Amerasia Journal ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ramj20 On Becoming Tender: Conversations with My Father Jennifer Kim-Anh Tran To cite this article: Jennifer Kim-Anh Tran (2021) On Becoming Tender: Conversations with My Father, Amerasia Journal, 47:1, 134-143, DOI: 10.1080/00447471.2021.1974280 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00447471.2021.1974280 Published online: 17 Dec 2021. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ramj20 AMERASIA JOURNAL 2021, VOL. 47, NO. 1, 134–143 https://doi.org/10.1080/00447471.2021.1974280 On Becoming Tender: Conversations with My Father Jennifer Kim-Anh Tran California State University, East Bay, CA, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY “Becoming Tender” invites readers to rethink intergenerational refugee relations. Rather than solely focusing on refugee parents and their failings, as commonly expressed in scholarly works, becoming tender necessitates children recognizing the perspectives and biases they bring into conversations with parents that impede empathetic connection and value for refugee knowledge. This two-way softening serves as a praxis to rewrite how refugee families have been represented by dominant discourse while also encouraging readers to answer the call to tend to their familial ties. Critical examination of intergenerational engagement between refugees and their children may illuminate unexpected enactments of refugee knowing and healing. KEYWORDS Becoming tender; refugee knowledge; intergenerational refugee tenderness; refugee fathering My dad once told me one of his favorite memories was during his few years in a refugee camp located in the Philippines. He found some moments of freedom in that camp. According to him, it was one of the few times when he felt like he did not have responsibilities. He recalls running through the nearby mangroves, picking and eating fruit until it was time to head back to the camp before dark. He would play and fall asleep to the warmth of the sun and wake to the chill that was the signal to return to the camp for supper. He closed his eyes briefly as he recounted this memory as if to bring back the cool breeze against his face. And at that moment, he was far removed from his reality. In my imagination, I see him running through the jungle, differently from the way he ran and fled from his home country after the Fall of Saigon. I think about the friendships that he left behind and the new ones forged under exceptional circumstances. As I reflect on his identity as a Việt kiều, an exile from his birthplace, and người tị nạn, a refugee-to-be in America, I am struck by the possibility of beauty and personal freedom sprouting from a site that is synonymous with despair, devastation, and chaos. Those limbs that he swung from tree to tree, those eyes that shuttered to awaken his other senses, belong to the same aging body of my father’s that slowly rises every morning in Oakland, CA. I used to view the calloused man who raised me as the polar opposite of this carefree young man running along the edges of the creek. Today I see him as a person who bobbed and weaved between two worlds — both molded by but never fully overdetermined by U.S. militarism and structural racism. His complex personhood as a former refugee, a man of color, a single CONTACT Jennifer Kim-Anh Tran East Bay, Hayward, CA, USA jk.tran@csueastbay.edu © 2021 The Regents of the University of California Department of Ethnic Studies, California State University, AMERASIA JOURNAL 135 father, and desiring being, has moved me to unlearn what we have been taught about refugees and freedom- primarily through the push-pull of our relationship over the years. Throughout my adolescence, it felt like we were never going to resolve our differences because we were coming from different worlds. Intellectual and emotional space afforded to academic research and reflection has allowed me to understand our fights as residual effects of parallel experiences of racialization – him as a refugee of color, and me as a youth of color growing up in Oakland. For instance, I felt deeply hurt by his inability to see the legacy and reality of systemic and structural racism in this country, despite its impacts on his lived experiences. Over the last few years, our relationship has changed as I began working with Vietnamese immigrant business owners and other refugee groups in Oakland. We still argue, but we are learning to direct our frustration toward the problems and finding solutions instead of at one another. As a result of these exchanges, this focus on the societal structures has transformed our relationship and allowed us to appreciate one another beyond how I could have ever imagined during my youth. Our evolving relationship has led me to write this meditation concerned with a means for enacting restorative dialogue. Our relationship has formed the foundation of what I theorize as “becoming tender” – a feminist refugee practice for creating alternative ethics from which to engage with refugees and refugee families. This practice refrains from imposing U.S. dominant assimilationist frameworks and adopts a willingness to critically listen with compassion to identify broader