Children on the Boat: The Recuperative Work of Postmemory in Short Fiction of the Vietnamese Diaspora

Abstract In this article we argue that a cohort of French, Canadian, and Australian authors of Vietnamese descent are adapting postmemory narratives to fit the purposes of the 1.5 generation. Linda Lê, Kim Thúy, and Nam Le each displace the Vietnam War to reimagine in its stead, for the first time in Vietnamese diasporic writing, the trauma of the refugee boat journey. Breaking the silence of parents wont to forget, in short fiction they narrativize shared accounts of flight by sea that have until this time remained the domain of autobiography and memoir. Through a process of spectral recuperation, these children of survivors employ the figure of the child to tell the event of their own refugee becoming. Former child refugees recently come of writerly age across a multilingual global diaspora are thus reappropriating an in-between generation’s collective postmemory to form what we call the sub-genre of “the boat narrative.”