Feeling Very Vietnamese Tonight

Conversation Series Fall 2025 Sofa Issues

Text by Sarah Ngọc Lưu with Sean Xuân Hiếu Nguyễn

“I just remember walking into a restaurant and seeing that as one of their beverage options, and was like, ‘Wait, are we drinking this?’ I was gagged.” 𑁋Sean Nguyễn

Sean and I first met through Interact, a high-school service club sponsored by Rotary International. Even though we lived in different cities, we became good friends as we regularly crossed paths since our high schools fell under the same 5150 district. Over the years, we graduated, went to college, and took off to start our lives. We first reconnected after running into each other at a HorsegiirL show in San Francisco over a year ago. My best friend, Alan, bumped into his ex-roommate on the floor who just so happened to be Sean’s partner (which I had no clue). When Alan and Sean’s partner saw each other, they screamed. When Sean and I recognized each other, we screamed. And then the four of us screamed together.

After such a fateful night at the club, we followed up with each other, discovering our shared love for a documentary about the Vietnamese-American New Wave scene and realizing two things: we were both pursuing graduate degrees and our themes of research were incredibly similar. With our curiosities aligned, we spent some time chatting over the phone. Reflecting on our thoughts and shared experiences, we reimagined alternative ways our collective histories can be remembered and how our legacy can transgress inherited traumas.

Sean Nguyễn: I think the last time that we talked, there were a whole slew of combinations that just made me feel like I wasn’t stable in my research. Where I am now is still slightly unclear, but I’ve moved myself into a more interdisciplinary approach. I’m trying to think about Vietnamese American storytelling in this particular way where we’re departing from the Vietnamese American literary canon that has been set up by authors like Việt Thanh Nguyễn and Ocean Vương.

These people who were making that be their work were being produced in some type of accommodationist white market. I think particularly why the Ocean Vương books did so successfully was because it really allowed white people to self-flagellate themselves and induce white guilt.

Sarah Lưu: How so?

Sean: I think now we’ve surpassed this really interesting period between 2018 and 2021 of just like pure unadulterated wokeness. I’m wondering how we move on from here where there’s movement outside of identity politics into something more critical?

Sarah: Is there anything you might be looking into that you feel brings a more critical sense beyond identity politics?

Sean: I just finished this book called Mỹ Documents by Kevin Nguyễn. The way that it’s written borrows from the history of Japanese American incarceration camps. Basically it’s about a series of terrorist attacks in the United States, seven bombings in different airports. The assailants are Vietnamese, and that triggers an executive order that puts all Vietnamese Americans into mass detention.

It’s in the perspective of these four half siblings. Because their father left several families, he now just has this cohort of half siblings and they kind of know each other. So he reinvents another set of contemporary displacement to think and exercise how we might reexamine Vietnamese American trauma, how we endure it, and how we could resist it without necessarily having to reinvoke the Vietnamese American refugee narrative.

Sarah: Which in many ways, is what we’re both thinking about now, too. We’re just both wondering what our “how” is.

And I definitely agree about those works appealing to a white audience in some ways. My first impression of Ocean Vương’s work was that it was beautifully written from a Vietnamese experience, but it didn’t particularly feel like it was for a Vietnamese audience. It didn’t feel like it was written for me.

Sean: I’ve been thinking, there’s a significance of family archives in Vietnamese American storytelling. Oftentimes family archives or family histories are the loci of how a Vietnamese American writer would want to approach storytelling, even if not for it being the main part of the story. It’s how one gets findings and the research to start writing.

There’s this idea of the second-generation Vietnamese American storyteller whose writings are incredibly distinct from that of the 1.5 generation* who hold direct experience of the war and can recall their own personal memories and/or the lack of it. Second-generation writers have it a bit more complex because they have to draw from different sources, but also hold a responsibility to acknowledge the distance between generations and their disconnection from the war.

*1.5 Generation: Those who were born in Vietnam but immigrated to the U.S. as children due to the American War.

Sarah: How does this responsibility affect the way we evolve? What are some of the implications it might have on how the second generation sees itself?

