“You Don’t Know This but I Keep Telling You”: Memory and Disavowal in Monique Thuy-Dung Truong’s “Kelly”

Abstract

How do Vietnamese American authors attempt to write against a national narrative in which their histories have no place? What links may be traced between their textual production and the tensions produced by their presence within a nation anxious to rewrite “Vietnam” as an exclusively American experience? In the following essay, I will explore these questions through an examination of Monique Thuy-Dung Truong’s “Kelly,” a short story that takes the form of a letter written by a Vietnamese American woman who spent 4 years of her childhood in the town of Boiling Spring, North Carolina. My analysis will focus both on the place of history within the narrative, and on the status of Thuy Mai’s letter as an epistolary text linking together two individuals with very different relationships to their shared past. How might this narrative be read as a reflection upon the problem of representing Vietnamese history in post-1975 America? What can the nature of the bond between Thuy Mai and her addressee tell us about the different ways in which histories may be remembered—or disavowed?