Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

7. On Victims and Voices

AS A CHILD, I WAS ALWAYS AWARE of the presence of the dead.¹ Although my Catholic father and mother did not practice ancestor worship, they kept black-and-white photographs of their fathers and their mothers on the mantel and prayed to God before them every evening. I knew the fathers and mothers of my father and mother only through their photographs, in which they never smiled and posed stiffly. In the 1980s, news of my grandparents’ passing into another world arrived one after the other, accompanied by more black-and-white photographs of rural funeral processions marching through a bleak northern landscape, of mourners dressed in simple country clothes and white headbands, of wooden coffins lowered into narrow graves. Visiting the homes of other Vietnamese friends, I paused to study the photographs of their relatives, invariably captured in black-and-white. Every household had these photographs, hallowed signs of our haunting by the past that were emblematic of a lost time, a lost place, and, in many cases, of lost people. For many refugees, the clothes on their backs and a wallet full of photographs were the only things they carried with them on their flight, “the family photograph clutched tight to a chest / When all the rest of the world burns.”²

In the strange new land in which they found themselves, these photographs transubstantiated into symbols of the missing themselves. Photographs are the secular imprints of ghosts, the most visible sign of their aura, the closest way many in the world of refugees live with those left behind. In le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, the narrator’s mother keeps the only treasured photograph of her own mother and father safe in the attic. When their home is demolished to pave the way for gentrification, the mother forgets to take the photograph with her in the family’s frantic attempt to rescue their belongings. Watching the destruction of her home, the mother calls out to her lost parents, “Ma/Ba.” The narrator, a child, listens to her mother’s cry and thinks of the world as “two butterfly wings rubbing against my ear. Listen … they are sitting in the attic, sitting like royalty. Shining in the dark, buried by a wrecking ball. Paper fragments floating across the surface of the sea. There is not a trace of blood anywhere except here, in my throat, where I am telling you all this.”³

thuy’s book, like much of the writing, art, and politics dealing with the war, focuses on the problem of mourning the dead, remembering the missing, and considering the place of the survivors. This problem is endemic to refugees, for whom separation from family and homeland is a universal experience. Common among refugees are memories and stories of the dead, the missing, and the ones left behind, those relatives, friends, and countrymen facing the consequences escaped by the refugee. In some cases, the refugee may even benefit from telling about those consequences and the ghosts of their past. Remembering becomes imbued with the dead, freighted with their weight, a risky and burdened act. As Nguyen-Vo Thu-Huong says, “how shall we remember rather than just appropriate the dead for our own agendas, precluding what the dead can tell us?”⁴ In a parallel case, Maxine Hong Kingston captures the ethical challenge for writers who speak about terrible events when she opens The Woman Warrior with her mother telling her, “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you,” a command broken in the very act of repeating it.⁵ The writer and the witness face the ethical demand to speak of things that others would rather not speak of, or hear about, or pass on into memory, even if in doing so they may perpetuate the haunting rather than quell it. Reflecting upon an anonymous aunt whose suicide was the consequence of family neglect and neighborly abuse, Kingston says, “I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.”⁶ As do all writers who speak of ghosts, Kingston inhabits the fraught territory of the substitute.

For Southeast Asians who lived through the war, ghost stories were easy to come by, as memoirist Le Ly Hayslip recounts:

We found ourselves praying more often, trying to calm the outraged spirits of all the slain people around us.… Slain soldiers used to parade around the cemetery too, but whenever we kids got close, they evaporated into the mist. At night, my family would sit around and the fire and tell stories about the dead.… Consequently I began to think of the supernatural — of the spirit world and the habits of ghosts — the way others might think of life in distant cities or in exotic lands across the sea. In this discovery, I would later find I was not alone.⁷

The appearance of ghosts like these becomes a matter of justice, according to the sociologist Avery Gordon. Their haunting demands that “we be accountable to people who seemingly have not counted in the historical and public record.”⁸ This demand weighs heavily on those investigating the war’s aftermath, like Gordon’s fellow sociologist, Yen Le Espiritu, who declares that we must “become tellers of ghost stories.”⁹ But speaking of ghosts is a dangerous act, for the storyteller must confront these ghosts, or exploit them, or return to the fatal circumstances that made them. In doing so, the storyteller must take responsibility for her tale when she invokes the dead, instead of merely claiming artistic license.

The ethical considerations for storytellers who speak of the dead and ghosts are particularly burdensome for minorities, those smaller in numbers or power. Thinking of themselves as weak or weaker, minorities may also be tempted to see themselves as victims, explicitly or implicitly. The majority may view the minority or the other as a victim, too, for that keeps the minority and the other in their places, their role to suffer and then to be saved by the powerful majority. Being a victim is a masked power that compels guilt on the part of the rescuer or the one who feels pity, but it is also a trick played on the victim for the victim’s supposed benefit. To see oneself only as a victim simplifies power and excuses the victim from the obligations of ethical behavior in politics, warfare, love, and art. Being a victim also forecloses the chance to wield real power, which the majority is not inclined to grant the minority and the other, offering them instead victimization and voice, two doors into the same trap. Ethics forces us to examine the power that we wield and the harm we ourselves can do, the dilemma that when one acts or speaks, even in the service of ghosts, one can be victimizer and victim, guilty and innocent.

