I’ll never forgive you if you stay: il perdono in Dragonfish di Vu Tran e Vietnamerica di GB Tran

This article analyzes the theme of forgiveness in two prominent works of Vietnamese American literature: the graphic novel Vietnamerica (2010) by GB Tran, and the crime fiction Dragonfish (2016) by Vu Tran. Bearing in mind the theories of philosophers Charles Griswold and Jacques Derrida, forgiveness is here intended as a narrative tool that shapes and sustains the architecture of the two novels and frames a contemporary approach to the ghosts of the Vietnam War, in the view of two authors who gather their war stories mainly from their relatives’ tales. Vu Tran and GB Tran belong, in fact, to the Vietnamese 1.5 Generation and Second Generation respectively. Engaging with a theme so deeply intertwined with postmemory allows the two authors to perform their own historical, stylistic, and emotional elaboration of the collective trauma that has characterized the lives of Vietnamese refugees in America.