If there is still Viet Cong, then I will never return : understanding the Vietnamese diaspora through memories of food, work, and nation

This research paper was completed and submitted at Nipissing University, and is made freely accessible through the University of Toronto’s TSpace repositoryIn this MRP, I analyze interviews with fourteen family members who migrated from Vietnam to North America, especially focusing on the period after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, to examine their experiences of the post-war years and consider how they make sense of them forty-five years later. These interviews provide us valuable insight into the experiences of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants and, as narrators share memories of these experiences, reveal how and why individuals, families, and communities establish collective memories of the past. In this case, my family members draw on narratives common in immigrant and refugee communities to frame their experiences as challenges overcome. They also maintain a strong anti-communist ideology which has become a core part of the collective identity of the Vietnamese diaspora. To explore the dynamics of these historical experiences and the memory making that participants use to make sense of them, I examine three key themes that emerged from my interviews: food, work, and the mobilization of national(ist) ideas. Especially because of the significance of food in Vietnamese culture, my family members viscerally remember the hunger they experienced after 1975, and food remained one of their largest considerations as they migrated and continued their lives in North America. They identify themselves as being extremely hardworking, a common self-identifier in various immigrant communities, particularly in overcoming the struggles they experienced because of political oppression in the communist regime and as newcomers to their host countries. Gender and class were especially important parts of their individual identities which shaped these experiences and memories. Most important to many of my family members was nation, especially South Vietnamese nationalism and the rejection of the current Vietnamese state, but secondarily the nations of the United States and Canada as their host countries and “rescuers.” I historicize the collective identity of the Vietnamese diaspora by exploring how and why the people in this community have remembered their experiences of food, work, and nation in the post-1975 years