Con ăn cơm chưa? Việt Kiều Care, Consumption, and Culinary Crossings
This project explores diasporic Vietnamese culinary histories and practices of care, as part of a larger dissertation entitled “Con ăn cơm chưa?” or “Child, have you eaten yet?” which uncovers intergenerational and transdiasporic approaches to care through the lens of food and feeding as found in diasporic literature, national archives, and community oral histories. Interviewing restaurateurs in France and Vietnam from refugee backgrounds or with family histories of displacement, this research raises the following questions: How do relationships to food and feeding evolve through generations of displacement? How might these be similar or different across national contexts? What lessons about care can be learned not only from refugees, but also post-refugee generations and those who have “returned” to Vietnam? Whereas discourse about the Vietnamese diaspora often centralizes attention on Vietnamese communities in the US, this project focuses instead on the ongoing ramifications of France’s colonial legacy, highlighting historical threads between consecutive imperial projects that have resulted in generations of displacement. Expanding upon extant US-based oral history collections, not only does this project seek to preserve often forgotten histories and unacknowledged practices of care, but the perspectives that come out it will also help facilitate transdiasporic dialogue and healing.
Description of Materials
The materials that I am sharing include two full interviews and their accompanying transcripts. The first is an interview conducted with Marie Kecman, chef/owner of Cafe Broc’ouest in Paris. This interview comprises two parts, conducted over two days in July 2024.
The second is an interview with David Thái, executive chef and owner of Kobe Bistro in Saigon as well as former Iron Chef of Iron Chef Vietnam
I intend to also include these in an archive of oral histories of chefs from immigrant and refugee backgrounds that I will manage myself as part of a collaboration with the local community organization, Oakland Bloom, which supports immigrant, refugee, BIPOC chefs through their Open Test Kitchen incubator program.
VIDEO RECORDINGS COMING SOON.
Grantee Bio
Alan Yeh is a Ph.D. candidate in French at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies refugitude aesthetics, memory, care, and food in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, especially of the Vietnamese diaspora. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Alan previously taught English in the Occitanie region of France and received his B.A. in both French and Literature from Hamilton College in central New York, having also studied for a year at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III. In recent years, he has presented papers on the works of Kim Thúy, Linda Lê, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. He currently has a forthcoming article on Lê’s refugitude aesthetics. Coming from a family of immigrants and refugees, he strongly believes in the critical power of “me-search” and considers the intersections and tensions of his own identity (as Vietnamese/Korean/Chinese American) and personal histories as inextricable from a critical approach to literary and historical study. When he is not poring over experimental literary aesthetics, he can be found experimenting in the kitchen, trying new restaurants in the Bay Area, or singing his heart out in karaoke with friends.
Questions? Get in touch with Alan at alanyeh@berkeley.edu .