Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora
The act of remembering is a means of bringing the past alive, and an imaginative way of dealing with loss. It has been the subject of much recent scholarship, and is of particular relevance at a time of widespread transnational migration. For refugees, memory acquires a particular power and poignancy, since the country that they remember is now lost to them. The memories of Vietnamese refugees have been molded by their experience of diaspora, and many guard these memories with silence, a silence that relates not only to the departure from Vietnam and the exodus itself, but also to the impact of loss and grief on individual family members. In one of the twentieth century's major diasporas, more than two million Vietnamese left their country after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. They settled in countries as diverse as Norway and Israel and established large, thriving communities in the United States, Australia, Canada, and France. Vietnamese women played a major part in this migration.
This book is a valuable and original contribution to the field of diaspora studies. Based on in-depth oral narratives of forty Vietnamese women, it deals with themes both universal and specific to this diaspora: divergent memories in families, the significance of homeland, the return to Vietnam, cross-cultural relationships, intergenerational tensions, and the issues of silence and unspoken trauma among Vietnamese refugees. It is the first study to apply memory and trauma theories to a substantial base of oral narratives by Vietnamese women in the West. Nguyen argues that understanding of these narratives provides not only an insight into the way Vietnamese women have dealt with loss, it also illuminates the experience of the wider Vietnamese diaspora and other refugees.