power dynamics produced by meaning-making institutions. Writing from an intergenerational refugee positionality allows one to carve a path toward alternative refugee narratives for collective healing and community building. This move requires understanding refugees from their points of view, or what Yến Lê Espiritu names their own situated epistemology. It is nestled in the closeness and senses of home which can embrace multiple definitions of home and homemaking. In this article, I meditate on becoming tender to reinterpret the conversations that I had with my father in a way that complicates the stern refugee father trope. This attempt to deeply understand, rather than criticize him for his (in)actions, sheds light on the structures that have impeded with his ability to fully process his journey and arrival to the present moment. Like the opening of this essay, I aim to understand his joy that was born out of the pain by revisiting some of his mundane and overlooked routines to unearth more memories that our parents and refugees have tucked away to piece together our dignity. I am interested in empathy that opens up room for seeing the structures that hardened my dad’s heart. This seeing inevitably shifts how we, children of refugees, can think about our own lives as inextricably intertwined with theirs. “Becoming Tender” invites readers – refugees, children of refugees, and others interested in solidarity – to rethink intergenerational refugee relations. Becoming tender unravels and defamiliarizes the usual subjects of who mainstream culture constitutes as experts and calls into question what knowledge is deemed valuable. Instead of solely focusing on refugee parents and their failings, as so commonly expressed in scholarly works, becoming tender also necessitates children recognizing the perspectives and biases that they bring into conversations with parents that impede empathetic connection and value for refugee knowledge. As part of this meditation, I, too, contend with my learned preconceptions and implicit biases toward my dad and other refugees. This two-way softening serves as a praxis to rewrite how refugee families have been represented by dominant discourse, while also encouraging readers to answer the call to tend to their familial ties. When we critically 136 J. K.-A. TRAN examine intergenerational engagement between refugees and their children (or even grandchildren) from a position of tenderness, we might uncover unexpected enactments of refugee knowing and healing. Becoming tender draws attention to the interiority of familial ruptures forged by ongoing wars, racial capitalism, and structural racism. The turn to personal conversations and impactful memories disinvests from dominant narratives about refugees to critique oppressive institutions that calcify refugee parents’ disposition. In addition to shifting the gaze toward root causes of community disenfranchisement, becoming tender implicates people, like me, who write about our own communities, requiring us to engage with our implicit biases born out of socio-politicization in the U.S. Becoming tender allows us to embark on a path less traveled toward intergenerational refugee futurity which is a byproduct of both generations’ willingness to engage and, at times, commit to an ongoing struggle with one another. Intended for a diasporic community like refugees, becoming tender is an everevolving reconciliation or, as ethnographer Dwight Conquergood refers to, “dialogic performance” between intersectional worldviews to achieve transformative and restorative dialogue.1 “So that you may understand one day” Becoming tender wrestles with a “damage-based” refugee scholarship that focuses on the Southeast Asian refugee family problem and parents’ failure to assimilate. Like Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s pathologization of the Black American family, sociological scrutiny of the Southeast Asian refugee family has reified their foreignness or non-Westernness. This refugee family problem observes “intergenerational cultural dissonance” or culture “gap” between parent and child, where children are perceived as becoming “too American” and parents are “stuck” in their old ways.2 Refugee parents are further criticized for their poor linguistic assimilation because of the role reversal between parent and child where children must often serve as translators for the family. Children must assist their parents in translating important legal documents and provide them with updates around the school.3 I recall times during my childhood where my parents and grandparents felt embarrassed because they were unable to help us, children, with homework. Refugee parents can be perceived by teachers and their own children as neglectful because they were not as involved in their children’s lives as other parents. Being judged as “bad” parents is also part and parcel of their marked difference. They are not “affectionate”; they enforce corporal punishment. They are “too strict.” This cultural Othering leaves out the structural racism, nativism, and sexism that force them into low-wage to semi-skilled jobs or even have to maintain multiple jobs to provide basic sustenance and shelter. Emphasis on refugee parent deficiency not only leaves out the structural factors that produce rigidity for refugee parents, but it also precludes any possibility of intergenerational refugee futurity. Growing up in a refugee family, I knew that families like mine were different from those of my U.S.