Suspended Spaces of Global Việt Nam: KT Food Stories and Gastro Cartographies of the Inscrutable

Vietnamese refugee cultural archives reveal indifference to prevalent linguistic racial homogenization using monolingual Vietnamese in digital space. By analyzing the food vlog KT Food Stories as a case study, this article demonstrates that the YouTube food channel is not unlike some restaurants or shopping centers in the physical Little Saigons across the globe in its use of nontranslation. But when English-language dominance becomes peripheralized within the suspended diasporic space of Vietnamese food vlogging, the problem of linguistic inscrutability–particularly as a basis for ridicule in dominant American popular culture–becomes reclaimed through indifference, and Vietnameseness has the potential to expand globally through intimate gastro cartographies of refuge.