When I first read the title of this weeks topic, I was a bit confused as to what exactly the title, "Diasporic Experiences and Transnational Processes", meant. When I read about Phuong Ho, a Vietnamese international student who was studying math at San Jose State University (Valverde, 145), I started to understand what it meant and how it relates to people from Viet Nam and other Asian people. The poor guy pulled a knife on his housemate as a joke and got the cops called on him. That's fair, but to get beat up and to continue getting beat up even though you're unarmed and surrendered is something else. The other thing to note is that this caused an uproar not only to some people in America but to people in Vietnam as well. The sad part is that some Vietnamese Americans did not want to stand up for it because they didn't want to be associated with the image of Vietnamese communists that Americans had instilled in their people's minds.
As Professor Valverde put it: "Vietnamese American lives are transnational and that this diasporic group is directly affected by and affects events in Viet Nam" (Valverde, 146). This is definitely still relevant today because anything negative that happens with a Vietnamese American or a Vietnamese immigrant, the US will paint them as the villain. Even though media does not shed light on this enough, I think it's important to note that incidents like the one with Phuong do happen to all kinds of Asian people and their narrative continuously gets rewritten in a negative light.
Question: Why can't Viet Nam be separate from the United States? It seems that the United States has only done negative things when it comes to Viet Nam especially.
Sources
Image: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/h2ESn_a5gSk/hqdefault.jpg
Valverde, Kieu-Linh Caroline. Transnationalizing Viet Nam: COmmunity, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora, 2012.
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