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Vietnam is a country, not a war-traumaand nostalgia in the anthology ThePerfume RiverHoa Phama
a University of Western SydneyPublished online: 03 Jan 2014.
To cite this article: Hoa Pham (2013) Vietnam is a country, not a war-trauma and nostalgia in theanthology The Perfume River, Creative Industries Journal, 6:1, 17-27
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CIJ 6 (1) pp. 17–27 Intellect Limited 2013
Creative Industries Journal Volume 6 Number 1
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/cij.6.1.17_1
Hoa PHamUniversity of Western Sydney
Vietnam is a country, not a
war- trauma and nostalgia in
the anthology The Perfume
River
abstract
Vietnam is a country not a war. But the Vietnam/American war is hard to forget in the Western context; even almost 40 years on, many Western introductions to Vietnam is through American war veteran movies and musicals like Miss Saigon. The scholarship on Vietnamese diasporic literature is similarly limited with only one major monograph. This is what I choose to tell by Isabelle Pelaud published in 2010 about Vietnamese diasporic writing in English. So the question must be asked who is creating Vietnam in the Western context? Vietnamese diasporic writers, I argue, are driven by ethics, partly due to the trauma suffered by the diasporic communities and partly because of the importance placed in Vietnam on the literature. By contrast, many Western perceptions of Vietnam are driven by nostalgia and orientalism, of a colonial past. This article will critique the anthology The Perfume River edited by Catherine Cole, which was released in 2010. It will look at short stories by Nam Le, Chi Vu and Catherine Cole.
Keywords
The Perfume River Nam LeChi VuVietnamese diasporic
writingCatherine Coletraumanostalgia
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IntroductIon
The power relations between Vietnam, a ‘third-world’ country, and America and Australia, ‘first-world countries’, cannot be ignored in reading or writing texts about Vietnam. These relations can be seen as depicted in Western main-stream war entertainment where America is seen as a big brother to Southern Vietnam. Vietnamese American stories are viewed as a ‘thorn in the side’ of the American psyche, representing the failure of its military ambitions (Pelaud 2010: 20). The relative scarcity of representation of the South Vietnamese who fought on the side of the Americans can be perceived as the inability of the superpower to acknowledge those they had left behind (Pelaud 2010:20). Cole has speculated that the dearth of Vietnam as a topic in published works in English in Australia during the first decade after the war was a sign of wanting to forget (Cole 2010: xii).
L. Hutcheon theorizes that history and fiction share narration and subjec-tivity in common (Hutcheon 1988:112), with history being discontinuous with paradoxes between the public and historical, and the private and biographical, as is fiction. The fiction written by Vietnamese diasporic writers appears to be driven by two imperatives, an ethical sense of conscience to portray the trau-mas in the Vietnamese diasporic communities and the importance placed on the literature in Vietnamese culture. These individual accounts often go against the grain of official Vietnamese and Western government discourses about the war. Pham Thi Hoai, an exiled Vietnamese writer residing in Berlin, said:
I come from a civilization which is marked by literature. There literature carries more responsibility for the social life than a mother with her new born child, more missions than a liberation army, more ties than blood connections and can create more miracles than magical power. There literature is a moral … and as a moral it has to be more than art.
(Pham 1993)
When Vietnamese diasporic authors write, they cannot help but be aware of mainstream representations. Vietnamese diasporic texts cannot be read in isolation of mainstream stories such as ‘The Quiet American’ and ‘Miss Saigon’, which portray Vietnamese women as beautiful and passive and Vietnamese men as effeminate and powerless – orientalism at its worst. It falls to them to write with a conscience (Pelaud 2010; Nguyen 2002; Vu 2010), sometimes to deconstruct these stereotypes and at other times to demonstrate the heterogeneity of Vietnamese experience. Writing then becomes a political act, in representing an alternative voice to the mainstream. Fiction becomes a ‘moral’, as described by Hoai, and becomes more than art.
