

I'd like to begin by asking about your background. How did you become interested in researching the documentation and transmission of Vietnamese-American lived experiences, particularly during the enduring aftermath of the Vietnam War, as expressed through cultural productions and across generations? Yeah, I think that...

When I started doing my research, there weren't all of these culture productions by Vietnamese Americans that were so prominent. So when I started graduate school, it was really about this question of culture.

Vietnamese American refugee resettlement in the United States. And I started to look at the sociological knowledge about them because that was the largest body of knowledge about Vietnamese Americans. I came to realize that sociology's overwhelming argument was that Vietnamese Americans had assimilated and they were successful and they were doing quite well.

So if that was the case and Vietnamese American families were so successful, then as the 2000s and 2010s works, cultural productions, texts, novels, film by Vietnamese Americans start coming out, I noticed that so many of these stories by the children of refugees were really about alienation, family discord, and these narratives.

Thank you so much. Your book is structured in a way that each chapter explores the affects and relational dynamics of assimilation as experienced by Vietnamese American children of refugees. And I think that's a really good way to start.

You draw on an impressive array of creative works by G.B. Tran, Thee Bui, Ocean Vuong, Thao Nguyen, and Trinh Mai. Could you share more about your research process?

How did you identify and compile this list of figures? And what insights do their works offer on the cultural politics of intimacy, family, and trauma? So I noticed that particularly in 2016, you have Viet Thanh Nguyen's two major books coming out. You have The Best We Could Do coming out. GB Trans, Viet Namerica comes out in 2012. Boi Chin Buong's novel is also around the 2016-2017 moment.

And then Thao Nguyen has her album Temple come out in 2020. For me, the list of objects that I chose were more about marking a particular kind of moment in an emergence of narratives about Vietnamese American refugee experience. And so I identify in this set of texts this desire to narrate

family origins by learning about family histories in Vietnam that all of these second generation, so American born Vietnamese Americans

felt that they had a personal responsibility to do. They had to learn about the Vietnam War in order to learn about their family experiences. And rather than seeing these as just texts about the Vietnam War, I noticed that these are really texts that are trying to figure out their place in U.S. society and trying to figure out how to place their experiences of racism and racialization

The emotions that I identify in each of these texts or the affects, I think affect theory is a really key part of my analysis here, shows us that these are not just stories about cultural shock, right? As people like to narrate them, they're not just stories about generational difference, which is a dominant narrative, especially when you see these books being assigned for generations.

city-wide reading events, right? They wanted to say, oh, this is the experience of Vietnamese Americans in terms of generational difference.

What I instead argue is that they are evidence of the lived experience of what it feels like to grow up as a Vietnamese American in the United States. In other words, the lived experience of growing up in a white supremacist society and dealing with day-to-day experiences of racism. So these texts were selected for their emergence and popularity, how they became these

really famous texts for thinking through this experience of the second generation. And I think that they became sort of a unifying frame, right? Ideas of trauma about the Vietnam War. I was interested less in the

how they showed us the trauma of the Vietnam War because I don't think that most of them actually do. I think a lot of them tried to narrate a personal history. They tried to make an argument that there is something about the war that affects their experiences with their parents. But what I found more prevalently is these feelings of...

you know, feeling disconnected from their families, feeling discriminated against in the towns that they grow up in. And really, it's a story about not belonging in the United States that came up. And so the idea of family as a way to narrate the experience of racialization in the United States and how ideas of trauma do the work of telling that story became very obvious when I looked at these texts altogether.

I see. And I also find it like incredibly provocative. And also you articulate this so movingly in the introductory chapter of your book that you deliberately avoid framing the intergenerational trauma experienced by the U.S. race and also U.S. born children of Vietnamese refugees in overly abstract and psychological terms.

Instead, you center family-oriented historical genealogy as a powerful site of articulation. You examine the everyday structures of racism and white supremacy. Also, rather than focusing on the master narratives and the grand national histories, you attend to the personal narratives and the silenced histories of traumatized Vietnamese American families.

Could you maybe elaborate on the trope of war trauma as family trauma and what is meant by family and kinship, terms that you use somewhat interchangeably in your book? Yes. So I think that...

What I think the title of my book is a little bit misleading, right? So I say Displacing Kinship, and that's the theory that I use throughout the book. But the subtitle is The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Culture Production. And so I think people will come to the text thinking that I will explain to them, you know, this is what intergenerational trauma looks like. This is how you identify intergenerational trauma. But instead, I'm going to explain to them

I identify that the idea of intergenerational trauma comes up again and again in how the children of Vietnamese refugees narrate their understandings of their family history. Right?

Right. And so rather than thinking about the concept as a psychological concept, I actually in chapter three walk through how the field of psychology, for example, can't really pin down the terms. Right. So they use the term intergenerational trauma to say, well, you know, obviously there's something about parental experiences that affect children, but we can't figure out how this experience is transmitted. It could just as easily be environmental. And so

there's a vagueness in the language of intergenerational trauma and what people want it to do. And I was interested in understanding why is this evoked again and again? What work is it actually doing? And so in the experience of Vietnamese Americans,

It was their family formation, right? So the U.S.'s ability to frame them as suitable for incorporation or assimilation by saying, look at these beautiful, civilized, modern families. They're going to be such great Americans. So the family became this vehicle for incorporating them into U.S. society and

And sociologists argue that this would happen seamlessly. They would be self-sufficient. They would do better than their black and brown neighbors. And so family becomes the site of their integration as well as the site of their disconnect from the critical history of the war. So as the United States is welcoming them as these new model immigrants,

I argue that this project of assimilation actually erases the history of the war, right? It erases the fact that the United States is responsible for continuing the decades of warfare after 1954, right? The United States is responsible for the material damage of bombing. And so part of the cost of being incorporated –

through these model Vietnamese families is this loss of critical history. And so in the text, I follow, you know, G.B. Tran and T. Boyd following this family history in the opposite direction, right? So if the story of the Vietnamese in the United States is the story about families being resettled here and resilience, right, then that story of resilience

It ignores the ways that we're cut off from the families that we lose and we're disconnected from in Vietnam. And so GB Tran, T-Boy are trying to trace that family history backwards to try to understand their day-to-day experiences, right? And so what you call a family-oriented genealogy is them trying to do this work of reorienting themselves to this larger history, right?

