Gốc Rễ as Craft: Notes on Survival and Knowing

Abstract

There is one thing I hold dear is the notion that narrative desire, in any circumstances, arises most strongly once historical erasure takes place, a local, personal reckoning naturally forming against the global, sweeping forces. After the American War in Vietnam, after generations lost to and were displaced by violence, the search for an identity in each individual becomes more sacred, symbolic and urgent, but as quiet as it can be. This critical essay is an amalgamation of autobiographical and critical writing on craft, survival, and language through a transnational lens informed by Vietnamese and Vietnamese American experiences. I look at the notion of mất gốc as a personal trauma and a generative space for craft. I look at the gaps and silences within the literary and historical canon. The works by Ocean Vuong, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Aimee Phan are relevant here as they facilitate my inquiries into the queer, diasporic, and transnational magnitudes of Vietnamese and Vietnamese American narrative works. I imagine a future for a novel that resists the assimilationist gaze and places the fragmented, haunted lives of Vietnamese Amerasians at the center stage. Ultimately, I argue for a literature and storytelling as an embodied act that sees the "art of staying afloat" as craft.