Writers, artists, and critics can inflict various kinds of harm with the symbolic power they wield; so can minorities and their advocates do damage. Harm is a consequence of holding power, and even minorities and artists have some measure of power. Raising the issue of how a minority can inflict harm acknowledges that a minority is a human and inhuman agent, not merely a powerless victim, a passive subject in history, or a romanticized hero. Thinking of minorities as being human and inhuman complicates the usual stances of a patronizing, guilt-ridden majority as well as many advocates for minorities, both of which prefer to see the minority as human. So it is that when advocates for minorities speak of them taking up power, they often mean power being used as resistance against abusive power, an act with greatly reduced moral and ethical complication. The possibility of the minority possessing power with all of its confusing and contradictory implications, including the negative and the damaging, may be forgotten or overlooked in the temptation to see the minority as the victim of abusive power. While a minority’s power is not equal to the majority’s power, the minority must claim responsibility for the power it does possess, the power it must have if it can resist and, ultimately, liberate itself. In the recent past, the Western Left, so keen on the cry for resistance and liberation, has had the luxury of not actually accomplishing revolution and therefore suspending the confrontation with what it means for the wretched of the Earth to have power. Thus, if there is one thing that the revolutions in Indochina can teach the West, it is that resistance and liberation have unforeseen consequences. Those who have been damaged can, when they come into power, damage others and make ghosts.

Vietnamese Americans offer a paradigmatic example of the problems of telling on and about ghosts. Of all the Southeast Asians in America, they have written the most literature and have the longest literary tradition. French colonial policies encouraged this tradition, with the French favoring the Vietnamese over Cambodians and Laotians for the colonial bureaucracy, a practice that inevitably cultivated a literary class. The Vietnamese also benefitted from a more intense extraction of their frightened population at the end of the war, vastly outnumbering Cambodian and Laotian refugees. Both in terms of the superiority of numbers and literary education, the Vietnamese in America are a politically engineered demographic who possess much greater cultural capital than Cambodian and Laotian refugees. Their literary output can and should be judged, then, by the highest standards of ethics, politics, and aesthetics, for they have had some advantages to balance their war-born disadvantages. Thus their literature serves as an ideal test case for how the use of victimization and voice has come to dominate the aesthetics of minority literature in America. By aesthetics, I mean the process by which beauty is created and studied, which, in the case of victimization and voice, is difficult to separate from the issue of ethical responsibility. In the realm of ethnic storytelling, the ethical and aesthetic reluctance to confront one’s power is manifested through not telling on one’s own side while reporting on the crimes of others and the crimes done to one’s own people. But only through telling on how one’s own side has made ghosts can one stop being a victim and assume the full weight of humanity, which includes the burden of inhumanity.

Telling on others and ourselves is perilous, not least of all for the artists who confront the victimization that would silence them and the lure of having a voice that promises to liberate them. Claiming a voice — that is to say, speaking up and speaking out — are fundamental to the American character, or so Americans like to believe. The immigrant, the refugee, the exile, and the stranger who comes to these new shores may already have a voice, but usually it speaks in a different language than the American lingua franca, English. While those who live in what the scholar Werner Sollors calls a “multilingual America” speak and write many languages, America as a whole, the America that rules, prides itself on trenchant monolingualism.¹⁰ As a result, the immigrant, the refugee, the exile, and the stranger can be heard in high volume only in their own homes and in the enclaves they carve out for themselves. Outside those ethnic walls, facing an indifferent America, the other struggles to speak. She clears her throat, hesitates and, most often, waits for the next generation raised or born on American soil to speak for them. Vietnamese American literature written in English follows this ethnic cycle of silence to speech. In that way, Vietnamese American literature fulfills ethnic writing’s most basic function: to serve as proof that regardless of what brought these others to America, they or their children have become accepted, even if grudgingly, by other Americans. This move from silence to speech is the form of ethnic literature in America, the box that contains all sorts of troubling content. After all, what brought these so-called ethnics to America are usually difficult experiences, and more often than not terrible and traumatizing ones.

We might say that the form or the box is ethnic, and its contents are racial.¹¹ The ethnic is what America can assimilate, while the racial is what America cannot digest. In American mythology, one ethnic is the same, eventually, as any other ethnic: the Irish, the Chinese, the Mexican, and, eventually, hopefully, the black, who remains at the outer edge as the defining limit and the colored line of ethnic hope in America. But the racial continues to roil and disturb the American Dream, diverting the American Way from its road of progress. If form is ethnic and content is racial, then the box one opens in the hopes of finding something savory may yet contain that strange thing, foreign by way of sight and smell, which refuses to be consumed so easily: slavery, exploitation, and expropriation, as well as poverty, starvation, and persecution. In the case of Vietnamese American literature, the form has become aesthetically refined over the past fifty years, but the content — war — remains potentially troublesome and volatile. Race mattered in this war, but to what extent it mattered continues to cause disagreement among Americans and Vietnamese. One can draw a distinction here between the two faces of one country, the United States and America. If the United States is the reality and the infrastructure, then America is the mythology and the façade. Even the Vietnamese who fought against the Americans drew this line, appealing to the hearts and minds of the American people to oppose the policies of the United States and its un-American war. As for Americans, they, too, see this line, although what it means exactly is a subject of intense debate. Many Americans experienced and remember the war as an unjust, cruel one that betrayed the American character. Many other Americans view the war less as a betrayal and more as a failure of the American character. But the number of Americans who think the war expressed a fundamental flaw in the American character, as a gut-level expression of genocidal white supremacy, is a minority.

