Reyes, Adelaida
1999 Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free: Music and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Notes: xix, 218 p.: ill.; 22 cm. ISBN:Reviewed 06 Jan 2003 by:
David W. Haines <dhaines1@gmu.edu>
Anthropology, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USAMedium: Written Literature Subject
Keywords:Vietnamese Americans - Music
Political refugees - United States
ABSTRACT: This book is a valuable contribution to understanding the Vietnamese refugee experience and, with its emphasis on music, opens new grounds for that understanding. Research in two refugee camps in the Philippines (Palawan and Bataan) and two resettlement areas in the United States (New Jersey and California) provides a strong comparative framework.
Adelaida Reyes provides a very important addition to the literature on the Vietnamese refugee experience. Specifically, she traces the ways in which music endures as an expressive form among Vietnamese refugees and how it is used both to define a distinctive Vietnamese past and adjust that past to refugeesÆ current conditions. That she has conducted research on both overseas resettlement camps and on resettlement areas in the United States makes her analysis particularly useful.Reyes begins her story with a general introduction to the nature of refugee flight, in which she places herself firmly among those who see a sharp, radical, and pervasive difference between refugees and regular immigrants. The remainder of the book is in two parts. Part I focuses on the journey by which refugees move initially to a country of temporary asylum and then on to a final country of resettlement. Her analysis is based on her own visits to two camps in the Philippines: Palawan was a camp of initial asylum for Vietnamese refugees arriving in the Philippines by boat and the Bataan RPC (Refugee Processing Center) was a camp set up specifically as a transit and orientation facility for refugees already accepted for resettlement by the United States. For both camps she provides a general review of life before addressing the specific issues of music.
Part II of the book addresses life in the United States. Here as well, she has two distinct sites for analysis: the New Jersey area in which she herself lives and Orange County, California--especially its focal point of Little Saigon in Westminster. For both these locales, she also begins with general observations of refugee life and then turns to issues of music. However, because of its overall importance for the Vietnamese overseas community, Orange County does receive more detailed attention.
ReyesÆ book is useful on a number of grounds. Most basically, it provides additional, interesting ethnographic detail on the Vietnamese refugee experience. Whether it is camp organization at Palawan, how Vietnamese interacted with Laotians and Cambodians at Bataan, or the mechanics of producing Vietnamese music for sale in Orange Country, Reyes provides insights that help broaden our understanding. Even better than the individual insights, however, are the comparative ones. Reyes is in the unusual situation of being able to track aspects of social life from camps to resettlement. She is very clear, for example, how the constraints of life in the United States consume so much of peopleÆs time that it is no longer possible to simply sit around and create music as a joint social activity. The contrast between New Jersey and Orange County, as another example, is a good reminder of how the nature of refugee resettlement is conditioned by the specific locality.
In addition to the general ethnographic and comparative value of her book is the specific analysis of music. Here Reyes breaks new ground both in her description and analysis. On the descriptive level, she provides an inventory of some of the different kinds of music, instrumentation, and themes--especially the distinction between songs of love and loss. On the analytic level, she provides an interesting discussion of how one might define music as being ôVietnamese,ö and how the views of Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese differ. This is, to a great extent, a reflection of the divide between musical form and musical text. To simplify her argument, for Vietnamese the criterion of ôVietnamesenessö tends to lie with the text -- it is, after all, in Vietnamese and thus effectively about Vietnamese issues -- whereas for non-Vietnamese the criterion of musical form tends to be more important--for example, to Americans, a particular piece of music may sound ôWesternö even though they may not understand any of the words. The analysis thus leads directly toward the broader cultural questions of who a people are and what demonstrates their uniqueness to themselves and to outsiders.
In her passage through this broad set of issues for a large and complex refugee population, Reyes has made some decisions that will be congenial to some readers, but perhaps not to others. She is adamant, for example, about the qualitative distinction between political refugees and other immigrants. One result is that other ways to distinguish international migrants are minimized; for example, legality of status rather than motivations for exit. Furthermore, her commitment to this notion of the political refugee intrudes at times into her ethnographic descriptions. This may be useful to those trying to grasp the broader issues of refugee movements, but may try the patience of those interested in the detail of her ethnographic work rather than in the invocation of a more generalized, moralized refugee experience. This commitment to reiterating issues of definition doubtless reflects ReyesÆs broader and persistent interest in making categories clear and taxonomies orderly and well-defined -- often in binary format.
Such caveats aside -- and they pertain more to the presentation than the content -- this is a very valuable book. It is essential reading for any student of the Vietnamese refugee experience and highly useful for anyone trying to think through the more expressive aspects of refugeesÆ lives as they are dislocated and then relocated. Music, Reyes demonstrates conclusively, will be a very good guide indeed to the shifts and continuities in refugeesÆ lives and how they themselves recognize and construct their identities under changing conditions.
Note: See also the very useful review of this book by Mercedes Dujunco in the Journal of Asian Studies 61(3):1128-1130, 2002.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Haines, David W.
2003 Review of Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free: Music and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience. Anthropology Review Database. January 06. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=1838, accessed November 22, 2009.© Anthropology Review Database
(available online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/)