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Journeying “Home”: Negotiating Belonging As Vietnamese American Việt Kiều, Mary Yee

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

For Southeast Asian young people who left as adolescents from their home countries, their connections to those places are often fraught with ambiguity. As for almost all first-generation immigrant youth, issues of belonging in America have touched multiple aspects of their lives, including issues of identity. Not belonging is the diasporic experience of the immigrant (Christou, 2011; Skrbis, 2008). This qualitative study examined the lived experience of three Vietnamese American young people returning home as Việt Kiều, or diasporic Vietnamese. For these emerging adults, it was an important developmental task to figure out one’s place in the world: one’s belief …