Mary Goodwin, "Mapping Memory in Tran's Vietnamerica" page 4 of 7
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.3 (2015): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss3/5>
Thematic Issue Life Writing and the Trauma of War. Ed. Louise O. Vasvári and I-Chun Wang
The urban scenes in Vietnamerica from New York to Saigon are central to the comparisons GB
makes between Vietnam and the United States. Before traveling to Vietnam with his parents, GB had
been living in New York. On the phone with his mother, he dismisses his mother's cautions to bring
antiseptic hand cleaner and earplugs to Vietnam; after all, he lives in New York, which is "not exactly
the cleanest or quietest place on Earth" (49). But the New York outside his apartment is a silent study
in blue, black, and grey, a ghost town without light or sound. This grim urban vision of empty streets
stands in contrast to the brilliant and chaotic streets of Saigon which erupt into view a few pages later.
GB exits the shadow of New York and re-appears in the middle of a Saigon street, his shock and awe
registered in the dizzy rings of his eyes, amid the smoking bustle and flaming chaos of the Vietnamese
city. Lit up in red and yellow, GB stands transfixed amid the vehicles, the clamor, and the mosquitoes.
Modern, urban Vietnam is clearly not what he had expected. His "map" has already begun to shift
away from what he had imagined that his ancestral home would look like from the serene heights of
the airplane (50-51). Similarly, GB's parents are forced to revise the "map" of Vietnam they have car-
ried back with them as they experience disorientation and culture shock on the same chaotic street
where their son finds himself a decade later. In 1994, when GB was in high school, his parents made
their first trip back since fleeing to the United States. GB is shown as a child sitting on the couch in a
suburban neighborhood, playing violent video games on the television. Absorbed in his game and
pleading schoolwork, he refuses to go back with them: "That doesn't sound like a fun trip to me"
(182). The irony is that Vietnam itself proves much more exciting and action-packed than GB's games,
which seem to represent the manufactured excitement available to children who experience life re-
motely. Through material and spatial contrasts between past and present, GB's parents' first return is
immersed in emotional context. Passing the McDonald's restaurants and a Hilton hotel under construc-
tion, they hunt for the little house they had lived in twenty years earlier (202-03). They find their little
old house stuck between two tall modern buildings and their sadness is registered in grey cross-
hatched panels empty of dialogue (204). In this scene, GB's parents appear in parallel panels with
older and younger versions of themselves looking at the same place, the past and present appearing
simultaneously both of Vietnam and of GB's family.
In these layered cityscapes we see the living connection between a picture of a place and its emo-
tional resonance, despite attempts by both GB and his father to dismiss or resist it. At the beginning
of his trip back, Tri Huu tells his old friend Do, "I didn't come here to be nostalgic … It's in the past.
What do I care?" (53). A few pages later, however, Tri Huu is overcome with nostalgia and enthusias-
tically shows GB around to the places he knew as a child. This time, it is GB's turn to echo his father's
earlier lack of interest: "It's in the past. What do I care?" (65). These parallel responses show a rela-
tionship between the past and present by means of the medium of place. Initially, both GB and his
father resist the pull of the past dismissing it as irrelevant to their current lives. However, as they
become immersed in scenes and places once significant, the past begins to exert an irresistible force
on them and they respond by attempting to reconstruct memories, but while for Tri Huu this means
memory of real experience, for GB it is the postmemory of his family's experiences. Similarly, in the
scenes depicting his family's history in rural Vietnam, Tran washes these panels in emotional context.
An early scene of Langson, a village in northern Vietnam where Tri Huu Tran's family lived during the
French occupation, is depicted in shaggy, unfinished-looking sketches as remote and mountainous:
"Langson's isolation and ruggedness made it a perfect base of operations for the Vietminh. And no
matter how much the French bombed, its beauty survived" (32). In a later depiction of Langson Tran
depicts his father's family's migration from Langson to the southern seaside village of Vungtau on a
road overwritten with the suffering of displaced persons (124-25). On the top two-thirds of the two-
page image, the physical effort of these internal refugees is detailed, with bare feet over rocky roads.
The lower third of the spread shows the splendid, empty beach area of Vungtau that awaits the refu-
gees, now only three tiny figures standing in a corner of the landscape, looking out to sea. This lay-
ered scene of countryside as the backdrop to human travail is the visualization of GB's (and Tran's)
developing postmemory, images which gradually emerge from blank spaces and unfinished sketches
into a narrative of effort and struggle: Space over time, inscribed with stories and what Rocio Davis
calls "a heightened degree of subjectivity, the interweaving of story and its attendant feelings" (3).
Two other depictions of topography which reflect historical developments and the human position
in the midst of these developments include a scene illustrating the banishment of intellectuals to re-
mote areas of Vietnam following the North's victory over the South. Against looming black mountains
and the forbidding reaches of the far north, tiny trucks can be seen that apparently are carrying away
Tri Huu's friend Do and others of the intellectual class, with a small box of text stating "the new
regime's biggest threat – doctors, officers, politicians, and scholars – people like Do – were considered
dangerous. The smarter you were, the farther away they took you" (145). Another significant land-
scape appears later as the war ends: a sea of cross-hatches stretching across two pages forms a dark
seaside town, with dark indistinct structures and no lights or human figures in view. In a corner at the
bottom left, there is one small balloon stating, "The Vietnam war is finished," in tiny text (223-24). In
both examples, darkness overwhelms a featureless scene, seeming to imply that although these mo-
ments will have enormous consequences, everyone is yet in the dark as to what is happening. The
war's-end scene is reminiscent of Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, another landscape
painting in which the great moment – a boy falling from the sky – is depicted as a small and insignifi-
cant fleck in the background irrelevant to the daily lives of ordinary people. One of the most striking
maps in the memoir is of post-war Vietnam depicted as a trench dug in the outline of the country and
from out of the southern reaches of this scar-like hole innumerable people are desperate to escape,
clawing toward boats on one side and reaching for Cambodia on the other (158). North of Vietnam,
Cambodia and Thailand are blank spaces in fading lines, mere names etched in military stencil. Vi-
etnam itself is not named: it is just a trench-scar dug in the shape of the country, a site of war teem-