Transcript Southeast Asian Histories: A Thematic Overview - East

Past Wars, Present Wisdom:
Negotiating for a Southeast Asian
American Vision through Memoir
Writing and Reading
July 21, 2011
Asian American Literature: A Contested Ground
RACIAL STEREOTYPING
kung-fu fighting, tiger-crouching, hip-hop variety;
bucktoothed Fu Manchu, apelike Jap, belligerent Korean
Grocer , tragic whore of war-torn Vietnam, or campy,
innocuous “Charlie’s Angel”
LUMPING
cannot distinguish Asian American Literature from Asian
literature
cannot distinguish the subgroups of East Asian Americans
from one another
cannot distinguish Southeast Asian Americans from East
Asian Americans
anticommunists, refugees, jungle
people, poor and uneducated people
open allies vs. covert recruits
educated vs. less educated
wet rice vs. slash-and-burn cultures
South Vietnam vs. North Vietnam
Kien Nguyen, dentist and writer
(May 12, 1967, Nhatrang, South Vietnam)
The Unwanted (2001, memoir)
The Tapestries (2002, novel)
Le Colonial
(2004, novel)
Plot: Book begins with a prelude that describes Kien’s 5-year-old-birthday party in 1972 at the
Nguyen Mansion. Fast forward to the fall of Saigon in 1975 and back to his childhood of being
ridiculed and insulted (school parade marshal, Luu, three potatoes, half-breed, burnt-rice, little
muck, trash), and then the years of hardship, including being raped by Lam, failed attempt to
flee by boat, being jailed, and the desperate preparation to flee.
Mother’s Relationships
An American civil engineer/Kien’s father, left money,
enabling the mother to join a bank partnership
An American officer/Jimmy’s father, left money, enabling
the mother to build Nguyen Mansion
Nguyen Mansion: 3 stories, 24 rooms, at least 8 bedrooms, Western furniture, Sears
catalog clothes, with gardener Mr. Tran, one cook, Loan, plus two other maids
A Vietnamese guy/Be Ti’s father, called Lam; raped and impregnated the family’s
maid and nanny, Loan; also raped Kien
Cui Ba, the community commander, Kim’s father, imposed himself on Kien’s mother
capitalist; corrupt
counterrevoluntary
half-breed/burnt-rice/little/muck/trash
victim of war and communists
rescued by America
freedom-loving
grateful to USA
model minority
SYMPATHY
“The memory of Kim flooded my mind…Now I understood the
price that I had to pay for my revenge. Whether Kim forgave me or
not, I had broken her physically and emotionally. I was no better
than Lam, or her father, or any other loathsome creature that
ever crossed my path. Worst of all, I had to live with that
knowledge.”
The Unwanted, page 322
Espiritu, Yen Le. “The ‘We-Win-EvenWhen-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press
Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary
of the ‘Fall of Saigon’.” American
Quarterly 58.2 (June 2006): 329-352. Print.
RIGHT AFTER THE VIETNAM WAR
Many Americans shunned the veterans upon their return from the battlefield,
treating them as visible symbols of the Unites States’ humiliating defeat in
Vietnam.
Refugees were unwelcome.
25th ANNIVERSARY/YEAR 2000
Los Angeles Times
The New York Times
The Washington Post
The Orange County Register
The San Diego Union Tribune
The San Jose Mercury News
Time
Newsweek
American veterans
Vietnamese refugees
the innocent and the might heroes
the loving family guys
the friends and the rescuers
the liberated and grateful refugees
the anticommunist Model Minorities
in “the Land of the Free”
Directing attention away from the geopolitical, military, and economic causes and
the ongoing devastation of the Vietnam War for the majority of Vietnamese people.
Underrepresenting many Vietnamese Americans whose life is characterized by
unstable, minimum-wage employment, welfare dependency, and participation in the
informal economy.
Naturalizing the great economic disparity between the two countries, depicting the
two economies as unconnected rather than mutually constituted.
Confirming the superiority of a white American middle-class way of life and the
righteousness of “rescuing” projects.
Making Vietnamese refugees become the featured evidence of the appropriateness
and even necessity of U.S. world hegemony.
Espiritu, Yen Le. “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press
Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon’.”
American Quarterly 58.2 (June 2006): 329-352. Print.
While most scholars have separated Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese
refugees into different fields of study, Espiritu shows how they are necessarily
joined: as the purported rescuers and rescued respectively, they together
reposition the United States and its (white male) citizens as savior of
Vietnam’s “runaways,” and thus as the ultimate victor of the Vietnam War.
The authors contends that it is this seeming victory—the “we-win-even-whenwe-lose” certainty—that undergirds U.S. remembrance of Vietnam’s
“collateral damage” as historically “necessary” for the progress of freedom
and democracy. The author argues this ability to conjure triumph from defeat
constitutes an organized and strategic forgetting of a war that “went wrong,”
enabling “patriotic” Americans to push military intervention as key in
America’s self-appointed role as liberators. In other words, the author argues
that it is the “we-win-even-when-we- lose” syndrome that energized and
emboldened the perpetuation of U.S. militarism.
After the war, the United States decreased the number of its overseas
bases, with the sharpest declines in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, from
183 bases in 1975 to 121 in 1988. During the 1980s, in response to the
widespread fear of repeating a national mistake, the United States sent
combat troops to back up its cold war policy only once—in its 1984
invasion of Grenada.
However, this anti-interventionist mood was short-lived.
By the end of the 1980s, the U.S. had “won” the cold war, making it the
world’s sole military power. Soon after, the media spectacularized the
1991 Persian Gulf War victory as the ending of the Vietnam Syndrome,
featuring a gleeful President George Bush declaring, “By God we’ve
kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” The 1994 lifting of the
U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam, which the media narrated as
Vietnam “opening up” to the West, constituted an important milestone in
U.S.-Vietnam relations. In the next five years, the two countries
hammered out a major trade agreement, signed on July 13, 2000, that
formalized their ties as trade partners.
To summarize, by 2000, the U.S. was perceived to have won the cold
war and the Persian Gulf War; and Vietnam (and also China) had begun
to “open up” to the West. With these military and economic “successes,”
the United States was understood to have left behind the “Vietnam
Syndrome” as it confidently reasserted its world power, calling for a
“New World Order” under its management.
If you want to ever achieve happiness, don’t dwell on the past.
Instead, start living. What is the point of obsessing over
something that has already happened, and that you cannot
change? Live! And be merry.
Epilogue & Page 312
personal healing
healing for 50,000 Amerasian children
healing for friends as well as “enemies”
healing for all or humanity
how and when the personal becomes the public
how and when the singular can represent the collective
War produces no winner.
“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.” by Wilfred Owen
develop views that are deeply rooted in the past as well as the
present, there and here, us and you
enabled to deliver not only sympathy but also EMPATHY