Graphic Novel Review: Vietnamerica

Bennett here, taking a break from not treating John Matrix's kidnapped daughter very well.

The great American novel. On the surface, it’s a simple concept, but a loaded one. Say you want to write the great American novel in any kind of company and watch the snickers and condescension rain down. In a country with such a variety of faces, with so many strikingly different groups of people, and with such disparity among classes, is there such a thing as the “Great American Novel?” Can there be? Or can you simply appeal to one group at a time?


It’s the same type of discourse that permeates the Asian American community—is there such a community, and if so, is it a legitimate one? A pan-Asian American community implies a shared history, a shared story, but clearly that hasn’t been the case. Not when you consider vastly different issues such as the Japanese internment versus the Southeast Asian exodus.  The only real, legitimate reason for a pan-Asian American community seems to be to react to outside groups (mainstream America) who would confuse East Asian ethnicities, as happened in 1982 to Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man who was bludgeoned to death by two out-of-work auto workers in Detroit after being confused as Japanese. The two auto workers were given probation. Today, incidentally, is the twenty-nine year anniversary of his death.

As Vietnamese American, I consider myself a detractor of the pan-Asian American identity. While experiences such as Vincent Chin’s death indicate a need for a banner under which Asian Americans can assemble, Asian America should be a more organic concept, one that compartmentalizes itself more often than not. I have no interest in discussing Filipino migrant workers of the 1800s any more than I do Bolivian immigration in Northern Virginia. Black America has, for the most part, a shared history that is integral to the American consciousness and identity. Asian American history operates as piecemeal, a mosaic of groups which have yet to blend together to form a coherent identity informed primarily by a universal American experience. Do Chinese Americans on the west coast who have been here for lord-knows-how-many generations have anything to do with the Hmong that arrived in the 70s and 80s? Why should we think they do? Simply because, to mainstream Americans, all East Asians look similar ?

The great Vietnamese American novel is an enticing idea, one that has been tossed around and attempted to varying degrees of success. One of my favorite memoirs, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham, retells the grand, epic journey of a Vietnamese American man bicycling through Vietnam, searching for an understanding of his heritage, and, at some level, to search for what his family has lost to the cloud hanging over them, the sense of impending doom—a feeling that manifested as dysfunction because they would not, and could not address it. Recently, Gia Bao (GB) Tran’s (graphic) novel, Vietnamerica, attempted to tell the great Vietnamese American story. Though I hesitate to put “graphic” in there at all, as the medium is too easily derided as low-art, or unintelligent. None of these adjectives describe Vietnamerica. Tran, who was born in the USA in 1978, never had much of a strong relationship with his Vietnamese heritage. The book recounts his parent’s often muddied history and their flight from Vietnam, and, briefly, their assimilation into American society.

It’s a common immigrant story, right? Departure, loss, assimilation, and the subsequent fracture in families, and ultimately the reconciliation of heritage, family, identity. And it’s so very tempting to write from the Vietnamese American point of view, particularly as a member of the 1.5 Generation. There are countless American stories about Vietnam, a revolutionary and devastating place and time for not just the country, but the world. Revolutions spread through countries colonized by western forces, and it all seemed to stem from a little country in Southeast Asia. And America cares about Vietnam, if only to see how its own identity as the Western superpower has been influenced by her.  Interestingly, Tran spent much of his life as someone who didn’t care for Vietnam, didn't care for the pain and history his parents (and their parents) endured as they wound their individual ways through French occupation, and civil war, and didn't care about how his heritage and history has changed the course of the country he now lives in.

Vietnamerica’s a beautiful graphic novel, absolutely magnificent in scope, ambition and writing. There are so many moments of poignant reflection: Tran's family doing what they had to in order to stay together; dealing with overbearing parents; the heartache and honesty of a home headed by a man who can’t adapt to American parenting. The art is somewhere between Joe Sacco’s Palestine and the graphic novel that Vietnamerica inevitably draws comparisons to: Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The gritty look of the art suits the book perfectly. The story is dirty, gritty, honest, and done in muted colors, almost a muddied look in black-and-white, well-chosen for a time that ironically can never be considered in black-and-white terms. Tran has created a complex, never-easy-to-read history that evokes an astonishing sense of loss and alienation. I won’t call it a triumph, but it’s certainly a resounding success, a wonderful addition to the Vietnamese American lexicon.

The two major problems with Vietnamerica become apparent about halfway in: the structure is so jumbled that instead of evoking a sense of confusion and muddled history that Tran may have been aiming for, it, at times, simply becomes difficult to read. Characters weave in and out of the story, unnamed, or named, or unrecognizable because of the artwork. We switch tracks constantly, jumping from Tran’s mother’s tale to his father’s, without much of a transition alert for the reader. We begin to forget things that came before, and things that should have much more weight are lost altogether. And the book lacks symmetry, a way to draw it all together. It starts well with Tran’s father visiting his estranged, dead father’s estate and leaving in a hurry, hinting at a tension, a driving point that would propel the story. But then we move outward, encompassing Tran’s mother’s story, and so much more of Tran’s father’s history, that the estranged father angle gets lost and by the time we revisit it, we’re left wondering what we’re supposed to take away from this at all.

In this respect, the main problem becomes obvious: there isn’t enough authorial content. That is, we need more direction provided by GB Tran himself. I get that this is a memoir, and one that he uses to tell his family’s (and ultimately Vietnam’s) story, but we need more of Tran. We need him to point us to the story, to the conflict that drives us. Because while the downfall of South Vietnam and the subsequent, staggered flight from there is a huge conflict, it’s strangely not enough to drive this narrative, because we’re not invested in Vietnam as a country, we're invested in the character that should be driving us: GB Tran. This should be about him, about how he has related to this incredible history with such complacency, and how he became driven to find out more about everything. That narrative layer is sorely needed to draw everything together, and the book really picks up when we get the small flashes of Tran’s more recent, personal history.

No review would be complete without a brief mention of Maus. And, really, that book works because Spiegelman used himself as the main driving force. We followed Spiegelman as the protagonist, as the one who filters the Holocaust story from his father, and we get the relationships and the give-and-take of a family dynamic. Tran completely bypassed this important part of the experience. And it’s not like he isn’t aware of Maus—there are points that are clearly influenced by Maus, the artwork in particular. The large, page-sized panels such as the one in which countless Vietnamese are shown clawing their way out of a ditch shaped to replace Vietnam on a map of Southeast Asia could have been taken directly from the pages of Maus.

While Vietnamerica stops just short of creating an immersive tale, it does give  enough to push the reader through, and for the most part, it’s an exhilarating experience. Sure, there are confusing passages, and vague, ambiguously drawn characters, but the drama of the family struggling to stay together trumps most of these issues. Perhaps a sequel would not be out of the question? The title, after all, implies a larger story, and his family, from the upper-academic echelons of Vietnamese society, tells only a small portion of the Vietnamese American experience. Additionally, Vietnamerica operates too much as exposition and within Vietnam to really earn the title. And I really want to explore this story more, especially if it dealt with issues unique to the children of refugees. But a sequel doesn’t even have to be about Tran and his family, necessarily… After all, he came with the First Wave of Vietnamese refugees—and the most common image of the Vietnamese refugee is from the Second Wave, the Boat People. But that’s completely beside the point. Vietnamerica is a worthy read, and a worthy addition to any library.