-born classmates. We lived in overcrowded apartments, and everything smelled like Goodwill or the flea market. I was not allowed to go to sleepovers. Whereas my classmates went on vacations, my parents worked seven days a week in a nail salon, scrubbing people’s hands and feet. Because my parents were not fluent in English, I had to help them with legal forms and documentation throughout elementary school. I recall spending months preparing my parents for their respective citizenship exams. I was not AMERASIA JOURNAL 137 allowed to argue with my elders because it was considered disobedient and “acting too grown.” Although all of these dynamics confirm theories on intergenerational cultural dissonance and “abnormal” parent-child relationships that marked us as different from other families, as I get older, I have become increasingly dissatisfied with the dominant acceptance of this disjointed refugee family trope. Intergenerational cultural dissonance and other tropes of the “refugee family problem” have made it impossible for children of refugees like me to imagine another kinship possibilities, especially with my father. My father raised me alone as I entered my teenage years. Being a “girl-dad” (before it was considered trendy), he struggled to communicate and balance the challenges that he experienced as a refugee father of color and empathize with my growing adolescent anguish. It was difficult to trace levity and dignity amidst the weight of everyday survival. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I viewed him through the lens that my grade school teachers and other “American” parents and officials saw him and other refugees: rigid foreigners unwilling to change. In this meditation, I rummage through my past and present in search of ghostly memories that may appear insignificant but continue to linger and underpin our psyche. Avery Gordon states, “following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located.”4 I recall one instance of returning home in the early hours of the morning before the sun peaked. I was 15 years old at the time. The doors were flung wide open; my dad discovered my blankets and human pillow tricks. He had been waiting up all night and was sitting in the living room with the lights on. I instantly felt all of my nerves twisting and knotting inside my belly. I knew I was in big trouble because he wanted to tell me a story of his arrival to the U.S. after the war. “When I arrived in this country, I didn’t speak the language,” he would also start his lectures: It had been nearly one year, and even with some assistance, I was unable to find a job. I became so desperate to the point that I decided to enlist in the military. It was a Thursday if I remember correctly when I walked to the station. I weighed in under 5 pounds of the requirement to join the U.S. Marine Corps. The Commanding Officer must have seen the devastation on my face when I learned that I couldn’t even make the cut to join the military. Taking pity on me, he told me to return the next day and to be sure to drink a gallon of water before I weigh in. On the following day, just hours before I got ready to head back to the station, my cousin, your uncle Long, called me and told me there was an open part-time electrical wiring position at a nearby warehouse. That call was what made the difference between me being shipped overseas and building a life here. The challenges around unemployment in the U.S. drove him to seek help from the same military system that played a critical role in his displacement from Vietnam. He paused for several seconds, but his lips continued to move as he aimed to find the words to express the despair he felt over the past 35 years. Seated with his tired body hunched over, I can almost imagine his devastation and the loss of self-esteem as he tells this story. Given my dad did not speak to me and my younger siblings much, these lectures were agonizing because I did not know what the appropriate response was. Looking back on such moments of deafening frustration, I realize that although my family escaped the Vietnam War, we struggled to escape the war raging inside our home. Being a teenager, I did not understand what his resettlement experience had to do with me staying out at night. I just wanted him to let me do what U.S.-born kids my age wanted to do at the 138 J. K.