Touching War Wounds: Vietnamese Refugee Trauma, Textured Forgiveness, and the Need for Sensory Epistemologies

American portrayals of Vietnamese refugees tend to underscore their forgiveness of American violence. Phan Thị Kim Phúc, previously known as the “Napalm girl,” was first introduced in American media through a picture of her terrified and severely burned body following a napalm strike in her village. Later in her adult life, Phuc went on to offer public forgiveness of the U.S. for its attack on her village (Smith 2019). 

Critical refugee scholars like Yen Le Espiritu and Lan Duong have pointed out that the image resonated because it fit within a particular “frame of war” (to use Judith Butler’s language) that renders non-Western people, particularly women, as objects frozen in time, yet tasked with offering forgiveness to redeem American war crimes (Espiritu and Duong 2018). Stories like Kim’s are widely promulgated in large part because her forgiveness fits within the frame of the eternally grateful and forgiving refugee (Nguyen 2012). In other words, the forgiving refugee is often the only refugee American media can recognize, relegating all others to the “realm of the spectral” (Butler 2016).

For Vietnamese refugees, the trauma of the war remains an unspeakable wound with a contested history; on one hand, Vietnamese critics have long condemned the ways in which the frame of war centers American male soldiers, rendering the wounds of the Vietnamese invisible (Wieskamp 2015). This especially true for Vietnamese women, who faced both the violence of combat and the additional violence of sexual assault and mutilation (Bingle 2023). On the other hand, Espiritu points out that refugee studies tend to counter this problem by utilizing a damage-centered approach to tell a story that renders the Vietnamese as objects of investigation rather than true subjects (Espiritu 2014). In the face of trauma that cannot be narrated, Espiritu asks how refugee lives might serve as a site of social critique. I argue further that refugee lives might serve as a site of theological critique: how might the wounds of Vietnamese refugee women challenge traditional Christian theological accounts of forgiveness?

In The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory, Jonathan Tran puts forth a compelling theological account of the American war in Vietnam: removed from Christological time, the United States’ nihilistic grasp for time and space was shaped by a sense of meaninglessness (Tran 2010). The solution, he writes, is to offer veterans new stories of meaning–primarily, the Christian story–to overcome the nihilism that leads to violence. Without narration, we risk forgetting, for memory is “unending narrative.” (Tran 2010, 105). For Tran, narrative seems inextricably connected to forgiveness; if the Christian story offers possibility of re-narrating stories in ways that make our lives more bearable, “our stories more than sad,” they must point toward the hope for a collective story in which all sins are forgiven (Tran 2010, 242).

Yet if narrative and forgiveness are the church’s alternative to “strategic forgetting,” one wonders where the trauma of Vietnamese refugees figures into the Christian story. For Tran, the spectral other is defined as the American veteran (Tran 2010, 125) and war crimes are defined as “the things men do in war and the things war does to them” (Tran 2010, 54). The place of Vietnamese refugee women in this narrative emplotment is never mentioned–an erasure that challenges Tran’s claim about forgiveness. Forgiveness here does not seem to offer an alternative to the strategic forgetting of Vietnamese refugee women; in fact, the demand for forgiveness seems to elide Vietnamese women’s lives altogether. Thus, forgiveness may collude in the very strategic forgetting that Tran attempts to denounce. Within the frame of Christian theology, much like the frame of war, forgiveness becomes the only means of achieving legibility for Vietnamese refugee women. 

Christian theology has an ethical duty to question how its theological frames collude with the frames of war and empire in silencing voices that fall outside the frame, raising the question: what resources exist for re-imagining the Christian notion of forgiveness? I propose two lenses: first, contemporary trauma theory, which questions the limits of narrative in working through trauma. Shelly Rambo argues that theology cannot limit its form to the primarily discursive practice particular to Western tradition. By paying attention to alternative modes of theology–particularly, more embodied modes–theologians may place themselves “at the sites in which language breaks…[enabling] the reception of multiple truths” (Rambo 2018, 266). The somatic focus does not preclude narrative; rather, sensory work declares that narrative alone is not enough to address the multisensorial problem of trauma. The touch of a witness enters the Christian story to refigure wounds into scars (Rambo 2015). This textured vision of wounds poses new ways to think about harm against Vietnamese refugees: not as something to be forgiven, but something to be witnessed through touch. 

Next, critical refugee studies have argued that, within a frame that denies refugee subjectivity, theorizing refugee lives risks exploiting their trauma for an audience, offering them little potential for real agency (Nguyen 2020). Narration is further complicated by the loss of refugee stories between generations, such that second generation Vietnamese are often unable to reduce their family histories into a cohesive narrative, even if they wanted to. Yet this gap may be both productive and agentive; by precluding the possibility of narrative, the gap opens toward artistic and somatic practices. Long Bui offers a refugee repertoire that utilizes bodily movements and performance as a way of resubjectifying the refugee without subjecting her to the public gaze (Bui 2016).

In this paper, I argue that Christian theology, in emphasizing the role of narration and forgiveness of harm over embodied witness to harm, has failed to uphold the agency of Vietnamese refugees. Using Shelly Rambo’s work on trauma and theology in conjunction with critical refugee studies, I put forth a sensory epistemology–drawing on diasporic art, poetry, movement, and breath–to pose a more textured view of Christian forgiveness that places Vietnamese refugees in the place of the subject, while resisting the need to make that subjectivity coherent for public consumption.