ABSTRACT
There are many works of literature, film, and theatre that address the Vietnam War, but relatively few of them look beyond the political divisions and traumatic memories involving white Americans. However, the civil wars and U.S. military interventions in Southeast Asia effected unprecedented changes in Asian America, as hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong were displaced. Acknowledging these events, this chapter compares three examples of theatre by Hmong American, Cambodian American, and Vietnamese American writers in order to reflect upon the ways that legacies of wartime continue to mold Southeast Asian American experiences in the United States. These productions-May Lee-Yang’s Sia(b), Jolie Chea’s Refugee Acts: Articulating Silences through Critical Remembering and Re-Membering, and Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone-both stabilize and unsettle ideas about family, home, and national belonging. Each of these plays unpacks a different approach to how refugees might understand and perform what is past or present, and how those memories inform what “home” means.
