Troubling Borders

Juxtaposing short stories, poetry, painting, and photographs, Troubling Borders showcases the creative work of women of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, and Filipino ancestry. This thematically arranged collection interrupts borders of categorization and gender, in what preface author Shirley Geok-Lin Lim describes as a “leap over the barbed fences that have kept these women apart in these, our United States of America.”The sixty-two contributors have been shaped by colonization, wars, globalization, and militarization. For some of these women on the margins of the margin, crafting and showing their work is a bold act in itself. Their provocative and accessible creations tell unique stories, provide sharp contrasts to familiar stereotypes—Southeast Asian women as exotic sex symbols, dragon ladies, prostitutes, or “bar girls”—and serve as entry points for broader discussions about questions of history, memory, and identity.

The combination of image with texts complementing and conversing with each other provides a textured, layered engagement with the subject matter., [A] collection that is at once scholarly yet accessible, purposely fragmented yet also deliberately interconnected, and always centering women in ways that surprise, challenge, and even provoke., [The] stories told dispel stereotypes and take on the complex challenges of colonialism, militarization, love, resistance, family, migration, and more. They reveal the intersectional and multilayered experiences of Southeast Asian women in the diaspora., Inspiring . . . uses a collage of art forms to portray varied, and usually under-represented, female identities . . . [and] shows how marginalized women have become empowered through their fervent and thought-provoking artwork and writings.

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. Lan Duong is associate professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California. Mariam B. Lam is associate professor of comparative literature and Southeast Asian studies, and associate vice chancellor and chief diversity officer at the University of California, Riverside. Kathy L. Nguyen is a writer and editor in San Francisco.