Assimilation, Belonging, and Cultural Identity Theme Analysis

Although the majority of Thi Bui’s book focuses on her family’s lives in and escape from Việt Nam, their arrival in and assimilation to life in the United States is also an essential part of the narrative. Before writing this book, having lived virtually all of her life in America, Bui feels caught between two competing systems of cultural values and expectations. Not only does she not know which system to choose, but she also does not know where (or how) she belongs. But when she dives into her family’s history, she realizes that hers is not the first generation that has been forced to assimilate to completely new surroundings: her parents and their ancestors also moved around and found belonging in foreign settings. Ultimately, she realizes that belonging and culture are not absolute or inherent; rather, “home” and “identity,” as far back as Bui can see in her family, are things people have actively made and chosen for themselves.

As a Vietnamese American, Bui feels a sense of loss at the beginning of the book: she feels that there is a cultural gap between herself and her parents, and that she does not fully understand the Vietnamese culture and history that should be her birthright. This cultural gap is first evident in her childhood, when Bui and her sisters arrive in the United States and feel a strong pressure to abandon Vietnamese culture and let themselves be “Americanized.” For instance, when the family first arrives in the United States, they move in with Má’s sister Ðào, whose family has already spent three years in the United States. Bui imagines that she and her siblings “probably embarrassed [Ðào’s family] with [their] fresh-off-the-boat appearance.” Jokingly, she recalls her sister Bích eating cereal directly from the box and one of Ðào’s daughters yelling at her, “Don’t be such a REFUGEE!”

Bui remembers learning about “Americanhood” from children in her neighborhood but, eventually, becoming something like a “normal” American teenager. This causes conflict when, like her sisters before her, she decides to move in with her boyfriend (“something you just didn’t do” according to Má). Essentially, like many immigrants, Bui feels that she is caught between her family’s (“Vietnamese”) culture and her environment’s (“American”) one. Having grown up in the latter, she believes that she has now lost touch with the former, which is part of her motivation for rediscovering her family’s past. Specifically, she does this during a trip to her old neighborhood of Bàn Cờ. But she was too young when she lived there to retain any memories of the place, so she (and her brother Tâm) spend the visit “documenting in lieu of remembering.” When she has to draw Bàn Cờ, she has little context so uses an American example—the Lower East Side—as a basis for imagining it.

But Bui soon realizes that her parents and their ancestors never lived a single, unchanging lifestyle—in fact, there is no pure “Vietnamese” culture, nor a pure “American” one. Rather, her ancestors have always been adapting to new and unfamiliar cultural contexts, moving between places and actively developing their sense of belonging (rather than having it handed to them). First, Việt Nam suffered so many waves of colonization and foreign intervention—from the Chinese, French, Japanese, and Americans—and has endured so many centuries of intermixture that there is no single definable “Vietnamese” identity. Rather, it has always been (and always will be) hybrid and layered, formed at the confluence of various places and forces, because Việt Nam has always assimilated foreigners and assimilated to them.

Specifically, Bui learns that her parents moved around a lot: Bố spends most of his childhood in Hải Phòng, and leaves his native village for the last time at age seven. He goes to Sài Gòn in young adulthood with his grandfather (by way of Hạ Long Bay) and then ends up in the Mekong Delta with Má, then Malaysia and the Untied States through a series of circumstances largely beyond their control. Similarly, Má grows up between Cambodia, Nha Trang, Đà Lạt, and Sài Gòn: she has no single home. The closest they can get in Việt Nam is the Bàn Cờ house where the whole family lived, but it is not theirs anymore—and when the family visits, they do not even recognize it, which underlines how secondary it is to the senses of self they ultimately develop. So while it could be said that they “belong” in Việt Nam, their experiences make it clear that Việt Nam is not one thing or place: not only are there immense differences between the North and the South, but they were not even the same country for the majority of the time that Má and Bố lived there.

Ultimately, by returning to Việt Nam and reconstructing her family’s history, Bui realizes that identity is a process, not a product: it is always hybrid and in the process of formation. At the end of her book, Bui reflects on her relationship to Việt Nam and decides that she “no longer feel[s] the need to reclaim a HOMELAND,” since she now knows that “the ground beneath [her] parents’ feet had always been shifting” and so “Việt Nam was not [her] country at all.” This does not mean she feels no attachment to Việt Nam, but rather that it is not the “true” basis of her identity any more than California is.

Bui realizes that her identity is as much about the family and future she has chosen for herself—her husband Travis and her son—as the family she came from, the place she was born, and history her parents lived. She ends by noting that her son will have the same chance to define his own identity and sense of belonging: the chance to “be free.” In tracing her family’s past, then, Bui learns that this past—where and what she comes from—influences but does not have to define her.