In Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees, the pioneering scholar Yến Lê Espiritu proposes thinking about a “post-1975 generation” of Vietnamese Americans, who were born “after the official end of the Vietnam War.” This generation, she says, has “create[d] a bearable and repeatable version of their family’s war and refugee experiences” from “bits and pieces of their own memories and overheard stories,” in response to silence and limits on discussion within their families. In fact, war and refugee histories are what differentiate family in Vietnamese American literature from the more general “concern with immigrant families and so-called intergenerational or cultural conflict” in canonical Asian American texts, as Linh Thủy Nguyễn remarks in her new book, Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production, released this spring in Temple University Press’s Asian American History and Culture series.
Writing against the trope of the traumatised refugee family, however, Nguyễn argues that “[t]he apparent pervasiveness of the Vietnam War as the source of trauma in second-generation and diasporic cultural production elides the overwhelming presence of assimilation as a source of violence and trauma.” With Displacing Kinship’s attention to “how the language of the family, war, and trauma has come to shape and constrain the possibilities for subjectivity, imagination, and relationality for the children of Vietnamese refugees,” she offers a valuable contribution to scholarship on a diasporic second generation.
Conscious of its mission to “avoid fetishizing the family or the traumas situated within it,” the book sets out to “displace kinship” by exposing how family is not a natural structure but is produced and represented “within the political economy of white supremacy and warfare.” Nguyễn’s analysis is methodologically grounded in a consideration of how an intersubjective orientation towards the family emerges from feelings of “ambivalence, irritation, and dismissiveness.” Since refugee communities have been formed by the heteronormative logic of family reunification under immigration law, Nguyễn lays the groundwork by establishing that the idea of family has operated as a vehicle for racialised assimilation into the model minority. Reading two major Vietnamese American graphic novels, she then examines depictions of broken family trees to argue that family is presented as a diasporic site of rupture and failed intergenerational transmission. Besides harbouring what Nguyễn calls “ambivalent attachments” that are oriented “toward the family without fixing it” in time and space, second-generation subjects must also contend with how economic and racial violence structure the site of the family, according to Nguyễn’s reading of works by two queer Vietnamese American artists, musician Thao Nguyen and author Ocean Vuong. Finally, Nguyễn proposes intimacy as an alternative “once we let go of ‘family’ and ‘trauma’ as the primary or sole structures of attachment” in Vietnamese American culture. Through embodied interactions, radical intimacy—which she characterises as “a historical materialist accounting” for violence—can, she suggests, attend to the violence of assimilation.
Central to Displacing Kinship is the thesis that “[a]ssimilation, rooted in race, gender, and heterosexual normativity, is and has been a violent and melancholic process of incorporation into the national family.” Despite the subtitle of the book, the question of intergenerational trauma undergirds Nguyễn’s analysis but does not come to the fore for much of it. Nguyễn explains in her introduction that individual chapters are “an engagement with the affective and relational resonances of assimilation as read through the lens of family.” Yet, while she lays out a well-conceived structure for the progression of her argument, its execution is uneven, especially given that the trope of family encompasses such a broad swath of themes that some are addressed only patchily. Certain sections and transitions in the writing feel abrupt, and connections across core ideas would benefit from a tighter focus on the main thesis.
Nonetheless, Displacing Kinship is clear in how it intervenes in the discourse on intergenerational trauma—a concept defined by Nguyễn as “a relational practice” between parents and children that “makes visible assimilation’s material and affective violence.” “Intergenerational trauma,” Nguyễn writes, “is a strategy of affiliation and recognition,” where subjects “negotiate with their own and their mothers’ lives and experiences to bring together past and present traumas.” In Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature, erin Khuê Ninh reconceptualises the Asian American immigrant family as “a production unit—a sort of cottage industry, for a particular brand of good, capitalist subject,” to reveal that the forces of racism and capitalism are not external to the family. Productively extending Ninh’s work, Nguyễn similarly studies the refugee family as “a site of power… alternately a refuge from the material realities of being thrown out on one’s own and a site of repressive protection and love.” Critically, she resists dominant models of trauma as either individualised pathology or restricted to experiences of “the war.”
In a vital move, Nguyễn instead proposes a new understanding of “the intergenerational as a mutual process of transfer and meaning making,” which is related to “processing the violence of racialization.” She delves richly into this topic in the third chapter, “‘Like a Fucked Family,’” which takes its title from an analogy from Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, where the text compares a buffalo herd’s suicidal clifftop leap and the Vietnamese American protagonist’s fraught relationship with his physically abusive refugee mother.
“The fucked family destabilizes the family romance, which coheres identity and nationalisms as the basis of political formations,” Nguyễn observes. She takes the point further: “Acknowledging the ways that families are ‘fucked’ by capitalism, war, racism, inequality, and the messiness of our intimate lives” reveals the healing process not as individualistic “self-determination” but as part of “a model of desire and belonging” in community, she notes.
Besides this theoretical reconsideration of intergenerational trauma, Nguyễn also articulates an important and much-needed critique of postmemory in “the generation after.” The concept of postmemory originates in Marianne Hirsch’s study of Holocaust survivors’ children but has also been applied to the children of Vietnamese refugees, such as in Espiritu’s theorisation of a “post-1975 generation.” Nguyễn notes that “postmemory acknowledges the ongoing impact of traumatic experiences on children who are generationally removed from them.” Still, she is attentive to how dominant discourse around trauma may facilitate “a problematic identification with the ‘aftermath’ and ‘afterlives’ of war.” Her position challenges and augments existing research on the Southeast Asian diaspora. An attention to the limits of intergenerational trauma as an epistemology—that is, her concern that a preoccupation with war obscures encounters with other forms of violence—prompts her to caution, “Postmemory as a performative and imaginative relationship to trauma can homogenize experiences, collapsing together things from displacement to domestic violence and racism.”
Overall, Nguyễn offers a bracing counterpoint to the assumption—which she sees as embedded in art by the Vietnamese American second generation—that the figure of the refugee “is a space of inherent critique.” The book’s epilogue, for instance, applies her framework to the multilingual letter-writing campaign in 2016 that saw younger Asian Americans try to engage their immigrant parents about the Black Lives Matter movement. “In substituting sentimental connection for political discussion of racism, the letters suggest that the resolution of interpersonal conflicts is somehow central to solving structural racism,” she observes—and overlooks how members of the older generation already “have firsthand experience of racism, white supremacy, and warfare and often negotiate within these terms rather than outright reject them.” At the same time, Nguyễn leaves ample room for further research, such as in her preliminary suggestion that her analysis of trauma in the family can be “relevant to other immigrant, Indigenous, and nonnormative subjects in U.S. history whose family forms have been targeted as sites of subjection” as well.
Building on and breaking with received wisdom, the book, which analyses a wide array of cultural forms, lays fruitful groundwork for exploring, “other ways to orient ourselves toward our communities, kin, and politics that do not take memory or the experience of trauma as the central organizing principle,” as Nguyễn puts it. Amid the flourishing of second-generation Vietnamese American art, Displacing Kinship is a timely and relevant scholarly work.
Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production
Linh Thủy Nguyễn
Temple University Press
H.M.A. Leow is a Singaporean writer and a PhD student in English literature, working on a doctoral project about transnationalism and race in 21st-century Southeast Asian American literature. She is interested in narratives about empire and nation, as told through memory, migration, and food.
