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Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility | Som-Mai Nguyen

astra-mag.com · 4,734 words · saved by 17 readers

Writers in the Vietnamese diaspora are too eager to signal ethnic authenticity. Have we no shame?

There’s a jazz-hands half-nelson device I dislike in diasporic literature and criticism. Writers extrapolate from orthographic coincidence and sprinkle in non-English words to assert unearned authority. I tire of variants on : in Vietnamese, a tonal language, ma can mean many things . The author rattles off ghost , mother , tomb , horse , code , accompanied by the suggestion that this phrenologically means something. These claims are in-group sleights of hand, smugly announcing, without real evidence, that the author has exotic cultural knowledge the outsider cannot fathom. If you know, you kn

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