Abstract: This essay pursues an analysis of form through Lady Trieu, the Vietnamese American villain of Damon Lindelof’s hit HBO show Watchmen (2019). I argue that a formal reading of Lady Trieu and her mother/daughter Bian reframes the Asiatic woman’s complicity and injury within the violent machinations of the U.S. state by pivoting from a politics of presence to a metacritique of historical narration. Rather than theorize an ontology for Asiatic femininity, I argue that the Asiatic woman’s recalcitrant materiality—highlighted by Trieu’s gleaming, brittle bodily surface and circular genealogy—is the mark of an ontological indeterminacy that unsettles Watchmen (2019)’s attempt to absorb the Vietnam War within its reparative narrative of U.S. empire. By attending to the specificities and recursions of loss, Asiatic femininity’s aporetic materiality endeavors in the interpretive task of speculating another world, a hermeneutic labor that conditions the creative reproduction of memory. In, with, and on the Vietnamese American woman, this essay argues, the long and slow violences of the American War in Vietnam return as the trace of the mother: unforget-table, treacherous, undoing the image from its edges. This would be the feminist work of the surface, the formal aesthetic strategy of an insistently materialist Asiatic femininity.
Shawna Tang (Sun,) studied this question.