Vietnamese women: narratives of cross-cultural marriage

• Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen
• Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific

Read the full text

Image: Danghongphuc / flickr

07 January 2010In one of the most substantive and visible diasporas of the late twentieth century, more than two million Vietnamese left their homeland after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and made new lives for themselves overseas. The majority resettled in the United States, Australia, Canada, and France, but Vietnamese communities were established in countries as diverse as Israel and Norway. Based on an oral history project conducted in Australia between 2005 and 2008, this article explores the narratives of four Vietnamese women who have intermarried with non-Vietnamese men.

The contexts for these marriages range from Asia in the 1960s to Australia in the 1990s. The four women are differentiated in terms of generation, class, and level of education, but all are shaped by the history and legacy of their family and country. Their lives in Vietnam were conducted against a background of political unrest and war, and all have been subjected to displacement or migration, and experienced profound loss in the shape of the loss of homeland. The author explores the representation of cross-cultural relationships in Vietnamese literary culture before examining the women's narratives in detail and focusing on two central questions: firstly, what do their portrayals of cross-cultural marriage reveal about their relationship with the past and with memory? And secondly, to what extent does their choice of a non-Vietnamese partner reflect a desire to distance themselves from their past and their history, and to seek a degree of separation from circulating discourses of grief and traumatic loss in a Vietnamese environment?

Image: Danghongphuc / flickr