Sean: Hmm. Maybe responsibility isn’t the right word because I feel it makes it sound like a burden that we haven’t experienced the war, but it does complicate our identities in the way that our direct history has to do with state-sanctioned trauma. It’s more of asking ourselves, “How do we continue to acknowledge and critique the war without having to always resurface the terrible?”

Sarah: Which is literally what I’ve been asking myself in my own research. As a child, anytime I wanted to learn something about our people’s history in America, I would see our people subjected to pain. They’re hiding, running, or lifeless. They’re in tears, faces filled with fear, desperation and uncertainty. I always felt like there could be more beyond the suffering. Wanting to know more about our ancestors’ history in the land we were born in just shouldn’t solely lead others like myself to the terrible and graphic.

Sean: I would love to point you in a theoretical direction. It really helped me think differently about my own thesis. What you’re talking about is so resonant with a concept I read about by Ly Thuy Nguyen called “Queer Dis/inheritance” where she essentially completely rejects the inheritance of her family’s trauma.

Sarah: Wait… I’ve never even thought about that at all. To me, it was always a part of us.

Sean: There’s talk about this sort of silence, one that’s provoked or even intentional between us and the 1.5 generation. There’s this Vietnamese-American artist, Trinh Mai, who made an installation called, “We Should Be Heirs”, where she displays unopened letters from her grandma. The unopened letter represents that collective silence and that takes shape in many ways. Keeping these letters unopened, holding her grandma’s secrets, tends to the gendered violences from the Vietnam war, like the way masculinity in the community has been handled differently in the refugee narrative.

Sarah: How does addressing the silence by leaning into it change the way we think about these gaps of silence, intentional or not, between generations?

Sean: Well, part of the ethos in Trinh Mai’s installation is that there is a contextual gap between her and the viewer, who maybe doesn’t know much about the Vietnam War. She’s not trying to set her work up as an educational activity, but rather just wanting to address the silence that’s between her and her grandma. In doing so, she recognizes her grandmother’s dignity that had been soiled in the process of displacement, being displaced, and then being racialized in the United States. I think that is a really generous and critical understanding of how we can think about the gap between us and the 1.5 generation, or the first generation, maybe.

Sarah: Wow. I love that approach. And I’m well familiar with Trinh Mai! I was able to hear her speak about her practice at an art lecture during my undergrad and she was the first artist whose work made me cry. That unintentional/intentional silence on war experiences is something I actually didn’t experience much of. My mother was very vocal about my family’s experiences, and was always sharing the photographs she had brought with her on boat. It’s led me to think constantly about others that might’ve done the same, and so I’m curious what you think. How does a family’s archive change when it crosses an ocean?

Sean: Wow… hmm. The crossing of oceans gives us an element in which the archive had been produced haphazardly, a byproduct of this really large imperial violent activity. If we were to think about your family’s collection of photographs being collected within the sense of urgency, then that already gives it so much more meaning.

I was TA-ing for a class yesterday, and we’re talking about this author named Karen Tei Yamashita, and she is this really awesome Japanese American writer. In one of her talks, she was addressing the question, “What does a home for Asian Americans look like?” She talks about this home as an imagined condition, represented by the crossing of oceans. That transnational part cannot be missed about how we think about archives, migration, and movement over the water.

Sarah: I completely agree. Our archives are so special because there are roots planted in multiple points around the world. And maybe that affects how our families have chosen to plant their roots here in the states. I imagine that every Vietnamese immigrant household is a reflection of the places they’ve been. The things that are collected, repaired and treasured… that in itself is an archive of its own . It’s a shame that many second-generation folks only describe it as “hoarding”. I feel like there’s much more to that. What do you think?

Sean: Well, the hoarding is like a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder for sure. When I think of hoarding in our community, I think about how displacement has conditioned lots of Vietnamese refugees to collect. It really can go both ways where if you lose your home first, you might be conditioned to think that nothing of yours is ever going to be permanent again. Conversely, if you were to lose your home in a very serious way, you might be conditioned to believe that you should build your nest with anything you can keep your hands on to affirm yourself that your home is here, represented by these objects. The sense of permanence is represented by how much stuff you have in your home.

