Refugee Narratives, Superhero Comics, and Performances in Andrew Lam’s “Show and Tell”

Abstract

Andrew Lam’s short story “Show and Tell” problematizes the multi-layered problems of refugee representation posed in American popular narratives, while offering a narrative possibility that disrupts the dominant framework in which Vietnam/Southeast Asian refugees have been imagined. Depicting the first two school days of Cao Long Nguyen, a young refugee from Vietnam in 1970s San Francisco, the story revolves around three narrative performances in the classroom to evince the performative nature of a quotidian school activity, the “eighth grade Show and Tell.” In the midst of the performativity and interactions of word and image operative in the employment of photographs, drawings, and comics, Cao’s presence is navigated through a nexus of the images and narratives encompassing the Vietnam War and American Superhero comics. In the end, however, Cao presents himself not as an object of representation but as an artist with a powerful creative agency, exceeding the layers of visual culture that have framed the figure of the “refugee” from the U.S. perspective. Cao’s colorful chalk mural on the blackboard is cartography and refugee art that evokes heritages of refugee aesthetics, both traditional and modern. If his camaraderie with Bobby, a fatherless youth from the South, suggests familiar motifs from American superhero comics applicable to their marginalized situations, the process of making efforts to understand and to be understood over the language barrier between the two is further enacted via the trope of comics and comics reading. Ultimately, their acquisition of voice is exercised and manifested through emotional empowerment with each other by way of their narrative performances both separate and together. “Show and Tell” invites the readers to witness their dynamics that embody the affect and affinity between refugee and non-refugee, defying and unsettling not only the concept of refugees but also the American rescuer/rescued refugee binary in the American social imagination.