#vietgone

Homeland (I’ll Make It Home) (A conceptual remix

POOR YELLA REDNECKS @ South Coast Repertory – Review

(Photo by ​Jordan Kubat/SCR)

Written by Daniella Litvak 

Back in 2015 I reviewed Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone when it debuted at South Coast Repertory. Vietgone told the story of how a young couple named Tong and Quang met and fell love while they were refugees at Fort Chafee in Arkansas, after the fall of Saigon. Poor Yella Rednecks picks up Tong and Quang’s story from where Vietgone left off.

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During the Fall of Saigon refugee immigration, the primary points of entry were those that Tong and others reference in the play: 

First, refugees were sent to Guam, a United States territory, from where US military personnel assigned refugees to camps on the mainland: Camp Pendleton (Southern CA), Fort Chaffee (Arkansas), Eglin Air Force Base (Florida), and Fort Indiantown (Pennsylvania). From there, the US government attempted to resettle refugees throughout the country.

As they resettled, many new Vietnamese-Americans found their way to California in part because the climate was rumored to be good and closer to home than the cold winters of the East and Midwest. Some of the largest communities of Vietnamese refugees grew up in Orange County and around San Jose/Silicon Valley.

The airport in San Diego was built in 1928, and flying commercial jets by 1960. San Jose's airport was built in 1949, but by 1968 had one million passengers travelling through it annually. 

In this essay the writer, Soya Jung, looks at “gook” as a racist tool of imperialism.

What struck me...was the breadth and depth of the word’s usage as a way to dehumanize native inhabitants of lands where the United States was the foreign colonizing force. It shows how Asia is less of a fixed, bounded area on a map, and more of a region (or an imagined set of regions) defined by U.S. military aggression. The word “gook” literally stretches from continent to continent to span the globe, long before the current-day, more commonly known reference to Asians in Korea and Vietnam. 

The word “gook” has not only a racial present, but a racial past. It was created as a tool of American war and conquest – a tool used to ensure the dehumanization of subject peoples, so that they could be killed and disappeared and stolen from with impunity. The word is, then, a symbol of racism and imperialism that has touched not only Asia, but also Latin America and the Caribbean, and by way of the slave trade, Africa. It has also extended, by way of war, to Arabs in Europe.

Jung heavily references another scholar’s investigation of the term, who cites its source as far back as the turn of the 19th century, during the Spanish-American War.

Irving Lewis Allen, in The Language of Ethnic Conflict, refers to goo-goo as "originally a Filipino in the Spanish- American War, 1899-1902" and some scholars of American English suggest that gook itself found usage during the same conflict. If so, gook developed among troops who were probably connecting contempt for natives with contempt for "promiscuous" women and for poor people generally. An 1893 citation from Slang and Its Analogues finds gooks to be "tarts" and particularly camp-following prostitutes or "barrack hacks" catering to the army. A 1914 source similarly defines a gook as "a tramp, low."

By the 1920s, gooks were French- and Creole-speaking black Haitians and Spanish-speaking Nicaraguans. Marines, as we have seen, made the Haitians into gooks. They also, after the 1926 invasion of Nicaragua, were responsible for so naming "natives" there. Into the 1930s in Costa Rica, goo-goo described the citizenry, at least to Americans. Such a term, in the Philippines or Latin America, could hardly have failed to conjure up an image of an infantilized subject population.