Sarah: This idea of accumulating as many things as you can to make sure that it’s permanent…That kind of parallels these personal family archives that traveled across the sea. How many things can I accumulate in my go bag? What can I take with me to preserve these memories I have of home? What is most important about the life we are forced to leave behind?

Sean: I think also another important element of these archives is, how do these objects tell a story when they’re all put in context with each other?

Sarah: That New Wave book is a great example to answer that question. I mean, when I shared that book with my aunts for the first time they screamed when they skimmed the pages. If those stories and photos were shared separately and not in that sort of “New Wave” container, they might’ve not associated it with New Wave music, but just a reflection of life for them in the 80s. But together, they saw a community carved out for themselves by themselves, clinging onto music to heal.

Sean: Which is why I think it’s so special because it has a postcustodial, living archive element when you think about it in a kind of meta way. It already has a really different perspective about the Vietnamese American lived experience through the practice of its archival research being sourced from different families across the states and all across the global diaspora. Collecting photos from several diasporas broadens the scope of it, and orienting its touring theater screenings within our community ties it all together as something that is living and breathing. It isn’t just static in its presentation or as something to be watched, but something to be handled.

Sarah: Definitely, oh my gosh. The first time I went to watch it was through the CAAM Festival at SFMOMA last May. I brought my mom because the Ruth Asawa show was happening at the same time. We saw the book first and thought it was going to be on the more lighthearted side, with all the glitz and glamour. When we left the screening room, our faces were wet and puffed red. During our CalTrain ride back home, we just talked the entire hour and a half. My mom was bringing up new stories I had never heard before. To see a documentary have so much reactionary power, I was in awe. It was deeply activating our personal repositories of memories.

Sean: Exactly, and the documentary wasn’t pulling things that we were never aware of. The things that were discussed were things we grew up watching, too. The documentary generates this drive to inquire critically about your heritage. The reason why we didn’t inquire about it is because we never understood it in the form of a story before. Otherwise, it would’ve been a pretty conventional and unassuming part of our lives, just something that our parents used to listen to. Because of Elizabeth Ai being able to turn it into a story, something to be moved by, it allows us to think more critically about our own history.

Sarah: I’ve been asking myself that, like what’s my story? What’s this narrative that my research could uncover? Elizabeth found a story in our relationship to music. I’ve been exploring our culture’s food and cooking.

Sean: Have you ever seen your mom make thịt kho? The caramelized meat and eggs?

Sarah: Yes!

Sean: Does she use the coconut drink*?

Sarah: Yes, she does.

*Ahh yes…the coconut drink. Coco Rico soda might just be a nice carbonated beverage to you, but to many Vietnamese immigrants, it’s solely for cooking, and the key ingredient to making your meat tender for thịt kho.

Sean: She does! Okay, because recently I went to this restaurant in San Francisco called Parada 22 and they sell the drink, you know, to drink. I was so taken aback by it because I’ve never questioned its ability to be… drunk. I just always thought it was a cooking ingredient because that’s only how I ever saw it.

Sarah: Me too! My mom would have so many of those coconut soda cans stacked underneath our kitchen table.

Sean: Exactly, it was just like MSG or nước mắm––another cooking ingredient. But anyway, I just remember walking into a restaurant and seeing that as one of their beverage options and was like, “Wait, are we drinking this?” I was gagged. How did that come to be? Has it always been a tradition?

It makes me think, if we were to assume that it isn’t a traditional thing and that it might’ve come from the sorting of resources for our moms to be thinking about that ingredient in the same way.

Sarah: Maybe there was a network of recipe exchanging that we might’ve been unaware of.

Sean: Those recipes must have been orated in a way where they were passed through communities through word-of-mouth. I don’t know that I’ve ever really seen our recipes being written down. That’s never something my mom did, and if she did, it was really rare. Maybe for stuff like banana bread, you know?

Sarah: Yeah, my mom was the same way. I remember asking her how she learned to cook and if there were recipes my grandma shared with her. She told me there were no recipes, just my grandma. Nothing was written down, it was all recollected in memory, passed down from one matriarch to another. I’[m always wondering which of those memories are the oldest.

