UC Irvine

This dissertation examines Vietnamese and Vietnamese/American cultural production relating to speculative horror, sites of ancestral ritual, and culinary cultures online. These mundane, unexpected cultural archives gesture to a h/ồntological figure of the “soul” as it navigates various realms of being. Long theorized by Vietnamese ancestral epistemologies, the h/ồntological is a particular mode of Vietnameseness, or Vietnamese ontology, that makes possible existence beyond the corporeal body through an inscrutable mode of being. Multidimensional archives such as these offer other modes of seeing, knowing and being that re-imagine Asia or Asianness beyond the objectifiable, consumable, and comprehensible. Though seemingly disparate, these case studies overlap as different spectral modalities and spaces that beckon subsequent generations to un/translate intergenerational stories of lived trauma through cultural archives found in everyday, often digital and intimate spaces of the global. In the work of un/translation, inscrutability is taken up as a methodology of practicing making meaning rather than finding truth that in and of itself is an impossibility. It is only through this intergenerational labor of interpreting meaning from h/ồnted Vietnamese and Vietnamese/American refugee cultural archives that second and later generations can heal from the traumas that the previous generations endured and passed down to them. I trace the h/ồntological figure as it navigates fragmented, ephemeral and suspended spaces of Vietnamese community cultural identity.In the first chapter, I tap into a third language within third space in order to analyze the fragmented, h/ồnting spaces speculatively imagined by second-generation Vietnamese and Vietnamese/American cultural producers who specifically work within the genre of horror. The horror video game The Death | Thần Trùng created by DUT Studios based in Việt Nam and the queer new adult horror novel She is a Haunting by Trang Than Tran allow me to delineate the ways that subsequent generations face and make sense of the fraught, often terrifying familial histories of trauma, war, colonialism and/or domestic abuse through the process of un/translating fragments of traumatic stories often through the depiction of varied, disembodied voice(s) and figurative as well as literal dismemberment of the body. Chapter two analyzes the ephemeral space of the Trần Hưng Đạo Memorial in the Vietnamese/American Little Saigon of Southern California and how physical offerings of food, drink, cigarette, and composition of the memorial statue itself tell us something about the limits of the physical and corporeal that insists on a h/ồntological mode of being to perpetuate an afterlife of Vietnamese community cultural identity in alternate spaces of ritual and the digital. Though the ephemeral site of the memorial and its ancestor worship rituals reflect a first-generation refugee insistence on cultural continuity through veneration of Trần Hưng Đạo, I look to how the altar is reimagined in the digital by second-generation Vietnamese and Vietnamese/Americans who utilize this altar-nate space to insist on what might sustain their own generation: global Vietnameseness through digital modes of relation. As another case of relational digital modalities, the third chapter observes the ways that Vietnamese and Vietnamese/Americans create and virtually occupy suspended spaces of monolingual Vietnamese-run food vlogs. The popular food vlog KT Food Stories, in its contributions to the refugee cultural archive, is an example of what I call gastro cartographies, or mappings and passages of food cultures across digital space that forge community identity globally. Gastro cartographies have the capacity to expand diasporic cultural identity through the intimate, consumptive experience of traversing digital foodways. By taking up monolingual Vietnamese as the primary mode of communication and global-diasporic relation, Vietnamese-speakers utilize linguistic inscrutability to foster their own spaces of Vietnameseness. This digital, global Vietnamese community takes up un/translation differently through a mode of indifference to prevailing racio-linguistic ideologies in their creation of other worlds on their own terms. The h/ồntological in this chapter are the very afterlives fostered within digital space through gastro cartographies. In the concluding chapter, I end by carrying this methodology of inscrutability to delve deeper into my mother’s unfinished oral history. I think through the ways that archival futures and justice are perpetually oriented towards a broader development of various kinds of remembering and memory work, or archiving. Whereas her story is interspersed throughout this project, my analysis of her fragmented oral history is to un/translate beyond it, unconstrained by the interview as the sole means of capturing truth and making meaning of her story. Unfinished as the oral history was, my mother’s story reveals the limits of the archive as incomplete yet insistent on interpretation as a way to heal intergenerational trauma.