On Slowness: A World Building Provocation for Teaching and Research

In the past, I was frustrated by how slow my work moved. I was impatient that my critical inquiry, confusion, curiosity forced me to constantly revisit sources, translations, historical contexts. Market pressures to publish and produce (a talk, an article, a dissertation, a book, teaching, digital resources) with the promise of professional security perpetuated a structure of external validation of scholarly production.

As I begin this new position at UCLA and transition into my professorial role, I’ve been reflecting on my messy and vibrant intersections of intellectual, personal, and political commitments. My transdisciplinary work in Southeast Asian history, community arts, digital humanities, and collaborative multimodal learning are all unified by an approach of ‘world building.’ I examine worlds past through historical and digital humanistic inquiry. A world building approach recursively makes space for the interwoven work of critique-reimagination of worlds past, present, and future.

At the heart of worldbuilding is an intention to slowness.

I undertake a slow critical approach in world building to take time to wander, wonder, pause, and be deeply embedded in cultural social worlds. I strive towards an ethical responsibility to understand primary sources and data and their affordances of production. I work and walk alongside others in intentional collaborations of knowledge making, honoring overlapping and divergent motivations and interests. We journey in collective writing sprints, organize feminist gatherings of knowledge sharing, workshop rough ideas, and enact tactics of creating near future and distant future realities. Scholarship is a communication ecosystem–through classroom engagements, public talks, side conversations, I revise and revisit my thinking in a persistent commitment to learn and unlearn. All of this work, this quiet labor and recursive journeying is both painfully and pleasurably slow.

Slowness in Teaching (Part 1)

Teaching through pandemic and navigating infrastructures of labor exploitation has left me beyond exhausted. Intentional slowness in teaching is a tactic of self-preservation and invitation towards rest. I counter both internal and external pressures to continually ‘improve’ or ‘innovate’ my teaching with a set of slow tactics:

Each time I teach a course, I permit myself to only ‘innovate’ (change the structure of the course) in either content or form. That means, I only change the reading/topics or change the structure of assignments/modality.
I offer assignments that invite in slowness from students rather than structurally add more. For example, rather than another paper or project, I task students with a portfolio assignment that recompiles and reflects on previous work within the classroom.
Topics are substantively aligned vertically instead of pressures towards horizontal expansion. We take ‘one thing’ and create opportunities to dive deeper, offering space for comparative wonderings but recognize that expertise in all the things is impossible. A final project that hones into the ‘one thing’ allows students to slowly explore.
At the heart of slowness is creating a class culture and community. As instructor, I dedicate time to learn about students through:
- A simple student questionnaire. Example
- First class session on building a collective class charter. Example
- Revisiting personal goals and experiences in the middle of term through a check in questionnaire. Example
- Creating space to celebrate and commemorate the class journey through a shared activity such as collective ‘yearbook’. See extended discussion of yearbook celebration and other assignments in my Teaching Workshop

Slides from talk: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17EoKTX5fX7sThm6pR5NmmPYCaTIdVzJm1MNDdZRXspM/edit?usp=sharing

Virtual Reality and Slowness

I joined the Virtual Angkor team late their dissemination stage as a teaching fellow, committed to rethinking how to ‘teaching’ with virtual heritage resources. I designed the following teaching module guided by the question “What does it mean to tour the past?” We carry this out firstly through a slow observation based learning (where often in university environments it’s all about fast, skimming, speed reading, losing the experiential wonderment of it all.) I organized this teaching module be a collective meditation on meaning making, guiding questions, vocalizing understanding, figuring out collectively an unfamiliar historic moment and social world of thirteenth century Angkor.

See complete Virtual Angkor teaching module here: https://cindyanguyen.com/2019/11/25/teaching-virtual-reality-module-analyzing-representations-of-angkor/

Slides on Decolonial Data Pedagogy Lecture with Fulbright-Hays (Middlesex Community College and Lowell Public Schools) Group : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zQFZdggH8Tp9ueUeUO0qoH9KRLVHNY6Vfkzqn1vNzjE/edit?usp=sharing

Slow Viewing Workshop Description

In this workshop, Dr. Nguyen invites participants to practice a ‘slow viewing, slow listening, slow thinking,’ process of meaning making in virtual reality that can be taught in classrooms focused on world history, global Asias, and digital media and design. Dr. Nguyen leads an exploration of Virtual Angkor, a virtual reconstruction of the medieval Cambodian capital of Angkor that seeks to explore the diversity and complexity of Southeast Asia in digital heritage studies. Virtual Angkor reappraises the neglected region of Southeast Asia as a dynamic and important center for understanding global processes of premodern urbanisms, climate change, and ‘non-western’ forms of governance and power. This workshop invites participants to enter a VR space to listen, examine, and question. The experience aims to facilitate a ‘critical making’ understanding of the past which undermines the romanticized representations of the exoticized orient or the ruins of Angkor that permeate both the French colonial record and the contemporary tourism industry complex of Cambodia.