Pelaud describes this sort of ethical storytelling as a deliberate conscious act to write against the mainstream, what some commentators have described as counter-memory (Nguyen 2002). History is seen as discontinu-ous and polyphonic, rather than having one defined truth (Hutcheon 1988) and ethical storytelling would be aware of the heterogeneity of people’s experiences.
Vietnamese American literature in English carries the implications that those who are writing it are already in a position of educated privilege in order to write in the nation’s tongue. They run the risk of expressing dominant views, which commentators such as Russell Leong are aware of in their academic work and their fiction.
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‘Vietnamese American literature rests at the juncture of various axes of power that contradict, coincide, silence or enhance the possibilities …of its expression’ (Pelaud 2010:11).
Counter-memory goes against the mainstream dominant memories of an event, stories going against the Western national story, such as the women’s stories described in Nathalie Nguyen’s Memory is Another Country (2010), which include the stories of four Southern Vietnamese veteran women soldiers from the south. Nguyen describes their narratives in hopeful terms, framing them as narratives of resilience and a multitude of voices that break the silence often ascribed to Vietnamese women. The boat person’s story like When Heaven and Earth Changes Places by Le Ly Hayslip (1987) and A Child of Vietnam by Uyen Loewald (1988) are other examples of Vietnamese civilian survivors whose stories contrast sharply to that of the American war veteran. Both books describe young girls’ civilian experiences of the wars and what they do to survive. They are not passive flowers waiting for the American hero to arrive, and in expressing themselves through autobiography they empower themselves and their stories.
In the case of the 1.5- and second-generation Vietnamese migrants, post-memory may dominate their writing (Cole and Burns 2011; Hirsch 1982). The 1.5 generation are those Vietnamese migrants who are born in Vietnam but raised predominantly in Australia. English is often close to their first language, and though they may have experienced the boat jour-ney and life in a refugee camp they may have been too young to remem-ber. The first-generation trauma can be passed down to second- and even third-generation migrants (Nguyen 2010: 7), resulting in post-memory (Hirsch 1988: 42).
M. Hirsch further explains:
Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up domi-nated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated. I have developed this notion in relation to children of Holocaust survivors, but I believe it may usefully describe other second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences.
(Hirsch 1988: 22)
The Vietnamese diasporic 1.5 and second generations have only started to be examined in oral histories in anthropology – for instance, in Nathalie Nguyen’s Voyage of Hope (2006)and When Memory is Another Country (2010). Researchers have just begun to look at Vietnamese diasporic literature and the complexity of representation of Vietnamese diasporic experiences (Vu, Pelaud, Nguyen). Unlike the two-dimensional portraits of Vietnamese people from Western men such as Graham Greene, Vietnamese diasporic literature portrays the heterogeneity of Vietnamese experience.
‘Vietnamese refugees find themselves at the crossroads of these compet-ing versions of memory. Absent or misrepresented ... refugees are just as likely to stage their own competing memory’ (Nguyen 2002: 31).
The official representations of the war from both sides and the dominant discourse of the relationship between Vietnamese and Imperial aggressors as the Communists would describe it are often written against by autobio-graphical accounts and fiction. To negotiate this complex terrain, Vietnamese
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diasporic writers need to be mindful of the lives one is seeking to fictionalize, especially being a 1.5 or second-generation writer.
Vu suggests that ‘... 1.5 generation authors...have to redefine their posi-tioning with each new creative work, to (re) translate themselves along a shifting continuum of otherness’ (Vu 2011: 131).
