In second generation’s autobiography films, the Vietnamese language appears as a prosthetic object that remains in the archival past. “The archival” is either the archive of the language in home videos, or Vietnamese has become the archival object of the past, even when speaking in the present within the family and community interactions. The mixture of different archival forms is also the expression of intergenerational anxiety and acts as the visual language to reclaim history—or the language of the archive. The archive sometimes acts as the main element of the visual narrative, which are images from the Vietnam home country captured by personal portable devices, from Western media, and especially images that portray the life of the Vietnamese diaspora’s community in home videos and family albums. The combination of these archives reveals the collective memory of the community from personal memory.
The Vietnamese language appears in Julia Huynh’s film is also in the form of archive – the archive of the language – such as the visual record of her father speech in his personal amateur videos. Vietnamese is presented as the language of the past, while the English subtitle is trying to translate the stories in the present to an Anglophone audience. Like language, the archive here is used to construct the narrative of “home” through visual representation—the language of the archive. She puts the archives on the split-screen either in comparison or in the same temporality of the past of the present in Peterborough and in the Vietnam homeland. Home is defined by the intuitive connection to space rather than where one was born and grew up. Her editing technique forms the language of the archive that portrays the connection and disconnection in the narrative of home through the language that is being archived. The conjunction of archives is the language to conveys the connection and gap of lived experience in the narrative that makes Peterborough home and the disconnection in the narrative of Vietnam that is no longer home.
However, the film shows that the home in Peterborough still makes the parents feel alienated outside the community. This is the problem of representation that Renov describes in the dominant narrative, in which the domestic ethnography plays between inside and outside boundaries[iv]. The inside narrative reveals the relationship between the domestic ethnographer and her subjects shaped by the external involuntary forces of displacement, the reconstruction of history by the diaspora community, and the postcolonial experience that silences language and visual representation.
In a mission to confront the dominant narrative, Adele Pham sets out to tell the history of the nail salon as the cultural identity of the Vietnamese diasporas, which is reflected in their domination in the nail market. Nailed It is the battleground of representation, starting with a typical American stand-up comedy, the indispensable images of the Vietnam War. and refugees. Nevertheless, these images are presented not as tiring political claims but to portray the people who happened to be in the midst of political turmoil caused by irrelevant imperial conquests. They are the refugees who were displaced by the forces in their homeland and being compelled to survive in the quickest way within the boundaries of the invisible good refugee that the host land had promised. The attempt to quickly adapt to the new life in the US was later faced by the emergence of the “yellow peril” that had also been experienced previously by Chinese and Japanese migrants. The archive shows the changing narrative of the American media from a benevolent multicultural country that rescued the refugees from the violence that they had created, to denouncing the stereotypical dirty Asian sweatshop or American businesses driven away by the Asian immigrants.
Nailed It from adele free pham on Vimeo.
In this contested site of representations, Pham uses the archive of family and community photo albums to connect narratives between past and the present to tell Vietnamese diasporic history, or the disconnection between the dominant and the personal ones. With these community stories, Pham admits the unstable positionality of the Vietnamese refugees who are willing to risk their lives by cutting corners and health measures in order to survive and raise the family. However, this inevitable aspect of inhabiting in American capitalism is taken to emphasize as the weapon to attack the yellow peril by the Western media, disregarding the lack of attention to educate and regulate the industry. Historical narratives here are entangled and in negotiation with each other.
The personal archives demonstrate how the nail business has helped the Vietnamese extend their interactions with the settler society by building the interracial relationships within the nail salons. This relationship can be seen from the initiation of the business by the Hollywood symbolic spectacle—Tippi Herdren—to help the refugees settle in the US, to the crucial customers from the black community. The director herself is also the outcome of this mixed-race interaction, and she identifies more with her white mother. These representations of mutual inhabitation of the Vietnamese diasporas disrupt the separation of the Self (the American general public) and the Other (the refugees and immigrants) of the dominant narrative. The images of the Vietnamese diasporas in the Western media are represented as the unstable mass who are not apart and as a threat to the stability of any country they reach. The representation of the unstable mass appears on televisual and photographic images as documentary, newsreel, or newspaper and operates to categorize and control the alienated population. Even after fulfilling the American promise and adapting to the society, the refugees are constantly in the precarious positionality of being disregarded as American citizens, discounting the community narrative of tight relationships with regional and national society.
As Timothy August in The Refugee Aesthetic points out, “while refugees themselves are, of course, quite diverse, the refugee images have been remarkably consistent in regard to its form.”[v] This categorization of representation allows “the exercise in state construction that selects incoming people on the basis of ideology, political affiliation and race.”[vi] Creating the distinction between the identical Self of the dominant narrative and the Other conceals other structural violence of displacement as the original cause of the conflict. It reveals the privileged point of having the capital to control the media and representation. Adele Pham reclaims the diasporas’ histories by challenging the changing dominant narrative and historizing the consistent precarity of the diasporas to demonstrate and maintain their livelihood in the settler nation.
In setting out the mission to explore personal and community anxiety, Vietnamese diasporic filmmakers tell stories that reshape the history of the diaspora community. They are not just the untold family traumas or community struggles, but also how languages and archives are employed in those films that reveal more structural experiences and struggles. As a nostalgic representation, the Vietnamese language appears as a cultural object among other cultural heritage objects that burden the next generations to carry on. The mingling of languages between Vietnamese and English inscribes as the postcolonial experience of diasporic history. Therefore, languages have become prosthetic objects that detach the mother tongue from self-identification. The use of the Vietnamese language as primary establishes “the return of the subject” in the closed relationship with the artist to tell untold personal stories as the characteristic of the autobiography. The artists engage with the archive to preserve the archival language through their visual strategy as the language of the archive. Using archive as a form of language, the archive is also the battleground of representations, in which the artist reclaims the diaspora’s history from the dominant narrative.
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[i] Michael Renov, “The Subject in History: The New Autobiography in Film and Video,” in The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 104-119, 110.
[ii] Rey Chow, Not like a Native Speaker: on Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 38.
[iii] Chow, 14
[iv] Renov, 218
[v] Timothy K. August, The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America (Philadelphia ; Rome ; Tokyo: Temple University Press, 2021), 26.
[vi] August, 22
Contributor’s Bio
Nhân Trần-Tiễn is an international student from Vietnam. He’s currently a master student in Film Studies at Concordia University and reside in Montreal, Canada.
