The UCLA Asian American Studies Center and Amerasia Journal are pleased to announce that Ms. Linh Nguyen, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, is the recipient of 2012-2013 Lucie Cheng Prize for her essay, “Recalling the Refugee: Culture Clash and Melancholic Racial Formation in Daughter from Danang.” Ms. Nguyen was nominated by her advisor, Professor Yen Le Espiritu.
Ms. Nguyen is currently a Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies, focusing on the field of Critical Refugee Studies. Her essay offers a critical reading of the documentary film, Daughter from Danang by interrogating the film’s subject, a transnational/multiracial adoptee named Heidi Bub, through the paradigm of the “refugee.” Nguyen’s interpretation of Daughter from Danang complicates the tendency to frame the documentary as a representation of “culture clash,” which, Ms. Nguyen suggests, essentializes American and Vietnamese cultural differences. Through her discussion of American involvement in Southeast Asia and its aftermath, Ms. Nguyen demonstrates how the place of Asian Americans in U.S. racial formations must be viewed in both national and global contexts.
The Lucie Cheng Prize recognizes exceptional graduate student essays in the interdisciplinary field of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies. The winning article is published in Amerasia Journal, and $1,000 is awarded to the recipient. Last year’s winning essay appears in the current issue of Amerasia Journal (38:3, 2012).
The Lucie Cheng Prize honors the late Professor Lucie Cheng (1939-2010), a longtime faculty member at UCLA and the first permanent director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center (1972-1987). Professor Cheng was a pioneering scholar who brought an early and enduring transnational focus to the study of Asian Americans and issues such as gender, labor, and immigration.
For more information about the Lucie Cheng prize, see: http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/ajprize/
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