Slowness in Research (Part 2)

My Decolonial Data Pedagogy Lecture with Fulbright-Hays (Middlesex Community College and Lowell Public Schools) Group (linked to above) has been a culmination of a slow alignment of my pedagogical and research commitments towards imagining a post/anti/decolonial approach to my research on colonial histories and knowledge production. Slowness was at the crux of this material-computational analysis of this peripheral text, Technique du Peuple Annamite, that haunted-mesmerized me since graduate school. After eight years of working on a different project (history of libraries) amongst other life things, I return to this work in full gusto. The slowness of ‘figuring out’ this text through close reading, material analysis, collaborative analysis, and computational modeling has given this work the timespan it needed to breathe and imagine. Digital humanities is not just method, but invited a commitment to decolonial data critique and to platform a decolonial imagining, a building of an alternative world beyond/in contestation with its colonial confines.

Slowness as Method

My regular check in: “Is this new idea/approach/methodology substantive or additive?”

As of late, I’ve been repeatedly told: “You have so much energy!” “You’re so productive!” and I often blink back in cognitive dissonance to the comments because they shroud the quiet, recursive labor of what it means to do teaching and scholarship on the everyday. Folks see the product, not the process.

I’m slowly trudging through a mess and I embrace it. Slowness is a feature not a bug (particularly in virtual reality and computational analysis). Slowness is an invitation to critique and contextualize. Slowness is a pedagogical imperative to permit students to be curious again, to reflect and to celebrate. Slowness is a license to pause, rest, and do nothing.

Collecting through Absence: Fragmenting Vietnamese Refugee Archives by Cindy Anh Nguyen [New Publication]

Truly honored to share the pre-print of my latest publication. This piece was produced in conversation with this ambitious special issue on the ‘littoral zone’ and the expansive ways in which we think/create/imagine Southeast Asian studies. Yet this piece also had several before lives, workshopped in literary arts communities and women’s writing groups that emboldened me to bring together my commitments to academia and arts in a singular embodied piece of writing. This piece marks my own transitional littoral moment, a turning of the chapter towards a different type of scholarly identity and community artist, a feminist troubling of knowledge and narrative.

For published essay, see

Cindy Anh Nguyen (2023) “Collecting Through Absence: Fragmenting Vietnamese Refugee Archives”, Wasafiri, 38:4, 22-30, DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2023.2237770

For other pieces in this special issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rwas20/38/4?nav=tocList

Excerpted from the opening essay by editors Nazry Bahrawi, Joanne Leow, and Y-Dang Troeung:

Etymologically derived from the Latin litus (shore), the word littoral refers to something that is ‘of or belonging to the seashore’. In oceanography and marine biology, ‘the littoral zone’ is the area of closest contact between the land and the water: the intertidal zone, the high-water mark, estuaries, straits, the continental shelf, and more. In the military, the littoral zone is associated with littoral warfare involving combat operations oscillating between water and ground. The littoral also invokes associations with edges, beaches, waterlines, litter, sediment, and drift. The littoral zone offers a rich metaphor for thinking through contact between material spaces such as the land and the sea, and conceptual spaces such as empire and ecology.

Surrounded by oceans, seas, and straits, with its multiple histories of maritime empires and nations, Southeast Asia lends itself particularly well to the study of the littoral zone, as source of livelihood for so many but also as subject of historical and contemporary colonial and postcolonial land reclamation and maritime disputes. From the colonial eras to the post-Cold War moment, Southeast Asian seas, straits, and estuaries have seen the transport of indentured workers, migrants, refugees, trafficked people, deportees, and many other racialised peoples whose bodies and labour have been rendered surplus.

In conversation with communities of artists and scholars in Southeast Asia, we have curated this special issue on Southeast Asia and the littoral. The littoral zones of Southeast Asia are contested spaces and in constant flux: the issue’s focus on postcolonial Southeast Asian texts (from Singapore, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Myanmar) aligns with Wasafiri’s long-standing focus on the themes of empire, colonialism, and decoloniality. Thus, a combination of critical, creative, and artistic works is necessary to capture the elusive and mutable nature of these ecologies and landscapes. The selection of contributions – that range from creative writing, traditional scholarship, visual art, poetry, photography, interviews, reviews, and hybrid format works – provide place-based testimonies and glimpses into the complex experiences of existing on the shoreline.