Sean: When I think about the passing of family recipes, I think a lot about what dictates a mother to make the decision to teach those to their children. For my mom, she’s been particularly hesitant to hand them over because I believe there’s a certain part of her that thinks she can still cook for me. There’s a bit of a power resistance going on where the passing down of recipes to me will lead to a lessened reliance on my mother to make them for me. It’s almost like, if I were to ask her for a recipe, she’d be like, “Okay, so you’d rather I die.”

Sarah: Okay, your mom is hilarious. Love her. But it’s quite interesting isn’t it? My mom isn’t really the same way, but she’s a heavy criticizer. Both of us are huge foodies and we love going out to eat. Whether it’s a new trendy spot or the tried-and-true phở restaurant close to home, she’ll always say at the end of the meal that she could 1000% make it better. And she knows exactly what ingredient it might be missing.

And again, I’ve asked her how she learned these skills and all of the recipes she’s cooked meals for me from. She said my grandma. There was no book to read or notes to take. My grandma would just be with her in the kitchen telling her what to do until my mom remembered it all by memory.

Sean: These unspoken customs make me think to put it in a larger context. We have a certain responsibility when we’re researching critical refugee studies and diaspora studies. How do we discern a Vietnamese American diasporic tradition that maybe would distinguish themselves from other communities who have been affected by displacement? What is the Vietnamese American response? What were the conditions that allowed us to think about things in a particular way than how a Chinese American or Mexican American would approach these questions of passing down family recipes or engaging in their own archives?

Sarah: I had a really great discussion with my directed studies advisor, Dr. Kiara Hill, whose work is rooted in the African diaspora. I was feeling lost with where to even start with such a grand topic, and she told me, “The seeds are in the mundane.” Thinking specifically about that, the simple ways we wake up, share meals, rest, work, and play… Observing our day-to-day habits could hold potential to show us what the Vietnamese experience is.

Sean: And resistance, especially when we’re thinking about the maintenance of memories; there’s a practice of certain memories we choose to keep and throw away for the sake of self-preservation. Something that you might benefit from is looking at Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory. She poses a lot of the questions we’ve been thinking about, which is how do we keep refugee traditions or practices in our memory without having to retell the horrors when it’s not necessary? Are we bringing up something that we don’t want to? What are the conditions of the baggage that comes up whenever we talk about the Vietnam War? Even though she’s writing it from a Holocaust perspective, the same mechanism of recalling memories from war, violence, and genocide are one and the same.

Sarah: The maintenance of memory sounds very alive. So what if memories are all that makes an archive? Could a person exist to be an archive in their own body? Memories stay as long as they live in others and I’m intrigued by the idea that an archive has a living heartbeat. When I think about archives, I think cream boxes on dusty shelves. I don’t want that to be how our histories are preserved and that being our legacy.

Sean: We’re kind of trapped in time with how we’re represented at the moment. Even so, writers like Việt Thanh Nguyễn and Ocean Vương are quite responsible for really breaking the Vietnamese American stories into the general market for refugee storytelling, so when they tell their perspectives as refugees, it’s really what they know best and what’s most earnest to them. But that being reiterated is somewhat of a problem too.

Sarah: It is definitely possible to have a revisitation of the trauma in a way that isn’t reimagining the experience and expanding the pain.

Something I’m curious about is the disconnect between us (Việt Kiều*) and the Vietnamese people back home. I’ve never been to Vietnam, but I hear that how we think of the war and the way it circulates in conversation is different. I wonder if that also applies to the way they address their war-related trauma, too.

*Việt Kiều: Term for describing those of Vietnamese descent living abroad.

Sean: Oh yeah, absolutely. When we think about how the Vietnam War was such an epic event in the American historical canon of empire, it was a huge ordeal… this holy interventionist thing. And then the whole humanitarian part of it is such an ingrained part of our American history. But in Vietnam, it’s one of many in their many years of colonial history; they treat it almost as if it was a footnote. Their entire history is predated on colonization, so in some ways colonization is part of their national identity and sense of nationalism.

