Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans

195 Pages·1993·0.82 MB·English

by  Nazli Kibria

Family Tightrope
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Family Tightrope
THE CHANG ING L IVES OF
V I ETNAMESE AMER ICANS
Nazli Kibria
P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
P R I N C E T O N , N E W J E R S E Y
Copyright  1993 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
The author gratefully acknowledges permission
to reproduce the following poems:
“Tomorrow I Will Be Home” by Cao Tan (epigraph to
chapter 5) and “The First Day of School” by Truong Anh Thuy
(epigraph to chapter 6), both from War and Exile:
A Vietnamese Anthology, ed. Nguyen Ngoc Bich
(Springfield, Va.: Vietnam PEN Abroad, 1989);
“Written Aboard a Boat on the Way Back to
Mount Con” by Nguyen Trai (epigraph to chapter 3),
from The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry,
ed. and trans. Huynh Sanh Thong (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1979); and “The Tale of Kieu”
by Nguyen Du (epigraph to chapter 4), from
The Tale of Kieu, trans. Huynh Sanh Thong
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kibria, Nazli
Family tightrope : the changing lives of
Vietnamese Americans / Nazli Kibria
p. cm.
ISBN 0-691-03260 — ISBN 0-691-02115-5 (pbk.)
1. Vietnamese American Families.
2. Vietnamese Americans—Social conditions.
I. Title.
E184.V53k53 1993
305.895′92073—dc20 93-18777
This book has been composed in Adobe Sabon
Princeton University Press books are printed
on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines
for permanence and durability of the Committee
on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council on Library Resources
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Disclaimer:
Some images in the original version of this book are not
available for inclusion in the eBook.
FOR MY PARENTS
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
CHAPTER ONE
Assimilation, Adaptation, and Immigrant Life 3
CHAPTER TWO
The Study and the Setting 24
CHAPTER THREE
Vietnamese Roots 38
CHAPTER FOUR
Patchworking: Households in the Economy 73
CHAPTER FIVE
The Family Tightrope: Gender Relations 108
CHAPTER SIX
Generation Gaps 144
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Changing Contours of Vietnamese American Family Life 167
Bibliography 173
Index 181
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Acknowledgments
Many people have generously oVered their time and advice in the past several
years as this book took shape, first as a dissertation at Rutgers University in
1986 and then in several permutations thereafter. This study would never have
been launched without the support and friendship of James Guetti. His pres-
ence in this book will, I hope, adequately suggest my personal and intellectual
indebtedness to him. The debt is both for specific advice on the manuscript and
for more generally teaching me—though I didn’t feel I was being “taught”—
that “accuracy counts for something.”
Thomas R. Edwards deserves special thanks for numerous suggestions as to
how the manuscript might be improved. His careful intelligence and his mem-
ories of going to drive-in movies both kept my spirits up. George Kearns
persistently oVered himself as “a hard wall to bounce oV of,” and I am grateful
for his continuing interest in my work, whether in New Jersey, Turkey, or
Scotland. George Levine, Andrew Welsh, and William Vesterman at Rutgers
all took time out from other obligations to comment on portions of the manu-
script, as, at Princeton, did Lee Mitchell and Marc Chénetier. They all have my
gratitude. Barry Qualls and Linda Kozusko both oVered indefatigable help and
good cheer at Rutgers; Emory Elliott and A. Walton Litz oVered sane counsel
and moral support at Princeton—and they threw some good dinner parties
too.
Behind all my work—if I’m lucky—lies the influence of Richard Poirier,
whose criticism and classroom presence ensured that never again would Amer-
ican literature be the same. It has been my additional good fortune to study
with a number of other extraordinarily talented and inspiring teachers: Wil-
liam H. Pritchard, G. Armour Craig, Christopher Ricks, Paul Fussell, David
Kalstone, Elaine Showalter, and William Howarth all deserve a word of
thanks. Each of them, in individual ways, quickened my sense of how in-
ventively improbable good writing is and why the improbability matters. Pete
Petersen, who first introduced me to American fiction as a sophomore at
Shasta College and who let me work on this book in his oYce weekends in the
spring of 1989, deserves special acknowledgment. More than one of the ideas
in here sprang from discussions with him over a beer on summer nights in
Redding. I also thought often while working on this project of Richard Dal-
rymple, James Loveall, and Ross Fetters at Shasta College, all of whom baZed
and entranced me as a young student with their love of poetry, medieval
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