Vietnamese American literature is thus published in a country with no consensus on what to make of this war. Was the war a mistake and a failure? A noble but flawed endeavor, carried out with the best of intentions? The naked throbbing of the heart of darkness?¹² If Vietnamese American literature could avoid the war, then it could avoid this challenge of confronting the mythology and the contradictions of America. But the literature cannot avoid the war, because the literature is inseparable from the Vietnamese American population itself, which exists only because of the war. For the Vietnamese American writer as a racially bound ethnic writer, the necessity of speaking up, speaking out, and speaking for remains tied to the name of the ethnic population. As much as this person might want to forget his or her racial past, America will not let this ethnic other forget. This is the history that critic Isabelle Thuy Pelaud speaks of when she characterizes Vietnamese American literature as being located between the poles of history and hybridity.¹³ America promises hybridity to its newcomers, the dream of becoming something different on American soil. But Americans cannot awaken from this war’s history, which Americans continue to evoke whenever the United States again ventures abroad.¹⁴

Each racially defined ethnic group in the United States gets its own notable history for which it is remembered by Americans. Blacks get slavery and the plantation, and the legacies they leave in blackness and the ghetto. Latinos are of the Americas but are neither North American nor white (at least the Latinos that come first to the American mind), their lives supposedly marked by barrios and the border. Native Americans get genocide, dispossession, and the reservation. Vietnamese Americans get the war. Any ethnically defined literature is bound up with that ethnic group’s history in America because so-called ethnic literatures are forms of memory, saturated by ethical problems around the remembering of selves and others.¹⁵ Again race is key. For ethnic groups that can shed racial difference, such as the Irish who were once depicted in American media as being inassimilable, or the Jews once seen as beyond the pale, ethnicity becomes, as the sociologist Mary Waters says, an option, a choice.¹⁶ Those ethnic groups that remain marked, or stained, by race, have choices, too, but they also have no control about how others thrust their ethnicity on them. The choices made by racially defined people always conflict with the hard expectations of other Americans, which is also a reality of the literary world. There, the box of form assumes the name of the ethnic group, such as Vietnamese American literature. In contrast, Irish American literature or Jewish American literature has less visibility, with John O’Hara, Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth being American writers first and ethnic writers second, if at all. They have the choice to be white that racial minorities do not.

Minority writers know they are most easily heard in America when they speak about the historical events that defined their populations. These writers can speak of something else, but they are rewarded for speaking about their history and their race. For some, the history of their racial difference instills in them the desire to speak about their past. Nam Le captures the dynamic of silence and speech in his story “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice.”¹⁷ A writer named Nam is studying at the fabled University of Iowa writing program. He does not want to write about Vietnamese experiences, but when his father visits, he decides to write the ethnic story, based on his father’s harrowing war experience. The father survived a massacre, and not just any massacre, but the most horrible event of the war for the American conscience — the My Lai massacre. Nam knows he can make a literary reputation for himself out of this story, but when he proudly shows it to his father, his father burns the manuscript. Ironically, this story brought Nam Le to visibility. Writing the ethnic story made his name in the literary scene, and yet the lure of history and race trouble both he and his character Nam. If the literary world allows ethnic authors inside, even if only to one corner, then surely this proves that the larger world also accommodates them and the people they speak of and for. This is perhaps the most troubling tension running throughout Vietnamese American literature. On the one hand, when the literature speaks of the war and the harm done to the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese are victims. On the other hand, the existence of the literature seems to prove that America ultimately fulfilled its promise of freedom, giving the Vietnamese a voice. These problematic scenarios of being a victim or having a voice place the ethnic author into an impossible situation.

Le’s story posits that being an ethnic author writing ethnic stories is not really liberatory, for while a pigeonhole can be home, it is a very small one. But it is not only the confinement of the author by the literary and larger world that the story questions. The father’s reaction illustrates another danger, that the ethnic author may betray those for whom he speaks, and may therefore deserve not the spotlight but the bonfire. The literary world hungers for secrets and calls on the ethnic author to work as tour guide, ambassador, translator, and insider, the all-purpose literary fixer who will hand over the exotic or mysterious unknown. But the ethnic population may want to keep its secrets or feel that its stories and its lives are being misused for the benefit of an author who is a thief and a traitor.¹⁸ The tension between the ethnic writer and the ethnic population is also a legacy of race and subjugation, for it is an inequity of stories that compels the writer and the population to be at odds. White Americans experience this inequity from the side of the narratively wealthy, for they control the production of stories, with literature as one key industry of memory. The airwaves and the pages are full of stories about Americans of the dominant class, discussed in all their Whitmanian diversity and individuality. And when these Americans want to know about their others, they can usually find the stories they want to consume, written to cater to their expectations. But while dominant Americans exist in an economy of narrative plenitude with a surfeit of stories, their ethnic and racial others live in an economy of narrative scarcity. Fewer stories exist about them, at least ones that leave their enclaves. Not surprisingly, both the larger American public and the ethnic community then place great pressure on those few stories and those few writers who emerge to stand on the American stage.

