I had the opportunity to virtually present a short paper called “Em Aime/Yêu Anh: Transnational Love and Solidarity After Agent Orange,” on Kim Thúy’s Em; Nguyễn Thị Mai Phương’s short story “Storms” in the recent collection Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath, edited by Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock; and the France-based solidarity association Collectif Vietnam Dioxine, as part of the guaranteed roundtable “Malady and Coloniality in the Francophone World” with LLC Francophone at this year’s MLA Convention in San Francisco last week, January 5-8.
This work builds upon a final paper that I wrote in the GETSEA (Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asia) online mini-course “Transnational Representation of Southeast Asia: Race, Gender, and Identity” in Summer 2021 with Prof. Quynh Vo (UH Mānoa) who provided invaluable feedback, and draws inspiration from discussions and readings from a biopolitics seminar with Prof. Donna V. Jones at Berkeley in Fall 2021.
Abstract:
From 1961 to 1971, the U.S. military sprayed an estimated 20 million gallons of chemical defoliants across rural South Vietnam, showering over 5 million acres of land and 4 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. After four generations of dioxin-related miscarriages, birth defects, and health issues, Trần Tố Nga’s lawsuit against the manufacturers of the Rainbow Herbicides offered possible justice until a tribunal de grande instance turned the case down in May 2021. Vietnamese literature, national and diasporic, have increasingly taken up the disasters of Agent Orange as a major theme, compelling readers to confront the injustices of the Vietnam War from Vietnamese perspectives and consider (im)possibilities for reparation. Kim Thúy’s Em (2020) situates Agent Orange within a longue durée, beginning with France’s introduction of Amazonian rubber trees to Vietnam which are then destroyed by American herbicides—another foreign substance that infiltrates the ecosystem, but inflicts violence through its alteration of DNA, rather than the exploitation of human labor. Comparing Em with Nguyen Thi Mai Phuong’s “Storms” (2020), I employ recent biopolitical concepts (e.g. Cazdyn 2012) to characterize the intergenerational embodiment of wartime and colonialism through chronic illness. I reveal how Thúy’s and Nguyen’s characters’ resilience and care for each other create possibilities for transnational love and solidarity after the fratricidal fissures of the war. As a concrete example, I turn to the international movement #JusticePourTranToNga launched by the Collectif Vietnam Dioxine, whose unifying mission, despite the legal system’s refusal of justice, still helps heal the wounds of war.
