Research

Book Project:

Nonarrival: Histories of Drift and Disappearance After the Vietnam War

The Boat of No Smiles, 1977. AP Photo.

Nonarrival: Histories of Drift and Disappearance After the Vietnam War tells a vernacular history of the Vietnamese diaspora through the movement of people into, out of, and across the watery expanse of the South China Sea. Focusing on the two decades following the fall of the Central Highlands in 1975, the book explores the dangerous environments and social conditions that propelled people to vượt biên—to cross borders and seas—and the historical processes that shaped them into refugees, economic migrants, illegal immigrants, and boat people.

Turning to oral histories, Vietnamese-language texts and sources, and institutional and community archives both within and outside the United States, the project charts the localized consequences of war, empire, political oppression, and authoritarianism as a way to emphasize histories without arrival. Challenging state-centric narratives that frequently position boat refugees within temporal (refugee to resettlement) or spatial (homeland to asylum) trajectories, which privilege survivorship and linear mobility, the book turns instead to ellipses in the historical record—the people abandoned during the Fall of Saigon, those caught or left behind in the homeland between 1975 and 1992, unfinished journeys at sea, and cases of boat pushback and forced repatriation in Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong.

Through various case studies that follow refugees both through and beyond the fray of Vietnam-US migration patterns, the chapters attend to surplus and non-hagiographic histories that liquefy the borders of nation-states and diasporas, elevating a radical critique of systems that perpetuate global refugee conditions by preempting personhood and livability. "Nonarrival," as both theory and method, is accountable to the dead, the disappeared, and the uncounted who have fallen victim to ethnic cleansing, racist bordering regimes, economic deprivations, political suppression, and extralegal violence. In registering these non-arrivals, the book seeks to denaturalize the relationship between refugees and resettlement, turning instead to the contingencies of migration as they are shaped by people, borders, boats, and states.

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Works in-progress

Forget Her Not: Piracy, Activism, and the Search for Missing Women
Zooming in to the height of the Vietnamese refugee exodus in the late 1970s and 1980s, this project focuses on the incredibly fraught and violent histories of piracy, kidnapping, and assault in the South China Sea and the efforts of diasporic organizations to stop the horrors of sexual violence on the international stage. Drawing on the archives of Boat People S.O.S., the letters and messages transmitted to Voice of Vietnamese Radio, and digital and fundraising campaigns to locate kidnapped women and children in Thailand, I map a transnational history of community activism that sutures together loss across multiple scales—from juridical erasure and state suppression to archival decay. At the nexus of these various reproductions of violence, I argue, is the abstraction of refugee rape as an exceptional aberrance to liberalized state order, rather than a convergence of regional humanitarian neglect and extralegal economies of refugee women's commodification under racial capitalism.

Book Chapter
Vietnamese Refugee Fishing: Labor, Displacement, and Livelihood Strategies on the Gulf Coast
In this chapter to an anthology on Stories of Refugeeness on the Gulf Coast, I historicize the life-making practices and survival strategies employed by Vietnamese American fisherfolk during and following their displacement from war, political persecution, and economic devastation. Drawing on archival newspapers and oral histories recorded between 2009 and 2013 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Oral History and Heritage, I explore how fishing as a mode of labor and livelihood is transformed and/or reinvigorated as Vietnamese fishers transition their practice from Vietnam to the U.S. Gulf South. In particular, this chapter concentrates on the livelihood strategies that allowed refugee fisherfolk to circumvent the numerous cultural, economic, and racial barriers they encountered after resettlement, and how they navigated these challenges through a latticework of mutual aid, co-ethnic collaboration, and self-determination.