I argue that that work is important, but it's incomplete, right? And I think we'll get to that in a couple other questions about what the limits of a family-oriented historical genealogy are. But to answer the second part of your question, in speaking about these personal narratives and silence histories,

I talk about this war trauma as family trauma just because it is the way that Vietnamese Americans understand their experience, their family experience. So for example, I have had students tell me in the past that they couldn't talk about political things with their parents or they couldn't talk about the history of the war because it would bring up too much trauma for their families. And so for them, the trauma of the war and family trauma are deeply intertwined.

And I'm trying to unpack that a little bit in the book and ask, you know, what does that make it difficult for us to see? It does facilitate certain things, right? It allows us to see personal experiences that are absent from larger discourses of war, but it also makes it hard for us to see the ways that our family history doesn't, you know, can't be the only explanation for larger historical factors, right? And so I talk about family and kinship

in terms of our relationships with our loved ones, right? So whether it's our blood family, our chosen family, it's really about this concept of who we relate to and how we're connected to them and how different ideas of belonging facilitate that or create barriers. Yes, thank you so much for this. And also one aspect of your work I found particularly compelling is

is that you move beyond treating Vietnamese American cultural production as mere evidence of violence or testimony to the enduring damage of the Vietnam War. Instead, you also argue that these works reveal a deeper ongoing source of harm, the violence perpetrated by white supremacy and the racial and national incorporation practices of the United States.

You point out quite convincingly that American neoliberal capitalism reduces systematic historical violence like racism, slavery, and genocide to something as narrow as family trauma, conveniently framed as something to overcome individually. Why has this discourse become so pervasive today?

And how problematic is it? How has it shaped the way we imagine Vietnamese American resettlement as a family project, quote unquote, in pursuit of capitalist individualism and white citizenship?

When the game tips off, the NBA action is just beginning on FanDuel, America's number one sportsbook. Because FanDuel is your home for NBA live betting, however you want to play. Now is the perfect time to join. Make every moment more with FanDuel, official sports betting partner of the NBA. 21 plus and present in Virginia. First online, real money wager only. $5 first deposit required. Bonus issued is non-withdrawable bonus bets which expire seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

This is such an excellent question. I think especially as we're approaching the 50th anniversary of the end of the war and we see all of these public events that are really framed around resilience, reclaiming our families. One thing that I really wanted to do in this book is kind of say –

Right.

Right. But I think that there's a disconnect that has to happen for Vietnamese Americans to be grateful to the United States for rescuing them.

that requires them not to talk about the ways that it's U.S. imperial projects which perpetuated the conditions of warfare in the first place, right? And so U.S. interventionism there. And so one thing that I want to do when I'm moving past the enduring damage of the Vietnam War is not to say that there wasn't damage, but what Vietnamese Americans are referring to when they talk about damage isn't really explicit. It's not specific, right?

It's quite abstract. And they're usually talking about the damage of family separation, the fact that their parents had to leave Vietnam rather than the violence of U.S. imperialism and interventionism. Right. And so this is not to say that there isn't there's not violence experienced by people, by local communities.

you know, by local entities as well, but by and large, right, it's U.S. white supremacy and imperialism that exacerbated and extended the war in Vietnam, right? I think that the fact that, you know, for example, central Vietnam is still like 80%

filled with unexplored ordinances, right? It's going to take over 100 years to remove all of the bombs in central Vietnam, not something that most Vietnamese Americans know, right? And so I think it's important to say that, you know, the work of Vietnamese Americans usually doesn't attend to that violence,

And they're using the idea of violence to talk about something else. They're using the idea of violence, especially if you deeply read these texts, to talk about why they don't fit in in the United States, right? To try to make sense of their parents' experiences of poverty, right? So many illustrations of poverty in Ocean Boone's book, so many illustrations of poverty in both graphic novels that I analyzed. You have explicit...

of their parents being discriminated against racially, right? So the famous line in Ocean's book about, you know, his mother as a manicurist, you know, saying, I'm sorry all the time. You have the image in T-Boy's book of her dad being spit on by a white person in San Diego. And so...

For me, it was really about trying to make sense of their experiences growing up in the United States, right? A place where they're supposed to have freedom, a place where they were supposed to be relatively safe, and then they experienced these other forms of harm, right? And they're really tied to poverty, which is tied to racial capitalism, how resources are allocated and people are dispossessed in the United States, as well as the things that the idea of being incorporated make invisible, right? So, okay, you're resettled, right?

And this story kind of ends there. Right. So many scholars of migration and resettlement criticize the resettlement project because they say you bring people over here and then you kind of leave them on their own. Right. And so let's talk about that experience. Right. And so especially in the graphic novels, because

The authors are, I think, slightly older than me. So they're growing up in this age of colorblind multiculturalism. And what I argue in my analysis of those graphic novels is that it's really this idea that, you know, we're past racism that leaves them grasping for something to try to explain their experiences of racism. And so I argue that they turn to the war as a way to explain this, right? So

there's a huge problem with reducing systemic inequality to interpersonal experiences, right? We absolutely feel systemic inequalities inter-personally.

personally, but our interpersonal experiences, you know, they're so varied, right? You have refugees who are resettled in the first wave who are wealthy, right? So from their stance, maybe racism doesn't exist, right? Or maybe inequality doesn't exist in that same kind of way. And so how can we situate people's individual experiences as within these larger structures of history? The

Violence of slavery, the violence of dispossession to understand why people are subject to these kinds of experiences of violence. Right. And so I situate in, I think, a lot of the chapters how different kinds of narratives of violence.

incorporation, self-sufficiency, freedom, and democracy are really about trying to train individuals to take the personal responsibility for history, to take personal responsibility for structural inequalities. And I think that

We're seeing that play out in history in the United States at this moment, right? So the kind of transforming larger structural violence to individual wrongdoing, right? What did you not do to kind of get over these kinds of circumstances, right?

And it's that individualizing narrative that problematically doesn't allow people to kind of respond to take a look at how did we get here? How did we come to be people who were exiled from a country to end up in this other place without being able to make that structural analysis? You can't individually achieve your way outside of white supremacy.

I see, I see. Also, in your introduction, also in the same introduction, there's a beautiful and thought-provoking quote that I'd like to share with our audience. I quote,

Unquote.

This is such a powerful shift from viewing trauma as a direct subjective experience of warfare to framing it as an intergenerational and cross-cultural conversation among the children of refugees. It also intersects with question of assimilation, what you refer to as, quote, racial integration and national assimilation, unquote, in the United States.