Vu acknowledges the ‘othering’ that occurs in the reception of work by the Vietnamese diaspora. 1.5-generation writers have to translate their culture from the minority to the mainstream and must overcome a cultural and linguistic gap to avoid being stereotyped (Vu 2011). This calls for a political awareness of how Vietnamese diasporic work like the fictions of Vu and Le would be read in the context of Western Orientalism. This is the challenge for all contemporary Vietnamese diasporic writers who choose to write about Vietnam. To negotiate the needs of fiction and honour the trauma of one’s parents and the Vietnamese communities requires conscientious choices on the diasporic writer’s part. Mishra quotes that ‘for diasporas facing up to ones own traumas and ghosts is a necessary ethical condition’. Vietnamese diasporic writers cannot write in a vacuum, and to write ethically one needs to have acknowledged one’s past.
The struggles of Vietnamese diasporic writers follow a familiar pattern of migrant or refugee writings: they commonly use the autobiographical form, explore transgenerational issues in the host country and the experience of returning to the land of origin, which is no longer home anymore (Cole 2010; Brook and Nunn 2010; Pham and Brook 2011; Nguyen 2006). Viet Nguyen has characterized these writers as ‘spiritual seeking a questioning of the indi-vidual’s place not just in the world but beyond it’ (Nguyen 2002:44), identi-fying a spiritual dimension to Vietnamese diasporic writing. There are many Vietnamese texts in English that feature literal and metaphorical hauntings of the protagonist’s past. The manner and process of acknowledging and/or exorcising these ghosts are a common theme of Vietnamese diasporic writing (i.e. Le 2009 and Vu 2012), much like the themes of Asian American ghost novels such as The Woman Warrior (1977) by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan’s work. Hauntings can be actual as per Vietnamese Buddhist belief, as well as operating in fiction as metaphor.
As Pelaud observes writing can be part of the healing process: ‘… the act of writing itself is … linked … to rectify social history, to serve as witness to the past and to foster individual and collective healing and self definition’ (Pelaud 2010: 51).
This process can be therapeutic and has been described in trauma theory and narrative therapy.
wrItIng trauma
Writing can be therapeutic in reclaiming memories distorted by trauma and sharing stories not often heard in mainstream media. Narrative therapy is based around counter or alternative storytelling for therapeutic effect. For instance, in Nguyen’s work Memory is Another Country (2009), she provides a framework and place for women’s stories about surviving the Vietnam/American War. These women have witnessed history and in the storytelling process find the strengths that have allowed them to survive so far and build lives in Australia (Nguyen 2010:7).
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was put in the Diagnostic Standards Manual 4, the psychiatric bible of diagnostic categories for mental illness, after
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the Vietnam/American War when American veterans of war came home. It is also a common occurrence amongst refugee populations, in particular for those Vietnamese refugees who fled post 75. PTSD is characterized by flash-backs and dreams and an inability to recall fully the distressing event. This ‘belatedness’ leads to the memory or forgetting unspeakable nature of some events that have been witnessed such as massacres and genocides like the Holocaust. This has been described in the context of mental illness, although one could describe it as an understandable reaction to traumatic events throughout history as described by trauma expert Cathy Caruth:
‘If PTSD must be understood as a pathological symptom … it is a symptom of history’ (Caruth 1995:5).
Recounting these stories in the form of testimony has had a healing effect for some groups such as victims of Apartheid and the Holocaust. The retelling of traumatic events can enable the narrator to claim ownership of his or her story and regain agency in their own lives. Survivors of trauma need to survive to tell their stories and tell their stories in order to survive (Laub 1995: 63).
In Vietnamese diasporic refugee communities, PTSD is present but is rarely treated by mainstream health professionals. The silence around the suffer-ing endured in war and the boat journey often is carried through to the next generation as post-memory. 1.5- and second-generation writers may wish to articulate that suffering through telling their stories (Nguyen 2010: 7) and in the process recover from that trauma:
‘the reappropriation of the past may reveal traumatic experience and devastating loss … but also be regenerative’ (Nguyen 2010: 7).
As detailed by Judith Herman in her seminal work on trauma, retell-ing stories of the past can help the individual move their suffering from the private domain into the public domain, thus contributing to community and collective stories. Public testimony has had a healing function as can be seen with the South African Truth and Reconciliation hearings.
