I had the pleasure of presenting a paper coming out of my current dissertation work on Kim Thúy called “Soups for the Soul: Complicities of the Diasporic Vietnamese Kitchen” at PAMLA in Palm Springs last week as part of a two-session panel entitled “Food and Drink in Migrant Narratives” organized by Liza Bolen (University of New Brunswick). I began by discussing the pilot episode of Kim Thúy’s TV series La table de Kim, her media presence, and the recruitment of Vietnamese refugees like Thúy and Phan Thị Kim Phúc (otherwise known as “napalm girl”) for testimonies of nation-state humanitarianism before offering complicity/complicité as productive frames for close readings of Ru and the culinary encounters staged therein. I also got to talk about a couple of my favorite Vietnamese soup dishes: hủ tiếu nước (although, I usually prefer dry style) and canh chua.
I am immensely grateful to Liza for the opportunity to present since last meeting at MLA in San Francisco in 2022 at the 20th/21st c. French panel “Words on Food” and to my co-panelists for the thoughtful engagement with each other’s work.
