Mnemonic splinterings and disciplinary convergences: Memory studies,Vietnamese studies,and diasporic Vietnamese studies

Abstract

This article considers memory studies in the context of the Vietnamese case study in order to test and revise previous assumptions on dimensions, levels, and modes of memory drawn mostly from European or Northern American frameworks. In particular, it examines the politics of modern Vietnamese memories about war and migration both in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and in the Vietnamese refugee diaspora to consider the possibilities, limitations, and implications of such contested memory work. Highlighting the particularities of Vietnamese memory politics, the article illustrates what memory studies, Vietnamese studies, and diasporic Vietnamese studies can bring to each other and contribute to important disciplinary discussions ongoing in these fields.

Memory is fundamentally transcultural. No version of the past and no product in the archive will ever belong to just one community or place, but usually has its own history of “travel and translation.” This is not only the case in our present age of globalization, but as mnemohistory has shown, this holds also true in a longue durée-perspective on memory—Astrid Erll.

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory—Viet Thanh Nguyen.

When a mirror breaks, what memories do its fragments hold? Who remembers or who gets to tell stories about the circumstances leading to, during, and following its breakage? Whose account is considered worthy of preservation and reproduction and by whom? Which details are included and excluded in the retelling and remembering of the event? In many ways, endeavors to understand “the past” are inherently fragmented, incomplete, and elusive undertakings, a fact resonant to those who have attempted to reassemble the shards from the past to approximate “what happened” and what it means. It is also known that the broken mirror of the past can be reassembled in many different ways, always incomplete with missing pieces, however. Each reconstructed version reflects not only a part of what had happened, but also the conditions and contexts of its reassemblage. This mediated engagement with the past resonates with Astrid Erll’s (2014: 178) observation in the first epigraph that “memory is fundamentally transcultural.” In other words, there are multiple versions of the past and thus no singular individual, entity, or culture can monopolize it, even when a dominant set of memory may seem to suggest otherwise. Furthermore, each version of said past is mobile and fluid, traveling its own path and process of becoming, emerging in relation to other factors; its trajectory always inflected by the concerns of the present.

The multiplicity of how we remember and engage with the past and its plurality is the reason why memory and history are not self-explanatory and rigid sites of recollection and retelling, but in fact contentious, malleable, and relational fields of knowledge production. Concerning the contentious nature of memory, especially war memory, Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016: 4) succinctly notes in Nothing Ever Dies: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Referencing the Vietnam War, Nguyen explores the ethics of remembering, cautioning against unjust memory projects that have emerged in the aftermath of this war, particularly those produced by American popular culture, the Vietnamese socialist government, and the diasporic anti-communist Vietnamese refugee communities. He attributes the mnemonic injustice to the failure of each involved side to recognize not only the humanity of “the other” but also its own inhumanity during the war in its divergent memory projects. This insistence on mnemonic accountability across different remembering cultures, to build on Erll’s framework, is an important imperative not only for those who do the remembering, but also for those who study the emergences, meanings, and impacts of any given memory work.

Since its inception, the field of memory studies has provided a productive space for scholars to contemplate on the complexities of memory. It has also been a site of convergences, bringing together a wide range of otherwise siloed conversations. The field’s growth, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, reflects what scholars have identified as the three overlapping “waves” of scholarship, punctuated by key theoretical and empirical evolutions (Erll, 2011b: 4–5; Sierp, 2021). For instance, the works of those who investigate connections between culture and memory on individual, social, collective, and cultural levels constitute the first wave (Bergson, 1994 (1896); Halbwachs, 1950 (1992)). Ushered in by the “memory boom” of the 1980s and 1990s, the second wave of memory studies attends to “memory works” arisen predominantly from the contexts of nationalism and in response to major twentieth century developments such as World War I, the Holocaust, World War II, decolonization, the Cold War, the rise and fall of totalitarian, authoritarian, and genocidal governments across many parts of the world (Nora, 1989; Winter, 1995; Young, 1993). Developments in technologies and media further contributed to and expanded that boom (Erll, 2011a; Olick, 2015; Sierp, 2021). Signaling the third wave, the simultaneous “transnational/global” and “transcultural” turns in the twenty-first century attend to how scholars have moved beyond the limitations of geographically, temporally, and culturally bounded understanding of the past to a more mobile and, at the same time, entangled framework of remembering (Assman, 2014; Bond and Rapson, 2014; Erll, 2011b; Erll and Rigney, 2018; Feindt et al., 2014; Wüstenberg, 2019).

