Sigh, Gone a memoir by Phuc Tran recounts his experience as a Vietnamese American refugee in Carlisle, Pennsylvania after the fall of Saigon. When Tran arrived in America with his family, he was only two years old. In the book, he reflects on his childhood and his formative teenage years in Carlisle. He was to navigate himself between two languages: the Vietnamese spoken only at home and the English pervasive in every other public context, which bleeds into the domestic as well. What I found interesting is how Tran finds diction to narrate communicative processes of himself and the people he is surrounded with; narrate from an adult point of view looking back at his younger self. Close-reading Tran’s choice of diction, as he describes linguistic processes happening around him in Carlisle, reveals the unstable and never-ending activities/performativity of linguistic and identitary subject.
The linguistic act of communication is described often in terms of a nominal language transformed into a verb. People in Sigh, Gone converse like this: “Chi and Chuong Vietnamesed with each other quietly” (40); “She Vietnamesed feebly” (31); “my father did most of the Englishing” (25); “I Vietnamesed quietly, embarrassed not to be speaking English in public” (153).
Tran’s (literary) style is often humoristic, sharp, and profane, so such diction might be interpreted as an excessively creative choice and then quickly glossed over, but I think it means more than it appears. The noun or adjective “Vietnamese” which denotes nationality, cultural identity, and a native tongue is transformed into a verb, a capitalized verb that encompasses all of these three markers in its very ongoing act of communication. “To Vietnamese” is not only to speak the language but also embody the language, the language as alive and in progress; it is not to treat the language as an object as in “to speak Vietnamese” or “to speak English.”
“To Vietnamese” can also be read as to perform the language and to perform the identity attached to that language; an progressively negotiative identity. Tran’s choice of transforming the noun of language into the active hybridity of noun/verb also depends on the context of communication and the person found in that context. The act of displacement from Vietnam to the US has destabilized the Vietnamese refugees’ identity and language since they are found in a foreign landscape and are Othered by the society occupying that context (the American town of Carlisle). So, Tran’s parents despite being geographically Vietnamese by birth into middle adulthood are described in her communication: “[Tran’s parents] Vietnamesed with each other quietly” (40); “[Tran’s mother] Vietnamesed feebly” (31); “[Tran’s] father did most of the Englishing” (25). “Vietnamese” as an identity and a language is a no longer stable object for them, but now is an act, “to Vietnamese” is an act.
In a scene where teenage Tran was shopping in a mall with his mother, he “Vietnamesed quietly [to his mother], embarrassed not to be speaking English in public” (153). It makes ostensible sense that growing up in America, his Vietnamese is unstable and his communication is designated with the verb/noun “to Vietnamese,” but also “to speak English.” English becomes an object for the teenage Tran to homogenize, to assimilate himself into.
(There are other incidents in the memoir, but at the moment, time constraint and exhaustion and the blogpost’s length don’t let me get to them here yet)
So far, I find Tran incredibly apt to transform the nominal language of Vietnamese into a hybrid process of verb and noun: “to Vietnamese”; which encapsulates the process of linguistic negotiation and identity formation of an diasporic subject. | Is the memoir making a case for such choice of diction? Not just to “speak” but to also contextually perform the linguistic act and embody the identity attached to it? But the conundrum here (for Tran and his family too) is that: if you are between two worlds (or more), two languages, is the verb+noun of one language, with its already destabilizing potential as a hybrid, enough to signify for the totality (or fragmentality is the righter word) of all the contexts within the subject?
I really enjoyed reading this post! The separate roles that Tran has assigned for himself, being American and Vietnamese, and the diasporic connotations of this divide in one’s identity exists even on a linguistic level. I completely agree in the fact that culture is adopted as a performance that the main character forces himself to play. I found it interesting that in the examples stated, “Vietnamesing” was mostly tied with adverbs like “quietly” and “feebly”, which reveals that even if Tran was a part of both Vietnamese and American culture, there is subtle rejection and embarrassment of being a part of the former community.