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This article argues that Tran Van Dinh's Blue Dragon, White Tiger, the first Vietnamese American novel written in English and published in the United States, helps to explain the victory of the Vietnamese communists over the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies. Some structures and theories developed in postcolonial criticism are used to elucidate the characters and the plot of this very important contribution to Vietnamese American literature, which captures the essentially poetic and humanistic soul of the Vietnamese people. Emphasis will be laid upon a discussion of the ironies of the U.S. intervention in Vietnamese politics, the destereotyping of the U.S. prejudicial portrayal of the communists, and a questioning of the "just cause" concept associated with the Vietnam War. The novel suggests reasons why Western political and economic agendas failed to win over the social and cultural hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people through a postcolonial discourse on the interactive socio-political aspects of the war.
Keywords: Vietnam War - Postcolonial discourse - Vietnamese American literature
Tran Van Dinh's Blue Dragon, White Tiger: A Tet Story, published in 1983, is the first Vietnamese American autobiographical novel written in English about the Vietnam War.1 The novel examines the growing corruption and eventual collapse of the South Vietnamese government, and it concentrates primarily on the educated Vietnamese, whose education was strongly influenced by Vietnam's traditional spiritualism, romanticism, and poetry, as well as by the classical Chinese and Buddhist traditions that also characterized the culture of prewar Vietnam. This article argues that Blue Dragon, White Tiger helps to explain the victory of the Vietnamese communists over the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies; it contrasts each side's political interests, leadership, and morality, concluding that the communist forces opposing American interests may not have held military superiority but that their efforts represented a native resistance force. The theoretical framework for the argument developed below is based on postcolonial theory.2 Notably, the narrative voice in the novel is that of a Vietnamese subaltern, the protagonist, who writes in English (the language of the "colonizers"), and who makes an attempt to produce a counterbalancing alternative to the generally onesided American discourse on the Vietnam War. Another aspect of the novel that needs to be understood from a postcolonial point...