Research Areas

20th- and 21st-century Francophone literature and culture; diaspora and migration narratives, particularly of the Vietnamese diaspora; critical refugee studies; food and foodways; memory
 

Biography

I am a Ph.D. candidate in French, specializing in refugitude aesthetics, memory, care, and food in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, especially of the Vietnamese diaspora.

Mu dissertation examines care and its tensions by focusing on a primordial act of care in the Vietnamese diaspora: feeding. I argue that the culinary and commensal both serve as a primary means of care in displacement and can offer an analytic site for exploring care’s complexities. Amid the inhospitable conditions of humanitarian governments and an ineffectual global refugee regime, my project asks what literary, aesthetic, and gastronomic strategies exist for not only creating alternative pathways to and forms of care, but also preserving diasporic and refugee memory? Drawing on diasporic Vietnamese literature, archival research in the US and France, and oral histories, I consider the ways in which diasporic and refugee subjects reimagine care and food as care, interrogate their promises, and expose their coercive co-optations. Working across genres (novels, memoirs, graphic novels, film, photography, and administrative documents), national contexts (Vietnam, France, the US, and Canada), and theoretical frameworks while curating an oral history archive of immigrant and refugee chefs to complement the dissertation, this project constructs an alternative archive of care that preserves and privileges typically unspectacular(ized) histories with the goal of facilitating transdiasporic dialogue. Ultimately, this project aims to illuminate strategies for and stories of reassembling homes, lives, and diasporic memory in displacement. This research has been generously supported by fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon Foundation (Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship) as well as UC Berkeley's Center for Southeast Asian Studies. 

Coming from a family of immigrants and refugees, I strongly believe in the critical power of “me-search” (cf. Nguyen 2014). I consider the intersections and tensions of my own identity (as Vietnamese/Korean/Chinese American) and personal histories as inextricable from a critical approach to literary and historical study as well as a driving force behind my research. Prior to coming to Berkeley, I received my B.A. from Hamilton College in 2018 where I simultaneously completed individual honors theses for French and Literature, both exploring the relationship between language and racial/identity formation in Asian diaspora literature (Franco/Québécois-Vietnamese and Korean American respectively). I also spent a year in Paris through Hamilton in France, studying at l’Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle – Paris III, and another year in the Occitanie region of France as a high school assistant de langue through the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF). I am always happy to speak about these experiences with undergraduates weighing out their options. 

When I am not poring over experimental literary aesthetics, I am experimenting in the kitchen, trying new restaurants in the Bay Area, or singing my heart out in karaoke with friends.

Selected Publications

Yeh, Alan T. ""J'écris contre": Linda Lê's Refugitude Aesthetics." L'Esprit Créateur, vol. 63 no. 4, 2023, p. 48-61. https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2023.a919688.