| This project explores the personal narratives and storytelling of women in Southern California's Vietnamese community. Through participant-observation, extensive interviews, and the collection of personal stories, narratives, and reminisces, I document the ways in which these women articulate their lives and negotiate a new sense of home and identity which is directly related to their having lived through, or been affected by, the loss of homeland. Specifically, I am interested in better understanding how these women use different forms of storytelling to build and maintain the social networks which are an integral part of their personal and cultural identity. These networks, which form the basis of their sense of home and community, are also important because they provide a cultural reference point, a link to their sense of “Vietnameseness” and their homeland. The social support that these networks provide are also vital because they can be useful in diffusing some of the patriarchal power of their own culture, while also providing some strength with which to negotiate the institutions of the dominant society. This research is situated in the Vietnamese community of southern California, centrally anchored by the business and cultural district of “Little Saigon” in the city of Westminster, in Orange County. Although some people would argue that the Vietnamese population is too dispersed throughout this region to really call it a community, my interest is not so much in the physical boundaries of community (which, in this case, I have found to be quite fluid), but in the social, emotional and cultural ties which, to the women I worked with, constituted a real, socially lived sense of what community is all about. Through an exploration of women's various forms of storytelling, the building and maintenance of this community, which is also at the heart of a created, ever-evolving sense of identity, will be more clearly revealed as a dynamic and creative process of which women are very much aware. |
