Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Maternal Becoming In The Vietnamese Transdiaspora: Kim Thúy’s Ru (2012) And Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017)

Maternal Becoming In The Vietnamese Transdiaspora: Kim Thúy’s Ru (2012) And Thi Bui’s The Best We... Kim Thúy and Thi Bui fled Vietnam with their families in 1975 and 1978, respectively, in the midst of the Vietnam War, a conflict that pushed hundreds of thousands of people from the country. These women authors are part of the 1.5 generation—they were born in Vietnam, left before adulthood, and are the children of refugees. In my comparative analysis of the authors’ first publications, I show how the two texts reveal their authors’ specific interventions related to transdiasporic identity-formation (an identity-formation that that resists home and homeland, that is ambiguous and shape-shifting, and that is outside of time and place) and to maternal becoming (a process of shape-shifting maternal development characterized by fluidity). I argue maternal becoming allows the protagonists of these texts to travel across time, revisit, reread and revise their ideas about their mothers, and discover an identity that relies on fluidity and time travel. In other words, these women authors suggest maternal becoming transforms the “postmemorial retrieval” process of their protagonists, a retrieval required of them because of their position as members of the 1.5 generation (Kurmann and Do 2018a). Motherhood nudges the protagonists toward self-discovery that is prompted by a “recuperative reading” of the mothers who raised them (Kaplan 1994). http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Diaspora A Journal of Transnational Studies University of Toronto Press

Maternal Becoming In The Vietnamese Transdiaspora: Kim Thúy’s Ru (2012) And Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017)

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-toronto-press/maternal-becoming-in-the-vietnamese-transdiaspora-kim-th-y-s-ru-2012-Ku6JSPjWB9

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Copyright
© Zoryan Institute
ISSN
1044-2057
eISSN
1911-1568
DOI
10.3138/diaspora.22.2.2022.05.24
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Kim Thúy and Thi Bui fled Vietnam with their families in 1975 and 1978, respectively, in the midst of the Vietnam War, a conflict that pushed hundreds of thousands of people from the country. These women authors are part of the 1.5 generation—they were born in Vietnam, left before adulthood, and are the children of refugees. In my comparative analysis of the authors’ first publications, I show how the two texts reveal their authors’ specific interventions related to transdiasporic identity-formation (an identity-formation that that resists home and homeland, that is ambiguous and shape-shifting, and that is outside of time and place) and to maternal becoming (a process of shape-shifting maternal development characterized by fluidity). I argue maternal becoming allows the protagonists of these texts to travel across time, revisit, reread and revise their ideas about their mothers, and discover an identity that relies on fluidity and time travel. In other words, these women authors suggest maternal becoming transforms the “postmemorial retrieval” process of their protagonists, a retrieval required of them because of their position as members of the 1.5 generation (Kurmann and Do 2018a). Motherhood nudges the protagonists toward self-discovery that is prompted by a “recuperative reading” of the mothers who raised them (Kaplan 1994).

Journal

Diaspora A Journal of Transnational StudiesUniversity of Toronto Press

Published: Sep 1, 2022

Keywords: Vietnam; refugee; maternal becoming; Thi Bui; Kim Thúy; transdiaspora

References