This chapter reads and surveys Vietnamese American literature as a creative refugee endeavor that was carefully tailored to meet the material needs and pressures of refugee life during the period 1965-1996. This era was a challenging period during which, despite close to 100 English-language volumes written by Vietnamese/Vietnamese American authors, finding a readership interested in the stories that refugees wanted to tell required multiple strategies of textual emergence. These challenges produced a bifurcation of public and private narratives and created a split between simple pedagogical stories that responded to the pragmatic demand to explain oneself and more complex stories that attended to the needs of the burgeoning community and the migrant psyche. With the Vietnam War looming large over their creations and the ways that these literary works are read, this era of Vietnamese American literature could be characterized as a series of attempts to rewrite and remap racial and cultural expectations of refugees, while laying the groundwork for greater forms of self and communal expression.

This chapter reflects on theorizations of “queer diasporas” through an analysis of Monique Truong’s novel The Book of Salt (2003). A crucial, though not uncontested, concept, “queer diaspora” investigates the global circulations and alterations of “queer” practices, identities, and economies as well as the incommensurate meanings and valuations of nonnormative gender-sexual formations across disparate geopolitical locations. The Book of Salt illustrates and complicates these precepts by rewriting the story of expatriate modernism in Paris from the perspective of a queer, exiled, Vietnamese cook employed in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s salon. The novel’s portrayals of queer diasporic crossings in Saigon and Paris refuse presumptions of queer commonality across social hierarchies as well as teleological narratives of gender-sexual liberation in the move from colony to metropole, while insisting on the narrator’s persistent pursuit of his queer desires in the face of repeated betrayal and nonreciprocity. It thus becomes the reader’s ethical obligation to respond sympathetically to the narrator’s temporally impossible call and recognize his subjective account.