Week 8 Prompt: Narrative of Vietnamese Refugees

In her article "Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US
Scholarship", Yen Le Espiritu critically analyzes the role of Vietnamese Americans in the US
society and contrasts reality with the traditional views of Vietnamese Americans as refugees of
war. She lists three dominant narratives that explains and reconstructs the idea of "refugee" as a
term that "critically call into question the relationship between war, race, and violence, then and
now" as opposed to "a stage for the (re)production of American identities and for the shoring up
of US militarism." (Espiritu, 411) The first narrative she touched upon is the construction of the
"model minority" as Vietnamese refugees are viewed as desperate-turned-successful examples of
the "American Dream". Later on in the second section of the article, Espiritu explains the spread
of Asian American consciousness and its social and political effects on the Vietnamese
Americans. Lastly, the idea of "refugee" is redefined as Espiritu examines the Vietnamese
Americans' role in the war and how memories of events define and change through generations.
The construction of "model minority", Espiritu argued, began with the view of
Vietnamese refugees as victims. "However well-intentioned, this crisis model, which fixates on
the refugees' purported fragile psychological and emotional state, discursively constructs
Vietnamese as 'passive, immobilized, and pathetic'." (Espiritu, 411) This effectively demonstrates
how Vietnamese are viewed as people who are to be pitied and thus in some aspects inferior to
the average American. This label of inferiority was then fully utilized by the American society
through arguing that undesirable jobs are better suited to these desperate refugee. Then, by
contrasting Vietnamese workers with other workers of color, they are used as a tool to rebut the
civil rights movements by claiming that hard work and selfless sacrifices are all that is needed
for success despite the fact that Vietnamese workers are stuck in low-paying dead-end jobs that

require them to work long hours. These effects, stemmed from the "model minority", works
against both sides by degrading blacks and Hispanics as "underclass minorities" and also
perpetuates the isolation and alleged inferiority of Vietnamese Americans.
This idea of "model minority" itself does not only negatively affect the black and
Hispanic racial groups, but also has a backlash on the Vietnamese community itself. They were
included in the pan-Asian American community on a "differential inclusion" basis where "[a]s an
example, given the availability of government funding for disadvantaged groups, many Asian
American agencies eagerly welcome the refugees into the pan-Asian fold, but often without
tending to the social, political, and economical inequalities that exist within and between their
communities." (Espiritu, 418) Although Vietnamese Americans were viewed as a part of the
model minority, within the Asian American group as a whole, they were viewed as a lower caste
compared to the dominant group of Chinese and Japanese Americans, and therefore are subjected
to inequalities and prejudice within the Asian American community.
Finally, the narrative of the "refugee" is discussed in the article; what is viewed by
spectators as the most predominantly defining narrative for Vietnamese Americans, Espiritu
argued, should be imbued "with social and political critiques -- this is, to conceptualize 'the
refugee' not as an object of investigation, but rather as a paradigm 'whose function [is] to
establish and make intelligible a wider set of problems.'" (Espiritu, 421) In respect of the "model
minority" idea, the refugee narrative is able to demonstrate the method through which the
American society utilizes constructed ideas to oppress minority groups by isolated examples.
Works Cited
Espiritu, Yen Le. "Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US
Scholarship," Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, nos. 1-2 (2006): 410-33.