Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey

Nonfiction | Graphic Memoir | Adult | Published in 2011

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

Nostalgia and Exilic Longing

For many refugees, notions of the homeland evoke contradictory feelings of nostalgia and anguish. During his visit to Saigon, Tri Huu contends that he has no desire to remember the past. He claims, “I didn’t come here to be nostalgic. To go, ‘oooo…ahhh…this is where I did this and that’s where I did that.’ It’s in the past. What do I care?” (53). Weighed by the painful memories of the war, exile, and his personal sacrifices, Tri Huu chooses to move forward and not dwell on the past as a necessary mode of survival. GB comments on how little he knows about his parents because of his “family’s unwillingness to share the most basic facts” (98). Tri Huu willingly forgets or silences stories of his past and refuses to discuss his feelings with his family. In repressing traumatic events, he dampens any sense of attachment, longing, or positive memories of Vietnam as well, resulting in an existence characterized by coldness, aggression, and resentment.

The memoir repeatedly references a quote attributed to Confucius, which states, “A man without history is a tree without roots” (8). This quote captures the paradox of refugee narratives, in which individuals uprooted from their native land have an elusive sense of home entangled with traumatic events that are painful to revisit. When Tri Huu and Dzung Chung return to Vietnam after 20 years, the country is no longer as they remembered. GB comments, “It was then that they realized their Vietnam only existed in stories and fading memories” (107).

Home for exiles is reconfigured in the practices and traditions that they continue in America. On a map of the US, GB renames Arizona as his “Parents’ Republic of Vietnam” (97), indicating that home and a sense of belonging for exiles is not so much a geographic place but an imagined space that they kept alive through memories and stories. In creating his memoir, Vietnamerica, GB thus realizes the importance of recapturing and retaining pride in one’s history and origins regardless of the associated pain. He honors his mother and her stories, making her memories the anchoring elements of his book, and he revitalizes the words of Confucius that his father wrote in the book he gave GB by showing his father the value of being a tree with roots.

Separation, Abandonment, and Loss

The theme of separation, abandonment, and loss emerges in many of the characters’ experiences throughout the memoir. Particularly in the context of family, separation is a ubiquitous consequence of war. Huu Nghiep abandons his family to fight against foreign aggressors, and Le Nhi leaves her eldest son with other relatives when she takes Tri Huu and his sister to Saigon. Manny and Lisa’s French mother deserts her husband and children, and Dzung Chung reluctantly leaves behind her mother, Thi Mot, her brother, Vinh, and her stepfather with the unfulfilled promise of returning to Vietnam within a year.

When GB asks his sister if she resents her birth mother’s abandonment of her family, Lisa simply states, “Back then, parents were constantly leaving their kids. It’s no big deal” (111). Her accepting attitude reflects her understanding of not only her family’s sacrifices but those of millions of Vietnamese whom the wars displaced. Lisa contextualizes her situation as part of a collective experience and reconciles her personal resentment with the historical conditions that divided the nation and disrupted families and individual lives.

In the US, the experience of loss continues, as GB’s parents navigate the challenges of resettlement and their children’s assimilation to American culture. The family’s lives of uncertainty don’t simply end when they become naturalized as US citizens; feelings of isolation and alienation persist even within their home. GB notes, “Customs and shared history were being lost within the span of a single generation” (207). GB admits to showing little interest in his parents’ or Vietnam’s history during his youth, and Do considers Tri Huu’s stoicism and isolation as the price of surviving in a foreign country. Do sympathizes with Tri Huu’s hardship in America and characterizes him as being “[t]oo busy to keep in touch with old friends. Too busy to worry about what he lost” (239). GB’s attention to his parents’ struggles in the US disrupts simplified narratives of the American dream and offers a more nuanced understanding of refugee experiences of war and relocation. The US refugee dispersion policies of the 1970s assumed that by separating Vietnamese refugees into smaller communities, they’d more quickly assimilate and avoid forming ethnic enclaves. The policies ignored the emotional, cultural, and psychological support that people in a large refugee community could provide for each other and instead perpetuated their experiences of isolation.

Memory, Truth, and Reimagining the Past

Throughout the memoir, GB uses various illustration techniques to articulate a sense of fragmented memory and the disruptive experience of displacement. He chooses to prioritize memories and stories over historical accuracy, and his illustrations often emphasize how portions of his parents’ memories remain incomplete, altered, fabricated, contradictory, or erroneous. Speech bubbles of his parents arguing and in mid-conversation are at times half legible or cropped (139, 215). Names in the family tree are crossed out or punctuated with question marks (62), and even the names of Tri Huu’s first wife and Thi Mot’s husbands in the interior cover’s “Cast” list are obscured, revealing only their initials.

The lapses in his parents’ narratives reveal a truth about their experiences that physical records, clear chronology, documents, and photographs alone can’t convey. Indeed, such hard evidence was often lost, abandoned, or destroyed along with many possessions during the multiple displacements and refugees’ exodus. For GB’s parents, as with many refugees, their memories comprise traumas recalled and/or repressed, longing and nostalgia, and reconstructions of the home and identity.

A significant example of memory functioning as reimagining are the images of Tri Huu’s childhood. Illustrated with deckle-edge borders reminiscent of vintage photographs, Tri Huu is depicted first as an adult, standing next to his wife, Dzung Chung; then as a graduate from school; and finally as a child gleefully riding a bicycle (24). In the background of each of these milestones, the blurry and transparent figure of his father, Huu Nghiep, appears. The illustrations capture memories of events that never existed, given that Huu Nghiep abandoned Tri Huu when he was three years old. However, his ghostlike presence functions to convey Tri Huu’s desire for the paternal love that he never received. The reverse chronology of the panels emphasizes the moment of Tri Huu on the bicycle—innocent, joyful, and protected by his father’s arms reaching around him. The bicycle image reappears in another section, this time with a caption of Tri Huu dismissing nostalgia and stating, “It’s in the past. What do I care?” (65). GB juxtaposes Tri Huu’s denial of caring with his childhood fantasy of a loving father. Both the statement and the image are untrue, as is Tri Huu’s claim of being estranged from his father for 50 years. However, they reveal a truth about Tri Huu’s psyche. Traumatized by his father’s abandonment, Tri Huu’s memories of his childhood are torn between resentment and longing.