‘the process of bearing witness can … be empowering for individual narra-tors and can generate public recognition of collective experiences which have been ignored or silenced’ (Hodgkin and Radstone 2012: 97).
To heal from trauma one may be compelled to tell one’s story in order to be heard. In the telling one rewrites oneself and reclaims one’s agency. Narrative therapy assumes that there are multiple stories and dominant narratives that create psychological reality through language. Like trauma theory, narrative therapy processes healing through alternative storytelling and the making of the self. Building a story and narration about the past can bring healing. However, the very nature of traumatic memory may make some memories resistant to being reintegrated with the self and cultural memory (Miller and Tougaw 2002: 9). Hirsch outlines the dangers of rememory – memories that traumatize rather than heal. It is important to have a framework in which memories can be retrieved and released in a safe and perhaps therapeutic fashion.
For Vietnamese diasporic writers, the act of writing for publication in English can be bearing witness to family and community traumas. The act of telling their stories can assist reclaiming of the past, to get in touch with the present and create a future. Their stories can inform the public of civilian suffering during wars and the terror of the boat exodus that so many have taken to reach a safe land. Their stories add to the mainstream discourse about the Vietnam/American War and help in giving voice to a marginalized community.
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The Perfume River
Cole’s edited the anthology The Perfume River (2010) is an attempt to showcase Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic writing. She comments that Vietnamese writers explore loss of homeland in fictional texts and attempt to come to terms with the past (Cole 2010: xiii). The past includes for Southern Vietnamese refu-gees the trauma of the boat exodus from the Communist regime.
The anthology The Perfume River seems to be flavoured with nostalgia, which is highlighted in the introduction by Catherine Cole. The cover of the anthology of ‘Vietnamese-inspired’ writing is of a woman in a conical hat in a rice paddy, reducing Vietnam to orientalist and colonial clichés. As Nam Le says in his short story ‘Love and …’ when picturing himself as an ethnic writer, he too imagines himself in a conical hat standing in a rice paddy.
This anthology has a broad authorship from Ho Anh Thai, a well-established author, and Bao Ninh, a northern Vietnamese soldier, to Nam Le, Chi Vu and Andrew Lam, all 1.5-generation Vietnamese diasporic writers. Published by University of Western Australia Press, it is the first anthology to include Vietnamese Australian writers in a mainstream distrib-uted volume – often to be found in the travel section of bookshops. Two examples of stories that challenge and problematize this nostalgia in the anthology is Nam Le’s ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Sacrifice’ and Chi Vu’s ‘Vietnam-A psychic guide’.
catHerIne cole – ‘long lIVe Peace’
The Perfume River portrays nostalgia about Vietnam even while including Nam Le’s and Chi Vu’s postmodern stories in the anthology, which subvert this para-digm. Catherine Cole’s story in the anthology ‘Long Live Peace’ features a naïve Western narrator meeting a famous Vietnamese general in Hanoi. Catherine Cole’s short story ‘Long Live Peace’ has a naïve foreign narrator who rails against the capitalism evident in Vietnam in contrast to its professed Communist lean-ings. Her naïve left-leaning expectations of communist Vietnam demonstrates her nostalgia for Eastern Bloc-style Communism. She meets a Vietnamese war veteran and shows him her favourite poem about Hanoi in the war time and is embarrassed by his lack of response. What is portrayed in the narrative is her First-World innocence in contrast to the war veteran who refers obliquely to the message in the story – that ‘a revolutionary fighter struggles for peace even if he doesn’t live to enjoy it himself’ (Cole 2010: 98). The veteran parts from the narrator saying ‘Long Live Peace’. It is left in doubt in the story whether the veteran is living to enjoy the peace he fought for. The two contrasting characters in the story can be seen as a counter-narrative – the First-World woman is at a loss and her sociocultural power and expectations is reduced in the face of the third-world old veteran’s war experience.
