Refugee Afterlives: Home, Hauntings, and Hunger

This book compares fiction and non-fiction written by two generations of the Vietnamese diaspora, the so-called 1.5 and second generation in France and Canada, namely, Kim Thúy, Doan Bui, Clément Baloup, Hoai Huong Nguyen and Viet Thanh Nguyen (USA) as they grapple with their positionality as refugee(s’) children and the attendant problematics of loss. How they recuperate this loss by deploying notions such as home, hauntings and hunger is central to this analysis. Refugee Afterlives identifies the tools deployed by the 1.5 and second generation, tests their limits while understanding that these writers’ creations are constantly changing and shifting paradigms and will continue to be so over the next decades. Each writer is finding their own voice and pathway(s) and while these may sometimes overlap and contain commonalities, afterlives by default imply plurality and differences. This book offers ways of examining these texts, juxtaposing them, contrasting them, putting them in dialogue with each other, underlining their differences, but ultimately demonstrating that there is much to be gained in seeing how 1.5ers and the so-called second generation Vietnamese refugee writers contribute to a wider discussion of Vietnamese refugee(s’) children and what happens to them after resettlement.