While this cursory sketch provides an impressionistic roadmap of memory studies, much of the points of reference in the early historiography of the field have primarily centered European and North American frameworks (Jarvis, 2021; Olick et al., 2015). The more recent decades have witnessed memory studies expanding into other geographies including Asia, Latin America, and Africa (Andermann, 2014; Diawara et al., 2010; Huang et al., 2022). These mnemonic contexts are not simply “additives” but have enriched and complicated memory studies in significant ways (Erll, 2011b: 4). Following this trajectory, this article puts the field of memory studies in conversation with the Southeast Asian context, particularly the Vietnamese case study. In so doing, it tests and revises some dominant assumptions on the dimensions, levels, and modes of memory that circulate within the field. It introduces the concept of splintering memories to account for the temporal complexity as well as the multiplicity of and unevenness in accounts about the past. The article also brings disciplines in convergence to see in which ways memory studies could renew old paradigms of Vietnamese studies and diasporic Vietnamese studies. Particularly, it turns to modern Vietnamese memory practices in Vietnam and across the Vietnamese refugee diaspora to examine how questions about memories of war and migration generate a dynamic if not contentious space that simultaneously connects originally distinctive fields of studies—Vietnamese studies, diasporic Vietnamese studies, and memory studies—and expand each in generative directions, demonstrating how memory crisscrosses disciplinary borders due to its “fundamental[ly] transcultural” characteristic, as Erll (2014: 178) notes. Memory’s multiplicity and mobility enables it to transcend the various geographical, temporal, material, cultural, and intellectual “containers” that attempt to capture it (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014; Erll, 2011b). Moreover, memory also does not occur in a silo but exists in relation to other local and transnational dynamics, simultaneously “entangled” in multiple individual, social, political, and cultural frames (Feindt et al., 2014). Exploring the contentious fields of Vietnamese memory reveals these dynamics and the different ways those who study splintered Vietnamese pasts in Vietnam and across the Vietnamese diaspora have meaningfully contributed to memory studies as well as their respective fields of study.

War, migration, and the splinterings of Vietnamese memories

On 30 April 1975, the collapse of Saigon ushered in the end of what is popularly known as the Vietnam War in the West. Yet it also made way for another conflict to enter the foreground—the memory war over how the two-decade long military event is to be remembered, as Viet Thanh Nguyen suggests. This mnemonic contention was already foreshadowed before and during the actual physical war, manifesting in the competing contemporaneous narratives about the war and the names that the various actors involved in the conflict used to describe and rationalize it. In the United States, for instance, “Vietnam War” is the commonly accepted nomenclature. On one hand, from the perspectives of many American conservatives and war hawks who championed the so-called “domino theory,” the war is understood and narrated as a necessary undertaking to contain the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, from the perspectives of liberal and anti-war Americans, the conflict is seen as an inhumane war of American imperialist ambition and military expansion. Meanwhile, the war is known in Vietnam among communist Vietnamese both in the North and in the South (i.e. the National Liberation Front) as “cuộc kháng chiến chống Mỹ cứu nước [The Resistance War against America to save the Nation],” which emphasizes the Vietnamese communists’ resistance war for independence. Lesser known is the vernacular name that non-communist South Vietnamese use to talk about the war, “cuộc chiến đấu bảo vệ miền Nam [The War to Defend the South],” which underscores the efforts of non-communist South Vietnamese through an alliance with the United States in resisting the encroachment of Hanoi and their communist compatriots.