One possible interpretation of this story is that it demonstrates the wish-ful thinking of nostalgic Western views of Vietnam and its naïvete. Pelaud has stated that the leftist view of Vietnamese communism and their victory as Marxism defeating imperialism is just as misleading as orientalist views of Vietnam like being just a cheap tourist destination (Pelaud 2010: 13). Another interpretation is that the contrast between the anthology’s intro-ductory theme of nostalgia and the content of the work by Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic writers have the same contrast, a white colonial literary trope attempting to classify writings that are far from nostalgic, informed as they are by trauma and post-memory.
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S. Boym defines restorative nostalgia as the longing for return to home, of truth and tradition, whilst reflective nostalgia problematizes the idea of one truth and consists of social memory (Boym 2001: xx). Social memory consists of collective frameworks such as refugees’ memories unlike national memory that consists of a ‘single plot of national identity’ (Boym 2001:xx). It is suggested that The Perfume River consists of reflective nostalgia, and of more complexities than is initially presented in the introduction. The short stories by Nam Le and Chi Vu are examples of these.
nam le – ‘loVe and Honour and PIty and comPassIon and sacrIfIce’
Nam Le’s ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Sacrifice’ has a self-reflexive Vietnamese Australian narrator Nam, who is dwelling on the ‘ethnic story’ he has been advised to write by his peers. Nam Le’s short story is notable in its commentary on the way ethnic literature is received in the United States. The ethnic story is seen as trendy, featuring cooking dishes and commer-cially popular, which Nam attempts to emulate. This short story translates the unspeakable memories of his father’s torture in a re-education camp into silence, memories that haunt Nam and a story rarely heard by the Australian or American mainstream. The story recounts Le’s wish to have some under-standing of his father and to earn his pride through writing about his father’s experience in the re-education camps. He declares:
‘I would write the ethnic story of my Vietnamese father. It was a good story, It was a fucking great story’ (Le 2009: 19).
He comments about the market currency of ethnic stories and titles his first attempt at his father’s story ‘Ethnic Story’, an ironic take on the comments he has received from a writing instructor that ethnic literature is hot. Nam in trying to come to terms with his father’s experience echoes with the common desires of 1.5-generation Vietnamese diasporic writers to come to grips with history. He wrestles with the ghosts of his father’s past and tried to come to terms with their estranged relationship. Le writes:
He had been buried alive in the warm wet clinch of his family, crushed by their lives. I wanted to know how he climbed out of that pit. I wanted to know how there could ever be any correspondence between us. I wanted to know all this but an internal momentum moved me further and further from him as time went on.
(Le 2010: 23)
The narrator Nam has survived transgenerational trauma through his father’s physical abuse and tries to understand the legacy of violence by imagining what it was like for his father as a 14-year-old to survive the My Lai massacre: ‘A past larger than complaint, more perilous than memory’ (Le 2010: 28).
Nam’s technique of connection and understanding is writing, the writ-ing of his father’s story. Nam is depicted as the generation who write to heal and to work through trauma. But his father only sees writing full of mistakes, and Nam informs his father that it is fiction. The potential writing cure of his father’s trauma is not recognized by his father, nor does it render his son made visible to him according to Nam’s wishes. Nam writes:
He would read it … and he would recognise himself in a new way. He would recognise me. He would see how powerful was his experience,
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how valuable his suffering – how I had made it speak for more than itself. He would be pleased with me.
(Le 2010: 29)
But the details of his father’s story are obscured and the reader is never shown the story, which Nam’s father destroys. This story has no resolution for Nam, the narrator, or for the reader. It is written with the non-Vietnamese literary audience in mind, with Le acknowledging their assumptions and expectations directly in the text. The work is a tease and yet more powerful for what it alludes to, even without the gory details of his father’s experiences. Le has stated in interviews that he views writing as a performative act, so it is likely that these postmodern allusions are done deliberately and consciously by Le (Cunningham 2009). Le has also alluded to wanting to do justice to his fami-ly’s past in his writing, which hints at the workings of an ethical conscience when depicting Vietnamese content.
