UCLA

Thesis Abstract: Using an extended case study of the three generations of Vietnamese American women, this thesis explores how imperialism and U.S. empire affected the women and mixed-race children produced from bar hostess kinships and marriages in the aftermath of war. The analysis is anchored in recent scholarship on the Cold War, Critical Refugee Studies, memory, sentimentality, womxn of color feminisms as well as critical mixed-race studies. I argue that intergenerational conversations are an act of resistance and survival that could lead to possible futures of healing by knowing, understanding and labeling the power structures that do not currently allow the women in my family to exist without having to experience racialized gendered violence, cope with mental illness and live a life that goes beyond surviving. The thesis also highlights the ways in which the multiple generations of women care for each other, find feminist forms of healing, and also create a network of care that goes against the idealized neoliberal capitalist cis-heteropatriarchal nuclear family unit. Overall, by engaging in oral history interviews and employing critical autoethnography, the paper challenges what is constituted as evidence in the academy, displaying the ways in which our lives are shaped by structures of violence that continue to uphold the logics of U.S. Empire, in hopes to shift the current refugee savior narrative that has been echoing in the American consciousness.