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In September 1975 a group of determined Vietnamese men participated in an elaborate and highly choreographed political demonstration in a U.S. refugee camp on Guam. Four men volunteered to have their heads shaved in a public performance of dissent. A makeshift platform served as a stage, and dozens of Vietnamese men witnessed the ritual head-shaving. A U.S. military public affairs officer documented the protest. He observed the event from a distance, and the final image was framed by barbed wire and attested to the Vietnamese protesters' confinement. In the background, a banner proclaimed boldly in English, "Thirty-Six Hours, Hunger Sit-In, Quiet, Hair Shaving Off, To Pray for a Soon Repatriation."1 The men were organized and purposeful in their actions, and through striking visuals they directed their message to the American, Guamanian, Vietnamese, and the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) officials who controlled their future. For in contrast to the more than 100,000 Vietnamese who sought and soon gained resettlement in the United States, more than 1,500 men and women who left Vietnam in the final weeks of war insisted in no uncertain terms on being repatriated. They did not want to resettle in the United States. They wanted to return to Vietnam.
The story of Vietnamese repatriates provides an unsettling counternarrative to the dominant story of Vietnamese immigration to the United States. As Yen Le Espiritu has argued, the U.S. government and the mainstream media consciously positioned Vietnamese refugees as a population to be "saved" by America and Americans, and through their rescue, the United States could redeem and erase its imperial war in Vietnam.2 The repatriates' consistent demands to return to Vietnam rejected this U.S.-scripted fantasy. Furthermore, unlike most accounts of Vietnamese American history, which have emphasized questions of acculturation, assimilation, identity, and community formation, the repatriates turn our attention to contingency at the moment in between Vietnam and the United States both temporally and spatially.
The politics of contingency possesses a special resonance in this chaotic moment at the end of a war. Contingency encompasses a doubleness that became acute for Vietnamese repatriates. On the one hand, contingency refutes a preordained future and emphasizes the possibility of both agency and chance, while on the other hand, contingency implies dependence and interrelationship-one...