Abstract
Karin Aguilar-San Juan’s subtitle contains the main question of her book: How do Vietnamese people in the United States stay Vietnamese? She recognizes that ethnic identity cannot be reduced to perpetuating the relations and culture of Vietnam, and that being Vietnamese in America must be a result of adaptations to the host country. Aguilar San-Juan believes that the two main forms of ethnic adaptation are community-building and place-making. The first entails the construction of relations based on ethnic group membership and the second entails the formation of a physical place for members.
Aguilar-San Juan draws mainly on her field work in Little Saigon in Southern California and in the Vietnamese community around Fields Corner in Boston. She places the history of these two places within the larger history of Vietnamese America. She maintains, reasonably, that the two can be seen as “ideal types,” since Little Saigon is a huge ethnic concentration in a region known for its urban sprawl and Fields Corner is a much smaller ethnic community in one of America’s oldest cities.
The author attempts to place ethnic identity within these two places in a nation-wide context by considering how American ideas of race and ethnicity encourage an Asian American self-image. She then looks at how the residents of these locations memorialize the past in Vietnam, and specifically the war, in their public states, relations, and physical representations. Finally, she considers the places as Vietnamese economies, examining how the Vietnamese package place and community to create cultural and financial economies.
The book makes a number of helpful contributions to the literature on Vietnamese Americans and to the broader literature on ethnic communities. It correctly calls our attention to the fact that Vietnamese residential concentrations are responses to the physical spaces and social structures they confront in this country, and not simply products of migration and settlement. It provides a fresh look at the oft-made observation that the self-identification of immigrant group members results from the interplay of responses to the cultural and structural setting of the host society and selective memories of the land of origin.
Aguilar-San Juan’s methodology and general approach do raise some questions. Field work, by its nature, can be highly subjective and it always poses the danger that a researcher with strongly-held theoretical preconceptions will fit all of the evidence into an a priori argument. In her dedication to what she calls a “race-cognizant” approach, Aguilar-San Juan indulges in extremely tendentious theorizing, and she too quickly dismisses some important questions that are inconvenient for her approach, including questions that are fundamentally important to many Vietnamese Americans. Vietnamese American parents, for example, are often deeply concerned about how their own children can achieve upward mobility in American society as it exists. Asking how social relations within Vietnamese communities can promote upward mobility must take American social structure as a given, and one cannot reject the question because it does not reflect one’s interpretive preferences.
The effort to shape all of her evidence to fit her argument leads the author to make a great deal of the 1982 Detroit murder of Vincent Chin and the 1996 Orange County murder of young Vietnamese American Thien Minh Ly. Both of these were racially motivated hate crimes. While tragic and deplorable, though, two killings over a period of thirty years do not constitute a pogrom, nor do the vicious passions of the killers tell us anything at all about the attitudes of millions of other Americans or about the structure of inter-group relations.
Aguilar-San Juan’s efforts to “racialize” Vietnamese Americans are also problematic. She insists on portraying them as a “racial” group, rather than an “ethnic” group, treating these as real categories, essential and inescapable, rather than as the highly flexible concepts they are. While Vietnamese Americans may sometimes appear as a distinctive “race,” especially around residential concentrations, they also move easily across ethnic lines. Intermarriage between Vietnamese and whites is common. Vietnamese American pastors head Catholic churches with parishes of all sorts of ethnic compositions. Of course, many Vietnamese Americans can also tell anecdotes about experiences with racial prejudice or about stereotypes of them that people in other groups hold. But anecdotes and incidents aren’t enough to support simplistic assertions of the overriding significance of racialization and racial oppression.
Along these lines, her attempts to say things about Vietnamese ethnic (or racial) identity fail to take a key point into consideration: the Vietnamese have only been in the United States for thirty-five years. It makes no sense to contrast them with the Irish, who began arriving in a quite different United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, except to say that Vietnamese Americans already enjoy much greater acceptance by today’s comparatively open American society than the Irish found in an earlier era.
Today’s “Little Saigons” are changing places, and Vietnamese American identity is changing. Despite the short historical existence of Vietnamese America, young people are already losing their parents’ language and moving away from the ethnic neighborhoods. In her conclusion, Aguilar-San Juan describes her trips to Vietnam and to the Philippines, the homeland of her own parents. She is probably right in seeing the link to the old homeland as the source of continuing ethnic identity. But the heavy movement back and forth between the United States and the Philippines is unique for nations with such great geographic distance, and it remains to be seen whether third and fourth generation descendants of people from Vietnam will maintain extensive transnational ties. At present, most of the indicators regarding the Vietnamese suggest that some version of assimilation (traditional or segmented) looks like the best way to describe the direction of change for Vietnamese Americans.