"Còn nước, còn tát": The Ebbs and Flows of Water across Vietnamese Anglophone Cultural Production

Event start: 2026-07-02T18:00:00Z Event end: 2026-07-02T19:00:00Z Location: Herring Hall   Speaker: Karen Siu Doctoral Candidate Thesis Defense Department: English Location: Herring Hall 255 As a child and grandchild of Vietnamese refugees, my scholarship is personal and political, purposely following feminist and Ethnic Studies methodologies. It intertwines oral histories, creative nonfiction, and art with academic writing. This project's hybrid form is meant to be an innovation and contribution to the field of Vietnamese American Studies, which has often separated the genres of creative and academic writing rather than intertwining them. I ask, why water remains such an enduring symbol for Vietnamese diasporic writers, scholars, and artists, when it is often a painful reminder of war. When the capital of South Việt Nam, Sài Gòn, fell to the North Vietnamese Army, effectively ending the Việt Nam War on April 30, 1975, the date became known as ngày mất nước, the day we lost the country, we lost the water. In Vietnamese, nước (pronounced nyúk or \ ü-äk\) means water, homeland, country, or nation. Fifty years after the war, it is clear that war and colonialism devastated the environment of Việt Nam, but what does it mean when the identity of the land, the water, and its people is also devastated? What does it mean to lose the water? This project pursues these questions at this poignant time. I examine the beginnings of nước in Vietnamese folklore alongside Vietnamese Anglophone Cultural Production, including literature, art, and war memorials and memorializations, in order to trace the transformation of nước before and after the Việt Nam War. I claim that Vietnamese Anglophone cultural works share an intimacy with water, deviating from a nước associated with the Vietnam War and towards a nước that instead emphasizes how our community survives and resists. I put forward nước as a cultural framework that is feminist, antiwar, and decolonial. Ultimately, I argue that these archives offer an ecofeminist, transcorporeal vision of hope and resilience in the wake of war, imperialism, and colonialism that gestures back to and expands on precolonial conceptions of nước. By ecofeminist and transcorporeal, I aim to show the fluidity and interconnectedness between gendered, reproductive bodies and water challenges the tendency to dichotomize humans and nature.  

(Department : English)