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Seashore

Research


Book Project
Nonarrival: Vietnam and the Vanishing Points of Diaspora

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The Boat of No Smiles, 1977. AP Photo. 

This ongoing book project examines the histories of post-1975 Vietnam’s heterogeneous and multiethnic diasporas through the nation’s various “vanishing points”: the interethnic violence, political censorship, disappearances, and deathworlds that comprise the narrative margins of postwar histories from Vietnamese, American, and Asian American perspectives. Focusing on the two decades following the fall of the Central Highlands in 1975, the manuscript explores the dangerous environments and social conditions that propelled people to cross borders and seas in search of an elusive freedom, and the methods by which states, policies, and even other refugees could betray them at each turn. 
 
Turning to multi-sited and multi-lingual sources from institutional and community archives in the United States, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, the project charts the localized consequences of war, political oppression, and authoritarianism to foreground histories without national arrival. Challenging diaspora narratives that frequently position refugees within temporal (refugee-to-resettlement) or spatial (homeland-to-asylum) teleologies, the book pivots instead to vanishing points in the historical record—the Indigenous ethnic minorities and non-elites abandoned during the Fall of Saigon, those captured or left behind in Vietnam between 1975 and 1996, and refugees who found their final refuge on Southeast Asian coasts.

 
Nonarrival, as both theory and method, is accountable to the dead, the disappeared, and the unwanted who have fallen victim to ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism, racist bordering regimes, economic deprivations, political repression, and extralegal violence. In registering these nonarrivals, the book seeks to denaturalize the relationship between refugees and resettlement, turning instead to the contingencies of migration as they are lived and shaped by those beyond borders and states.

Works in-progress  

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 and co-ethnic collaboration.

Second Book Project
Unseaworthy: The Material Histories of Boat Migration

This second book project returns to the site of the boat to uncover the material history of maritime technologies from the French colonial period to the American occupation and into the "boat people" migrations from postwar Vietnam. It traces how French colonial nautical ethnography and American military knowledge regimes not only documented and racialized Indochinese vessels, but also produced the technical and infrastructural conditions that later shaped refugee escape routes and possibilities at sea. By examining the connective threads between these imperial archives and refugee flight, the project shows how colonial and Cold War interventions transformed local boatbuilding traditions, linking them directly to the emergence of refugee boats. Closely analyzing differential regional boatbuilding cultures and technologies—from hull design to navigation practices—and the instruments that facilitated movement (i.e., engines, petrol, gold, maps, and food), the study demonstrates how these materials enable a more precise understanding of refugee migrations across the South China Sea. Drawing on U.S. military documents, colonial records, refugee oral histories, and surviving material artifacts, the project ultimately foregrounds the improvisational and embodied knowledge through which refugees survived the dangers of the open ocean. 

 

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