Vietnam by Removes: Storytelling and Postmemory in Minh Tran Huy

Minh Tran Huy participates in the production of a second-generation Vietnamese French literature that departs from the first-generation’s autobiographical immigrant narrative. In two novels, La Princesse et le pêcheur [The Princess and the Fisherman] (2007) and Voyageur malgré lui [Travelers in Spite of Themselves] (2012), Tran Huy engages with the postmemory that interrogates war and the trauma of the French colonization of Indochina, the American military engagement during the Vietnam War and refugee displacement from Vietnam to France that parents and families experienced. Attending to Tran Huy’s position as a second-generation Vietnamese French woman writer, I argue that she (re)presents the second generation’s postmemory through the mode of storytelling. Storytelling highlights the interpersonal exchange and transmission that occurs through the spoken word between generations despite traumatic silence.