-A. TRAN time, hoping this would resolve the seething trauma that resided in my body. When I would ask him to empathize with my severe depression, he would bellow, “If it’s anyone who should feel depressed, that should be me! If I were depressed like you, I would have died by now.” For many refugee parents, depression and other mental illnesses are perceived as American constructs.5 I never asked him if he felt depressed or what caused him to feel (or not feel) depressed because my own desperation and inner turmoil blinded me from seeing his emotional state. Was it his hardship that made me uncomfortable, or did it have more to do with my difficulty of imagining the toughest man in my life as fragile and scared? My dad would tell me stories like this one so that I can understand the hardships that he experienced. Whether he realizes it or not, today I hear these stories and see him differently. As an adult looking back at the times when we argued, I no longer only see an angry, rigid man who wouldn’t let his teenager stay out late. Instead, in the case of this story, I see the power of the U.S. military to uproot him from his home on 100/144 Lê Quang Định, Bình Thạnh, Sài Gòn, leaving him in statutory limbo for four years. I can grasp the reality of unemployment (stemming from a capitalist system) that made him desperate enough to enlist in the U.S. Marines. I can connect the structures of oppression that forced him beyond depression because he really doubted his ability to survive amid such chaos and immeasurable loss. Without dismissing my personal battle with depression, the steps I take to empathize for his anguish, both the one that he has lived with since wartime and his fear for the safety of his teen daughter in Oakland, loosen my attachment to the stern refugee father trope and shift my critical gaze to the broader structures that bind us. Due to language barriers – refugee parents who are not fluent in English and their children who are unable to speak their parents’ native language with confidence6 – becoming tender can be difficult for many refugee families. As illustrated earlier, parents and children carry their respective pain, emotions, and traumas into conversations.7 In addition to the literal language barrier, a shared language does not exist for parents and children to disentangle the parallel but relational experiences and frustrations. Their worldviews, therefore, are not antagonistic but rather un-visible to one another.8 Drawing upon commonly used words that are associated with refugee experiences or what the Critical Refugee Studies Collective refer to as “critical refugee vocabularies”9 opens up space to become tender. Below, I share a critical reading of another specific memory of me and my father that centers and acknowledges the lived experiences of refugee parents without moving to rationalize it or fix it. sự trải qua // passage For boat people, the sự trải qua, like war, is never over, but a psychosomatic experience that they and their families learn to live with. Trải qua literally translates to “cross,” “passthrough,” or “undergo,” referring to a period of life occurrences that are beyond one’s control. The words “sự trải qua” are often used to describe the collective experience of a marginalized group of people (refugees, Black people, people of color, etc.). On November 3–4, 2017, the Critical Refugee Studies Collective organized the “San Diego Refugee Teaching Symposium” in the East African Community and Cultural Center in City Heights, a high-refugee density neighborhood. At the heart of the symposium was a strong desire to shift the way refugees are talked about as traumatized and damaged to AMERASIA JOURNAL 139 what refugees can teach us about society. Refugee community members, high school students, academics, organizers, and artists gathered with the shared intention to redesign approaches to education curriculum and social services that center refugee epistemologies, knowledge production, and everyday living. As the closing speaker for the conference, I projected my father onto the screen via a video application called Viber, in front of roughly one hundred people. My father shared an encounter with an instructor from Heald College when he was studying to become an electrician. He recounted the day he entered the classroom late and the instructor escorted him and another classmate across the campus to another classroom that seemed to be for advanced students. He recalled, “He told the other students, ‘You need to study hard and work hard if you want to avoid being a loser like these two guys’.” When I asked him what was going through his mind when the professor said those words to him, he began to sob, remembering the feelings of humiliation that he felt that day. Between blowing his nose and wiping away the tears streaming down his cheeks, he whimpered, “I felt like it was a form of discrimination. More importantly, he used his power as a professor to make me feel small, less, stupid.” The auditorium was completely still as my father sat in his office chair, crying in his dress clothes. When he finally caught his breath, he revealed that he had not shared this story in over thirty years because he did not think it was worth sharing. For thirty years he kept this memory hidden because it pained him to relive moments when he was made to feel disrespected and inferior. This was a big moment for both me and my father. The only other time I recall him crying was when his mother died when I was a young girl. I used to cry a lot. I cried when I felt lonely. I cried when I felt unloved. I cried when I felt inadequate. I cried when I felt scared. Growing up, when I was getting disciplined, I used to get hit more by my uncles because I cried. Sometimes in quiet moments, I can still feel that