Viet Nguyen - Nothing Ever Dies - Vietnam and the Memory of War

6. ON ASYMMETRY

1. Yamashita, The I-Hotel , 2.

2. Gustafsson, War and Shadows , xiii.

3. See Taylor’s Vietnamese Women at War and Turner and Phan’s Even the Women Must Fight for studies of Vietnamese women during the war.

4. Comments made at the event “Dreaming of Peace.”

5. For a collection of images of these lighters, see Buchanan’s Vietnam Zippos.

6. The paragraphs on the Zippo lighter are adapted from my article “The Authenticity of the Anonymous.”

7. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 29.

8. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , 30–31.

9. The description of the photograph’s physical condition comes from a private correspondence by email from Horst Faas, June 2, 2003.

10. Faas and Page, Requiem , 315.

11. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting , 15–19.

12. Young, The Texture of Memory , 5.

13. On the research that says the dead far outnumber the living, at about fifteen to one, see Stephenson, “Do the Dead Outnumber the Living?”

14. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting , 166.

7. ON VICTIMS AND VOICES

1. The first six paragraphs of this chapter are adapted from my essay “Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam.”

2. Bao Phi, “You Bring Out the Vietnamese in Me,” from Sông I Sing (11). Of course, my thinking here on photographs and their relation to the dead is influenced by Sontag ( On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others ), Barthes ( Camera Lucida ), and Sebald ( Austerlitz , among many of his works).

3. thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For , 99.

4. Nguyen-Vo, “Forking Paths,” 159.

5. Kingston, The Woman Warrior , 3.

6. Ibid., 19.

7. Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places , 15.

8. Gordon, Ghostly Matters , 187.

9. Espiritu, Body Counts , 23.

10. Sollors, Multilingual America.

11. On the distinction between race and ethnicity, see Takaki, ed., From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America , and Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States.

12. The academic and journalistic accounts of the divisions within American culture about the meaning of the war are many. Here is just a sampling, their titles perhaps enough to indicate some of these meanings: Anderson and Ernst, eds., The War that Never Ends ; Appy, American Reckoning ; Bates, The Wars We Took to Vietnam ; Christopher, The Viet Nam War/The American War ; Hellman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam ; Rowe and Berg, The Vietnam War and American Memory ; Turner, Echoes of Combat .

13. Pelaud, this is all i choose to tell.

14. Some sample articles in the popular press evoking this war in relation to contemporary wars, published during the writing of this chapter, include: Friedman, “ISIS and Vietnam”; Logevall and Goldstein, “Will Syria Be Obama’s Vietnam?”; Packer, “Obama and the Fall of Saigon.”

15. For an historical account of Vietnamese American literature, see Janette’s Mỹ Việt .

16. Waters, Ethnic Options.

17. Le, The Boat.

18. On the theme of betrayal in ethnic literature, see Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion , and Parikh, An Ethics of Betrayal .

19. C. Wong, “Sugar Sisterhood.”

20. Cao, The Lotus and the Storm , Kindle edition, loc. 80.

21. Nguyen, The People of the Fall . Critic Mimi Thi Nguyen calls this bind of gratitude and betrayal “the gift of freedom,” from her book of the same title.

22. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , 89.

23. Espiritu, Body Counts , 101.

24. See Wang’s “The Politics of Return” for a study of this return in Vietnamese American literature.

25. O’Connor, Mystery and Manners , 86.

26. McGurl, The Program Era.

27. Truong, “Vietnamese American Literature,” 235.

28. Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverance of Others , 1.

29. Duong, Treacherous Subjects , 1–22.

30. Nguyen, Pioneer Girl.

31. Kinnell, “The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible,” from The Book of Nightmares.

32. thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For , 160.

33. Trinh, Woman Native Other , 7.

34. Ibid., 98.

35. Dinh, Love like Hate , Kindle edition, loc. 113.

36. Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde.”

37. Dinh, Postcards from the End of America , http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/.

38. Martin Luther King Jr. in a 1966 interview with Mike Wallace for CBS Reports. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mlk-a-riot-is-the-language-of-the-unheard/.

39. Phi, Sông I Sing , 9.

40. Ibid., 39.

41. Ibid., 78.

42. Baldwin, No Name on the Street , 167.

43. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others , 112.

44. Ibid., 113.

45. Acosta, Revolt of the Cockroach People , 201.

46. Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , 4. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu provides historical context for American minority radicals who sought to build international connections with Chinese and Vietnamese communists in Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era .

8. ON TRUE WAR STORIES

1. Kingston, China Men , 284.

2. O’Brien, The Things They Carried , 76–77.

3. Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places , 97.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 15.

6. James, The Moral Equivalent of War , 3.

7. Miles and Roth, From Vietnam to Hollywood , 20.

8. O’Brien, Journey from the Fall , 226.

9. Žižek, How to Read Lacan , 47.

10. Hinton et al., “Assessment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Cambodian Refugees Using the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale,” and Marshall et al., “Mental Health of Cambodian Refugees 2 Decades after Resettlement in the United States.”

11. Žižek, How to Read Lacan , 47.

12. Chang, Inhuman Citizenship , 14.

13. Heinemann, Paco’s Story , 195.

14. Ibid., 209.

15. “The Latehomecomers,” Entertainment Weekly .

16. Artist’s talk at the “Southeast Asians in the Diaspora” Conference, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, April 16, 2008.

17. Thiep, The General Retires , 102.

18. Ibid., 104.

19. Ibid., 113.

20. These paragraphs on “Cun” have been adapted from my essay on “What Is the Political? American Culture and the Example of Viet Nam.”

21. Mishra, “Why Salman Rushdie Should Pause Before Condemning Mo Yan on Censorship.”

22. Said, Culture and Imperialism.

23. Mishra, “Why Salman Rushdie Should Pause Before Condemning Mo Yan on Censorship.”

24. Yang, The Latehomecomer , 46

25. Ibid., 4.

26. Ibid., 46.

27. Ibid., 93.

28. See also Cargill and Huynh’s Voices of Vietnamese Boat People , Kindle edition, loc. 1341 and 1798 for the unsanitary conditions of refugee camps.

29. O’Brien, The Things They Carried , 161.

30. Jin, The Writer as Migrant , 4.

31. Moua, Bamboo among the Oaks , 10.

32. Bhabha, The Location of Culture , 87.

9. ON POWERFUL MEMORY

1. Kipling, Kipling , 97–98.

2. Trinh, Woman Native Other , 10–11.

3. In her valuable work on War, Genocide, and Justice , Schlund-Vials argues that S-21 encourages visitors to see its history through the eyes of the prison’s administration and guards (43). If so, this is one possible reason why the Khmer may not be interested in visiting.