Articulating Identity: Vietnamese Diasporic Culture in Literature and Media

In her article “The Confucian Four Feminine Virtues,” Ngo Thi Ngan Binh interviews contemporary Vietnamese women living in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly called Sai Gon) to highlight and analyze the contradictions and expectations of family members governing female behavior and actions. Binh’s ethnographic research regarding how “modern” females--or contemporary young women--should follow tenets of societal expectations is significant when examining the stories of the two females I studied. These two individuals are Chi or Minh (the older sister nay transgender brother of the author) and Andrew Pham (the subject of Marlo Poras’ documentary Mai’s America). This essay explores the shifting identities of these Vietnamese females as they travel from their “home”--or natal country--of Vietnam to inhabit the borders of the US nation-state. In making this transnational move, they undergo a type of racialization familiar to travelers and those who relocate, but it plays a particular role for people of color, who have immigrated or have been part of a racial or ethnic group living in America. For example, people from the Caribbean, Latin America, or 8 Africa who are noticeably dark become grouped into the category of African Americans, though their migration histories and patterns may be quite different from African American counterparts (whose past is often connected to the former US slaves). Moreover, these other groups may speak Spanish, Patois, Creole, as well as other languages. This racialization within the Black community is very similar to those in the Asian and Asian American communities living in the US nation-state. For example, Asians from countries as diverse as China, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. are considered “all alike” by those unfamiliar with the heterogeneity of the Asian body. Also, like many other non-white groups, individuals are gendered and sexualized into designated subgroups. Thus, I intend to analyze and to interrogate how Chi/Minh and Mai complicate and challenge racial, gendered, and sexualized expectations of themselves by others. I will not address what their intentions for exploring and “performing” different gender paradigms means to them (because I really could not do so), but I will try to formulate the traces or remnants of how their performances of their gender and sexuality have affected those emotionally and physically close to them, not to mention to their audiences.