trembling sadness in my body. And just as I begin to sense a surge of emotions well up, I hear his words, “Ninh! Khóc không giải quyết được gì,” which mean, “Stop crying! Crying doesn’t solve anything.” This need to solve a perceived problem as if it were the same as turning off a faucet reveals how he dealt with feeling inadequate, inferior, and uncertain about his future. For thirty years, he strived, as Espiritu might put it, to “assuage private grief with public achievements,” only to find himself publicly disclosing this intimate story with strangers at a university conference.10 However, this time, he managed to accurately assign blame to the instructor who humiliated him. His weeping and storytelling led a few people in the audience to cry, possibly reminding them of the times their teachers, employers, peers have inflicted shame onto them, but they chose to remain silent. In my father’s case, I believe the first account of the story was meant for me to feel his pain and anguish so I can appreciate him more. However, his second account of the story involved me, in which I asked him to reflect on the incident. In his second reflection, he was able to articulate the instructor’s intention to embarrass him. For thirty years, humiliation and shame weighed heavy on his heart and how he raised me, creating tension between us. The Critical Refugee Studies Collective refers to this accumulated heaviness as “baggage” which for the refugee carries material and symbolic meaning. Combined with the physical luggage that refugees put together in their haste to escape violence, baggage represents the different forms of content that people try to fill and carry. For example, war is a baggage that refugees 140 J. K.-A. TRAN always have to carry. The refugee also becomes baggage for the nation-state. Baggage also simultaneously functions as trauma and resilience/survival. To be sure, baggage is ephemeral; it can be lost through movement without the possibility of retrieval. Yet, traces of the baggage and its contents remain. The baggage does not have to be full in order for it to be loaded, or visible for its impact to be felt. Baggage is also culturally specific so that it may signal the “missingness” in history and knowledge formation or represent the presence of refugee epistemologies.11 Refugees often say that they set foot on American soil with nothing more than the clothes on their back. Despite the social capital that some refugees possess, as nonwhite newcomers to the U.S. or any host country, the reality of being abruptly uprooted and frequently exposed to a new unrecognizable environment can leave refugees feeling raw, vulnerable, and as if they have “nothing.” As they strive to get settled, everyday incidents begin to wear and tear away at the glimmering image of the U.S. All throughout my life, I often heard family and community members say, “I don’t know.” On many accounts, both of my grandmothers used to always respond to English-speaking callers, “I don’t know,” and quickly hung up the call. When the words “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand” are some of the first words that they learn, this “not-knowing” becomes normalized and internalized not only by refugees themselves but also expected by people working with refugees. At surface value, one can interpret his story as an individualized refugee experience with discrimination. However, I reread this as a moment that illuminates the structures of education systems and refugee schooling discourse that socially construct refugees as unknowing subjects devoid of voice and agency. This not-knowing, which is a form of bodily baggage, becomes exacerbated by events like the story that my dad shared about the instructor, who assumed that my father was ignorant and inferior to other students because he did not speak English. My father’s tears made visible the injuries and emotional impacts that the educational system inflicted on his personhood thirty years ago. That story did not entirely end at Heald College, because sharing the story at the conference also shaped him. After he caught his breath, he concluded, “I feel relieved [to tell my story] because I no longer feel alone. And perhaps with me telling that story, no other refugees will have to experience what I went through.” He became vulnerable when he revisited these memories, not by choice, but as a result. Becoming tender allowed him to reclaim himself from a system that has socially constructed him – and refugees generally – as an unknowing subject, and transforms him into a guide for reimagining refugee teaching and sharing refugee knowledge. At this event, and in publicly sharing his story, my father was able to work through an enduring impasse, thereby, activating an ongoing collective passage. Following his story, many other community members from diverse backgrounds in the audience also shared their personal experiences with similar painful and poignant memories. “Do you know what makes me happy?”: Intergenerational refugee knowledge I can’t help but remember a recent conversation I had with my father that continues to touch my heart. He once asked me: “Do you know what makes me happy? Do you know how I know that you love me?” I