This force shapes ethnic literature in general and Vietnamese American literature in particular, providing them with some common generic features. One is the sign of translation within the story, when the author or the narrator explains some feature of the ethnic community, such as its language, food, customs, or history. Since the insiders of an ethnic community obviously do not need these things explained or translated to them, the explanation or the translation implies an audience of outsiders, as critic Sau-ling C. Wong argues in the case of bestselling writer Amy Tan.¹⁹ Sometimes the address to an outside audience is explicit, as in Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, where she speaks directly at the beginning and end to Americans, especially veterans, absolving them of any guilt they may feel about the war. Sometimes the address is implicit, as in Lan Cao’s The Lotus and the Storm. In just one example, the character Mai recounts an episode from the classic The Tale of Kieu and says that “Every child in our country grows up with this story.”²⁰ One does not have to explain such a fact to one’s countrymen, only to those who did not grow up with it. In translating like this, authors can speak for the community to those not of the community, a power that can be rewarded greatly, with publication, sales, prizes, and accolades. But in an economy of narrative scarcity and inequity, the ones with real power are the outsiders (to the ethnic literature) who are the insiders of the literary industry: agents, editors, publishers, reviewers, critics, and readers who demand that things be translated to them. The ethnic writer is the literary industry’s employee, a status shared with most American writers. To be an employee does not say everything about the writer but it says a great deal, most importantly about the choice that all writers face: to see themselves as individuals working privately for art (even as that art becomes a commodity), or to see themselves as part of a larger community, imagining in solidarity even if writing alone.

Related to translation, another generic feature of ethnic literature is affirmation. Translators affirm those whom they serve, for while translators serve both sides of the translating relationship, the most important side is the one that pays. How much, exactly, does the person asking for the translation really want to know? Does the translator soften the blow of the translation? Does the translator silence what does not pay? The most subtle and excellent kinds of affirmation are invisible, so ingrained that both the person affirming and the person affirmed simply take for granted what is being said. This implicit version of affirmation in ethnic literature endorses the American Dream, the American Way, and American exceptionalism, the belief that no matter how bad it was over there, things are better here. But that endorsement takes place in stories that also criticize those mythological American ideas. Vietnamese American literature will often bring up the failure of American ideals during the war, while simultaneously affirming how America rescued refugees from that war. Historian Phuong Nguyen calls this maneuver “refugee nationalism,” where the refugee feels bound to America in both resentment for being betrayed and gratitude for being saved.²¹ Failure and idealism are part and parcel of the ideological power of the American Dream, the American Way, and American exceptionalism, all of which profess that while Americans may falter, they always strive, with the ultimate proof evident in how Americans allow others to speak.

It is arguably the case that the majority of Vietnamese American literature engages in endorsing this kind of American self-regard, partially through what it depicts and more so through what it does not mention or criticize. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” and the silence in Vietnamese American literature is about revolution.²² While some Vietnamese American literature reminds Americans that the Vietnamese have been victims, most of it has given up on revolution, which is one of the most important ways of transcending victimization. Most of the literature settles for having a voice, which allows the authors to criticize America, to a degree. But the very existence of that criticism proves that American society allows them to speak, so long as they pass over certain things in silence. Emphasizing the claiming of voice over the act of revolt, the literature inoculates itself against being a radical threat to American mythology. Communism tainted revolution for most Vietnamese Americans, and revolution is already a difficult topic for them to raise in America, which accepts only one revolution, its own, now safely fossilized. Revolution exists as the horizon for most Vietnamese American literature, forbidden in the United States, foreclosed in Vietnam. What remains is either a resentment that returns to the bitter past, more likely to be spoken of in the kind of literature that Americans cannot read, written in Vietnamese, or the desire for reconciliation and closure. Reconciliation and closure are foregrounded in the endings of Hayslip’s and Cao’s books and in the literature that is explicit in its affirmation, as in Andrew Lam’s collection of essays, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. Here the Viet Kieu — the overseas Vietnamese — embody American possibility, a successful model minority who returns to Vietnam as a kind of Superman, flaunting the American wealth that the Vietnamese could have had, if not for communism.

Vietnamese American literature’s political position on the American landscape as a literature of translation and affirmation might best be described as anticommunist liberalism. As Yen Le Espiritu says, “Otherwise absent in U.S. public discussions on Vietnam, Vietnamese refugees become most visible and intelligible to Americans as anticommunist witnesses, testifying to the communist Vietnamese government’s atrocities and failings.”²³ In the literature of these refugees or their descendants, there is faith in America as well as awareness that America needs protection from its worst instincts. There is sympathy for others, bred from the experience of being others. There is an awareness of history, because these authors are shaped by a history they cannot forget. There is an investment in the individual, in education, in free speech, and in the marketplace. All of these liberal gestures take place against the backdrop of anticommunism, not of the rabid, demagogic kind found on the streets of Little Saigon, but the reasonable, intellectual kind that allows for conversation with former enemies, for returns to the homeland, and, most importantly for American readers, the possibility of a reconciliation that will put their war to rest.

