In Treacherous subjects, Lan Duong does what most Asian Americanists studiously avoid, that is, she engages in sharp criticism of nationalism in so-called ‘homeland’ and community politics. Her ambitious new book provides a courageous and much-needed gender analysis of Vietnamese, Vietnamese-American and French-Vietnamese literature and film, hopefully paving the way for new scholarship that looks across national borders. This approach should prove particularly fruitful in analysing Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic cultural productions. Not only does it disrupt the borders placed by the institutionalisation of Asian Studies and Asian American Studies and the ideological divide between Vietnam and refugee communities abroad, it also reveals the impact of the legacy of colonisation and American imperialism on women and the stories they produce. Such complex comparative examination creates new ways of conceptualising Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic identities.
The tensions created by having to side with one ideology or the decision to stay or leave Vietnam continues to haunt Vietnamese and those living in the diaspora. Lan Duong begins the book with a personal story to indicate her positionality. Her father was labelled a collaborator of ‘Vietnam's colonial and Cold War enemies’ by the Vietnamese because he left Vietnam as a refugee in 1975, while her mother was considered loyal because she stayed behind. Both suffered tremendous loss as the family was separated. The themes of loyalty and ‘treason’ are most relevant to Vietnamese and refugee Vietnamese in the diaspora. Trust or the inability to trust still pervades family and community dynamics as Duong argues, collective anxiety surrounds the impossibility or inability to remain faithful to one ideology or commitment, as historical and traumatic events unfold. These anxieties, she firmly shows, are overwhelmingly projected onto the bodies of women. Accusations of treason do not reflect reality, but point instead she says to the perceived interest in strengthening alliances for the purpose of nation or community building.
In this book, Lan Duong specifically examines the impact of what she calls ‘the trauma of betrayal’ marking Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic subjectivities. Although these are characterised by divided loyalties and shifting alliances, she carefully points out that these are ‘not fixed and tend to fluctuate with economic and political relations between countries. Duong uncovers double meanings in collaborative postwar Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic literary and filmic representations, most interestingly in cultural works around the theme of treasonous collaboration. Duong specifically asks: ‘Why is the collaborator figure so often a woman?’ Highlighting the recurrent figure of the prostitute in literature and films, she gestures for instance, to the discrepancy between the reception men and women diasporic artists have received. Vietnamese-French male director Tran Anh Hung (with his movies The scent of green papaya and Cyclo) and Vietnamese-American filmmaker Tony Bui (Yellow lotus and Three seasons) present women as self-sacrificing for the nation, and both have been acclaimed in the community. However, female Vietnamese-American author Le Ly Hayslip and Vietnamese French writer Linda Le, who have criticised the idealisation of women and family in the figures of the concubine and prostitute, have been denigrated as traitors. According to Duong, such difference in reception points originates with the notion of female figures as ‘outsiders’ to enable patriarchal and nationalist ‘collective solidarity’ (p. 3). The trope of the family strengthens the condemnation of collaborative work as a form of treason.
Duong's trans-Vietnamese feminist lens is significant because it allows a firm criticism of hetero-patriarchal nationalism that maintains itself by demonising collaboration and denigrating women's artistic work. Collaboration, Duong ultimately argues, is actually an important feminist practice needed to fight traditional notions of gender, family, and nation, and de-centres what she calls interdependent ‘nationalist notions of the family and familial notions of the nation’ (p. 3). Her analysis complicates ‘Western feminist scholarships on Vietnamese women’ that tend to focus on women's rights. The attention she gives to the negotiations women have to make in the context of nationalism and patriarchy, but also the contradictions of modernity, racial hierarchies, class and normative sexuality, is crucial to understanding the dialectical relationship existing between history, social contexts and cultural productions. As minority artists, Vietnamese artists of the diapora, for example, had to collaborate with Vietnamese at home for their works to be published or shown on screen, at the cost of being treated as traitors by their communities. Attention to such forms of negotiations and agencies move readers away from the fixed framework of loyal heroine vs. treacherous collaborator. The transnational and feminist aspect of Duong's work effectively brings to light dynamics of gender, transnational, race, class and sexuality that would otherwise be unnoticed.