was struck by the question (because he was not smiling and he rarely laughs these days), but I responded, “tell me.” AMERASIA JOURNAL 141 “That you need me. You come to me with your questions. That means you’re wise and you know that I have a lot of life experiences. You want to hear my opinions.” In contrast to the last section where he felt belittled by the professor, I interpret his assertion here – “I have a lot of life experiences” – as a declaration of his refugee knowledge. At the beginning of this essay, I discussed how refugee scholarship focused on topics like language and cultural barriers to reinforce the “refugee family problem.” While I am less interested in dismantling or solving the “refugee family problem” or redeem my father, I want to illustrate the absurdity of labeling refugees/refugee communities as dysfunctional without accounting for systems and environments that do not nurture self-determination. There is always more time to critique systems and discuss the role of accountability and complicity in uneven power structures. Still, I argue that what is lacking at this moment is a reassessment of relationships and developing a new grammar or “critical refugee vocabularies” that enable us to capture refugee parents’ dreams, co-constructed with their children (and perhaps with other communities of color). During his late twenties, my dad secretly aspired to be an organizer, but his limited language kept him from pursuing it. As a kid, I used to fall asleep on his lap while he shared grandiose visions about the importance of the Vietnamese community to have a voice. Today, I regularly consult my dad for my community engagement work with Vietnamese and other refugee communities in Oakland. Whether it is related to where they receive their news, to whom they ask when in need of assistance, or how they engage with legal authorities, refugees have a way of doing things that I have had to learn through my father. I turn to him because traditional models of organizing are not designed for non-English speaking immigrant community members who have legitimate fears about political backlash based on their lived experiences as former refugees. My intentional willingness to be in relationship with refugee communities, despite our differences, is opening up new interpersonal possibilities.12 When I unpack these statements, I find that my love for him, rooted in my acknowledgment of his wisdom, makes him happy. He becomes tender because I come to him for help with things he is knowledgeable about. “You come to me for help” reverses the traditional power dynamic of refugee parents asking their American-born children for assistance pertaining to professional matters. More importantly, underlying this statement is a desire to help me make up for all of the times he probably wished he could have helped me more into adulthood. Upon listening to his bitter hard-learned life lessons, my heart softens to receive a kind of love from my father, who, as a single refugee father of color in the U.S., only understood love through the actions and sacrifice of his mother; he had lost his father to the war when he was 12 years old. Amending refugee futures/toward tenderness He always says that he’s busy. There is a certain beauty in his labyrinth of errands. Even during a pandemic, he struggles to remain still. Within an hour of watching him scurry around the backyard, it seems less like work and more like a game to him. He bends his knees to pick up heavy pots and takes tiny shuffles to move them from one corner of the backyard to another corner. I watch him handle newly sprouted plants with such care as if they were baby chicks, chirping for droplets of water. How I enjoy seeing him toss aside his 142 J. K.-A. TRAN garden gloves to dig deep into the cool soil with his bare hands. With dirt caked deep beneath his nails, he could spend hours in that happy place until the sun comes down. And when he’s done for the day, with his hand on his hips and his belly poking out, he looks at his creation with quiet satisfaction, not quite smiling. My dad knows that I am writing this piece about him and our relationship. I recently asked him what he thought if he saw a connection between him running through the jungles and his love for gardening. He answered, “When you’re stressed out, one needs a hobby, something to help you distract you from the many competing obligations and feeling overwhelmed. Some people drink. Some people gamble. Some people give up. But I like to be near nature. It produces a relaxing sensation in my body that makes me forget.” In my analysis of several points in my father’s life, I was able to link the burden of my father’s emotional and bodily exhaustion to collateral damage waged by imperial projects and public institutions. Despite the entanglements of state violence and its ability to determine social death for some and add years of life onto others, it is my hope that the snapshots of his life and our exchanges revealed dimensions of refugee fathering that have been absent from broader refugee literature, which tends to focus on gender dynamics within domestic partnerships and intergenerational cultural dissonance. I write this reflection with