This essay analyzes “The Decade of a Vietnamese Refugee Girl” written in Japanese by Tran Ngoc Lan, a Chinese Vietnamese who was accepted into a refugee by Japanese government. Lan has been using multiple languages including “Mandarin,” “Cantonese,” “Hainanese,” “Vietnamese,” and “Japanese” in her life in a complex and interrelated manner. Lan also identifies herself as a “Chinese-Vietnamese,” a “boat people,” and a “Vietnamese-born Japanese of Chinese descent”. In order to capture Lan's experience of living in a contact zone of multiple languages, this essay considers “The Decade of a Vietnamese Refugee Girl” as a minor literature.
First, this essay took up four scenes: her life in Vietnam, her exile at sea after escaping from Vietnam, her junior high school life that she transferred to immediately after coming to Japan, and her participation in university entrance examinations in Japan, and analyzed how literacy of Han writing have become a sort of “passport” for Lan, who has been confronted with local spoken languages. She was born and raised in Chinatown in Saigon. Speaking Hainanese and Cantonese as first languages, she experienced exclusion from the “national” spoken language, Vietnamese, in her life in Vietnam. Before leaving Vietnam, she prepared herself to pronounce her brother's address in Japan in Japanese. This provided her with emotional support when she left Vietnam by boat. After coming to Japan, she was confronted with a new spoken language, Japanese. At the junior high school she attended after arriving in Japan, she entered the Japanese curriculum based on her literacy in kanji, the written language. However, when it came to university entrance exams in Japan, Japanese as a spoken language again prevented her from entering the university of her choice.
Lan was excluded from various local voices, such as Vietnamese and Japanese, through her mobility in the contact zone of multiple languages. She was not fully accepted in either place. On the other hand, the Chinese characters in the middle of the various local voices were a source of strength for her. However, Lan's description of her homeland in her autobiography shows that local spoken languages are essential for expressing emotions. She desired to live in different local spoken languages. The use of these local spoken languages was also a source of comfort to her. She was trying to live with the local voice, relying on the Chinese characters. Through the analysis in this essay, we have suggested the possibility of a discussion on the medium that connects multiple local voices.
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