The varying names of and the divergent narratives about the war, its objectives, and its impacts illustrate what I characterize as the splinterings of modern Vietnamese memories. Mnemonic splintering is a useful concept to introduce to memory studies because it challenges the assumption that memory pertaining an event takes shape following the occurrence of that event. For example, memory about a war conventionally would emerge at the end of the war, in a second battlefield, as Nguyen has suggested. However, this linear view of memory overlooks the fact that events and narratives preceding and during a war also crucially lay the foundation for how that war is to be remembered. Mnemonic splintering thus accounts for the multiplicity of memory in a more temporally expansive way and acknowledges the multiple levels and scales of remembering—local, national, and transnational as well as individual and collective. Mnemonic splintering is hardly exceptional to war memory. In fact, it is an organic and expected part of how humans variably attempt to make sense of and interpret events that have come to pass from their different positionalities and points of view. For every mundane or spectacular event that occurs, there could be a myriad of ways in which it could be remembered by the various actors involved. Each memory is anchored on and reinforced by a certain set of details colored by the biases of those doing the remembering. Attending to the different namings of the war in Vietnam, for instance, reveal just how war memory are already being actively shaped during the conflict. Yet the naming barely scratches at the surface of the truly complex and often contradictory memoryscapes that connect/sever/inscribe the evolving and fragmented present to the evolving and fragmented past. Of course, not all memories of any particular event exist equally as they manifest in specific historical contexts, dynamics, and often time uneven power relations. Like the shattered mirror invoked at the beginning of this article, the bits and pieces of memories are often broken into many different, uneven sizes. Some shards are salvaged while others discarded and/or irretrievable. Some memories are reinforced, reproduced, and proliferated through robust mnemonic structures and infrastructures sponsored by the state such as education and cultural productions, enabling them to become dominant public memory. Others, in the absence of state support, or sometimes as a result of the destruction by state-sponsored mnemonic infrastructures, must fight for survival and legitimacy in the wake of the mnemonic purges and reorderings that typically emerge in the wake of major events such as war and regime change.

In the Vietnamese case, the end of the war in Vietnam led to a systematic purging of non-communist South Vietnamese memories in order to solidify and bolster a culture of remembering that valorizes Vietnamese communism and legitimizes its success in defeating the mighty American power and reuniting the long-divided country. Such valorization and legitimization are predicated on the erasure of non-communist South Vietnamese memories. In this instance, such splintered wartime memories and narratives underwent a moment of consolidation, elimination, and ultimate banishment of non-communist memories. The concrete pathways through which the victor of the war asserted control over non-communist South Vietnamese memoryscapes included the toppling and razing of monuments and memorials to the Republic of Vietnam and its defenders; the renaming of many South Vietnamese streets and cities including the former capital Saigon; the “cultural revolution” that involved the mass burning of South Vietnamese and western books and other publications deemed as “reactionary,” “depraved,” and “decadent”; and the banning of South Vietnamese and western cultural productions (Duiker, 1985; Huy Đức, 2012; Nguyễn and Cooper, 1983; Taylor, 2000). This multi-pronged elimination process cleared the path for the consolidation, ascendance, and hegemony of socialist national memories, which privilege mnemonics of revolution, liberation, and reunification.

Banished from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) or internally exiled, non-communist South Vietnamese national, social, political, and cultural memories became fugitives, finding refuge in and sustained by the clandestine memory work that often takes place in unassuming private spaces such as family altars to the dead of the losing side (Espiritu Y, 2014, 2016; Peché, 2016). Memories of South Vietnam also eventually found refuge in the refugee diaspora that emerged at the end of the war and in the aftermath of revolution, liberation, and reunification. In diasporic spaces—formed out of and strengthened by the various and overlapping postwar emigration waves—Vietnamese refugees invoke memories of South Vietnam primarily to help them articulate, process, and ameliorate the quadruple trauma of losing the civil war, losing their country, experiencing forced migration, and living in exile. In addition, such mnemonic reconstitutions have enabled them to rebuild their communities, restore their narratives, and assert their identity claims as refugees of communism and as Vietnamese. In this sense, having survived the mnemonic purge of the postwar communist regime, some of the splintered memories of wartime Vietnam literally traveled with the South Vietnamese refugees, who, too, splintered from their compatriots in their homeland and live scattered across the world.

At the same time, new memories of rupture, displacement, and migration experiences also emerged and expanded Vietnamese exilic memoryscapes, breathing new meaning into Vietnamese identities and complicating the lens through which one interprets past Vietnamese events. However, similar to the non-communist South Vietnamese memories of the war, memories of the postwar refugee migration have no place in communist Vietnam for they directly contradict the state’s narrative. Refugee memories, which expose the violence that the Vietnamese communist state committed in the name of revolution, liberation and reunification, continue to splinter and exist outside of the state. Similar to the disavowed memories of the war that belong to the losing South Vietnamese, memories of migration could only live on clandestinely in the privatized ways in which the past, or certain versions of the past, remain in circulation. In the diaspora, somewhat free but not immune from the grip of the state, Vietnamese refugees’ memories reemerge through reconstructed and recalibrated diasporic mnemonic infrastructures—cultural productions, naming politics, and memorial and monument constructions.