Can you expand on this discussion? Yeah, I think that there's, I'm going to start over. For me, it was really important to not disavow trauma, right? It's not my responsibility to name trauma or to disavow trauma, but as somebody who's doing the work of cultural studies, to notice the concept and the term circulating and what kind of work it's doing.

And I think that it's a trap to talk about, you know, validate certain kinds of traumas and invalidate other kinds of traumas rather than paying attention to what that concept enables, right? And again, I think that we're seeing this play out in real time, especially in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests, right? We shift from conversations of trauma

which are more open to understanding people as subject to historical traumas, to this moment where it's really about the individual trauma of white supremacists who feel like they're aggrieved by any structures that try to address or redress that trauma, right? So for me, it's not about dismissing that, right? Trauma is real. People experience trauma. Trauma from warfare is absolutely real.

But I noticed a kind of problematic trend in some literatures where people want to try to make sense of their experience by talking through their parents' trauma or trying to seek legitimacy by pointing to the trauma of their collective identity. And so I wanted to understand how that's operating rather than tell them that they're experiencing it or not experiencing it.

I don't want to claim broadly. I think that there is a group of people who claim kind of a refugee lineage and they say, oh, I am because my family's refugees, I'm refugees and we carry this trauma. And I think that that doesn't do as productive political work as we want it to do. Right. And so it is a direct subjective experience for people. But I'm not interested in that part of it. Right. I'm more interested in.

how we keep using this concept to do different kinds of things. Right. And so, um, in my, in reading these texts and trying to figure out what it was doing, I noticed that the, they, they don't use the concept, right? So the, um, the, uh,

authors that I analyze don't really use the concept of intergenerational trauma to talk about their work, but other people do, right? So in sites all over the place, people kind of will point to this book and say, this book explains intergenerational trauma. And so I wanted to understand what does that enable, right? And what actually, if I'm going to give a reading of what kinds of possibilities people are hoping that

that it will open up for them. I saw that they wanted to use intergenerational trauma as a way to say, I'm experiencing something that I can't quite name and it feels related to this other thing.

And so it becomes this kind of conversation between the present day experience of racism that the people in the literature and the film that it analyzed are experiencing and something about their parents' experiences of exile and displacement and surviving warfare. And so it was really about trying to make sense how the through line of white supremacy is informing both their parents' trajectories as well as their trajectories. It's not the same.

But the structure of white supremacy makes all that possible. And so it was important for me to acknowledge that there's a mediation happening in the concept of intergenerational trauma. How are we mediating the experiences of the U.S. born with those who are displaced from Vietnam?

And I think that for me it's, so in chapter three I say, you know, the concept of intergenerational trauma is like a kind of form of misdirection because I think people are going to turn to that chapter and say, okay, here's a definition I can use and now I can describe things as intergenerational trauma. And I kind of turn that on its head and say, you know, this is the work that it's hoping to do and it's actually a little bit murky, right? There's both possibilities and ways that that obscures trauma.

In your first chapter, titled Attractive Families, Assimilation and the Sociological Containment of Race, you present a striking portrayal of Vietnamese refugees' arrival in the United States, characterized by their representation as, quote, over-documented, unquote, and, quote, Americanized, unquote, family units.

Government data collection, state policies, and also sociological studies of this mass resettlement seem to overwhelmingly frame Vietnamese refugees as the quote-unquote good refugee, feeding into the American palette for model minority stereotypes of the Asiatic racial form.

Through various procedures and classificatory schemes, sociologists didn't just gather information about Vietnamese refugees, but they also positioned them within the broader framework of immigration governance, deeply intertwined with the racialized ideals of families shaped by white supremacy.

You outlined this dynamic in three key ways, and I'm going to just summarize for the audience. First, by upholding policies that enforce heteronormative family structures.

Second, through an anti-Black discourse that unjustly compares Vietnamese refugees' economic and academic achievements to those of Black Americans. And third, by making Vietnamese refugees legible as families through the uncritical reproduction of family values and the ethos of hard work. Could you walk us through these three measurements in the state materials that you examined?

Thank you for such an excellent and thorough summary of the chapter and for these great questions. I think that I can, so the question is, can you walk us through these three measurements? So one of the things that I want to make clear in my analysis of this chapter, I think people will read and say, why are you suddenly, why do you begin with sociology and then immediately turn to cultural texts? One of the things that I'm trying to make visible is that

All knowledge production are cultural texts, right? So sociological knowledge, policy papers, these are...

This is knowledge that is produced within a particular social context with ideologies and norms that inform it. And so when we decide the parameters of our research and how we're studying a group of people, what kinds of questions we're asking, these are informed with the dominant norms that we have about the group that we're looking at, right? So assumptions about immigration. And so some of the assumptions about immigration that I make visible in this chapter is that

that in the case of Vietnamese refugees, I think people have to understand that this was actually quite exceptional and unique. The resettlement of Vietnamese refugees was the very first time that Asians were welcomed in immigration policy in the United States, right? So after over 100 years of Chinese exclusion and various anti-Asian immigration acts, right, including, you know,

granting the Philippines independence through the Tidings-McDuffie Act so that they could make them non-nationals and prevent them from continuing to migrate to the United States.

The Vietnamese come to the U.S. for the first time, you know, after the passing of the Immigration and Naturalization Act. But it also requires this sort of justification for why are you resettling this huge group of Asians to the U.S. for the first time? So I argue that the immigration act,

The sensibility of immigration in that moment was we have to make them palatable to the American people. And we have to do this through arguing that they're not going to pose a threat. They're going to assimilate. They're going to be successful. I opened that chapter with this image of, you know, this well-dressed woman, this Vietnamese man in a suit. She's wearing aliai. Her child is wearing aliai.

And, you know, this description of them as these beautiful, gorgeous families. And so this is really a project about making them palatable to the American public, right? So many people have cited all of the polling that happened when the Vietnamese were first resettled in 1975, and the U.S. overwhelmingly did not want to resettle Vietnamese refugees. So how do you get the country to accept a population that they affiliate with this horrible war that lasted for too long, that the United States, quote-unquote, lost control

but that took the family members of these U.S. servicemen. And so they argue that the Vietnamese were –

heteronormative families, that their family structure, because it was headed by a male, but because there were traditional gender dynamics, that they would be successful, right? That these aligned with U.S. heteronormative family structures. In the analysis of the Moynihan report, I show that Moynihan was really making arguments about how the black family was, you know, the pathology of the black family was really, you know,

situated in the rise of female-headed households. And one of the metrics for his argument was how many Black women were the heads of households who were employed, right? How many Black women were working out of the home? This very same metric emerges from

in reports that are studying Vietnamese refugee resettlement. And so when Vietnamese refugees were resettled, the U.S. government hired a task force to examine how they were doing. So the mandate was Vietnamese refugees have to achieve a level of self-sufficiency for resettlement to be successful. So we're going to measure employment. We're going to measure whether their children are doing well in school. We're going to measure income.

