From entry into the United States as refugees, “boat people,” and immigrants to the configuration of distinctive communities, Vietnamese Americans inscribe complex trajectories, desires, and political spaces. While many influential inscriptions emerge from American perspectives and reconfigure the Vietnam War and its aftermath in solipsistic terms of Cold War imperatives, loss of innocence, and ideations of a “noble cause,” South Vietnamese narratives and analyses increasingly insert alternative, often contradictory, voices.

Lieu's insightful study of the diasporic Vietnamese entertainment industry is conscious of the shadow of the war and its representational power, particularly from within Vietnamese subjectivities:

Lieu examines how the latter image – whether in beauty pageants or videos and variety shows such as the popular Paris by Night series – “enable new ways of literally envisioning Vietnamese culture in exile, carving out spaces for the articulation and formation of postrefugee gender, ethnic, and cultural identities” (81). In recognizing that these identity formations are imbricated in nostalgic recuperations of a lost nation and homeland and the desire to “preserve” “Vietnamese culture,” Lieu highlights the paradox of counterhegemonic narratives that are potentially embedded in the framing of absolutist discourses.

The ethnographic detailing of beauty pageants and videos is valuable precisely in the ways in which it reveals the staging and performance of “Vietnameseness” along with a concomitant aspiration to belong to “the American nation” (86). At its best the analysis is sensitive to diasporic desire and its problems. For instance, Lieu does not shy away from the cultures of surveillance inherent in exile communities such as Little Saigon, or from the ways in which women's bodies are showcased “under the guise of cultural preservation and ethnic and national celebration” (77), or from the “struggle to define what is authentically Vietnamese” (91) that devolves around a fervid anticommunist stance and is reflected in local conservative political alliances. She cites Stuart Cunningham and Tina Nguyen on the ways in which diasporic elites welcomed glorified images of the former Republic of Vietnam “because they not only addressed their ‘depth of loss and longing’ but also the ‘still-strong politics of disavowal of the regime's complicity in its own downfall’” (85). Recovering complicity and political responsibility seems crucial within fields where the process of justly highlighting US imperial intervention in Vietnam and its consequences often leads to elisions of historical memory. Conservative revisionist narratives from American and South Vietnamese perspectives display a stunning ideological coherence in the denial of discomfiting pasts, reconfiguring innocent and heroic memorial landscapes – even though the ideological ends are disparate. While critiques of mainstream American representations of Vietnamese Americans as refugees and “model minorities” who flourish within the unique democratic environs of the US are entirely necessary, the erasures within diasporic self-representations need equal attention.

It is this uneasy balance between critical insights, recovery, and amnesia that is continually negotiated not just in the performance of Vietnamese identity but in critical analysis. In foregrounding the “Vietnamese American community's resolute determination to hold on to the historical legacies of the war” insofar as it “stands as a powerful reminder of U.S. involvement and failure in Vietnam” (57–8, original emphasis), Lieu retrieves one vital aspect of buried histories while seeming to underplay its counterpart: South Vietnamese failures, leaving open the possibility of reconfigured victimhood (a position her subjects deny and assert in variant forms and forums). The desire not to be defined purely by war is vital as it fractures dominant American narratives but it is problematic in its implicit forgetfulness. Memories – in Lieu's introductory image opposition cited earlier – are or must be jettisoned because they paralyze and confine. Is the “first image” “of the despondent war-torn refugee” only constraining and can liberation from this image occur without working within and through the ideological baggage of history?

Questions of memory, history, and representation are at the heart of Isabelle Pelaud's sensitive study of Vietnamese American literature. Theorizing a relatively recent body of writings in terms of hybridity, Asian American contextualizations, fear, hope, and despair, Pelaud perceives literature as part of the struggle over memory and history, a type of corrective to dominant narrations: “For some, the act of writing itself is intimately linked with the wish to rectify social history, to serve as witnesses to the past, and to foster individual and collective healing and self-definition” (51). While deeply conscious of trauma and dislocation, Pelaud's analysis of Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala seems to posit an ameliorative, potentially teleological narrative trajectory as the narrator An returns to America after a trip to Vietnam: “This voluntary and new embrace of America mirrors a transformation from refugee to immigrant, an experience that is no longer defined by fears, but by trust in one's ability to control the present and the future” (85). The analytical and narrative agency restored is valuable but perhaps illusory and/or temporary in that it arises from an epiphanic moment in Pham's account where, swimming in Nha Trang with an old lady, the past is laid to rest and his “Americanness” validated.

That such validations may be tenuous at best is pointed out in Pelaud's analysis of Truong Tran's Dust and Conscience and Linh Dinh's Fake House. The narrator in the former resists the “voyeuristic gaze that looks at natives like animals in a zoo, and only so as to find resolution for a lost war” (110). This voyeurism applies as much to the American veteran in search of forgiveness as to the Viet Kieu questing for “home” or “roots,” and Tran's narrator is “detached from loss” but “without nostalgia and bitterness” (107). Dinh's stories, too, move beyond nostalgic frames, focussing instead on Vietnamese American disenfranchisement within the US and global structures of capital and labour. The predicament of Vietnamese American women in particular at “the bottom of an infernal transnational food chain” (112) is what makes Dinh's narratives distinctive and discomfiting.

In her excellent exegesis of reviewer bias and preconceived expectations, Pelaud contrasts the laudatory reception of Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and the denigration of Linh Dinh's Fake House. The former fulfils the desire to consume “exotic,” tractable Vietnam/ese while the latter is “dismissed for addressing the ruthless reality of life on the margins, which includes caricatures of offbeat white characters” (132). The discursive boundaries constitutive of “Vietnamese American” continue to be policed from within exclusivist, indeed exclusionary, positions (as Pelaud further points out in her discussion of Monique Truong's The Book of Salt) and the long shadow of the Vietnam War. In this context, Pelaud's question, “When will Vietnamese American literary texts be appreciated for their literary quality and not only for their origin?” (103), is pertinent at the same time as it posits a false dichotomy between politics and aesthetics. A more nuanced position is what she defines as the “politics of identity, politics of position” (104), wherein “origin,” while not absolutely determinative, cannot be entirely dismissed. Pelaud perceives in mainstream portraits of US involvement (such as The Deer Hunter) an absence of “the deep sense of abandonment and betrayal that South Vietnamese felt following the sudden departure of American forces from Viet Nam” (91). These erasures serve to present Americans as victims, but “abandonment and betrayal,” while perhaps legitimate in individuated loci, seem to simultaneously erase South Vietnamese collusion in US imperial projects in Vietnam. A parallel, almost competitive, victimhood is set up and the voices of South Vietnamese “others” inserted within a nation that desires “resolution.” The paradox, as Pelaud argues, is that the best Vietnamese American literature refuses such closure, victimhood, exoticizing, and erasure.

The American Dream in Vietnamese and This Is All I Choose to Tell are critically valuable interventions within the field of Vietnamese American studies, not merely within contexts of the Vietnam War and its memorial afterlife, but also within larger debates in Asian American representations related to ethnicity, immigration, gender, class, and the continual reconfiguration of recently (dis)integrated individual, political, and national selves. The fact that these analyses offer occasional iterations of Vietnamese victimhood and erasures of collusive pasts is indicative of precisely the interstitial spaces inhabited by former allies, defeated nationalists, refugees, and immigrants by turn. Within an economy of representations dominated by Hollywood and conservative revisionist histories, Vietnamese Americans stage, perform, and write not just their own pasts and futures but that of the nation they now call “home.”