Portrait of a Lost Paradise: Diasporic Delusions in Linda Lê's <i>Héroïnes</i>

Abstract

This article examines Lê's deployment of photography, performance, and writing as media through which the Vietnamese overseas preserve, contest, and transmit the past in the present. Lê's novel as kaleidoscope reflects the multilayered heterogeneity of the diaspora through the lens of its second generation, who are ambivalent agents of cultural memory, unable or unwilling to grapple with these shifting fragments of the past. The image of Saigon, April 30, 1975 is fragile with their children. And just as the Saigon left behind exists no more, the image of this lost Saigon, Lê's novel suggests, will one day also be lost. Show more