And based on the measurements of how many Vietnamese women were in the workforce, they argued that they're doing well. This is the exact same metric that they use to vilify the black family. But in the case of the United States, right, they're able to use Orientalist ideas of Vietnamese families and say, oh, look at this subversion of the traditional family. This proves that they're assimilating to white values. Vietnamese women want to work. They're going to be incorporated. They're going to be successful. Right.

And so they are made legible through this idea of family values that they describe pretty vaguely. Because if you look at the chart of family values –

I think it would be quite difficult to identify any family anywhere in the world that doesn't value, you know, like connection or respect or, you know, these kinds of things. And so they argue that there's something special about Vietnamese family values and their desire to work really hard that's going to make them successful in the United States, which in this moment in 1975, you have the, you know, the beginnings of Vietnam.

You know, the shutting down of the social welfare state, right? We're going into, we're having the economic crises that followed like 1973 and the oil crisis. And you have this moment where you have to prove that Vietnamese Americans are not going to be a threat to the U.S. economy and U.S. society. And we're going to position them against Vietnam.

African-Americans, Black families, Latina families who are part of the civil rights movement in the United States who are trying to say that the reasons that they're not succeeding has to do with structural inequality and racism.

If we can individualize this and say, well, it's just their bad families, then we don't have to do any sort of restructuring to make things, you know, create equity for people in this country, right? So Vietnamese arrive at this moment where people can capitalize on their apparent proximity to whiteness, right? And again, for scholars of Asian American studies, they are going to notice this as this really stark moment. How do you go from vilifying Asians as anti-white to

Or vilifying Asians as being the opposite of whites, of being threatening to white society. And suddenly like, oh, they're so close to white people and they're going to be great and they're just like us and celebrate them. This has everything to do with how we're individualizing their quote unquote successes so that we don't have to allocate state resources so that people can actually do well.

Oh, yes. In the first chapter, you guide us through how the, quote, racist, capitalist and imperialist frame, unquote, of American governance and national assimilation sought to incorporate Vietnamese refugees into the American family narrative, using time as a central discourse.

Chapter 2, titled Ambivalent Attachments, Orienting Toward Family in Vietnam America and the Best We Could Do, shifts focus to a case study informal analysis of two remarkable graphic novels, Vietnam America by G.B. Tran and The Best We Could Do by Thị Bụi.

To start, could you introduce us to Chi Pichuan and Thich Bui? And how do your reading practice of these authors engage with the model of displacing kinship and the disavowal of race in an era that claims anti-racism? How do their works explore the deeply contradictory realities of Vietnamese immigrant families, particularly as they navigate intergenerational power dynamics?

Chapter two is a direct response to the previous chapter, right? So if the first chapter argued that sociology did the work of containing race or containing the racialized histories of Vietnamese Americans and positioning them in relationship to a U.S. nation-based frame of integration assimilation, right, the

the nation of immigrants narrative that so many people are familiar with, which the United States doesn't really kind of promote anymore in the last decade, right? So that's kind of fallen away as anti-immigrant attacks have risen. But that first chapter is really about how did Vietnamese Americans get incorporated into the supposed national time, which is about forward trajectory, generational inclusion, right? So this idea that

Your parents, they come, they have hardships, but the next generation is going to do better. They're eventually going to be incorporated. They get aligned with this forward trajectory of national progress, right? So there are so many people who tell this story, right? I think like famously, it's like Keihe Kwan, when he won that award, it's like, oh, this is an American dream story. This is that sort of story. Chapter two is really about how

Yeah.

I do that through noticing these are really similar stories, right? And so I think in interviews, T-Boy has talked about how she really talked to GB about writing her graphic novel and saying, well, how can I write my graphic novel? He already wrote this story basically about, you know, parents coming to the United States, them

feeling alienated from their parents, and then there being kind of a moment where they realize, oh, I should actually probably learn my family history. And then they walk us through how they learn it and how it unfolded, right? And so in that chapter, I argue that it's really about them trying to reorient themselves toward the past, right? So to resist the pull of national progress, which orients the enemies Americas towards the U.S., to desire the U.S., to align themselves with U.S. values, right?

These graphic novels are trying to look backwards to see, you know, is there something that I can recapture, something that's missing, something that I feel very viscerally is missing in my experience. I feel effectively in my feelings of disconnect from my family. Maybe if I look back to family history, I can recapture some of that, right?

And so in my analysis of these graphic novels, I say that they do the work of reorienting us to family histories of the past, which includes the overlapping histories of French colonialism, Japanese occupation, and then the U.S. war with Vietnam. So it's the second war in Vietnam. And they...

try to make sense of, you know, how did we end up here? How did we end up in this place where we don't understand our parents? We feel disconnected from our history, but I make it clear that, um, that just accounts for kind of recounting the experiences of racialization, right? The experiences of racism and that that sort of project is an important project, but it's an incomplete one. Right. And so I think I say, um, you know, um,

These chapters reorient through time and space to try to recontextualize their experiences. And this amounts to identifying the devaluation of Vietnamese culture and heritage or naming what is racist. Right. And so then my analysis steps in to actually preemptively

process, to name how they're processing the experiences of racialization. So my methodology, the book's title, Displacing Kinship, I say that it's an approach to examining the texts by focusing on the affective investments evoked through various representations of family and kinship

and situating them materially within the political economy of white supremacy and warfare. So my analysis of these texts is really by focusing on the kinds of emotional discord and disruption that the texts themselves portray,

through their representations of family, and then try to put that in the greater context of what informs them, right? And so as you mentioned your question, as I mentioned earlier, growing up in a moment of colorblind racism and multiculturalism is a really disorienting experience. And so if you don't have the language of race to talk about your experiences, you're going to grasp at something else to try to make sense of this, right? And so

I think the project of displacing kinship names those conditions. It names the economic shifts, right, which is cutting the 1980 Refugee Act off

cut resources to refugees, right? So prior to 1980, you have this ad hoc response to refugee resettlement, different kinds of allocations that are made on a case-by-case basis by Congress. You have the formalization of a refugee policy for the first time in 1980, but it is really in these very neoliberal terms. It's really about, okay, we will resettle them,

We're going to give them the bare minimum of resources to succeed. We're going to make sure that they accept jobs as soon as possible because this proves that they are self-sufficient. And so it's really about making sure that they adopt neoliberal values as quickly as possible. But in the 1980s, we know that this leaves lots of people in the dust, right? So there have been plenty of studies that show that many of the really poor refugee families that got resettled, for example, like Eric Tang's work,

they end up on welfare and they stay on welfare, right? So they are not able to actually overcome their circumstances. Mm-hmm.

