Buried History and Transpacific Pedagogy: Teaching the Vietnamese Boat People’s Hong Kong Passage

Abstract

Hong Kong received 223,302 Vietnamese “Boat People” beginning on May 3, 1975. The last camp in Hong Kong, Pillar Point refugee camp, was officially closed on May 31st, 2000, over 25 years after the end of the Vietnam War. The residuals of this violent past continue to haunt the collective memory of the Vietnamese in the diaspora, yet the Boat People’s “Asian passage” remains an untold chapter of Hong Kong’s national history. Exploring the complex relationship between global compassion fatigue, the camp state of exception, and storytelling as a refugee tactic, Vietnamese American writer Andrew Lam’s “The Stories They Carried” recounts the experience of Vietnamese refugees abandoned in Hong Kong throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in extra-territorial limbo between Vietnam and the West. This paper will discuss the experience of teaching Lam’s story to students in the local Hong Kong context, where refugee and asylum seeking policy continues to be a highly charged political topic. I consider the ways in which Lam’s text bears pedagogical resonance across the Pacific, arguing that the teaching of this piece constitutes the remembering of a missing chapter in both the Vietnamese American narrative and the history of Hong Kong.

Student-centered, “embodied inter-referencing” as antiracist and anticolonial pedagogy

“…My project builds on these efforts but primarily with pedagogical goals in mind and invites students to practice inter-referencing by using their own personal and collective experiences as resources to discuss literary texts. This approach was inspired by the ethical and critical pedagogical practices of several scholars before me (Chen, 2005 ; Cheung, 2005 ; Lin, 2012 ; Troeung, 2015 ), but I most directly adopted Park’s ( 2019 ) strategy of “embodied inter-referencing,” which she developed in a course on institutional racism in a university in Australia in a classroom that includes domestic and international students of East, Southeast, and South Asian backgrounds. Park applied Chau’s (2015) method of “inter-referencing” and actively used the autobiographical narrative to “clarify, critique, and expand the parameters of theoretical concepts” from relevant fields of study (271).…”

“…Troeung ( 2015 ), in the context of teaching Asian American texts to students in Hong Kong, noted that contrary to her colleagues’ assumption about students “more interested in studying British and American literature than Asian American literature since the former was more valuable to them as cultural capital” (pp. 252–253), she found that the students were willing to engage with Asian American texts.…”

“…Building on the intellectual movements of “Asia as method” (Chen, 2010 ) and “diaspora as method” (Khoo, 2019 ; Kim & Lee, 2019 ), my project aimed to move beyond the convention of studying Asian culture by referencing Euro-(North-)American theory, knowledge, and experience. Instead, it employed “embodied inter-referencing” (Park, 2019 ), where students discuss what they have learned from Japanese literature in relation to their own and local experiences (Cheung, 2005 ; Lin, 2012 ; Troeung, 2015 ) and engage in small-group interactions. At the same time, I also struggled with the question of how to decolonialize my pedagogy given that Japan, historically, has been a colonizer in Asia (Takayama, 2016 , p. 28).…”