Entering Linh Dinh's Fake House: Literature of Displacement

Abstract

For two decades after 1975, Vietnamese American literature was mostly ignored, largely for political reasons. Vivid reminders of either national guilt or the abuses perpetrated by leftist regimes - neither the American Right nor the Left were keen to hear Vietnamese American stories. Like Third World literature, these literary texts project political dimension in the form of a national allegory regardless of how private the subject matter may be. In the last decade, however, with the end of the cold war, the subsequent lifting of the economic embargo on Vietnam in 1994, and the coming of age of Vietnamese Americans educated in the United States, a shift in reception has occurred, and Vietnamese American literature has enjoyed a relative degree of popularity, especially when addressing the Vietnam War and the refugee experience.