In these multiple ways, the splintering of Vietnamese memories must be understood as dynamic and ever evolving. While the Republic of Vietnam’s demise orphaned official RVN memories in the postwar public arena, these memories did not fully perish as non-communist South Vietnamese memories were tucked away and stay hidden in the private realm. They also resurface in the Vietnamese diaspora along with fresh memories of postwar Vietnam under communism and of the refugee migration. Such memoryscapes become literal splinters that stubbornly refuse to be rooted out by the Vietnamese communist regime in power. Similar to splinters, their existence further disrupts, discomforts, resists, and, on occasions, threatens the narratives and memories of the Vietnamese nation-state, challenging its monopoly over how Vietnamese pasts are to be understood and remembered. To date, the Vietnamese communist government continues to attempt to assert its power over these strayed memories. In that context, it is imperative to think of Vietnamese memory as not in a vacuum, but in relational and entangled transnational frameworks that can account for and complicate the twists and turns of modern Vietnamese historical memories.

Crossing disciplinary divides: memory studies, Vietnamese studies, and diasporic Vietnamese studies

At the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars increasingly noted the significance of the past and the politics of memory in contemporary Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora. Surveying the emergence of memory as a “method” for interrogating Vietnamese pasts and present in the multidisciplinary field of Vietnamese studies, anthropologist Christina Schwenkel locates the genesis of her own ethnography on war remembrances in Vietnam at the intersection of memory studies, anthropology, and Vietnamese studies. Schwenkel (2017: 25) credits the early works of the historian Hue-Tam Ho Tai, who “brought to the fore the fraught relations between memory, power, and materiality.” She names Ho Tai’s essays—“Hallowed Ground or Haunted House: The War in Vietnamese History and Tourism” (1994), “Monumental Ambiguity: The State Commemoration of Ho Chi Minh” (1995), and “Representing the Past in Vietnamese Museums” (1998)—as key texts that laid the foundation for memory studies within Vietnamese studies. She further assesses,

Taken as a whole, these early publications, with their attention to memory’s materiality, its surface appearances and spatial qualities, constitute what might be called an archaeology of Vietnamese memory, which locates “history” in its multifaceted and variegated forms (social, political, and aesthetic) through the study of artifacts and the built environment (p. 27).

One could further argue that Ho Tai’s earlier and subsequent works significantly complicate how we think about the second and third waves of memory studies. Influenced by but also critical of Pierre Nora’s concept of les lieux de mémoire due to its failure to account for the roles of imperialism and colonialism in the (re)construction of French national history, Ho Tai saw early on the limits of nationally bounded (both geographically and temporally) understanding of the past. Her attention to such omissions stemmed from her positionality as a postcolonial Vietnamese subject who views French past “from the margins of both French history and of the French nation” (Ho Tai, 2001c: 907). From that vantage point, it is clear to her that the selective nature of French national memory is predicated on the marginalization/ forgetting of colonial memories despite the deep entanglements between France and its colonies. In this context, Ho Tai alludes to the mnemonic splinterings that have shaped French past and raises the question about French mnemonic accountability. She thus recognizes the limitation of nationalist memory projects much earlier than other scholars in memory studies since the field’s general “transnational/global” and “transcultural” turns did not occur until around the time of Astrid Erll’s “travelling memory” and “transcultural memory” interventions in 2011. Ho Tai’s critique of Nora’s work further anticipates the more recent call to decolonize memory work and memory studies (Charumbira et al., 2022, Jarvis, 2021).