The choice to express these narratives through graphic novels, blending both visual and narratorial storytelling, it's also fascinating in itself. It kind of reminds me of a lecture I attended by Professor Kavita Daya, in which she discussed This Side, That Side, which is basically an anthology of graphic narratives reflecting on the partition in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

In the anthology, 20 creative artists use comics to embody the experience of displacement, placing the body directly on the page. As Professor Deya noted, trauma is often deposited in silence, and visual narratives like comics actively resist that silence.

I feel that Tay Bui and GB Tran similarly approach their work with this intention, kind of like reorienting transnational and diasporic family histories away from the American narrative and instead back toward the Vietnamese experiences. Would you agree or like how could you elaborate on how they achieve this orientation?

I think that argument is one that was also echoed in an anthology about comics by Kathy Schlenbiles and I'm forgetting the co-author, that there's something about comics that allows us to

articulate, uh, different kinds of things that, you know, uh, trauma, whatever, um, visual narratives make it possible to depict certain kinds of things. Right. I think that that's absolutely true, but I think that also, um, there's nothing about, uh, graphic novels that, uh,

does only the kind of work that reveals trauma. And I'm thinking, for example, of, you know, the kind of famously examined graphic novel that was put out by the Australian government called

you know, to deter refugees from coming. Right. And so they use visual depictions to really tell this violent message of like, do, do not come to Australia. We will deport you. And so I think that there's something about the visual that allows us to depict a lot of things that we, you know, especially, you know,

narratives that are shrouded in silence, narratives that we cannot speak, that we don't have access to. Absolutely, I think that there is there. But what I think that the texts do here is they do more than resist the silence. It's about making visible the silence

the kind of the layers of their experience. One is one of the things that graphic novels can also do is to give us different kinds of orientations towards time, right? And so jumping back and forth in time throughout all the different kinds of novels, one of the things that I argue in my reading of G.B. Tran is that

there's this sense of sort of timelessness that's happening in the lack of gutters and formal enclosures on the page, which I call like the, this depiction of the sort of time of colorblindness, right? So we're in a time beyond race. There are not these kinds of frames for making sense of our experience. And so I think that they do this kind of work. And as I said, they're naming these experiences of racism by tracing their family histories, right?

But I think that beyond this work, and I've mentioned this before, that it is important for marginalized people to tell their stories, absolutely. But then what do we do with them? And so I think that the second part in...

of my analysis when I shift in this chapter to analyzing T-Boy and analyzing the ambivalence that I read all throughout that graphic novel is really about, you know, what sorts of work processing work do the texts do for the authors and

is what I'm analyzing, right? So it's more than just correcting history, right? It's them trying to make sense of their own experiences of feeling alienated in their families, feeling experiences of racism, but also feeling

experiences of familial violence, right? And so in T-Boy's graphic novel, it's really this kind of desire to connect with her parents that she can't quite place. Can she blame that disconnect on the Vietnam War? Not exactly, right? And so how do we understand this ambivalence of, you know, desiring but feeling distant from? And so in that text, I say, you know, they do reorient, but is reorientation enough, right? So if we simply just challenge the

stereotypes. You know, there's people have famously said, right, like if there's a stereotype and you challenge the stereotype, you're also affirming it a different kind of way. And so rather than just saying like, you know, we need to position ourselves in relationship to Vietnamese history instead of American history. Right. I'm interested in asking this question of like, what kind of what do we want that to do? Like when we reconnect to Vietnam, what are we hoping for?

we're hoping for a reconnection to a particular kind of intimacy, right? We're hoping for a connection to a kind of relationships or relationality that we imagine has been foreclosed to us because we don't know that history, but then they learn that history. And then do they, are they closer to their parents? Do they, you know, like in the end it's kind of vague. And so, um,

It's a device, but it's an incomplete device. And so in the end of that chapter, I argue for a sort of ambivalent attachment to these narratives of family and history using Sarah Ahmed's concept of feminist attachments that says instead of just kind of letting go of history and letting go of family, if we hold them tighter and we let them transform and be something else, which is tied to the way I'm thinking about displacing kinship, right?

which comes from Chin Min-ha talking about, you know, strategies of displacement, if we allow these ideas to become something more than what we want them to be, then we have the possibilities of actually reconnecting, right? So if you have like an idea of an ideal family, right? Oh, okay. So for example, in these texts, you have, you know, fathers who are aloof or, you know, violent, right?

And so if you say, okay, these Vietnamese Americans just wish that they had like loving dads, right? This idea of the dream family that you want is actually an obstacle to you getting the thing that you really desire, which is an actual relationship with your parents.

right? Which is an actual relationship to your community. So how do we ambivalently attach ourselves to things, right? Like we want family, but we want it in a particular kind of way. And that doesn't let family actually be the thing that we can have, right? Like if it's a relationship, if it's a process, your image, your idealized image is always going to get in the way of you accessing the relationship that you actually want. Right.

As you mentioned at the end of chapter two, you interpret the affective valences, what you've just described as feminist ambivalence, emerged in the text expressed through the lens of a daughter witnessing her parents' lives while stepping into their roles as a child herself.

This theme transitions seamlessly into chapter three, where you expand on the concept of affective attachments, particularly in relation to the material and quotidian violence faced by racialized others. Here, you focus on the works of queer Vietnamese-American artists, Ocean Vuong and Thao Nguyen. Let's start with Ocean Vuong, an internationally beloved poet whose work I also personally admire.

