The Vietnamese Diaspora’s Return Journey and Transnational Belonging

초록

This paper examines the homecoming journey of overseas Vietnamese as depicted in Kim Lefèvre’s Retour au saison des pluies [Return to the rainy season] (1990) and Kim Doan’s Sur place [On location] (2003). The experiences of members of the Vietnamese diaspora returning to their homeland, as depicted in these autobiographical works by two French writers of Vietnamese origin, are used to question the reality of an ethnic diaspora as a transnational community, and to examine how the narratives reveal the sense of belonging and identity formation of the overseas Vietnamese. While Kim Lefèvre’s narrator returns to the land of her birth, where she used to suffer discrimination and hardship, to reunite with the family she left behind, reminiscing her past and reconstructing its unknown parts, Kim Doan’s protagonist travels around Vietnam trying to overcome fragmented recollections and trauma to come to terms with her past. However, the tensions and conflicts that the overseas Vietnamese experience hinder identification and accentuate their sense of otherness and alienation from the local population. In the given narratives, it is more with the native landscape, than with any ethnic national identity that the overseas Vietnamese ultimately identify, offering a representation of self-identification based an idealized, deterritorialized image of the homeland.

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