The movement from the homeland to the adopted land, as refugees and exiles, and finally the return and the reconciliation, marks much of the literature.²⁴ This is the case in Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala (2000), about a Viet Kieu who returns to the homeland during the early, difficult years of economic reform in the 1990s, or Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003), which follows the story of a young peasant in French colonial Vietnam who migrates to France to become the cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Or the literature is set in ethnic enclaves such as Little Saigon, as in Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet (2005), about orphans who have no choice in being moved to America. The literature overall is marked by the powerful stamp that says to America “we are here because you were there.” This stamp’s implications are not to be disregarded, but anticommunist liberalism contains them by holding communism responsible first for bringing America to Vietnam. Education also plays an important role in subduing these implications, particularly as it comes to represent the promise of the American Dream. Education is the invisible infrastructure of Vietnamese American literature, integrating it into the literary industry and the military-industrial complex, with authorial credentials being the baseline BA and the preferable MFA. In the common instance, the workshop model reinforces an averageness of taste, with a master of the craft leading students as they read and comment on each other’s work in a democratic appropriation of the communist self-criticism session. As writer Flannery O’Connor puts it, “so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.”²⁵ This competence or averageness reflects the mainstream values of the literary industry, the educational system, and American society, while reinforcing the literary world’s hierarchical nature. The MFA cultivates a standard of aesthetic excellence, and the literature produced from it is, as a result, competent in meeting that standard, which, almost by definition, cannot threaten the literary industry.

As Vietnamese American literature in English developed to meet this industrial standard, only one author emerged who was not college-educated or from the political or military elites, Le Ly Hayslip. Her two memoirs are also cowritten, which is as good as to be damned in the literary world. Her work may lack “competence” as defined by the literary industrial standard, but it possesses great vision — whether or not one agrees with that vision of humanity and reconciliation — which so many literary works lack. Outside of oral histories and besides The Book of Salt, her book is also the only major work that focuses on the life of a peasant. Most of the literature centers on those from the political, merchant, military, mandarin, elite, or middle classes, which all imply an elevated educational background in Vietnam for the protagonists or their parents. This elevated status shapes the worldviews of the protagonists — their vision, so to speak — and the settings of the stories, as well as their amenability to an anticommunist liberalism once they move to the United States (or once the American-born or raised protagonists come to consciousness). Given that the overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese are peasants, it is ironic that almost all the literature focuses on the classes above them. This irony is especially evident when American readers rely on a Vietnamese American literature produced by an urban, educated class to tell them something about the history and culture of the agrarian country and peasant people for which the war was fought.

While Vietnamese Americans are socioeconomically diverse, Vietnamese American authors are not, at least in terms of their education. This is especially evident with the wave of Vietnamese American literature that commenced in the 1990s with Catfish and Mandala and in 2003 gained momentum with The Book of Salt and The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Hayslip was the most visible Vietnamese American author until the arrival of this younger generation who, unlike her, could claim auteur status. They won major prizes and received wide recognition from the literary industry, their works considered “literary” in a way that Hayslip’s was not. While none of these authors had MFAs in creative writing, those that followed would, such as Aimee Phan and Nam Le. As Mark McGurl argues, the MFA program helped shape post — World War II American literature.²⁶ Vietnamese American literature is no exception, being the expression not of Vietnamese Americans in general but of their most educated class. If using literature gives the Vietnamese American author a voice, it does not give a voice to the people for whom the author speaks, or is perceived to speak.

Class markers are evident in what Vietnamese American literature does not often address (the peasantry), as well as in an array of stylistic features that mark an authorial anxiety about being the educated elite of a racial minority, both resentful of and dependent on the literary industry. The most significant anxiety has to do with voice. College-educated writers, especially the American-raised ones, are aware of their status as the people who have the voice to speak of and speak for Vietnamese and/or Vietnamese Americans. This call to be both one’s self (which is how one becomes American) and to write about others (who, even if they are other, look like one’s self) is both a responsibility and a burden, as Monique Truong shows in her essay on “The Emergence of Vietnamese American Literature.” Truong’s essay takes place against two notable acts of speaking of and for Vietnamese Americans. In 1991, Robert Olen Butler won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of short stories written from the perspective of Vietnamese Americans, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Earlier in 1986, Wendy Wilder Larsen cowrote a collection of poetry with Tran Thi Nga, Shallow Graves: Two Women and Vietnam. For Truong, both of these books are problematic. The acclaim given to Butler’s work raises the issue of whether American audiences prefer hearing an American speaking for the Vietnamese rather than the Vietnamese themselves (Truong does not consider whether Vietnamese American writers simply were not good enough at the time to interest American audiences). In Larsen and Nga’s case, Truong uses the metaphor of the bow and the violin to describe their creative relationship, where Larsen is the “active, narrative-generating bow” while Nga is the “passive instrument.”²⁷ Against these American literary acts that appropriate or subordinate Vietnamese voices, Truong makes a persuasive call for a Vietnamese American literature written by Vietnamese Americans.

