Freedom to speak: Vietnamese reeducation and the search for Cold War refuge.

Abstract

This dissertation offers an ethnographic study of the relationships between Vietnamese H.O. emigrants and the states that have attempted to regulate their transnational movements. During research with women and men who emigrated to Seattle, Washington through special immigration provisions for the survivors of post-war reeducation camps in Vietnam, emigrants expressed both a desire to and a fear of narrating the past. This study argues that emigrants' fears stem in large part from the continuous attempts by revolutionary Vietnam and U.S. officials to restrict the ways that emigrants remember and recount their most personal memories. With the recognition that refugee migrations are central to state power, I trace how emigrants' journey narratives proved useful to each state first during the transition from colonialism to the Cold War order, and then during the transition from war to post-1975 national struggles over history and memory. This study considers the economy of stories that each emigrant was required to enter in order to access refugee status; confessions of a traitorous past could be exchanged for survival under reeducation, while life narratives of persecution under communism could be exchanged for permission to enter the U.S., for the gift of refuge, and for U.S. citizenship. Yet, this study also speaks to the limits of state power. Neither Vietnam nor U.S. officials have ever been able to constrain the meanings of refuge. Emigrants' desires to remember the past illuminate the roles that memory plays in the constitution of places of refuge. Through poetics and politics, emigrants drafted their own versions of history and transformed Seattle into a dwelling place. Finally, the study considers the remarkable flexibility of state rule, and the tenuous nature of refuge. With the end of the Cold War, emigrants' fears and desires about the past have been heightened. As city and national initiatives have renewed ties between Vietnam and the U.S., and the familiar Cold War journey narrative is no longer valued, emigrants fear that they will not be heard. At the same time, the need to reconstitute their pasts for the next generation seems even more urgent.