JUNE 2020

“From Huang to Huynh and Back Again” 

LANI MAC

ARTICLES

Published June 2020

ABSTRACT

Among the 1.6 million individuals who left Vietnam in the Indochina Refugee 
Crisis, hoa people, ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam, were resettled throughout 
North America, Western Europe, and Australia. Arriving in these new locations, 
the ethnic Chinese developed “twice-migration backgrounds.” Focusing on 
either the Vietnamese diaspora or Chinese migration, the present literature 
does not adequately address the hybridity of Chinese-Vietnamese identity. 
Exercising an interdisciplinary approach, I combine narrative with theoretical 
discourse and draw from my family’s migration story, existing research on 
ethnic identity among Chinese-Vietnamese in southern California, and literature 
on Chinese in present-day Vietnam. By framing identity as a continuous practice 
that is carried out in contexts of language, political history, and social environment, 
I address how first- and second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese Americans 
experience ethnic identity and suggest an expanded understanding of 
Chinese-Vietnamese identity that is fluid rather than static.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33682/wz3t-j5ry
PDF

HOW TO CITE (CHICAGO):
Mac, Lani. "From Huang to Huynh and Back Again." The Interdependent 1 (2020): 156-82. https://doi.org/10.33682/wz3t-j5ry