From Huang to Huynh and Back Again: Traversing the Hyphen Between Chinese-Vietnamese Identity

Abstract

Among the 1.6 million individuals who left Vietnam in the Indochina Refugee Crisis, hoa people, ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam, were resettled throughout North America, Western Europe, and Australia. Arriving in these new locations, the ethnic Chinese developed “twice-migration backgrounds.” Focusing on either the Vietnamese diaspora or Chinese migration, the present literature does not adequately address the hybridity of Chinese-Vietnamese identity. Exercising an interdisciplinary approach, I combine narrative with theoretical discourse and draw from my family’s migration story, existing research on ethnic identity among Chinese-Vietnamese in southern California, and literature on Chinese in present-day Vietnam. By framing identity as a continuous practice that is carried out in contexts of language, political history, and social environment, I address how first- and second-generation ChineseVietnamese Americans experience ethnic identity and suggest an expanded understanding of Chinese-Vietnamese identity that is fluid rather than static.