Refugee Assets

Abstract

This chapter explores the challenges of memory work for Vietnamese diasporic subjects in the face of postwar historical amnesia and trauma. It analyzes Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, which tells the story of two families that fled from the Vietnam War still grappling with the messiness of their war-torn past. Offering a powerful analytic for situating gendered practices of remembering and forgetting by mostly women, the term “reeducation” suggests that refugee memory work never simply takes the form of nostalgia or denial of the past but is a constant negotiation of history as interpreted through past wrongs or obligations. As a hermeneutic for critically reading the refugee as a figure of debt, “reeducation” links the programmatic indoctrination of South Vietnamese political prisoners by communists to the Western pedagogical program to civilize refugees from South Vietnam, recognizing the psychic and material debt survivors of war owe to the sacrifices and suffering of others, and the political agency found in that recognition.