ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the multiple ways in which Andrew Lam's work explores the tension between stasis and mobility in the life of many viet kieu. The protagonist in Lam's essay apparently engages in what the author calls, back-to-the-roots tourism. The intriguing possibilities and transformational nature of the prefix trans, which we can find in different neologisms, have been explored by diverse critics in several fields but it is the preference of the term transnational over alternative ones that interests us here. In contrast to the synchronic approach to the roots/routes dialectics, the author argues for approaching Lam's texts diachronically, as a patchwork of synchronic moments that constitute history of the development of many Vietnamese Americans. Both narratives of return, the one just analyzed and the one discussed, seem to echo the misleadingly stable roots/routes dichotomy. Conversely, Lam's self-figuration as a cosmopolitan traveler can be interpreted within the framework of "discrepant cosmopolitanism" or "minor transnationalism".
