Introduction: Critical Refugee Studies and Asian American Studies

Abstract

I didn’t know I was missing it until I had it. The “it” here refers to the profound intellectual companionship forged with members of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC) as we bring our whole refugee selves – our family secrets, memory gaps, and private grief as well as our creative energy, critical thinking, and improvised practices – to the work of building a field of study for and with displaced human beings. When we launched the CRSC in 2017, I had already spent close to three decades building Asian American studies as a scholar and teacher. And yet, for most of that time, I had deferred, deflected, and decentered my experiences as a refugee from Việt Nam. In truth, I did not know how to tell the story of Vietnamese refugees – how to highlight the ongoing costs of war without reducing us to mere victims, even if our losses have been significant? Having received my doctoral training in sociology, I knew that I did not want to replicate that field’s treatment of Vietnamese refugees as a problem of immigrant integration. But I was less clear on how to engage Asian American studies, whose understanding of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese refugees have long been more about Asian America than about Vietnam and its displaced people. As a Vietnamese refugee scholar, I am disheartened that Vietnamese lives, histories, and politics continue to be peripheral to the field of Asian American studies. It is not that Asian American scholars are disinterested in the Vietnam War; it is more that their retelling of the war is more about Asian America than about Vietnam(ese). In these retellings, the Vietnam War was a pivotal event that radicalized their identities and politics, forging their racial consciousness as “Asian American.” As an Asian American activist declared, “As long as there are U.S. troops in Asia, as long as the U.S. government and the military wage wars of aggression against Asian people . . . racism against them is often racism against us.” Accordingly, in her study of the Asian American Movement, Karen L. Ishizuka notes that “it was no accident that Asian America was born at the peak of the Vietnam War.” However inadvertently, the focus on the Vietnam War as an Asian American event – a site for Asian American political awakening – elides the long-lasting costs of the war on Vietnamese bodies and psyches. As Nguyen-Vo Thu Huong poignantly observes, “Vietnamese Americans as refugees occupy the position of self-mourners because no one else mourns us.” Moreover, the common reference to the U.S. war in Southeast Asia as the Vietnam War semantically locates that war, and all that it connotes, geographically in Việt