Between Refugee and ‘Normalized’ Citizen: National Narratives of Exclusion in the Novels of Bich Minh Nguyen

Abstract

This essay traces how novelist Bich Minh Nguyen intertwines questions of identity and national politics in Short Girls (2009) and Pioneer Girl (2014).While Pioneer Girl has received critical attention for its engagement with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels through the eyes of a daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, this essay asserts that Short Girls, a meditation on precarity in Midwestern immigrant communities after 9/11, exposes Nguyen’s insistence on the connection between the local and particular and the national and global. Drawing on a framework of critical regionalism, I argue that Nguyen’s novels link her characters’ deeply personal navigation of community and identity as Asian Americans in the Midwest, national myths romanticizing a white pioneer past, and political narratives over who belongs and who should be excluded in the post-9/11 era.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.