children of refugees in my heart. Written at a time of great uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic, global social movements in solidarity with Black Lives Matter activists, and varying responses toward the uptick in violence against Asians in the U.S., our parents’ actions may feel inadequate and disappointing. Like many others, I often felt misunderstood by my father, and at times, I wished that he was different. As a child of a single refugee father of color, I no longer ask for things from him that I know he cannot give (at least at this precise moment). Letting go of the need for a clearly defined relationship based on Eastern/Western patriarchy has created an opening for me to rewrite a new chapter of our story. This new chapter reexamines moments of tension and surprise to critique structures instead of individuals. More importantly, this new history untethers him and me from our internalized shame and pain that stems from larger structural forces. I am my father’s daughter, and our relationship is bending toward tenderness. As both a meditation and process of imagining another world, becoming tender centers intergenerational refugee knowledge and desire. Becoming tender offers a reprieve from transgenerational shame. Though pain and trauma caused by war may never fully heal, I hope that these reflections embolden readers to weave new tapestries that capture the iridescent spectrum of refugee crossings. Notes 1. Dwight Conquergood, “Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance,” Literature in Performance 5, no. 2 (1985): 1–13. 2. Khanh T. Dinh, Barbara R. Sarason, and Irwin G. Sarason, “Parent-Child Relationships in Vietnamese Immigrant Families,” Journal of Family Psychology 8, no. 4 (1994): 471–88; J.K. Boehnlein et al. , “A Comparative Study of Family Functioning Among Vietnamese and Cambodian Refugees, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 183, no.12 (1995): 768–73; Yoonsun Choi, Michael He, and Tracy W Harachi, “Intergenerational Cultural Dissonance, Parent-Child Conflict and Bonding, and Youth Problem Behaviors Among Vietnamese and Cambodian Immigrant Families,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 37, no. 1 (2007): 85–96; Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second AMERASIA JOURNAL 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 143 Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Min Zhou, “Growing Up American: The Challenge Confronting Immigrant Children and Children of Immigrants,” Annual Review of Sociology 23, no. 1 (1997): 63–95. Kristen Perry, “‘Mama, Sign This Note’: Young Refugee Children’s Brokering of Literacy Practices,” Language Arts 91, no. 5 (2014): 313–25. Avery Gordon. Ghostly Matters Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 22. Elizabeth Kramer et al., “Cultural Factors Influencing the Mental Health of Asian Americans,” The Western Journal of Medicine 176, no. 4 (2002): 227–31; Aiwha Ong. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Joanna E. Bettmann et al., “Somali Refugees’ Perceptions of Mental Illness,” Social Work in Health Care 54, no. 8 (2015): 738–57. Min Zhou, “Straddling Different Worlds: The Acculturation of Vietnamese Refugee Children,” in Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America, ed. Rubén G. Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Carola Suárez-Orozco, and Desirée Qin-Hilliard, New Immigrant and Language: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the New Immigration (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014). Devon E. Hinton et al., “Anger, PTSD, and the Nuclear Family: A Study of Cambodian Refugees,” Social Science & Medicine 69, no. 9 (2009): 1387–94; Andre M. N. Renzaho, Nidhi Dhingra, and Nichole Georgeou, “Youth as Contested Sites of Culture: The Intergenerational Acculturation Gap Amongst New Migrant Communities-Parental and Young Adult Perspectives,” Public Library of Science 12, no. 2 (2017): e0170700; and Yến Lê Espiritu. “Refugee Postmemories: The ‘Generation After’,” in Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees, 1st ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). In a lecture given by Yến Lê Espiritu at UCSD in 2009, she used the word unvisible instead of invisible because structural conditions and contexts hinder communities’ ability to see certain issues. “Critical Vocabularies,” on Critical Refugee Studies Collective’s official website, https://critical refugeestudies.com/critical-vocabularies Espiritu, Body Counts, 170. “Critical Vocabularies,” Critical Refugee Studies Collective’s official website. In their 2020 #Projectbaconoi campaign, PIVOT has done an excellent job mobilizing Vietnamese progressives to reach out to Vietnamese elders and voters who may be misinformed or unclear about voter registration and current political discourse. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Jennifer Kim-Anh Tran is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at California State University, East Bay. Research areas include interracial relations, refugees, community engagement, and race, gender and sexuality. She is the co-editor of Love, Knowledge, Revolution: A Comparative Ethnic Studies Reader (Routledge, 2022).