This urge for self-representation and self-determination is deeply embedded in ethnic literature in general. If “ethnic” means anything in relation to literature, it is the sign of the ethnic speaking of and for the ethnic population. But the issues Truong raises in terms of appropriation and subordination are important for both outsiders and insiders. The ethnic author as an insider is not immune to the risks found in speaking for and speaking of others, even the others of one’s own community. Truong’s The Book of Salt dramatizes these risks and embodies them. In the novel, the peasant cook for Stein and Toklas — Binh — discovers that Stein has secretly written about him. Spoken for and about, he steals the book in revenge. In depicting these acts of mutual theft, Truong depends on speaking for and of Binh. The relationship of author to fictional character here parallels the relationship of author to a real community. Do Vietnamese American authors also run the risk of ventriloquizing through the creation of fictional characters that are also rather distant to them? If Larsen’s bow plays on Nga’s violin, does Truong do the same to Binh? No, because Nga is a real person while Binh is a character of Truong’s imagination. But the risks in speaking for and of others are not erased because the other is fictional.

In the case of ethnic literature, the “ethnic” label collapses the distinction between author and character, so that an ethnic author using ethnic characters somehow appears more “authentic” than a nonethnic author doing the same. This implies the reverse: that an ethnic writer writing about her ethnic people is “natural” but also limited, whereas a writer writing about a population he or she does not belong to may be appropriating but is also being artistic in a way that the ethnic writer is not — hence the regard that Butler received. Despite the risks of authenticity, there is good reason to think that ethnic authors are more sensitive in depicting characters of their own ethnicity, and that they should have the opportunity to do so. In an economy of narrative scarcity where literary representation cannot be separated from larger social issues of equity and justice, ethnic authors should have equal opportunity to represent both themselves and ethnic characters. The drawbacks to this necessary move are twofold. One is the reinforcement of authenticity, the belief that authors who share a background with who they represent will tell a more truthful story. Authenticity, however, does not eliminate ventriloquism. If Butler’s short stories had appeared with a Vietnamese name on them, few would question their authenticity. A blind taste test of literature with authorial names stripped from book covers would probably prove that the author’s ethnicity cannot be determined from the content. But the author’s identity and body is relevant because art exists in a social world where readers and writers bring their prejudices to the act of reading. Ethnic authors need to speak for and of ethnic characters, but they must do so aware of the fact that all literature is an act of ventriloquism, depending, as the critic David Palumbo-Liu puts it, on the “deliverance of others,” of otherness itself, to readers.²⁸ It is risky to claim an authenticity that is fictional at best and illusory at worst, but since race is forced on ethnic authors, ethnic authors are necessary to address the preexisting condition, or affliction, of race.

Another drawback to ethnic authorship concerns betrayal. In the fictional world, Binh steals the book about him and Nam’s father burns his story. They resent their depictions by the authors within these stories. This implies that the authors of books take the chance of exploiting people through telling their stories, both in relationship to their characters and their communities. Betrayal is hence an omnipresent theme in Vietnamese American literature, although for more than formal and racial reasons. Betrayal is a part of Vietnamese history as well, particularly in the twentieth-century era of war and revolution, when politics encouraged partisans to betray each other, or to betray family members of different political stripes, or to betray certain sides or the entire nation. But as Lan Duong says, betrayal in Vietnamese culture is the other side of collaboration. The positive aspect of collaboration, or working together, is fundamental to artistic work and to building the nation. The negative dimension of collaboration is found in its being seen as an act of treachery, of working with foreigners to betray the nation, an especially volatile charge when applied to women, as it so often is.²⁹ Likewise, authorial depiction of others is an act of collaboration — explicitly so when those are “real” others, people like Nga, and implicitly so with fictional others, as in the cases of Truong and Le. Their fiction shows what can happen when the others who are spoken for do not desire this collaboration. Throughout Vietnamese American literature, however, collaboration’s positive aspect is also present. Nguyen Qui Duc wrote his memoir Where the Ashes Are partially as a story about his father, turning a self-oriented genre into one about others. Andrew X. Pham goes a step further in The Eaves of Heaven, writing in his father’s voice to depict a man rarely seen in American literature, the southern Vietnamese soldier of a lost regime. He and his father also collaborated on the translation of Dang Thuy Tram’s diary into Last Night I Dreamed of Peace. Even the self can be the site of collaboration, as Lan Cao shows in The Lotus and the Storm. One of the central characters has multiple personalities, caused by terrible trauma, but even they eventually move from conflict to cooperation.

The ambivalence between collaboration and betrayal in Vietnamese American literature signals ambivalence in the literature itself. Vietnamese American literature is collaborative in its relationship to American culture. The literature engages in tactics of translation and affirmation, fulfilling a role it shares with ethnic literature in general, that of America’s loyal opposition, bringing up the past in order to lay it to rest, or attempt to do so. As such, the literature can raise the troublesome past of war and even the difficult present of racial inequality, so long as it also promises or hopes for reconciliation and refuge. But signs of betrayal are scattered throughout the literature of loyal opposition, criticisms so serious that they threaten the ways that Americans like to see themselves. At times, the same work exhibits impulses toward both collaboration and betrayal, like The Lotus and the Storm does. The novel ends on reconciliation between Vietnamese and Americans, but it also indicts America for not learning from its war with Vietnam as it fights new wars in the Middle East. At other times, the betrayal is hinted at obliquely, through ruptures where the past cannot be forgotten, as in GB Tran’s graphic novel Vietnamerica. The frenetic, color-saturated narrative ends in the blackness of an airplane hold as the cargo doors shut on frightened refugees fleeing the fall of Saigon. Vietnamerica’s timeline does continue past this point in the plot of the book, with the refugees fleeing to America and then eventually returning to Vietnam, but the book’s ending on this note of claustrophobic blackness suggests that the loss of their nation and American betrayal will always entrap Vietnamese refugees.