Viet Nguyen, an academic from the University of Southern California, identifies this flaw in Vietnamese diasporic writing about their experiences:
What we find in Vietnamese refugee memory is that it presents its own narrative of memory and amnesia, of insight and blindness, of ethical responsibility and ethical failure. This narrative occurs even as Vietnamese refugees may seek to do justice to the ghosts of their past.
(Nguyen 2002: 33)
This is demonstrated in Le’s story in the unreliable narrator Nam who has his own agenda for wanting to hear his father’s story. Vietnamese diasporic writ-ers are human, and cannot be seen as individuals to have the definitive version of any one truth about the Vietnam/American War. One person’s story cannot be seen to represent all, and the reader must avoid essentializing the minor-ity voice. This view in a political minefield of recollection needs to be handled carefully. Like all war survivors, Vietnamese refugees need to articulate and have acknowledged their suffering. Each story is one of many.
The critical acclaim and reception of Le’s work confirms to the model minority stereotype (Lowe 1996). He was a lawyer and a high academic achiever, and he has declared his real family’s history off limits in his fiction writing. His high profile and the diversity of work in The Boat (Nam Le, 2009) challenges the preconceived notion that Vietnamese writers can only write about Vietnamese stories.
cHI Vu – ‘a PsycHIc guIde to VIetnam’
Chi Vu’s ‘A psychic guide to Vietnam’ is a return home narrative, consisting of postcards written by Michelle, a Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese) tourist in Hanoi. The story opens with a quote from Picasso ‘Art is a lie that makes you realise the truth’ and is concluded by Michelle commenting ‘I tell you a lie, I tell you a truth’ (Vu 2010: 49). This book ending of the narrative signals to the reader that this postmodern work is open to interpretation, with Michelle’s observations being unreliable.
Vu plays with audience expectations and assumptions, destabilizing Michelle’s viewpoint and extending the stories about Vietnam into the fantas-tical, such as the story Michelle tells about Hanoians conversing by tying pieces of string to one another.
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Vu overtly engages with Western expectations of Vietnam directly, with Michelle asking a local what she thought of Three Seasons – an American film starring Harvey Keitel featuring romantic stories about Vietnam. The local replies that the film portrays rural Vietnam, but Vietnam is modern now. Michelle describes Hanoi as a snake shedding skin, with the old skin next to the new reflecting the modernity of Vietnam.
Vu’s narrator comes to no firm conclusions about her return journey to Vietnam, but builds increasing complexity with every encounter. In one section, for example, Michelle converses with a taxi driver about the different Vietnamese words for war, and the taxi driver states: ‘It’s not anyone’s fault which side of the war they fight for. Where you live is who you fight for’ (Vu 2010: 46). This pragmatic judgement is at odds with Western patriotism and simplistic assumptions about which side the Vietnamese people fought on. Michelle concludes this section with that she enters the ‘museum of sadness’ today (Vu 2010: 46), referral to an universal truth about war.
The reader is left with tantalizing glimpses of Hanoi and reflections from Michelle – who comments that she could not take pictures because she does not know ‘who the person pressing the button was’ (Vu 2010:47) – a shared dilemma of the 1.5 and second generation to find their sense of self on the return journey to Vietnam.
Vu describes the 1.5 generation of which she is a part, as translators – 1.5 generation writers need to reinvent themselves with each work and monitor what cultures they are translating and for whom (Vu 2011:131). In using English, a colonizing language to write Vietnamese diasporic stories, 1.5 generation authors are translating their experiences into a more common frame of reference for the non-Vietnamese reader. Vu suggests that such writ-ers need to be mindful of how they can be read, which is evident in her own work (Vu 2011: 32). Michelle translates what she sees to the audience without much narrative commentary, leaving the reader to make up their own mind, not just about Vietnam but also about Michelle.
