front cover of The American Dream in Vietnamese
The American Dream in Vietnamese
Nhi T. Lieu
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
In her research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, Nhi T. Lieu explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ideals and consumer capitalism prior to arriving in the United States, postwar Vietnamese refugees endeavored to assimilate and live the American Dream. In The American Dream in Vietnamese, she claims that nowhere are these fantasies played out more vividly than in the Vietnamese American entertainment industry.

Lieu examines how live music variety shows and videos, beauty pageants, and Web sites created by and for Vietnamese Americans contributed to the shaping of their cultural identity. She shows how popular culture forms repositories for conflicting expectations of assimilation, cultural preservation, and invention, alongside gendered and classed dimensions of ethnic and diasporic identity.

The American Dream in Vietnamese demonstrates how the circulation of images manufactured by both Americans and Vietnamese immigrants serves to produce these immigrants’ paradoxical desires. Within these desires and their representations, Lieu finds the dramatization of the community’s struggle to define itself against the legacy of the refugee label, a classification that continues to pathologize their experiences in American society.
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Becoming Refugee American
The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon
Phuong Nguyen
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Vietnamese refugees fleeing the fall of South Vietnam faced a paradox. The same guilt-ridden America that only reluctantly accepted them expected, and rewarded, expressions of gratitude for their rescue. Meanwhile, their status as refugees—as opposed to willing immigrants—profoundly influenced their cultural identity.

Phuong Tran Nguyen examines the phenomenon of refugee nationalism among Vietnamese Americans in Southern California. Here, the residents of Little Saigon keep alive nostalgia for the old regime and, by extension, their claim to a lost statehood. Their refugee nationalism is less a refusal to assimilate than a mode of becoming, in essence, a distinct group of refugee Americans. Nguyen examines the factors that encouraged them to adopt this identity. His analysis also moves beyond the familiar rescue narrative to chart the intimate yet contentious relationship these Vietnamese Americans have with their adopted homeland. Nguyen sets their plight within the context of the Cold War, an era when Americans sought to atone for broken promises but also saw themselves as providing a sanctuary for people everywhere fleeing communism.

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Behind the Bamboo Hedge
The Impact of the Homeland Politics in the Parisian Vietnamese Community
Gisele L. Bousquet
University of Michigan Press, 1991
Studies the critical role homeland politics plays in Vietnamese immigrants' assimilation into the host society
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Filipino Tapestry Audio Supplement
To accompany Filipino Tapestry, Tagalog Language through Culture
Rhodalyne Gallo-Crail and Michael Hawkins
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
This audio CD is a central component of the lessons in the textbook Filipino Tapestry, which offers an innovative approach to learning language by emphasizing the critical intersection of language and culture. Together, the book and CD provide activities and exercises that immerse beginning and intermediate students of Filipino language in a variety of authentic situations to simulate an in-country experience. The audio CD contains clear, concise, authentic dialogues of native Filipino speakers. The tracks are designed to convey actual conversations in relevant cultural contexts.
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Filipino Tapestry
Tagalog Language through Culture
Rhodalyne Gallo-Crail
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

An official language of the Philippines, Filipino is based on Tagalog, with elements of Spanish, English, and Chinese mixed in. The result is a rich, expressive language spoken in the Philippines and throughout the far-reaching Filipino diaspora.
    Filipino Tapestry offers an innovative approach to learning language by emphasizing the critical intersection of language and culture. It provides activities and exercises that immerse beginning and intermediate students of Filipino in a variety of authentic situations to simulate an in-country experience. Starting with chapters on such topics as family, friends, and home, it then expands the student’s world in chapters prompting conversation about food, shopping, parties, and pastimes. Its later chapters push learners to discuss city and country life, cultural traditions, religion, history, and politics.
    Features include:
•    background chapters on phonology, sentence construction, and common expressions
•    photos and cultural notes about chapter themes
•    grammar, reading, listening, and speaking exercises
•    glossaries of words and additional expressions

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Linguistic Diversity and National Unity
Language Ecology in Thailand
William A. Smalley
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Unlike other multi-ethnic nations, such as Myanmar and India, where official language policy has sparked bloody clashes, Thailand has maintained relative stability despite its eighty languages. In this study of the relations among politics, geography, and language, William A. Smalley shows how Thailand has maintained national unity through an elaborate social and linguistic hierarchy.