A decade before the work of memory studies scholars on the transnational/global and transcultural turns emerged, Ho Tai’s edited anthology, The Country of Memory (2001d), maps the broader landscape of memory in the context of Vietnamese studies and facilitated the transnational and transcultural turns in Vietnamese studies. Still within the rather contained parameters of area studies, most contributors to the volume examine the different Vietnamese “sites of memory” in what is now the geopolitically bounded SRV, including revolutionary prison memoirs (Zinoman, 2001); the communist state’s martyrization of revolutionary soldiers who died in the wars against the French and Americans (Malarney, 2001); local shrines erected to honor southern revolutionary leaders (Giebel, 2001); revolutionary arts (Taylor, 2001); the post-đổi mới tourism industry (Kennedy and Williams, 2001); war memories in revisionist films (Bradley, 2001); and the presence and absence of women in the SRV’s remembrances of the “American War” (Ho Tai, 2001b). While these case studies focus on how Vietnamese state and non-state actors remake memories of revolution and war to serve various concerns in late socialist Vietnam, the anthology ends with Ho Tai’s call to “re-define the meaning of community and expand the geography of memory,” explicitly naming Vietnamese exile memory as “a truly contrapuntal voice to the official discourse” (Ho Tai, 2001a: 229). In acknowledging the need to include and engage with Vietnamese exiles’ rememberings of historical events in Vietnam, Ho Tai recognizes the splinterings and multiplicity of modern Vietnamese memories. Her positioning of diasporic memory both as outside and in opposition to Vietnamese official memory reminds us that the Vietnamese nation-state does not have a monopoly over the past. This explicitly transnational and transcultural frame of reference was directly influenced by her critique of Nora’s works as noted earlier. At the same time, similar to her earlier positionality at the margin of French national history as a colonized subject, Ho Tai, once again, writes about Vietnamese memory from the margins of Vietnamese history and Vietnam as a diasporic subject.

To appreciate the significance of Ho Tai’s prescription on the need to transnationalize modern Vietnamese memories, one must note that at the time A Country of Memory was published, scholarship in Vietnamese studies and diasporic vietnamese studies hardly intersected, given these fields’ distinct and somewhat antagonistic histories and purposes. Divided geographically and politically with different intellectual agendas, neither discipline had an interest in the other, that is, until more recently. In general, Vietnamese Studies has two main strands of scholarship. The first comprises those written primarily in Vietnamese and are produced in Vietnam by Vietnamese scholars about Vietnam and Vietnamese people, history, culture, and society. ¹ The second strand includes works by non-Vietnamese scholars who produce knowledge about Vietnam, Vietnamese people, history, culture, and society primarily for non-Vietnamese audiences. ² In the United States, Vietnamese Studies is an area studies field that originates from the Cold War context. It emphasizes knowledge production about Vietnam as a geopolitical area of strategic US military and economic interests. Since diasporic Vietnamese are literally outside of the geographical boundaries of the Vietnamese nation, they are not seen as significant hence the absence of scholarship on Vietnamese refugees in this strand of Vietnamese studies. In Vietnam, while a handful of publications about overseas Vietnamese exist, those works tend to be rather dismissive of the Vietnamese refugee diaspora (Trần, 1997, 2005). As those who fled from the SRV and whose existence are tied to the collapsed Republic of Vietnam, Vietnamese refugees and their exilic memories are sites of inquiry often ignored by those in Vietnamese studies. Moreover, the active and state-mandated forgetting of the Republic of Vietnam in the postwar SRV ensured that no scholarship produced in Vietnam in the aftermath of the war broach the topic of South Vietnamese memories let alone the memories of the migration that occurred in the postwar era. Ho Tai’s call on interrogating Vietnamese past transnationally through the lens of memory thus opens up new possibilities.

In contrast, diasporic Vietnamese studies in the United States, ³ more specifically, Vietnamese American studies, has its roots in the ethnic studies tradition, which is critical of US military and other forms of intervention abroad and is more invested in the histories and experiences of the Vietnamese refugees living in the United States as a racialized minority. Unlike Vietnamese studies scholars, those studying Vietnamese Americans have been attentive to how Vietnamese refugee memories constitute fertile grounds to investigate experiences of war, rupture, migration, and displacement as well as competing claims to local, national, and international past, present, and future. One could locate the earliest iteration of memory studies in diasporic Vietnamese studies in the context of oral history. Conducted at first by non-Vietnamese anthropologists and historians and later by diasporic Vietnamese scholars themselves through book or archival projects, these works collected individual narratives that capture not only memories of the war in Vietnam, but also of the mass emigration of South Vietnamese in the postwar context (Cargill and Huynh, 2000; Chan, 2006; Freeman, 1989; Viet Stories: “Vietnamese American Oral History Project” at University of California, Irvine; Texas-based “Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation 500 Oral Histories Project”). These individualized approaches to memory correspond to the first wave of memory studies and generated important archives that otherwise would have been silenced in Vietnam and ignored in mainstream American society. These oral history collections also reflect the isolation and marginalization of Vietnamese Americans/diasporic Vietnamese experiences. As Nguyen-Vo Thu-Huong (2006: 170) writes, “Vietnamese Americans as refugees occupy the position of self-mourners because no one else mourns us.” Indeed, mainstream American memories of the Vietnam war is reduced to war-themed Hollywood movies and musical productions that are only interested in the American soldiers’ experiences during the war and completely flatten the Vietnamese perspectives, both communist and non-communist views (Nguyen, V. 2016, Nguyen-Vo, 2006).

