Contested Kinship: Vietnamese Prodigal Sons and Ideas of Rootedness

Abstract

Tracing various historical and literary iterations of the trope of the prodigal son in the early context of Vietnamese travel abroad, this essay puts into question what it means to feel kinship to one’s native culture and land. By focusing on important particularities of Vietnamese life and culture in the first half of the twentieth century, including increased diasporic mobility, a shift from ideographic to alphabetic writing systems, and new cultural influences from France, the author advances the argument that kinship, though uncanny and difficult to define, is not merely an automatic transfer of connection or relation from one generation to the next. Rather, kinship operates on a scale beyond the family, requiring a conscious questioning of one’s identity in relation to one’s place of origin.