Sarah: How did you learn about that?

Sean: It was expressed to me when I went to Vietnam earlier this year. I stopped by this risograph studio in Ho Chi Minh City called “We Do Good”, mostly because I wanted to take a look. But I was picking their brain a little bit about Vietnamese history and how Vietnamese youth are thinking about these things.

They deal with a lot of censorship and there’s a lot of criticism about the government, but not a lot is done or said about it. It’s just a conversational practice. For Vietnamese youth, they’re very apolitical about everything. When I asked them about what they’re making art about, it’s all about the personal, individual, and the family. Almost nothing has to do with politics. Bringing that into a larger context of history that isn’t visible, it was really hard for them to gain political support in expressing solidarity through encampments or protests because it wasn’t embedded in their culture or tradition to protest. It was hard to get word across.

Sarah: Which is a huge 180 from what we observe here, even with some in our immediate circles. I mean families will argue over which is the “right” flag, but it just ends at the dinner table.

Sean: Yeah, and it’s interesting how much Vietnamese youth are gravitating towards the art scene. It’s all an archive in its own way.

Sarah: Making art about their day-to-day life…if we put all of those works into the same container then in some ways it’s a capsule of the Vietnam our parents never got to know. The way our parents might experience the expressions of this unknown Vietnam to them may be a parallel to the way we experience these memories of war from a secondary perspective.

Taking everything we’ve discussed in account, how has your research journey impacted the way you are thinking about the Vietnamese-American experience? How did your findings and field research in Vietnam help you further understand our place here?

Sean: I realized that the site of our inspiration and the passion is driven by one’s self-reflexiveness and own sense of urgency for wanting to learn about these things. I think it also affects the degree of critical consciousness. A lot of people our age are stuck at discovering one’s own identities through the way that we’re commercially understood or racialized. These master narratives have led us to believe that our culture is alive only through food and tradition as we know it.

I think the stuff they do at Vietnamese Student Associations, with these traditional dances, for instance, is how those patterns and practices are reiterated and are oftentimes a comfort zone for a lot of Vietnamese Americans. While it’s really great to celebrate our heritage through traditional dances or these grand cultural shows, it’s an echo chamber. These commercialized things become the responsibilities of burden, because we have it in our imagination. We were raised to think about how hard our parents have worked for us.

When we connect our reading and American heritage to large complexities of capitalism and imperialism, we become unburdened as our experience as a Vietnamese American becomes something greater than the family. If we have no tactile relationship with literature, we are missing the chance for our brains to reimagine how the conditions for our world can be. Refusal to read types of literature and diaspora storytelling outside of our cultures restricts empathetic capacity for other diasporas.

Sarah: How would you reimagine it all for yourself?

Sean: I want to feel some type of ancestral soil, to understand ancestry beyond grandparents, to have a developed home. A better imagined world is one where home is a bit more definitive and stable.

SEAN XUÂN HIẾU NGUYỄN (he/they) is a master’s student in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. They received their Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Sean is a multidisciplinary writer and aspiring educator, and their developing research examines Vietnamese American narrative strategies across literature and visual art via personal family archives. They currently work with the San Francisco State 1968-69 BSU/TWLF Strike Digital Oral History Archive. Nguyễn likes Tuesday crosswords, portmanteaus, and audio guides at the museum; he does not like slow walkers, double negatives, and dogs in restaurants.

SARAH NGỌC LƯU (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She gravitates towards photography, ceramics, zines, print-making and music. Her current interest revolves around the experiences of the Vietnamese diaspora and how its complexities are largely preserved through memory. Lưu’s work has touched on themes of their mixed Vietnamese-Chinese identity, intergenerational trauma and cultural traditions. She explores themes outside those topics by grabbing inspiration from her lived experience growing up in the Bay Area surrounded by a vibrant arts and music culture. Lưu holds a BA in Studio Art, Preparation for Teaching from San Jose State University and is currently studying for an MFA in the Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University. Her favorite food is her grandmother’s Bánh Canh and she can roller skate backwards.