Colonial Vietnam: History, Agency, Culture, Power” Invited Scholar Lecture for the Vietnamese American Refugee Experience Model Curriculum

In July 2023 I delivered a scholar talk to curriculum writers working on the “Vietnamese American Refugee Experience Model Curriculum” as part of broader state initiatives to incorporate Southeast Asian studies and refugee experiences as part of K-12 curriculum. It’s an honor and privilege to be part of this educational movement, and I provided through my lecture longer contextual histories of Vietnam to situate teaching and learning about diaspora, culture, and politics of Vietnamese American refugee experiences. Below is my lecture and links to primary sources, ideas for teaching materials, and I am excited to see the development of the curriculum and open source publication of teaching materials to come.

Part 1: History and Agency

Part 2: Culture and Power

Activity: Primary Sources

“Culture and Power: Colonial Vietnam and its Legacies“

This talk explores the historical context and legacies of French colonial Vietnam from 1858 to 1945. This talk will focus on colonial Vietnam and the interwoven themes of culture and power. Rather than position colonialism as an external agent of change, this talk analyzes the colonial encounter as complex exchanges, geographically diverse, and socially uneven. Key debates addressed include the production and legacies of colonial knowledge, the impact of global capitalism, construction of Vietnamese modernity and civilization, and articulations of identities around gender, class, and nation. To contextualize the historical context of French imperialism in Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos), I position nineteenth and twentieth century Vietnamese history within the long autonomous histories and diverse region of Southeast Asia.

[Given the abridged length of the talk, I had to cut most of this discussion out: This talk covers two case studies to demonstrate the political economy and cultural impact of French colonialism and its legacies in Vietnam: colonial tourism and libraries. The first case study examines visual and textual representations (historic film, maps, tourist advertisements) of Indochina and the ways in which Vietnam was exoticized for Western tourist consumption. These historic tourist documents function as source critiques to understand the relationship between power and culture—how colonial documents exoticized and created caricatures of essentialized notions of Vietnameseness, how these types of representations continued on in the 1950s and 1960s during American intervention, and how exoticized representations of the ‘Vietnamese past’ influence contemporary Vietnamese tourist industries today. I also contextualize the rise of colonial tourism as part of infrastructural and social-economic transformations of twentieth century Vietnam— urbanization and transportation networks, ecological devastation, plantation economies and resource extraction.

The second case study examines the colonial building of the Hanoi library, and traces the social-cultural practices of public reading and use of public space by Vietnamese readers. I explain the history of language (multilingual writing scripts, vernacular spoken language, literacies), colonial education, and urban environments in Vietnam and showcase the legacies of colonial institutions in postcolonial Vietnam. These two case studies open up the discussion around the historical construction of ‘Vietnam’ as a unified cultural and political identity, transformed and fractured by a relatively recent twentieth century history of foreign intervention (colonialism, decolonization, militarism).]

My own personal, political, and pedagogical commitments to teaching cultural histories of colonial Vietnam are grounded in cultivating critical, anti-racist, global frameworks. I am commited to teaching students a complex understanding of colonialism and its legacies in Vietnam in order to learn decolonial frameworks and analytical tools 1) to recognize and critique systems of inequality (racism, exoticism, capitalist exploitation) and 2) to recenter narratives of agency and cultural production in Vietnam.

