ABSTRACT
Although the Vietnamese community in Germany is a group of migrants with diverse backgrounds such as boat people, former contract workers, free immigrants and students, their diaspora literature has never been thoroughly studied as a cultural heritage of the immigrant community. The two issues that I focus on in this chapter are: (1) how the memories of crossing borders are reproduced traumatically in diasporic Vietnamese literature; and (2) how the creation of homeland, i.e. Vietnam, is represented ambivalently in the writing. Varied interpretations of the diaspora, both as a social form and as a type of consciousness, also allow me to consider the representations of memory in relation to identity and to figure out the diasporas’ struggles to define their identities through diasporic narratives of memory.
