Mobility and Making ‘Tin Lanh’ in America

Abstract

This thesis traces the dynamics of community and place-making for Vietnamese Protestants, and introduces a different interpretive framework for this using the language of mobility. It argues that mobility has been central to the placemaking practices of Vietnamese American Protestants from the arrival of the first border crossers in 1975 to now. This research combines archival as well as ethnographic research methods with the aim of exploring what types of mobility are important for Vietnamese Protestants in different contexts, scales, and times. For Vietnamese Protestant refugees coming to the United States in the wake of the Fall of Saigon in April 1975, the debates over the shape and purposes of their churches formed the discursive landscape in which the connections and entanglement between refugee politics of gratitude and indebtedness, Christian rhetorics of spiritual brotherhood, and articulations of exilic belonging and desires of an eventual return to the Vietnamese homeland, were revealed. In this context, the major type of mobility that had to be confronted was that of refugee passage, but present day border crossings from Vietnam to the United States carry a different set of political and spiritual impositions. These border crossings instead allow us to see the ways that mobility can become linked to ideas of modernity not through notions of material development or progress, but as the first step, an alternative to conversion, in which the act of migrating is the precondition through which one gains access towards the possibility of individual self-transformation through spirituality. Finally, drawing from archival material on the Vietnamese Boat People Evangelical Church that existed in Hong Kong, this thesis argues that mobility works not just by revealing or encoding narratives about or into places and bodies, but demonstrates the ways in which spaces of worship needed to confront the mobilities that brought people to the church as well as the border crossings that were still to come.