Vietnam is a country, not a war-trauma and nostalgia in the anthology The Perfume River

Abstract

ABSTRACTVietnam is a country not a war. But the Vietnam/American war is hard to forget in the Western context; even almost 40 years on, many Western introductions to Vietnam is through American war veteran movies and musicals like Miss Saigon. The scholarship on Vietnamese diasporic literature is similarly limited with only one major monograph. This is what I choose to tell by Isabelle Pelaud published in 2010 about Vietnamese diasporic writing in English. So the question must be asked who is creating Vietnam in the Western context? Vietnamese diasporic writers, I argue, are driven by ethics, partly due to the trauma suffered by the diasporic communities and partly because of the importance placed in Vietnam on the literature. By contrast, many Western perceptions of Vietnam are driven by nostalgia and orientalism, of a colonial past. This article will critique the anthology The Perfume River edited by Catherine Cole, which was released in 2010. It will look at short stories by Nam Le, Chi Vu and Catherine Cole.