Teaching Vietnamese Vietnam War Stories in the Land of the “Big Red One”

Abstract

Beginning from an understanding of the American Midwest as the “heartland of Empire,” this article offers a pedagogical case study of teaching two Vietnamese narratives about the Vietnam War—Lê Minh Khuê's 1968 short story “Distant Stars” and Dương Thu Hương's 1991 Novel without a Name—in a predominantly white, pro-military, Midwestern context. Theoretically framed by Viet Thanh Nguyen's explorations of a “just” memory and David Palumbo-Liu's investigations of the “deliverance of others” through literature, this analysis finds that “Distant Stars” and Novel without a Name invite identification with, rather than against, an “enemy combatant,” enact a decentring of the United States and of ethnocentrism, and promote anti-war sentiments. Yet “Distant Stars” and Novel without a Name also need to be followed by a greater ideological challenge to prevent a flattening universalism and avoidance of global accountability. I offer the explicitly anti-American diary of a North Vietnamese field doctor, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, as an effective complement. The first two narratives offer to majoritarian American readers intellectual and homeostatic mechanisms that can avoid the shut-down of offended white privilege; Last Night I Dreamed of Peace can then build on this empathetic foundation to more effectively challenge majoritarian students to engage US contemporary hegemonic militarism and historic global aggression.