The text of ‘A psychic guide’ teases the reader with its flights of fancy and leaves more questions than it attempts to answer. It has been included in the PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists and Novelists) Anthology of Australian Writing (2010) and in English secondary curricula. These inclusions demon-strate the repositioning of Vietnamese Australian writing within the broad category of Australian literature: they are no longer just stories of ethnic margins. The reader’s imagination captured by these works can influence how Vietnam is perceived and received.
These sophisticated renditions of Asia, of the past, the present and the future, complicate perceptions of Asia for non-Asian audiences. Nam Le’s short story and Chi Vu’s short story presents to the reader an example of what a mainstream audience may be willing to embrace. Nam Le’s success indi-cates that audiences do not shy away from complex challenging material on the very nature of Vietnamese ethnic representation and what it implies.
However this might be read by the layperson, it demonstrates the power of creative industries and how they can play a part in formative views about Asia. Not only does the Vietnamese communities see them-selves reflected in Le and Vu’s stories, it can also inspire future generations of young Vietnamese Australian writers to do the same, to create an Asia that is familiar to them and will familiarize non-Asians to their point of view. Writing in this way can ameliorate Orientalism and create new Asias in the process.
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conclusIon
The common depictions of Vietnam in the West are dominated by Orientalism, and it is up to Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic writers to produce counter-memories and stories against official Vietnamese and Western government views. Representations of Vietnam cannot be reduced to singular tropes such as the frame of nostalgia that Catherine Cole attempts in The Perfume River anthology. Depictions of Vietnam, especially by Vietnamese diasporic writers, are governed by conscience and ethics to acknowledge the ghosts of the past. The stories in The Perfume River collec-tion subvert the expectations of the Western-influenced reader and of Cole herself. These examples illustrate the importance of creative industries in portraying formative views of Asia in providing a vehicle of counter-memo-ries and conscience.
references
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Vietnam is a country, not a war- trauma and nostalgia ...
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Pham, H. (2013), ‘Vietnam is a country, not a war- trauma and nostalgia in the anthology The Perfume River’, Creative Industries Journal 6: 1, pp. 17–27, doi: 10.1386/cij.6.1.17_1
CONTrIbUTOr DETAIlS
Hoa Pham is a psychologist and writer. She is completing a Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Western Sydney and was one of the found-ing editors of Peril, an online Asian-Australian arts and culture magazine.
Contact: Writing and Society Research Group, Bankstown Campus, Bullecourt Rd, Bankstown NSW, Australia.E-mail: [email protected]
Hoa Pham has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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Intellect is an independent academic publisher of books and journals, to view our catalogue or order our titles visit www.intellectbooks.com or E-mail: [email protected]. Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, UK, BS16 3JG.
Hospitality & SocietyISSN 2042-7913 | Online ISSN 2042-79212 issues per volume | Volume 3, 2013
Aims and ScopeHospitality & Society is an international multidisciplinary social sciences journal exploring hospitality’s connections with wider social and cultural processes and structures. This international journal aims to provide a unique publication ‘meet-ing point’ for those communities of scholars who use hospitality as a lens of analysis and/or focus of investigation.
Call for PapersHospitality & Society welcomes submissions from various disciplines and aims to be an interactive forum expanding frontiers of knowledge and contributing to the social scientific literature on hospitality. It strives for a balance of theory and application. However, it is ultimately concerned with developing theoretical perspectives/insights related to hospitality. For submission guidelines please contact the editors.
Email: [email protected]
Co-editorsPaul Lynch University of Strathclyde
Alison McIntoshUniversity of Waikato
Jennie Germann Molz College of the Holy [email protected]
Editor EmeritusConrad Lashley Oxford Brookes [email protected]
Controversies and Reviews EditorPeter LugosiOxford Brookes Universityplugosi@[email protected]
intellectwww.intellectbooks.com
publishersof original
thinking
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