"The Nationhood of Vietnamese America" Wins Southeast Asia Digital Library Paper Competition

I took Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Southeast Asia in tandem with a Vietnamese language course, and the class impelled me to reflect on my own identity while engaging in intensive study of the language and its many facets. I was surrounded by people in both classes who came from the same, or a tangential, cultural background as me.

Really stepping into the academic side of my culture, with these people’s perspectives, allowed me to write things that felt personal, rather than purely academic.

My Vietnamese language professor, Professor Quang Phu Van, encouraged our class to attend Council events. Professor David Thang Moe is also very involved with the Council on Southeast Asia Studies. Both professors urged us to participate, and while I had always been interested, I hadn’t had a community to attend those events with before. I became engaged with the Council because of the people I surrounded myself with.

Erik Harms, who chairs the Council on Southeast Asia Studies, is an anthropologist. I met him a few times during my sophomore year, when I was becoming more interested in anthropology, and I found his research fascinating. That was another incentive for me to start showing up.

That’s a tough one. I can describe it not through definition, but through description. When communities migrate from an origin country, they carry over the origin country’s culture of that time. Time continues to move as normal in the origin country, but it seems to freeze wherever that community moved to. The diaspora retains the culture from the instance of their move. That’s cultural freeze.

“How does who we say we are influence who we are?” This question of personal identity, which I explored in my paper, stems directly from my upbringing.

My dad immigrated to the United States when he was about 11 or 12, and my mom came much later, at almost 20. Their approaches to assimilation into a community they knew as refuge, rather than home, were very different and deeply interesting to me.

That question of identity, the immigrant experience, and what it means to be oneself in a new place continues to shape not only this paper, but my broader academic work as well.

I have visited Vietnam three times in my life. The first was when I was very young.

The second time was during my junior year of high school. My paper described my family member saying, “Well, you're not Vietnamese, you're American. Those are two different things.” That was the first instance where I thought, “[My culture] is something different.”

I went for the most recent time this past summer to do ethnography. I'm 100% Vietnamese, but people spoke to me in English and tensed up in my presence. I stuck out like a sore thumb, which I did not expect. The way I dressed was different, the way I looked was different.

My ethnographic methods necessitated being a fly on the wall, and I couldn't be. It’s because over time, I've picked up on so much that isn't what they would view as Vietnamese. I would be told, “You sound like my grandma.”

It's as if somebody came up to you and started speaking in a Transatlantic accent. Not only were they experiencing that with me, but I was also experiencing that with them.

Having to blend into a culture that I viewed as mine was really, really difficult for me. We're not supposed to be oil and water; we are actually from the same place.

I grew up deeply immersed in Vietnamese culture: I speak the language fluently, I eat all the food, and yet, that's not enough. Why?

I think that it's not only these aspects of identity that matter. It's also the aspect of being recognized for that identity by others. That perception needs to be acted on for it to be valid.