Published sixteen years after the end of the Vietnam War, Robert
Olen Butler’s Pulitzer-winning short-story cycle A Good Scent from
a Strange Mountain (1992) is an imaginative attempt by a Euro-
American writer to come to terms with the consequences of the armed conflict
for the many thousands of Vietnamese refugees who emigrated to, and
settled in, the USA during and after the conflict. The stories dramatize the
internal and external conflicts that the predominantly Vietnamese-American
protagonists experience owing to their cultural and national relocation as firstgeneration
immigrants, or due to their cultural and ethnic hybridity as secondgeneration
immigrants. This essay aims to show how both the form and central
theme of the volume can be understood not only as a negotiation between
American and Vietnamese identities, but also as going beyond the compulsion
to identify self and other along national and ethnic lines. It will argue that
Butler’s text transcends national and ethnic determinations by imagining a
transcultural subjectivity, according to which characters can enjoy something
close to mutual understanding. As will be shown, this transcultural transcendence
takes place on different levels in the text: on the level of the characters,
on the level of the narrators, and on the level of the author. Thus, the text
itself can be seen as an example of transculturality in the sense that the author
crosses cultural boundaries in order to imagine and narrate his stories from a
Vietnamese-American perspective.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. p. 93-112