Smalley contends that because the people of Thailand perceive their social hierarchy as the normal order, Standard Thai, spoken by members of the higher levels of society, prevails as the uncontested national language. By examining the hierarchy of Thailand's diverse languages and dialects in light of Thai history, education, culture, and religion, Smalley shows how Thailand has been able to keep its many ethnic groups at peace.

Linguistic Diversity and National Unity explores the intricate relationship between language and power and the ways in which social and linguistic rank can be used to perpetuate order.
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Rice and Baguette
A History of Food in Vietnam
Vu Hong Lien
Reaktion Books, 2016
The once-obscure cuisine of Vietnam is, today, a favorite for many people from East to West. Adapted and modified over thousands of years, it is probably best known as a particularly delicious result of combining traditional southeast Asian cookery with visible outside influences—notably, the crunchy baguette—from its French-occupied past. Drawing on archeological evidence, oral and written histories, and wide-ranging research, Vu Hong Lien tells the complex and surprising history of food in Vietnam.
            Rice and Baguette traces the prehistoric Việt’s progress from hunter-gathers of mollusks and small animals to sophisticated agriculturalists. The book follows them as they developed new tools and practices to perfect the growing of their crops until rice became a crucial commodity,which then irrevocably changed their diet, lifestyle, and social structure. Along the way, the author shows how Việt cuisine was dramatically influenced by French colonial cookery and products, which introduced a whole new set of ingredients and techniques into Vietnam. Beautifully illustrated throughout and peppered with fascinating historical tales, Rice and Baguette reveals the long journey that Vietnamese food has traveled to become the much-loved cuisine that it is today.
 
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Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies
History, Community, and Memory
Edited by Linda Ho Peché, Alex-Thai Dinh Vo, and Tuong Vu
Temple University Press, 2023

The large number of Vietnamese refugees that resettled in the United States since the fall of Saigon have become America’s fastest growing immigrant group. Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies traces the ideologies, networks, and cultural sensibilities that have long influenced and continue to transform social, political, and economic developments in Vietnam and the U.S.

Moving beyond existing approaches, the editors and contributors to this volume—the first to craft a working framework for researching, teaching, and learning about this dynamic community—present a new Vietnamese American historiography that began in South Vietnam. They provide deep-dive explorations into community development, political activism, civic participation and engagement, as well as entrepreneurial endeavors. Chapters offer new concepts and epistemological approaches to how legacy and memory is nurtured, produced and circulated in the Vietnamese diaspora.

Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies seeks to better understand the rapidly changing landscape of Vietnamese American diaspora.

Contributors: Duyen Bui, Christian Collet, Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox, Elwing Suong Gonzalez, Tuan Hoang, Jennifer A. Huynh, Y Thien Nguyen, Nguyen Vu Hoang, Van Nguyen-Marshall, Thien-Huong Ninh, Hai-Dang Phan, Ivan V. Small, Quan Tue Tran, Thuy Vo Dang, and the editors

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Warring Visions
Photography and Vietnam
Thy Phu
Duke University Press, 2021
In Warring Visions, Thy Phu explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to complicate narratives of conflict and memory. While the visual history of the Vietnam War has been dominated by American documentaries and war photography, Phu turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese themselves, capturing a range of subjects, occasions, and perspectives. Phu's concept of warring visions refers to contrasts in the use of war photos in North Vietnam, which highlighted national liberation and aligned themselves with an international audience, and those in South Vietnam, which focused on family and everyday survival. Phu also uses warring visions to enlarge the category of war photography, a genre that usually consists of images illustrating the immediacy of combat and the spectacle of violence, pain, and wounded bodies. She pushes this genre beyond such definitions by analyzing pictures of family life, weddings, and other quotidian scenes of life during the war. Phu thus expands our understanding of how war is waged, experienced, and resolved.
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