While Vietnamese American literature that avoids the war is developing slowly, as might be found in Bich Minh Nguyen’s writing, the refusal to discuss the war can still be seen in light of the war itself.³⁰ Somewhere the corpse continues to burn, as poet Galway Kinnell says, and even if we avert our eyes and pretend we cannot smell it, the odor lingers, its flickering shadow occasionally leaping into our peripheral vision.³¹ The odor and the flickering shadow of war’s burning corpse still haunts Vietnamese American literature, as The Gangster We Are All Looking For makes evident. The narrator flees by boat from Vietnam and survives, but her brother does not. His ghost shadows her, becoming one sign of the past that will not go away. The author’s postscript to the 2004 paperback edition makes haunting even more explicit, recounting that her name is not her own but her older sister’s. The author and her father had fled on a separate boat than the mother and older sister did, and, after being rescued by an American ship, her father had mistakenly identified her with her sister’s name when filling out paperwork. When the family is reunited, the mother reveals that the older sister drowned at a refugee camp, and asks that the younger sister — the author — keep her older sister’s name. “My mother saw my father’s mistake as propitious; it allowed a part of my older sister to come to this country with us. And so I kept my sister’s name and wore it like a borrowed garment, one in which my mother crowded two daughters, one dead and one living.”³² Ghosts like this that tie Vietnam to America must be honored if Vietnamese American literature is to stop being an ethnic literature that ultimately affirms America.

How can ghosts be called on not to propitiate them and send them back to the otherworld, leaving us to our human existence, but to live in the present and to animate our memories with an inhumanity that reminds us of our own? Unsurprisingly, the authors that eschew implicit affirmations of America write from the margins of the literary industry, published by university or small presses rather than major trade houses. Feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, for example, has focused relentlessly on foregrounding the illusory power in having a voice. Her best-known work, the documentary Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, features the words of Vietnamese women who were interviewed about their wartime and postwar experiences. In the first half of the documentary, actresses perform those words in the guise of those women, while the second half focuses on the actresses in their lives off camera. The documentary shows that these women are actresses and not the actual women in order to demonstrate that the stories of Vietnamese women are performances, not historical fact. Trinh’s book Woman Native Other elaborates her suspicion about the seductiveness of authentic voices. She points out how, for women of color, writing is an act of privilege tainted by the guilt of being dependent on other women’s labor, or speaking for other women.³³ Writing should be a form of liberation for the writer and for all women, instead of only a form that seizes the stories of women who cannot tell their own. To enact this liberation, Trinh does not rely on singular notions of ethnic identity in service of a literary industry, in being only Vietnamese, but instead reaches for solidarity with women of color, drawing on their writings and emphasizing how there is a “Third World in the first, and vice versa.”³⁴

Following that insight, Linh Dinh’s Love like Hate is raw, sometimes rough, always impolite, as he depicts, satirizes, and criticizes both Vietnam and America unrelentingly. “Saigon is often squalid but it is never desolate,” he writes. “Vietnam is a disaster, agreed, but it is a socialized disaster, whereas America is — for many people, natives or not — a solitary nightmare.”³⁵ This double-edged writing cuts both ways in order to slice open the ethnic box, refusing to affirm either of the nations or their platitudes, as a more radical Vietnamese American or ethnic literature should. The poet Cathy Park Hong points to how minority poetry faces the exact same problems outlined here for Vietnamese American writers, caught between the mainstream and the avant-garde:

Mainstream poetry is rather pernicious in awarding quietist minority poets who assuage quasi-white liberal guilt rather than challenge it. They prefer their poets to praise rather than excoriate, to write sanitized, easily understood personal lyrics on family and ancestry rather than make sweeping institutional critiques. But the avant-gardists prefer their poets of color to be quietest as well, paying attention to poems where race — through subject and form — is incidental, preferably invisible, or at the very least, buried.³⁶

Hong insists on the inescapable importance of race in poetry. How can an author address that importance? Instead of simply being caught between two worlds, or reveling in the wondrous fusion of two cultures, as the literary industry typically expects of ethnic literature, what can a more radical literature do?

One way to dispense with the ethnic is to engage in comparison and contrast across borders, illuminating the cross-border operations of power and its abuse, greed and its operations. Another way is to reveal the disturbing universality of a shared inhumanity, rather than only the heartwarming cliché of a shared humanity. Dinh’s writing carries out both of these strategies. His voice is abrasive and caustic, and his stereoscopic vision of his two countries is sordid, sad, and suicidal. While ethnic literature often turns to digestible metaphors of food and hybrid cuisine, and if reviewers of ethnic literature often do the same, a reader of Dinh’s writing would benefit more from the dirty metaphors of parallel roads — the raucous, lawless streets of Saigon, or the underpasses and sidewalks of America. This is where he finds evidence of the inhumanity of humanity, as recorded in his blog, Postcards from the End of America, devoted in his words and photographs to the mundane horror of the American present: the wretched and the poor, the ugly with their bad teeth and unkempt hair, reeking of failure and ignominy, ghost-like because we are both afraid of them and refuse to see them at the same time.³⁷