Secondary Sources

Cindy Nguyen, “Reading Rules: The Symbolic and Social Spaces of Reading in the Hanoi Central Library, 1919-1941,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, (2020) Volume 15, No. 3: 1-35. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2020.15.3.1
Cindy Nguyen, “Creating the National Library in Saigon: Colonial Legacies, Fragmented Collections, and Reading Publics, 1946-1958,” in Building a Republican Nation in Postcolonial Vietnam, 1920-1963, Volume 1, edited by Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2022)
Christopher E. Goscha, Going Indochinese: Contesting Concepts of Space and Place in French Indochina. Copenhagen, Denmark: NIAS Books, 2012. (Public Blog Book Review by Cindy Nguyen)
Stéphanie Ponsavady, Cultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French Indochina: A Colonial Roadshow, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992
Martina Thucnhi Nguyen, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2020
Aline Demay, Tourism and Colonization in Indochina (1898-1939), Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.
Cindy Nguyen, “‘A Xu/sou for the Students’: A Discourse Analysis of Vietnamese Student Migration to France in the Late Colonial Period”. In Transnational Migration and Asia: The Question of Return, edited by Michiel Baas, 135–56. Amsterdam University Press, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1963142.11.
Accessible Public Scholarship:
1. Libraries and the Public in Late Colonial Vietnam Lecture, Yale University, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rst3CIHrDH8
2. Blog Post: Cindy Nguyen, “Generational Identities and Cultural Politics: A Historiography of Vietnamese 1920’s and 1930’s Student movements,” April 21, 2016, https://cindyanguyen.com/2016/04/21/generational-politics-vietnam/
3. Blog Post: Linh Pham, July 14, 2023, “The Life, Death and Legacy of 7 Pillar’s of Vietnam’s Quốc Ngữ Literary Wealth,” Saigoneer, https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-literature/25576-the-life,-death-and-legacy-of-7-pillars-of-vietnam-s-qu%E1%BB%91c-ng%E1%BB%AF-literary-wealth
4. Blog Post: Cindy Nguyen, Expressions of Borders and Place through the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship,” April 9, 2016, https://cindyanguyen.com/2016/04/09/vietnam-borders-place/
5. Blog Post: Cindy Nguyen, “When does the ‘modern’ begin in Vietnamese history?” April 9, 2016, https://cindyanguyen.com/2016/04/09/modern-modernity-vietnam/

Open Source Sources and Discussion Questions

British Pathe short film Women of Hanoi, 1930

(0-52 seconds) Street scenes: What does ‘urban’ Hanoi look like? What types of transportation, people, and buildings do you see?
(54 seconds) Food: The title slide describes eating as ‘peculiar.’ “Where eats are eats—but peculiar.” Describe the scene of people eating. What makes the eating ‘peculiar?’ What type of value judgment does the film make?
(1:29) Paper Industry: “Hanoi is a centre for an ages-old industry of paper-making—using special kinds of barks, pounded primitively into pulp.” What types of technologies and methods do people use to make paper? Who is involved in the papermaking process? Why does the film describe this as ‘primitive?’
(2:44) Writing: Who is writing? What type of writing system is the ‘public writer’ using?
Who might the audience be for this compilation of documentary footage of Hanoi? What makes you say that?

Creative remixing of historic comics from 1930s Vietnamese periodical, by Sonya Bui

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16dyynFI0wnVO5VrGeQBYXqkpeu0EuntyXKD-z1yyqrk/edit#slide=id.ga6af389ae1_0_41

Semi-Fictional Travelog to France by Nhất Linh

“Broken Journey: Nhat Linh’s ‘Going to France’ [Translated from the Vietnamese by Greg and Monique Lockhart with an Introduction and Commentary by Greg Lockhart.].” East Asian History, no. 8 (December 1994): 73–134. https://www.eastasianhistory.org/sites/default/files/article-content/08/EAH08_04.pdf

Translated Tourist Guide

Translated Tourist Guide: “Indochina: Glimpses of a Great Tourist Country” https://archive.org/details/ldpd_6345193_000/page/n4/mode/1up

Additional Primary Sources for teaching ‘colonial tourism’

British Pathe Short Film Scenes of “Indo-China” 1930 https://youtu.be/FyOJVbIsOc4
MSU Vietnam Archive: A Guide to Vietnam from the Press and Information Office of the Embassy of Vietnam, Washington D.C., 1959, http://vietnamproject.archives.msu.edu/fullrecord.php?kid=6-20-25D
“How to Behave in Vietnam”, Speech by Tran Long, 1960, cultural differences between east and west, historical context of Vientamese-American social relations during Vietnam War, cultural essentialisms and cultural translation http://vietnamproject.archives.msu.edu/fullrecord.php?kid=6-20-277

Additional Primary sources for teaching ‘legacies of colonialism: division’

US interest in Vietnam in 1950–’aid’ not intervention https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/qg40s2
1954 partition map and colonial legacies, interest of US in region to prevent spread of Communism, nationalist sentiments of Vietnam https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/jt3e2r
“Politics in an Underdeveloped State, the Colonial Imprint” (undated) http://vietnamproject.archives.msu.edu/fullrecord.php?kid=6-20-193

Giới Thiệu GS Nguyễn Cindy: Lịch sử Thư viện VN – Vietnamese History & Arts Practice, Saigon 2023

It’s been over six years since I had the opportunity to return to Vietnam, and nearly a decade since the first time I presented in Vietnamese. I had the privilege of presenting alongside a community of women-identifying Vietnamese scholars and artists based in the United States. I had just landed 2 days in Saigon after a feminist roundtable and retreat I convened in South Korea (longer post to come, but here is our webpage with the video and transcript of workshop), hence my communication in Vietnamese is extra rough and extra jumbled as I existed in multiple multilingual, arts, academic, familial environments in such an intense time period. Below is a summary of my project Bibliotactics on the history of libraries written by the prolific Nguyễn Thị Minh. A special thank you to the Ladder and the Nhà Xuất Bản Phụ Nữ Việt Nam for hosting us!

