Subarno Chattarji

‘‘The New Americans’’ : The Creation of a Typology of Vietnamese-American Identity in Children’s Literature

The influx of Vietnamese refugees, “boat people,” and immigrants into the United States after April 1975 has led to the establishment of a significant Vietnamese-American community. There is a body of literature written for children and young adults that creates and delineates this new community within the topography of a welcoming and immigrant-friendly USA. This paper will examine the meanings and implications of the appellation “Vietnamese-American” as defined within a body of nonfiction childrens literature. It will highlight how these texts negotiate questions related to refugee status, immigration, identity and belonging, contributing in many instances to a bland re-creation of a formerly oppressed but now coherent and increasingly prosperous and Americanized people. The childrens literature plays an important role in defining the relatively new community to itself and to mainstream America. In its dissemination of truisms about Confucian heritages and stereotypes of “model minorities” the literature reveals as much about American ideological desires as it does about “the new Americans.”

Imagining Vietnam: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

The critic and activist H. Bruce Franklin relates an encounter with a woman during the campaign against napalm in the suburban town of Redwood City, California, in early 1966. ‘Asked to sign a petition against the local production of napalm, she responded: “Napalm? No thank you. I’m not interested. I always use Tide.” ’1 The story is indicative of a general level of indifference toward and ignorance of a war that continues to haunt the American imagination. The ways in which John Kerry’s Vietnam service record surfaced as an issue during the 2004 presidential election is just one example of the presence of that conflict in the American landscape.