This chapter reads and surveys Vietnamese American literature as a creative refugee endeavor that was carefully tailored to meet the material needs and pressures of refugee life during the period 1965-1996. This era was a challenging period during which, despite close to 100 English-language volumes written by Vietnamese/Vietnamese American authors, finding a readership interested in the stories that refugees wanted to tell required multiple strategies of textual emergence. These challenges produced a bifurcation of public and private narratives and created a split between simple pedagogical stories that responded to the pragmatic demand to explain oneself and more complex stories that attended to the needs of the burgeoning community and the migrant psyche. With the Vietnam War looming large over their creations and the ways that these literary works are read, this era of Vietnamese American literature could be characterized as a series of attempts to rewrite and remap racial and cultural expectations of refugees, while laying the groundwork for greater forms of self and communal expression.

This chapter examines 1.5 generation Asian American literature, considering its thematic, formal, and critical value within Asian American studies more broadly. The 1.5 generation typically refers to subjects who are able to mediate between generations, languages, and cultures because their migration to another country at a young age results in transnational and intercultural knowledges and skills. This model for comprehending the 1.5er can be complemented with analyses of literature that is written by and/or conceptualizes the notion of the 1.5 generation. From this perspective, 1.5 generation Asian American literature is not necessarily defined by a fixed set of themes and forms but, rather, draws attention to shifting US–Asian relations and their impact on Asian American lives. Focusing on Vietnamese American anthologies published in the 1990s, this chapter demonstrates how the increased visibility of Vietnamese American literature largely centers around the notion of the 1.5 generation as a critical posture. Foregrounding neglected Southeast Asian contexts, these anthologies posit 1.5 generation literature’s critical importance in rethinking Asian American studies paradigms.