Unsettled Time in Bich Minh Nguyen's Pioneer Girl

In the twenty-first century, Asian American fiction has exhibited a growing interest in explicitly experimenting with historical narrative and producing alternative temporalities, not merely in more conventionally defined speculative fiction genres, but across structures of historical fiction and literary fiction as well. In this paper, I analyze Bich (Beth) Minh Nguyen’s Pioneer Girl (2014) for its theorizing of history and conjugate construction of what I call an “unsettled time,” a temporality that emerges through a constant haunting of displacement and empire in the narration of everyday intimacies, a relational critique of U.S. settler colonialist logics of assumed ownership and homesteading and transpacific imperial incursions, and a subversive failure of heteropatriarchal linearity, such as that which characterizes a traditional marriage plot or model minority narratives.

Though the narrator, Lee Lien, having returned home after earning her PhD in literature, is contrasted against the characterization of her mother in ways that seemingly demonstrate a paradigmatic “necessity” and “extravagance,” as conceptualized in Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (1993), I argue that the novel’s unsettled time revises this critical analytic, offering a means of re-orienting Necessity and Extravagance for contemporary Asian American literary studies. Interweaving the global and local constellations of the Asian American Midwest and Vietnamese diaspora through intertextuality with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, Pioneer Girl re-orients Asian American Studies’ attention to how the Midwest region foregrounds Asian migrant-native-settler triangulations and the entanglements of heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, and U.S. transpacific imperialism, which I read through Lien’s wandering, the novel’s emphasis on ephemerality, and a stuttering rather than steadiness of home.