Buổi trò truyện “Phụ nữ Việt Nam xuyên văn hóa”, Saigon 2023 GS. Cindy Nguyen – Giáo sư khoa Nghiên cứu thông tin, Đại học California, Los Angeles. Nghiên cứu của cô tập trung vào lịch sử Việt Nam, văn hóa in ấn Đông Nam Á, nhân văn kỹ thuật số và thư viện. Bản thảo cuốn sách của cô “Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam” xem xét lịch sử văn hóa và chính trị của các thư viện ở Hà Nội và Sài Gòn từ thời Pháp thuộc cho đến quá trình phi thực dân hóa thư viện. Phần chia sẻ của Giáo sư Cindy sẽ xoay quanh công trình của cô về thư tịch và nghiên cứu lịch sử đọc sách của công chúng ở Việt Nam. Trong công trình này, cô khám phá sự xuất hiện của một công chúng đọc sách do nhà nước thực dân bảo trợ trong khuôn khổ thư viện ở Việt Nam thế kỷ XX. Theo đó, mặc dù nhà nước thuộc địa Pháp đã cố gắng ban hành một “trật tự thông tin” bằng cách xây dựng thư viện để hợp pháp hóa thẩm quyền của mình và kiểm soát việc lưu thông báo in, song người sử dụng thư viện ở Việt Nam đã định hình sứ mệnh của mình và hình thành nên một “văn hóa đọc công cộng” đặc thù, cho thấy tinh thần giáo dục tự định hướng và hướng đến chủ nghĩa thế giới về văn liệu. Người nghe cũng có dịp được hiểu biết về không gian đọc dành cho nữ giới và nam giới ở các thư viện Hà Nội và Sài Gòn thời thuộc địa. News

Press coverage about event, July 10, 2023: https://thethaovanhoa.vn/phu-nu-viet-nam-xuyen-van-hoa-20230710063107274.htm

Roughcut talk video, recorded via GoPro by my partner and child

The Politics of ‘Good Reading’: Libraries and the Public in Late Colonial Vietnam Talk at Yale

Politics of ‘Good Reading’ Talk at Yale’s Southeast Asia Seminar

Last spring I was invited to give a virtual talk at Yale’s Southeast Asia Seminar. It was an honor to present a portion of my manuscript Misreading at the Yale seminar, and to be part of the vibrant Q&A, which due to its virtual format spanned institutions and continents. Thank you to Quan Tran for the talk moderation, Yale’s Council on Southeast Asian Studies for the kind invitation, and to all who were able to attend.

Abstract

This talk examines the role of state-sponsored libraries within the landscape of print culture and reading public in late colonial Vietnam. I consider how library administrators and government officials defined ‘good reading’ as didactic, politically safe, and vulgarizing reading matter. Through the specific project of the Cochinchina Library bibliobus or xe sách [book wagon],* I reveal how colonial print control and book distribution drew inspiration from the Dutch East Indies Balai Pustaka and American libraries and publishing initiatives. This talk contributes two major interventions in the history of libraries and colonialism in Vietnam. Firstly, it situates the library within the landscape of print culture and peripheries of colonial control, and secondly it points to the administrative exchanges between imperial projects and international library sciences. This talk is part of my book manuscript Misreading: Social Life of Libraries and Colonial Control in Vietnam, 1865-1958. I examine the mechanics, discourse, and everyday practice of the library to fulfill its role as an official governmental institution, resource of public education, and cultural space for the practice of collective responsibility, urban civility, and public reading. I embed libraries within the multilayered landscape of print control—the politics of production, dissemination, and preservation of print matter. I follow the dynamic debates on print control among French colonial and post-colonial government administrators, librarians, archivists, translators, publishers, and readers. These diverse actors investigated the content, language, and influence of ‘good reading’ and initiated projects to disseminate reading matter through translation, publishing, and libraries.