His work, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was translated into Vietnamese and published in Vietnam in 2019. In this chapter, you take a step beyond your arguments of Chapter 1, where you suggest that the incorporation of Vietnamese families as part of the working class perpetuates violence rooted in white supremacy and capitalism.

you argue that the intimacy impacts of assimilation cannot be reduced solely to the economic precarity of capitalism. Instead, the pain, belonging, and identity articulated by Vuong's characters, Little Dog and his mother, are also shaped by heteronormative racialization and the developmentalist rhetoric of such narratives.

How does theorizing intergenerational trauma, as opposed to dominant frameworks of trauma, address this discursive gap?

Where chapter two gives us the theory of feminist ambivalence to think through how to turn towards the family without fixing it to counter the disorienting effects of assimilation. I think of chapter three as a way to

articulate a relational practice, right? So if ambivalence shows us the work that this turning back towards history makes possible,

Intergenerational trauma is the concept that I offer to allow us to make visible the material and affective violence of assimilation that shows us how this plays out in the day-to-day rather than in the spectacularized and abstracted violence of Vietnam. And so in this chapter, I look at

what I call two parallel narratives of national progress and development. The coming out narrative

as well as the assimilation, right? So I name assimilation as a narrative of national progress and development, right? And so in Tao's work, her album Temple, as well as her documentary film and the media that she produced surrounding it, as well as Ocean Vuong's work, I noticed that there was this kind of simultaneous,

tying together of queer identity and Vietnamese American identity that challenged the project of national inclusion. And so you see the pain that they both experience in their expressions of queerness or closeted queerness. And so the logical conclusion that somebody would come to based on our dominant ideas of sexuality is that if you come out, you're going to be liberated. This is the truest expression of your self-fulfillment.

In both of these texts, that wasn't the case, right? And so especially for Tao, she is really afraid to come out in, you know, naming her girlfriend and her wife. She has these experiences.

And for her, coming out wasn't about getting away from the family, right? So in white, narratives of coming out is really about individualizing yourself and freeing yourself of the binds of your family in order to fulfill yourself as a sexual being, right? In Ocean's novel, you have the famous scene where he tries to come out to his mom, assuming that she's going to disown him and that he has to leave. And she says, where are you going to go?

And so in these moments of kind of these failures to come out, you see that what these two cultural producers are doing is showing that the desire for belonging is not realized through the fulfillment of individuality, right? And assimilation as this kind of national project toward inclusion in the United States is also about this movement towards inclusion

neoliberal ideas of the self. And these two texts challenge those by showing that not only are they really difficult to achieve, they're not desired, right? Ultimately, both authors want to be themselves within the context of their own families and their own communities, right? And so I turned to this concept of intergenerational trauma in this chapter to show that

they're trying to tie their personal experiences to their parental experiences in order to bridge this gap, right? Not in order to tell this story about who they are as individuals and that, in fact, the frame of intergenerational trauma makes visible the overlapping material conditions that both the children and the parents face that make it difficult for them to actually have relationships with one another, right? And so this...

Each of the structures of coming out as well as the structure of assimilation are developmental structures.

that are rooted in narratives of self-revelation that actually make it hard for us to see the violence of heteronormativity, right? And it makes it hard for us to see the violence of racialized subjection. And it also makes it difficult for us to see the interpersonal violence within these very families, right? So intergenerational trauma isn't a way to wash over any of these, right? Isn't a way to excuse parental violence, right?

to try to situate all of these experiences within that larger frame. What forms of PTSD do little dogs' mother and grandmother carry that lead them to treat him in the way that he does? This isn't an excuse of those forms of violence, but a way to try to make sense of how the structures of their lives that led them to behave in certain kinds of ways also structure his life.

Right. It is also the barrier to the closest that he wants to feel. Right. And so this I think that this chapter is my most ambitious chapter in trying to articulate a theory that tries to make sense of what the intergenerational is trying to do.

Right. As a discourse, a way to try to parse the trauma, to understand the process of racialization. Right. A way to bring the violence of the past to speak to everyday violence that people are experiencing as racialized subjects in the United States.

And so it is definitely about economic precarity, right? But it's not only about economic precarity, right? It's also about white supremacy. It is also about heteronormativity. And it is also about the interpersonal violence in the family. I think that the intervention that I make here in thinking about intergenerational trauma is really about not...

trying to achieve a sort of like healed individual self, because I don't think that is possible under the conditions that we live, right? And so I think that we can become, you know, and so don't get me wrong, right? Like, I think that therapy is really important. I think people need to address their traumas. But if the idea of...

doing away with trauma is really about trying to get over certain kinds of things. I don't know how we as individuals can get over empire, white supremacy, and the conditions of capitalism. Oh, yes, I see. Also in your analysis of Tao's documentary film interviews and also her album Temple, you title one subsection of the chapter with a particularly intriguing phrase,

And I quote, coming out as Vietnamese, passing as straight, unquote. And I think this phrase is so amazing because this captures so well what you've just shared to the listeners that this assimilation into white culture also strikingly intersects with the closeting of both Thảo Nguyễn and Ocean Vuong's racial and sexual identities.

But when we move to chapter four, titled Embodying Memory and Remembering Race, which delves into theories of performance and post-memory as generational frameworks within a family-centered model of history and transmission.

In your discussion of Jin Mai's artwork, you illustrate how second-generation art explores the shared emotional and physical dimensions of interpersonal relationships, weaving together both real and imagined connections among kin and families. What stands out is your critical engagement with this theoretical lens. You caution against the risk of

reducing structural history of systemic inequality to cultural difference or interpersonal experience.

So first, can you introduce us to Trinh Mai and her work? And secondly, in what ways do theories of memory, post-memory, and family fall short as viable frameworks for understanding these narratives? So I'll start with talking about Trinh Mai. So Trinh Mai is an artist in Southern California, second generation. I think she's...

Her work is very visible, especially in California. She was the artist in residence for an exhibit at UCI for the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. And so that's where I first sort of encountered her work. I think that what I want to do in Chapter 4 is really –

think about different ways to engage with memory as a way to access the history of the Vietnam War. And so I analyze several texts, including the art of Chin Mai in this chapter, to kind of show how these artists argue that there is some sort of generational form of transmission. Lots of people like to use the concept, Marion Hirsch's concept of post-memory.

And so I do a reading basically through the frame of post-memory and then I challenge it.

So I think that post-memory is an interesting, really innovative frame for thinking through the ways that the children of survivors understand the past and really how the past impacts them. But I think that it runs the risk of doing work that actually is also not liberatory, right? There's nothing inherently ethical about imagining a relationship to a past. Right.

And so in this text, I show us what post-memory can do. And then I say, but if post-memory can do all of these things, then where are the boundaries? In particular, I talk about the really damaging impacts of narrating a history through trauma, which we see in a lot of different kinds of relationships.

right-wing nationalist projects, right? They're really narrating particular kind of history in order to claim legitimacy of their project, right? And so in a

I'm really interested in – and I don't think that most scholars do this, right? I think that it happens much more in popular conversations. You know, your quote of reducing structural histories of systemic inequality to cultural difference or interpersonal experience. I think that dominant media is doing this right now, especially in the United States, right? Reducing structural histories of systemic inequality to cultural difference.

It's a way of disavowing the reality of how our lives come to be shaped, right? It's a way of disavowing the meaning of the factors that coalesce to produce what we experience as identity, right? And so in this section, I kind of talk about how memory was really provocative, sort of corrective to dominant history. And that absolutely makes sense when we're talking about

Who gets to write history? Who is an academy? Who has access to these things? These critiques are totally legitimate when we think about the power structure of who can produce knowledge. But if we're thinking about memory as somehow automatically liberatory or automatically ethical, I think that's a little bit lazy. And we're not really doing the work of asking these questions of like, what would it look like for a memory project to be reparative other than just

doing the work of reclaiming, right? What gets us past, you know, the individual memories, which are very important, right? I think we need to

uh capture the individualized memories of survivors of war right i think like um particularly of marginalized populations particularly it for example right in this moment um people wanting to uh you know collect oral histories and interview people from gaza as they're being displaced that's it's such critical work when dominant frames don't allow those stories to circulate or exist

But if we're arguing that memory is somehow an unproblematic way to get to this past, we have to ask ourselves, like, what kinds of memory projects in the past have

been engaged to do lots of damaging things. And so I move through memory to, you know, what I call embodied memory, which people, I think people will be like, fine, that's still memory. But what I'm trying to actually do is say, you know, memory can be an entry point. Post-memory can be an entry point. But if Vietnamese American texts are really longing for a sense of community and a sense of relationship, then

Why not go to the thing that we want, which is the intimacy, which is the relationship, right? Like how do we be with our parents, community members, and actually have the conversations with them

rather than, you know, desiring them from afar. In this chapter, I also show how, you know, the graphic novel that T-Boy is writing isn't just the story. It becomes the device that she's able to use to achieve that intimacy with her parents that she wants, right? She shows them drafts and she's able to kind of use that as a device for connecting with them further. Right.

My critique of post-memory is, you know, I quote Crystal Pak's work there. You know, there are limitations when the conditions which made possible war, right? In Crystal's work, she talks about how do we talk about the end of the war in Korea when the war hasn't ended, right? And so if we're talking about

recentering the conditions of white supremacy, recentering the conditions of empire, these also endure, right? And so what other modes can we engage to try to get to what we're looking for, which is this set of ethical engagements and ethical relationships, right?

Oh, yes. I think to me, one of the most striking moments in your book, to me personally, is the paragraph where you write, and I would love to quote it for the audience, that while most Vietnamese American literature has been concerned with the war as the marker for what was lost and the potentials that may never be,

I conclude this chapter by asking what is gained by letting go of the family and the war as the primary signifiers for the Vietnamese-American experience.

And I think this is such a provocative rethinking of Vietnamese-American cultural narratives, just because, as you say, the alternative forms of what you call intimacy and embodied memory, perhaps through non-verbal or non-narrative approaches also, rather than treating the absence of traditional narratives as a void.

becomes a viable point of departure for this vacancy in narrative transmission. And I think that is just beautifully captured and articulated in your book. When we move to your epilogue, you raise an important cultural phenomenon that sheds light on a certain degree of internalized anti-blackness within Asian American and immigrant communities in the United States.

It's particularly fascinating how during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2016, as you already mentioned a couple of times, Vietnamese Americans were actively teaching their parents about their complicity in the structure of racism of white supremacy. And as you've shown in your book as well, Vietnamese parents in the U.S. are not outside the bounds of racial knowledge.

As refugees, they have also had to navigate the complexities of citizenship, inequality and opportunity in this country, often emphasizing their refugee status in that negotiation.

How can we move beyond the binary frames of race and ethnicity to critically engage with ongoing racism and disentangle the deeply intertwined constructs of family and nation? I think it's, I've been told in conversations with other people, I have said that one of the things that I wanted this book to do is to kind of force Vietnamese American cultural production to articulate racism

a clear cultural politics because I don't think that most of it does. I think most of it is really about this reclaiming of family history. And I think that the book is an attempt to explain the huge impulse to do this reclaiming of family history, this tracing of family history work. And I think that what I wanted to do in the epilogue is be explicit, right? And say,

Vietnamese Americans are situated racially in the United States in a particular kind of way, right? We are situated, you know, whether you want to call it model minority racialization, but, you know, as Asian Americans, our existence in the United States is structured by pre-existing ideas of Asians, as well as the racial divides that are created, you know, ideologically and culturally and materially.

So I opened with the kind of Black Lives Matter moment in this letter to Asian parents about Black Lives Matter because I felt like it echoed very much of my students' experiences navigating that moment. And something that kept kind of coming up for me is this sort of desire to inform parents while simultaneously treating them as

though they're not racist because maybe they don't know enough, which I find it to be, it's an attempt to generously kind of read some of the racist things the parents say. But I find it totally misplaced because they're,

you know people who are subject to the racial hierarchies in the countries that they move to they understand how race works right they understand who to vilify who to align themselves with and they may not articulate it out loud right so um it was my way of saying like you know vietnamese parents live they live here they lived through the racism of the war in vietnam they know what it's like to be racialized they moved here they also know what it's like to be racialized here

how they choose to align themselves. And, you know, I use the word choice very loosely because it's, you know, all of these are very coerced choices. I mean, some people might make choices to be explicitly racist or anti-racist, but when you live in the structure of white supremacy and it is normal as the air you breathe, the things that you say and the ways that you see the world are going to be white supremacists unless they're challenged otherwise, right? And so it was my way to say,

you know, Vietnamese refugees definitely negotiated their refugee status to gain resources, to get access to things, to present themselves as sympathetic. You know, a huge conversation that I want this book to eventually open up that I didn't attend to is the anti-communism in the Vietnamese American community, right? How do you talk about

race without talking about anti-communism as a racializing discourse, right? Or communism and anti-communism. So I wanted to say like, okay, I understand we want to cut our parents some slack, but like what does it actually do for us as a community if we're not going to name the racial dynamics that we live in, the racial dynamics that our community engages in and that inform how we

Right.

Asian Americans become complicit in the structures of anti-blackness and white supremacy as well. And so I wanted to really show how this plays out and becomes this site that people don't talk about. So people say things, I've heard students say, like, I can't talk about

I'm like, what do you mean you can't? You can, you know, it's different to say that, you know, I have a difficult relationship with my parents, so I can't talk about certain kinds of things. But, you know, I'm like, what do you mean you can't?

The kind of idea that we need to treat our parents with these like kid gloves and like not actually treat them as the other people who live in the world is a disservice to them. And it's also a disservice to any sort of political work that the community is trying to do. I think that something else that I wanted to to note to kind of go back to.

a previous comment that you had is that, you know, this chapter is really also about like unpacking this idea of family and unpacking war, you know, untethering them from, from the Vietnamese American project, not to say that like those things don't matter, but to actually like unpack them, let's have a conversation, right? Most Vietnamese Americans can't explain to you what the war was about, right?

right? Most Vietnamese Americans can't explain to you the very specific contours of like

Who actually were the refugees? Who stayed behind? What was the project that was happening in Vietnam? Can you talk about Ho Chi Minh without actually vilifying him? And so can we actually talk about family as a site of violence as well? So in letting go of these things, it's really about letting go of the kind of preciousness that we have about, oh, these are protected things that we can't interrogate and can't have conversations about.

And what I wanted to do in the epilogue was say, we actually have to engage with these things if we want to do more than these kinds of looking backward projects, right? Because retelling the history doesn't automatically lead to solidarity projects with other communities, right? It can let us consolidate what we want to call Vietnamese American identity, right? It can help us build this thing, but like,

What is the purpose of building a Vietnamese American identity, right? How does that let people engage politically or how does it prevent people from engaging politically? And I think it's pretty obvious that in my work, I want it to do cultural work, right? If you want to make a critique of the war, let's actually critique bombing people. Let's actually critique the people who dropped the bombs and the companies that make the bombs and who is left to clean up afterwards, right?

Let's take these things out of the abstract and make them material. Let's talk about why your family is not a hospitable place because your parents have to work two jobs for racist people, that they're constantly feeling discrimination, that they can't retire, you have all this stress. Why are you so pressured to succeed? This has everything to do with our material and economic conditions. And if we can't actually interrogate these things,

we can't articulate a cultural politics that attends to those material conditions. Thank you so much. Before we wrap up and hopefully inspire our listeners to rush out and read your book, let me ask one of the last questions. What do you think critical refugee scholars can learn from the fascinating figures and analysis in your work?

And why is it so important for the world to pay closer attention to what second-generation Vietnamese Americans have to say about their family lives and their lived experiences of marginalization in the United States?

especially when this episode comes out in 2025, which marked the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, end of the Vietnam War, and precipitated the exodus of millions of people from South Vietnam to America. This work is very much indebted to the genealogy of critical refugee studies, right? And I think that people who are interested in looking at critical refugee studies will

appreciate my attention to the realm of the affective. I think that affect feelings are really an under-theorized part of how we understand political power. I think that coupled with my attempts to make affect a way to see our material conditions can be useful for people trying to think through critical refugee studies, because I think that

What is obvious but maybe not articulated is that immigration and refugees, these are sites of interrogation because they are so emotionally fraught. They elicit such strong emotions from people, whether you...

side with refugees or whether you vilify them and you blame them for all of our problems. These are about feelings, right? And so I think my book is really about trying to make it visible the really important work that Affect is doing in this project of racialization, devaluation, how people get included and excluded.

I think that for me, why is it important for the world to pay attention to second generation Vietnamese Americans? They are writing so much. I think that, right, second generation, right? It's the children of Vietnamese refugees that have so much to say about their parents' experience. And one of the things that I hope my book does is to show that there are –

and histories that shape the way that they're making sense of the past and making sense of the history. And it's not as though second generation stories are somehow more important than first generation stories, but they're very important for making visible to us

you know, what the experience of incorporation and racialization in the United States was like, right? So they were born here. They're inundated with various narratives, both from the history of Vietnam as well as the history of the United States. And their interpretation of the significance of these histories is what you will find in all of these different kinds of texts, right? What frames are available for them to make sense of the past, right?

That's what my book is trying to make visible, right? The kinds of things that are present that shape how we talk about stuff. I'm trying to shine a light on those very frames and say, you know, here's the story, but

what context make this story possible over other stories? What other stories can we tell when we can make these different, make up alternative frames visible and possible? Unfortunately, we are almost out of time. And to bring our

conversation to a thoughtful close. Could you share with our listeners what you are currently working on? What questions have been occupying your mind lately? And what new interests or new directions are you exploring for your next project?

Thanks for this question. I have so many different ideas, I think, especially in this particular moment as we're, you know, facing all of these different kinds of attacks on, you know, I think studies education as well as queer and trans communities and things like that. I think that are important.

the project of knowledge is more important than ever, right? A few things that I have been thinking about that are really influenced by this moment and in the wake of this book is one, kind of how the concept of trauma is circulating politically to talk about experiences of race, right? So what does racial trauma do?

What is racial trauma? How have we been talking about it? How does the scientific and medical community talk about it? So kind of a deeper dive into that. I've also been thinking about a project that

a near-ease genealogy of Asian American feminism. I think that the book is really informed by Asian American feminist ideas. You have Chin Min-ha, you have Merle Wu, you have Amatsuya Yamada. And thinking about why...

Asian American feminism as an intellectual formation is not very legible, right? So does it have to do with, you know, criticisms of empire? Does it have to do with a sort of anti-military, anti-imperial focus? These are questions that I'm thinking about right now.

Thank you so much. Yes, and I have had the pleasure of speaking with Professor Linh Thuy Nguyen about her first monograph, Displacing Kinship, The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Reproduction.

It's a truly remarkable resource for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the narrativization of familial and intergenerational trauma in second-generation storytelling and cultural politics.

The book was published by Temple University Press in 2024. And you've been listening to a podcast episode on the New Books Network. Thank you so much for tuning in. You can download or stream this interview free of charge on the New Books Network website or on platforms like Apple Music and Spotify.