Maternal Becoming In The Vietnamese Transdiaspora: Kim Thúy’s Ru (2012) And Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017)

Abstract

Abstract:Kim Thúy and Thi Bui fled Vietnam with their families in 1975 and 1978, respectively, in the midst of the Vietnam War, a conflict that pushed hundreds of thousands of people from the country. These women authors are part of the 1.5 generation—they were born in Vietnam, left before adulthood, and are the children of refugees. In my comparative analysis of the authors’ first publications, I show how the two texts reveal their authors’ specific interventions related to transdiasporic identity-formation (an identity-formation that that resists home and homeland, that is ambiguous and shape-shifting, and that is outside of time and place) and to maternal becoming (a process of shape-shifting maternal development characterized by fluidity). I argue maternal becoming allows the protagonists of these texts to travel across time, revisit, reread and revise their ideas about their mothers, and discover an identity that relies on fluidity and time travel. In other words, these women authors suggest maternal becoming transforms the “postmemorial retrieval” process of their protagonists, a retrieval required of them because of their position as members of the 1.5 generation (Kurmann and Do 2018a). Motherhood nudges the protagonists toward self-discovery that is prompted by a “recuperative reading” of the mothers who raised them (Kaplan 1994).