This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (iii)

from critic Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and ethnic studies

This is All I Choose to Tell offers an analytical introduction to Vietnamese American literature, and delineates the historical, social, and cultural terrains from which the writings emerge and critics read and interpret them.

The author, speaking for the book, offers. The verb that came to mind in Vietnamese is mời, as the host gestures to the table of prepared dishes. Then I recall a professor of Vietnamese literature in Paris saying je vous propose, conjuring a plan of action.

Neither is a command but refusal would withdraw abruptly from the work already done for you: an analytic introduction to Vietnamese American literature. Analysis breaks things down. Introduction leads inside.

The Army instructor stands in front of the soldiers and recites the parts of the rifle while pulling the weapon’s insides out. You learn them to clean, load, and fire.

Just so, analysis introduces the workings of Vietnamese American literature, writings that emerge and critics who read and interpret them. The book delineates, that is, outlines down to the ground, terrains where these activities take place.

Here you go, the author has written, speaking for the book, and you now read to yourself. I have broken it down for you and led you inside. I have drawn you a map.

Although Vietnamese Americans established a presence in America more than thirty-five years ago, this is the first book-length study of their literature.

This is All I Choose to Tell engages with the material, political, and historical production of differences that stands in stark contrast to a multiculturalism that asserts representationality for all.

My own Viet Nam letters concern a nation that has occasioned points of view that do not countenance each other, that do not agree that any other exists let alone to disagree. Those incommensurabilities are what I gauge and measure here.

I am a child of the great war for France, the labor movement of the boom of the 20s and the bust of the 30s, the New Deal, the popular front against fascism, the United Nations,

the Fellowship of Reconciliation, victory in the long freedom movement, the beginning of the one against the end of life on earth, ten years of struggle to get the United States out of Vietnamese affairs,

all the national and personal liberations that so at last got out of the bag, and then reconciliation with the Vietnamese Communist Party. We all on my side do not agree or like each other. That is the point. I think we all have benefited from the new courtesy this century but I see the multiculturalism

I hear about as a new whiteness, bland oppression over real difference. I see my literature, what I call Viet Nam letters, in stark contrast to a multiculturalism that asserts representationality for all,

rather a place for all to be rude as possible in their representations. The author and I are on the same page. I bet we disagree about that.

The book is divided in two parts. The first, which includes three chapters, speaks toward the “inclusion” of Vietnamese American literary studies in academia and of Vietnamese American literature in American culture.

After setting the larger context in which Vietnamese American literature is produced, Part Two, “Interpretation,” deepens the analysis.

After you learn to take the weapon apart and put it back together again, you get to watch them shoot. What are the targets?

The fifth chapter examines two books from different genres that expressly work against audience expectations, though they arrive at opposite points of view, one emphasizing hope and the other despair.

The four books analyzed in those two chapters explicitly or implicitly address the enormous pressures of being associated with the Viet Nam War.

Tell me about it.

Inspired by those who fought hard to institute ethnic studies programs forty years ago, This is All I Choose to Tell covers the issues I see as relevant to this body of work, even if they might elicit discomfort among readers.

Rock on.

This was the third Viet Nam letter addressing Isabelle Thuy Pelaud’s This is All I Choose to Tell. The first went out April 11, 2022 and the second went out May 11, 2022.

The fourth posted on September 5, 2022 and the fifth on October 19, 2022.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of Viet Nam letters is a thumbnail version of a photograph of me speaking on a Veterans Day with the novelist David A. Willson.