記憶皺褶、感知拼圖、觀點聯覺：陳家寶的《越美：一趟家族旅行》

Folds of Memories, Maps of Affects, and Synesthesia of Perspectives: GB Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey

陳家寶(GB Tran)於2010年出版的《越美：一趟家族旅行》(Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey)以第二代的身分回應越裔離散「鄉關何在」的提問，並以圖像敘事的方式書寫與勾勒回歸與離散的迂迴路徑。這篇論文擬由這本書獨具創意的書名出發，檢視這本圖像回憶錄在敘事美學、離散情感與生命倫理上的嶄新意涵。陳家寶的《越美》在轉譯與探索「越美」抒情想像與倫理實踐時，選擇使用圖像來演繹越美的前世與今生，更由親子債務的角度重新詮釋「越美」族群親子世代的關懷倫理，藉此凸顯越美的創傷魅感與觀點聯覺，亦可成為開展未來可能的前提與條件。論文分成三個部分，第一部分探討作者藉由圖像敘事來拼貼出創傷聯覺所召喚出的獨特氛圍，而凸顯庶民的感受；第二部分則由當代圖像敘事的研究出發，討論《越美》如何反覆操作圖像敘事的文法，而動員觀者的各種感知官能，並喚起人與人、人與物之間的情感關聯。第三部分則聚焦於書中幾幕有關祖父、父親、兒子相視無言的場景，而將這本圖像小說讀為作家對於親子倫理與債務的反思與回應。

As a second-generation Vietnamese American artist, GB Tran writes Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey to respond to the Vietnamese Diaspora’s preoccupation with the problematic of home and homecoming, while unsettling the homecoming narrative, a genre popular among Vietnamese diasporic writers, with the medium-specific tools and techniques of comics, both to map its convoluted affective trajectory and to propose an alternative mode of reading the Vietnamese diasporic experience. Motivated by Tran’s creative conjoining of Vietnam and America into a new word, Vietnamerica, the title of his graphic memoir, this article proposes to study how Tran uses comics to re-articulate Vietnamerica into both a synesthetic experience and an ethical practice. The article is divided into three sections. Section one examines the graphic strategies Tran deploys to fuse together an assemblage of senses. Section two argues that given the structural complexity of Tran’s graphic novel, it requires the reader to practice an affective mode of reading to do justice to the multisensory forms of transgenerational communication. The last section zooms in on key scenes in the novel, which are charged with unspoken emotions that move both fathers and sons into mutual, though mute, acknowledgement, so as to flesh out the affective mode of transgenerational communication Tran promotes, which is oriented less towards debt than towards gift.