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Abstract

Monique Truong’s southern gothic novel Bitter in the Mouth and Catherine Hernandez’s migrant novel The Story of Us are Southeast Asian narratives that reimagine narratives about the Vietnamese refugee and the Filipina domestic worker. They not only detail the common struggles that the Southeast Asian subject experiences but also examine the overlooked moments and temporalities of rest, intimacy, and agency nestled in Southeast Asian life. Within these novels, the affective force of indifference disrupts the conventions of gratitude and subservience expected from Southeast Asians in the US and Canada. In Truong’s novel, indifference carves out ways and worlds for the refugee to feel refuge marvelously beyond the assimilationist logics set by the nation-state. In Hernandez’s novel, indifference carves out ways and worlds for the Filipina domestic worker to endure the confines of work as a full-time live-in caretaker and ekes out more expansive imaginings of the domestic. My thesis turns to indifference, as both a state of being and style, to examine what inexpressiveness affords the Southeast Asian subject. Through indifference, I conceive of a different notion of carework that is situated in tending to the self, relations, and well-being of the Southeast Asian. Chapter One analyzes Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth for how the Vietnamese refugee’s indifference ruptures the linear and neat temporality of refuge. Through its unexpectedly indifferent narrator Linda, Truong rethinks what it means for the refugee to experience refuge, the received temporality of the “good life” and the obligations that come with it, indifferently. Chapter Two examines how indifference emerges within the Filipina migrant domestic worker’s experience of work time in Hernandez’s The Story of Us. MG’s indifference to the temporality of work time emerges as a practice to survive work, as opposed to life as a whole, and limns the excesses of selfhood and relationalities within the domestic that fall outside of the transactional exchange of labor and capital. My conclusion leaves the reader with a notion of home that is built by the affective blocks of memory and kin, a home whose warmth and love can be felt again and again within oneself.