Abstract
This essay focuses on a recent Asian diasporic auto/biographical graphic narrative that uses family stories to mediate history: Gia-Bao Tran's (Tran GB. 2010. Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey. New York: Villard). Because of the cultural implications of the Vietnam War, particularly the ways stories about it have been constructed, visualized, inherited, consumed, and challenged in the USA, I argue that a life narrative such as Vietnamerica intervenes in the contemporary production of memory and the forms contemporary historical writing might take. Tran very consciously places himself within the narrative and shows how historical events become catalysts for the ways a subject evolves and might be represented, with emphasis on the embodiment of the subject, memory, and, strategically, emotions. He thus multiplies his text's discursive possibilities by requiring readers to read beyond the narrated, toward the embodied – physically and emotively. Vietnamerica, therefore, is not a mere recounting of past events, but a representation and a performance of how events were experienced, how they are remembered and even re-experienced, through emotions, in the present.