It is precisely because Vietnamese refugees must mourn themselves that distinctive and incredibly robust and complex diasporic Vietnamese memoryscapes emerged as well as the scholarly work that document and analyze them. The first commemoration of the Fall of Saigon took place as early as April 1976 across several fledging Vietnamese American communities. Since then, this annual commemoration serves as a significant site of community building and counter-memory to how the Vietnam War and the end of that war is remembered in the SRV (Aguilar-San Juan, 2009; Nguyen-Vo, 2005; Vo Dang, 2008). Beyond this particular commemorative practice, archives and museums are additional portals into diasporic Vietnamese memories. These physical and digital repositories, spearheaded mostly by Vietnamese refugees, actively collect and safeguard documents, narratives, and objects pertaining to various aspects of Vietnamese American past and present (Fujita- Rony, 2020; Tran, 2023; Vo Dang, 2023). Diasporic Vietnamese memoryscapes are also populated not only with memorials to the Vietnam War, but at the turn of the twenty-first century, with memorials to the boat refugee exodus that emerged in the postwar context (Tran, 2012, 2016).

Diasporic Vietnamese further grapple with the past in digital spaces. Growing Internet access in the past two decades has enabled Vietnamese in the United States and elsewhere in the diaspora to assert, reconcile with, debate, preserve, and transmit individual and collective memories in cyberspace and thus transcend geographical limitations and democratize narratives and understandings of the past (Espiritu Y, 2014; Espiritu E, 2017; Tran, 2023). The prolific and dynamic cultural outputs both in physical and digital spaces in the Vietnamese diaspora further reflect the depth, breadth, and nuances of diasporic Vietnamese memoryscapes. In the past several decades, memoirs, autobiographies, novels, graphic novels, short fictions, poetry, anthologies, blogs, films, music, performances, and the visual arts articulate the consequences of war, the loss of nation, postwar economic instability, exile, migration, and resettlement (Bui, 2018; Duong, 2016, 2020; Espiritu and Duong, 2018; Le, 2005, 2021; Lieu, 2011; Nguyen P, 2018; Pelaud, 2010; Phu, 2014; Reyes, 1999; Valverde, 2012). This rich and growing body of cultural productions and the scholarship examining them underscore the profound and transgenerational impacts of war and migration, giving rise to a distinct set of refugee discourses and paradigms. As such, different Vietnamese American generations have taken up multiple questions about the past, each with their unique entry points and concerns, revealing the heterogeneity and multiplicity of diasporic Vietnamese memoryscapes.

As the brief overview above suggests, diasporic Vietnamese memories are inherently transnational since they are first and foremost sites where memories about Vietnamese pasts survive and flourish outside of Vietnam. Moreover, such memoryscapes connect geographies that span the Vietnamese diaspora and is not contained in any singular site, demonstrating an elaborate and entangled network of remembering that stretches not only across four continents but also across generations. As I have written elsewhere, the turn-of-the-century constructions of memorials to the Vietnamese boat people exodus in countries where Vietnamese refugees have resettled and the Vietnamese communist government’s subsequent attempts to destroy them exemplify the splintering of diasporic Vietnamese memories on one hand. On the other hand, they also reveal the intra-diasporic linkages that connect and sustain Vietnamese refugee memories across multiple geographies. Furthermore, the on-the-ground dynamics animating these memorial projects, which include the negotiations with local actors and the intervention of the Vietnamese communist government at various points and in different national contexts, reveal how diasporic refugee memories remain entangled in local, national, and transnational histories (Tran, 2012).

Yet, as other scholars have also pointed out, diasporic Vietnamese memories are not without biases and shortcomings. Public commemoration, cultural production, and community protests can privilege specific memories (namely war memories and anti-communist memories from South Vietnamese male soldiers’ perspectives), inducing public silencing of the complex and diverse ways diasporic Vietnamese address the past. These acts of simultaneous remembering and forgetting can also permeate diasporic spaces as direct, indirect, and unspoken traumas of war and migration often affect intergenerational relationships, highlighting how memories and struggles with the past also travel across generations (Bui, 2018; Espiritu Y, 2014; Nguyen P., 2018; Peché, 2016; Vo Dang, 2008). Since the splinterings of diasporic Vietnamese memories are ongoing through uncovered memories and intergenerational shifts, the lenses to interpret them also need to be continually recalibrated.

By no means exhaustive, this overview of Vietnamese American memoryscapes demonstrates that the past occupies a prominent and powerful space in the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora. Its invocations emerge on various platforms and across generations, gender, language, migration and resettlement experiences, geographical location, and degrees of connections to the homeland and host country. The contradictions and tension inherent in diasporic Vietnamese memoryscapes operate within, across, and in between physical and abstract terrains, where, as Yến Lê Espiritu (2014: 108) asserts, “public and private memories intertwine parallactically.” Thus, the contours of diasporic Vietnamese memoryscapes include acts of remembering and forgetting that are publicly accounted for and those that are not yet or cannot be seen or articulated publicly yet are still powerfully felt privately. Moreover, it is imperative to attend to what is being remembered and forgotten and by whom, and the contexts in which such remembering and forgetting surface.

This tracing of modern Vietnamese memory practices reveal how memory is not only an important method, but also a rich and dynamic analytic for unpacking local, national, and transnational histories and thus brings diverse scholarly traditions into conversation. As memory anchors and dominates the scholarly landscape of diasporic Vietnamese studies, it also enriches and expands the fields of Vietnamese studies and memory studies given the fact that some scholars in all three fields draw on the work of each other for new empirical examples and theoretical models while also contributing their own unique theoretical insights. For example, Astrid Erll (2011b) engages with Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s critique of Pierre Nora to advance her concepts of traveling and transcultural memory. Yến Lê Espiritu’s notion of “refugee postmemory” (2014) draws on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” (2002) and applies it to the Vietnamese refugee case study. These examples of intellectual convergences generatively transcend geographical and disciplinary boundaries.

Understanding Vietnamese memories as splinters and as splintering phenomena reveal how they travel and forge new and alternative paths and sites to understanding the past in nonlinear, transnational, and polyvalent registers. Vietnamese exilic memories highlight how a transnational and transcultural approach can expand the field of vision and understanding of the past in and beyond Vietnam. By juxtaposing Vietnamese memories of the war and migration with those of diasporic Vietnamese, we begin to see a third space for understanding Vietnamese pasts. In that third space, no singular entity has a monopoly over the past. The task is not to consolidate or smooth out the ragged edges but to acknowledge the value in holding multiple narratives about the past all at once. In fact, each point of view is necessary for us to piece together a larger piece of the puzzle about the past, which is never a fully completable task.

Conclusion

In almost five decades since the Vietnam War ended, many of those who directly experienced that conflict and the subsequent refugee migration have been (re)building the infrastructures to safekeep memories of their diverse experiences and to ensure that such memories outlast their own mortality. Some have done so with the full support and resources of the Vietnamese communist government and at its behest while others have managed to carve out precarious forms of existence on the margins and in diasporic spaces. The splintering and contested terrains of Vietnamese memories generatively remind us that the past is far from settled, even long after the initial event is seen as over. To account for such evolving complexities, we need a multivalent approach to memory, one that benefits from the convergence of multiple disciplinary inquiries as well as transnational and transcultural frameworks. While the Vietnamese case is hardly exceptional since the mnemonic tensions that this article observes also resonate in other conflict and post conflict contexts, it is a launching point to (re)examine some of the assumptions about memory studies, Vietnamese studies, and diasporic Vietnamese studies and to show how bringing these initially disparate fields together, a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the modern Vietnamese past can emerge.

The Vietnamese case study indeed reveals the limitations of state-sponsored sites of memory. In moving beyond national memory, which has dominated the field of area studies and the scholarship in the second wave of memories studies, it is possible to engage diasporic memories and arrive at a different and perhaps fuller understanding of the past through a transnational and transcultural lens. This more capacious understanding of the past opens up new possibilities in both fields of area studies and memory studies to account for the inherent multiplicity of memory. At the same time, in acknowledging the splintering of memories, it is clear that diasporic memories, exilic memories, or memories of those who are marginalized and minoritized are simultaneously precarious and powerful because they can raise significant questions about how dominant memory projects reassemble the past and what they omit. Moreover, returning to the mirror metaphor invoked at the beginning of this article, shards of the broken mirror, no matter how big or small, are all parts that can shed light on the past more fully, allowing for a more wholistic reconstruction, however incomplete.