Mobility Humanities

The end of the American war in Vietnam in April 1975 saw hundreds of thousands fleeing to the United States and other countries by plane and in risky journeys by boat. Characterised by precarious longdistance movement, the refugee angle thus challenges romanticised notions of mobility which celebrate the unworried and freely chosen nomadism of rootless wanderers. However, refugees’ escapes entail not only involuntary and perilous mobility, but also forced and insecure immobility marked by uncertainty and impermanence. For example, exiled subjects are detained in refugee camps and obliged to stop, wait and contrive strategies for transitory dwelling in unfamiliar environments. In this paper, I will focus on contemporary Vietnamese American fictional productions that imagine refugees’ breaks on their escapes in refugee camps. The spotlight lies on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Vu Tran’s Dragonfish, two novels by 1.5-generation writers—who were born in Vietnam and fled at a young age—whose narrators under consideration are members of the first generation. Emphasising the collective elements of displacement and emplacement, these refugee camp narratives encode various refugee experiences that illustrate the long-lasting importance of ties nurtured and created in these physically, but not socially immobilising spaces.