Vietnamese in America: Literary Representations

When, in 1987, John Clark Pratt proposed a structure to the canon of Vietnam War literature in his excellent "Bibliographic Commentary," he divided the material-fictional treatments-into five "acts" (corresponding to stages in the battlefield progress of the war itself) that the literature, regardless of publication date, represented. The acts in Pratt's "Shakespearean tragedy" are surrounded by a prologue and an epilogue ("everything after 1975"). A mere ten years ago, then, Vietnam War literature was primarily defined as combat literature. However, a year after Pratt's essay appeared, William J. Searle, in his Search and Clear, provided a selection of commentary that recognized an important second stage of Vietnam War literature. In a section on "Return and Partial Recovery," essays by James A. Robinson, Vince Gotera, and Searle himself provide an early map of the war's consequences in terms of representations of the veteran's return. Such representations (like Larry Heinemann's prizewinning Paco's Story and Philip Caputo's Indian Country) explore not only the veteran's condition but also the represented America the veteran re-entered. Many of these titles have a temporal sweep that overlaps the chronology of the war itself. In his study of veterans' poetry (Radical Visions, 1994), Gotera collapses the literature into two neat categories, "The `Nam"' and "The World." Works in the former group reflect primarily battlefield experience, while those in the latter group-a group having grown in size and importance-portray the returned veterans' ongoing trauma, problems of reintegration into U.S. society, and (less often) the more general theme of Vietnam as a continuing cultural pathology or syndrome.' If extended in fiction, the latter category would include such works as Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country and an expanding library of detective fictions featuring protagonists whose Vietnam War backgrounds influence the conduct of their cases and their lives.2 Another group of writings, perhaps distinctive enough to constitute a separate category, is beginning to claim attention: representations of the Vietnamese in America. One consequence of the war is the growing number of stateside Vietnamese communities. These communities are directly investigated in several monographs and in a special issue of Vietnam Generation entitled Southeast Asian-American Communities (1990) that contains a comprehensive bibliography. The imaginative literature, particularly prose fiction, reflecting this new ingredient in our cultural landscape explores or at least hints at the meaning of this presence both to its members and to the majority culture. While there is a growing body of literature by Vietnamese Americans, representations of the Vietnamese in America by writers from the majority culture reveal something about that culture's ability to perceive and to absorb this new element. Significant among literary treatments of these Vietnamese residents are Robert Olen Butler's novel The Deuce (1989) and his short story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992). Other noteworthy representations include Wayne Karlin's Lost Armies (1989), which conjures up a Vietnamese community in southern Maryland proximate to the nation's capital, and Charlie McDade's The Gulf (1986), in which Vietnamese refugees try to take up their traditional occupation of shrimp fishing in coastal Texas. T. Jefferson Parker's mystery thriller, Little Saigon (1988) examines the turbulent Southeast Asian community in Orange County, California. Four of these five works have as background or foreground a love relationship between an American man who served in Vietnam and a Vietnamese woman he met there, a circumstance that suggests a tentative embrace of cultures and a healing potential even as it harkens back to a longer tradition of wartime romances about American GI's who had affairs with and sometimes married Asian women.3 Renny Christopher's recent book, The Viet Nam War / The American War (1995) elaborates the larger context for these concerns. …