1 Critical Refugee Studies and Asian American Studies: Vietnamese Refugees in Asian America

Abstract

1 Critical Refugee Studies and Asian American StudiesVietnamese Refugees in Asian America Yê´n Lê Espiritu (bio) Refugee Story # 1 – In 1975, I arrived in the United States as a refugee from Vietnam, speaking no English. I attended cash-strapped schools, where I encountered underand mis-education, anti-Asian racism, and language and class discrimination. I did not know at the time that just a few years earlier, Asian American (and other US Third World) students had protested against systemic racism and demanded fundamental changes in higher education: better access for students of color, more inclusive and relevant curricula, and the creation of Asian American studies programs. Although I entered higher education after the Asian American protest movement, I became a direct beneficiary of these struggles—personally, intellectually, and materially. Asian American studies opened up for me the world of critical scholarship and pedagogy. It also helped me secure my first job: an Asian American studies position at UCSD that students had fought for—long and hard. More than thirty years later, I am still at UCSD, teaching, mentoring, writing, ever mindful of the legacy of Asian American student activism that brought me there. Refugee Story # 2 – In the summer of 2019, I was contacted by the campus police with startling news: the mother of one of my students had threatened to physically harm me. According to the police, the mother, a Vietnamese refugee herself, was [End Page 159] furious that I had encouraged her daughter to major in Asian American/ethnic studies. Having worked 16-hour days for years to ensure a better future for her children, she felt betrayed that her daughter had chosen a non-STEM major—and she blamed me. I wonder if her fury were further fueled by the fact that I was Vietnamese, and thus, in her opinion, should have known better—that a college education is an investment in your family, and not in yourself. Although I did not fear for my safety, her threat deeply troubled me because of what it implied about the perceived relevance of Asian American studies to the communities that it purports to serve, both materially and ideologically. Materially, what could I say to my student's mother about the practical usefulness of an Asian American studies major? Ideologically, what could Asian American studies scholars say to refugees who seemingly embrace the "politics of accommodation,"1 not because they are duped but because they do want a better life in the United States for themselves and their family, having risked so much to get here. I open this essay with these two refugee stories because they reveal both the promise and limits of Asian American studies. Born out of the 1960s civil rights movements and liberation fronts, Asian American studies forged pan-Asian solidarity by exposing and linking the histories of racial and class discrimination against Asians in the United States. But Asian America's heterogeneity—its class, ethnic, national, generational, and ideological diversity—has always been there, shaping the trajectory of the field.2 As Viet Thanh Nguyen and others have established, Asian America is capable of "promising equality" but also of "practicing hierarchy when it comes to dealing with various Asian ethnic groups with conflicting interests."3 Some critics have decried the field's privileging of East Asians over less established Asian groups—an indictment of the suppression of diverse histories, epistemologies, and voices within the pan-Asian framework: "To be merely peripheral subjects, hasty additions to course syllabi, or latecomers at Asian American Studies symposiums does not satisfy."4 In Asian American Panethnicity, I critique the intermittent but strategic absorption of Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians into the Asian American framework, showing how this "differential inclusion" has benefited the more dominant groups within the panethnic coalition, but left intact the social, political, and economic inequalities within Asian America.5 In her 2003 review of the state of the field, Linda Trinh Võ concludes that the inclusion of Vietnamese refugees into the teachings, research, and theories of Asian American studies "remains undeveloped or neglected."6 Even today, Vietnamese lives, histories, and politics continue to be peripheral to the cultural, literary, and political center of the...