Link to Recording of Talk >

[TEACHING] On Digital Teaching During and After COVID-19

On November 9, 2020 I was invited to speak on the topic of digital teaching as part of the History Department, Center for Digital Scholarship, and 21st Century PhD Series at Brown University. The talk was well attended on Zoom from faculty, staff, and students from all over campus.

I talk through concrete activities, tools, and materials on remote digital teaching for history seminars. Drawing from my experience in critical digital pedagogy, inclusive design, and digital humanities, I share three guiding design principles: 1) variation of modality, 2) time/energy management, and 3) built in reflection and explain how I build in these principles into the class structure and assignments. The session concludes with time for Q&A and group discussion of challenges and experiences teaching during COVID.

Video Recording of Zoom Talk

Translating Across Time and Space: Film Screening, Artist Talk, and Creative Translation Activity at Harvard

I was invited to speak at an innovative event on translation and creative expression organized by the scholar Catherine H. Nguyen from the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature and the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights at Harvard University. Together with poet-scholar Quan Tran, we shared our scholarship and arts practice. I spoke about my scholarly research and its intersections with artistic expression and personal history. It was a refreshing and radical opportunity to speak honestly about my ‘historian-artist’ identity and diverse body of work–from research essays and teaching on Vietnamese history to film-poetry on translation and feminist performance art.

Continue reading “Translating Across Time and Space: Film Screening, Artist Talk, and Creative Translation Activity at Harvard”

Making Art in the Time of COVID: Why I Made the Film NONFUTURE

It’s been hard. My mind, heart, and body have been on overdrive. I made the film “NONFUTURE, Meditations on Time” to make sense of it all. If this strikes a chord with you, please share.

I hope that this film

brings moments of lightness in a very dark and difficult situation
inspires creative experimentation to make meaning of our changing realities
reminds us that we are all connected in our collective struggle
sparks playful movement, gratitude, and laughter
moves us to be resilient, brave, and kind to each other

Continue reading “Making Art in the Time of COVID: Why I Made the Film NONFUTURE”

My Experience Living through History: War, Human Agency, and Non-Future

Update 4/10/2020: Thank you so much for the kind and loving words of support! As a grassroots deployment of our skills during this difficult time, we have now started a “Long Hai Feeds You” Campaign to feed frontline medical workers. Read more and donate here. Thank you for the love and stay safe!

As a historian, I analyze continuity and change. How do moments of upheaval affect people, states, institutions, across time and space? I consider the nuances of change for certain communities—the degree of rupture from previous ways of life and the resiliency of individual lives, social practices, and cultural norms.

I examine the history of Vietnam, where war haunts all aspects of life and sense of temporality. Disruption was the only constant, and fear functioned as a stimulus for survival. The prolonged state of uncertainty led to the utter abandonment of all trust in the socio-political fabric of governmental systems, economic stability, and sense of community. Vietnamese lived at the boundary of divine intervention and fated misery. A sense of a non-future and the loss of human agency shrouded the everyday. I have come to understand this reality through my mother and father’s life. They were kids forced to become adults in the midst of war, created a family out of tentative dreams and functional necessity, and escaped their war torn world in hopes for any kind of future for their family. I am deeply embedded within this traumatic history as a child of the Vietnam War, born in a refugee camp in Malaysia, and growing up in America the land of promise, hope, and hypocrisy.

My family in the relocation camp in the Philippines after we were accepted to migrate to America. I am the infant in my mother's arms. My father is on the far left, my uncle next to my mom, my oldest sister (3) and older brother (2). A neighborhood kid on the far right. — My family in the relocation camp in the Philippines after we were accepted to migrate to America. I am the infant in my mother’s arms. My father is on the far left, my uncle next to my mom, my oldest sister (3) and older brother (2). A neighborhood kid on the far right.

Yet, it was not until COVID-19 that I now know what it means to live through history. While this moment is not the same as war, I have become familiar with its symptoms and side effects. The loss of human agency in everyday action. The inability to fathom a future. The surrender to fated defeat and existential misery.

Continue reading “My Experience Living through History: War, Human Agency, and Non-Future”

Why Study the History of Colonial Indochina? Talk at Middlesex Community College 2020

I recently delivered a talk to 150 college students at Middlesex college through the Asian Studies Development Program. I was encouraged to prepare a talk which spoke to diverse students who might not have a background on Asian history. In preparing for the talk, I took a long time reflecting on the simple question, “Why study the history of colonial Indochina.” In the talk I explain three reasons: