Becoming Refugee American

The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon

Phuong Tran Nguyen

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780252082887
  9780252041358
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252099953
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Social Sciences

Vietnamese refugees fleeing the fall of South Vietnam faced a paradox. The same guilt-ridden America that only reluctantly accepted them expected, and rewarded, expressions of gratitude for their rescue. Meanwhile, their status as refugees—as opposed to willing immigrants—profoundly influenced their cultural identity.

Phuong Tran Nguyen examines the phenomenon of refugee nationalism among Vietnamese Americans in Southern California. Here, the residents of Little Saigon keep alive nostalgia for the old regime and, by extension, their claim to a lost statehood. Their refugee nationalism is less a refusal to assimilate than a mode of becoming, in essence, a distinct group of refugee Americans. Nguyen examines the factors that encouraged them to adopt this identity. His analysis also moves beyond the familiar rescue narrative to chart the intimate yet contentious relationship these Vietnamese Americans have with their adopted homeland. Nguyen sets their plight within the context of the Cold War, an era when Americans sought to atone for broken promises but also saw themselves as providing a sanctuary for people everywhere fleeing communism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Nation of Refugees
• 1 Accidental Allies: America’s Crusade and the Origins of Refugee Nationalism
• 2 From Grief to Gratitude: Reaffirming the Past by Rewriting It
• 3 “Farewell, Saigon, I Promise I Will Return”: Social Work and the Meaning of Exile
• 4 The Anticommunist Việt-Cộng: Freedom Fighters and the New Politics of Rescue
• 5 Assimilationists and the Postwar: Model Minority Politics in Little Saigon
• 6 Divided Loyalties: America’s Moral Obligation in the Post–Cold War Era
• Conclusion: Finding Roots in Exile
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index