ABSTRACT
The American wars in Viet Nam 1 and Iraq have been compared in geopolitical terms but rarely in terms of the refugees consequent to the wars. Between 1975 and 1989, nearly 700,000 Vietnamese became refugees to the United States; by 2010 the number of Vietnamese refugees, immigrants, and nativeborn and naturalized American citizens of Vietnamese descent exceeded 1.5 million (US General Accounting Offi ce 1990; US Census Bureau 2011). Since 2007, 64,000 Iraqis have been “resettled” in the United States (“Iraqi Refugee” 2012). What can the Vietnamese refugee experience elucidate about settling in the country responsible for the confl ict in one’s home country? In “Letter to a Young Refugee” (see the chapter-opening quote), former Vietnamese refugee and American journalist Andrew Lam laments this “limbo,” this unhomely position. “Unhomely” originates in Sigmund Freud’s unheimlich , or “everything that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light” (Bhabha 2000, 773). Homi Bhabha extends that into the “unhomely moment,” when the private, domestic space is infused by the public and political and, though discomfi ting, is revelatory (Bhabha 2000, 773). Migrants, Bhabha suggests, are attuned to these interstices that “provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhoodsingular or communal-that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defi ning the idea of society itself” (2000, 765). Although this terrain founds the migrant’s new, hybrid identity, “the migrant’s double vision” simultaneously reformulates the host nation’s identity (Bhabha 2000, 768). “The Western metropole,”
insists Bhabha, “must confront its postcolonial history, told by its infl ux of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity ” (2000, 769, emphasis in original).
