Organizer: Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard; Southeast Asia Initiative of the Harvard Asia Center

Type/Location: Hybrid / Cambridge, MA

Description:

This year 2025, it will be the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon—or the Liberation of Vietnam to those in Vietnam—and the end of the Vietnam War: April 30th, 1975. Given this, I like to consider the question of memory, remembrance, and commemoration. Rather than engaging with narratives explicitly about the Vietnam War and its military violence that this kind of anniversary would invoke, I turn to the Vietnamese mixed race child, who is instead the product of the war, born of the Indochina Wars—the French-Indochina War (1946-1954) and the American War in Vietnam (1955-1975). In particular, I place the Vietnamese mixed race child within the longue durée of Western imperialism from French colonial Indochine through the American War in Vietnam with this comparative study of Kim Lefèvre’s and Kien Nguyen’s writings. 

In this talk, I discuss the generic engagements and imagined genealogies of Vietnamese mixed race authors Kim Lefèvre and Kien Nguyen and how they construct dreams of empire. Born of a French father and Vietnamese mother, Lefèvre documents her experiences as a métisse in two memoirs during the decline of French empire and a return trip to Vietnam after thirty fives years living in France. Similarly, Amerasian Kien Nguyen uses the memoir form to work through the difficult life he experiences as his Vietnamese mother falls from wealth and favor because of their American af/filiations. What is of particular interest is how both mixed race authors then move to the genre of historical fiction. Lefèvre’s Les Eaux mortes de Mékong (2006) proposes a colonial romance to conjure an impossible love affair between a French colonial soldier and a Vietnamese village girl. Nguyen’s historical fiction similarly relies on the familial romance and colonial nostalgia in The Tapestries (2002) and Le Colonial (2004). The divergence between critiques of empire and war within the memoir genre and the imagined colonial romances in the historical fiction offers other ways to conceptualize nostalgia, memory, and remembrance in this post-Indochina War period.

About the Speaker:

Catherine H. Nguyen is assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College. She has published in l’Esprit Créateur and Adoption & Culture and edited collections on multiethnic graphic novels, postmigratory Francophone literature, and the Vietnamese diaspora. She is currently at work on a book that investigates the history and representation of the Vietnamese mixed-race child and transnational adoptee during the Indochina Wars and through its refugee aftermaths.

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