Asian American Research Journal

The end of “The Second Indochina War,” “The Vietnam War,” or “The Anti-American Resistance War” forty years ago has led to millions of Vietnamese fleeing Vietnam to the United States and millions of others living in post-war poverty. The historical, political, and spatial separation between North and South Vietnam has also resulted in a fragmented Vietnamese identity and subjectivity. As a Vietnamese international student growing up in north Vietnam, moving to the United States, and coming in contact with the Vietnamese diaspora here without identifying with it, I am driven by the questions: “What does it mean to be Vietnamese in the United States? How do I reconcile the internalized tension of North/South Vietnamese historical conflict and come to terms with my Vietnamese experience in the U.S. I share with many other diasporic subjects here?” Using María Lugones’s frameworks of diasporic and nondiasporic subjects, liminality, and complex communication, I analyzed Thi Bui’s memoir The Best We Could Do and traced back my own family’s history from a Vietnamese nondiasporic position in an attempt to bridge across fragmentation and build a coalitional Vietnamese resistance through time and space.