A radical literature that strives against the ethnic can also turn with great passion and righteous indignation to American landscapes populated by refugees and ghosts, where “riot is the language of the unheard,” the threatening voice that ethnic literature so often softens.³⁸ This threatening voice is heard loudly in poet Bao Phi’s Sông I Sing, where he mixes lyricism with obscenity. His subjects of war, racism, and poverty are obscene, but his other subjects of refugees, people of color, and the working class are deserving of lyrical treatment. In his “refugeography,” war delivers the refugee to America, where the refugee will encounter another, if subdued, war on the poor in the inner cities and dead zones of a necropolitical regime.³⁹ Of Vietnamese refugees rendered homeless once again by Hurricane Katrina, he writes that “It’s like this country only allows us one grief at a time. Your people, you had that war thing. That’s all you get. Shut. The fuck. Up.”⁴⁰ His grief and rage are aimed not only outward toward America but inward toward those who have absorbed the racism and class warfare directed at them, internalizing it and siding with the powerful. What happens, then,

When you can no longer tell

if you’re liberating yourself through expression

or selling your oppression.⁴¹

This challenge can be leveled at any ethnic author in America. This author should be rightfully paranoid about being caught in so-called ethnic literature’s defining dilemma, which is to talk about only one thing, the one grief that can be possessed, worn, and hawked. While the literary industry sees the ability to tell one’s story with one’s own voice as a sign of humanity, it is also the mark of inhumanity, as both the ethnic author and the ethnic story become commodities, sold and sold out.

Can a writer do more than intuit the problems in having a voice and speaking of one’s victimization? Trinh T. Minh-ha shows us one way, gesturing at the importance of suspicion (toward authenticity and voice) and solidarity (between women, natives, and others). Linh Dinh and Bao Phi show us another, pointing toward the simultaneity of the human and inhuman. Some other writers who are not Vietnamese provide a third way, invoking Vietnam and sharing their grief and rage, which helps to overcome the oppressor’s divide-and-conquer strategy. Here James Baldwin speaks of the Black Panthers, the Viet Cong, and America:

Nothing more thoroughly reveals the actual intentions of this country, domestically and globally, than the ferocity of the repression, the storm of fire and blood which the Panthers have been forced to undergo merely for declaring themselves as men — men who want ‘land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.’ The Panthers thus became the native Vietcong, the ghetto became the village in which the Vietcong were hidden, and in the ensuing search and destroy operations, everyone in the village became suspect.⁴²

Baldwin neither denies nor bemoans the histories of war and slavery that define the Vietnamese and African Americans in American eyes. He does not simply inhabit the history given to him as a black man. He connects those histories, bringing two different spaces together so that the exercise of American power over there becomes the logical extension of American power over here — the Third World within the First, and vice versa. Victimization is not a lonely experience but is shared, which is a point that Susan Sontag also makes when she criticizes how many victims privilege their suffering: “victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings. But they want the suffering to be seen as unique.”⁴³ Even more, “it is intolerable to have one’s own suffering twinned with anybody else’s.”⁴⁴ Sontag and Baldwin agree that victimization must be seen as more than an isolated or unique experience. Suffering can become solidarity through political consciousness and simultaneous revolution, the only ways for the natives over there and over here to confront the global force of the American war machine. First the natives of a particular place must learn that they are not the only ones victimized, that there are others who share their grief; then they have to stop identifying themselves as only victims.

So it is that Baldwin insists that war occurs not only on foreign soil, waged by soldiers against the enemy or villagers, but also on American soil, carried out by the police against blacks. Oscar Zeta Acosta makes the same charge on behalf of Chicanos when he says that “We are the Viet Cong of America. Tooner Flats is Mylai.… The Poverty Program of Johnson, the Welfare of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, the New Deal and the Old Deal, the New Frontier as well as Nixon’s American Revolution … these are further embellishments of the government’s pacification program.”⁴⁵ To be poor and black or Chicano was to suffer from a low-intensity counterinsurgency that occasionally erupted into all-out assault, as happened to the Panthers, who the state needed to put down because the Panthers had ceased to see themselves as only being victims and began to see themselves as revolutionaries. Writer Junot Díaz agrees that war, and the interpenetration of foreign wars and domestic tragedies, is central to American life:

Where in coñazo do you think the so-called Curse of the Kennedys comes from? How about Vietnam? Why to think the greatest power in the world lost its first war to a Third World country like Vietnam? It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq). A smashing military success for the U.S., and many of the same units and intelligence teams that took part in the ‘democratization’ of Santo Domingo were immediately shipped off to Saigon.⁴⁶

In this footnote from his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz tells us that Americans have a bad habit of invading other countries. American memory may forget the invasion of his country, but that should not prevent us from seeing that the invasion of Vietnam (as some Vietnamese see it) was not an aberration. At least the Vietnam War has a name, an identity; confronted with how the invasion of the Dominican Republic has no proper name, Díaz, like all artists who look at war, engages in memorialization. He tells his readers that his Dominican characters live on American soil because war brought them here, the human blowback of American intervention. When we remember the wars that forced people to flee, oftentimes into the embrace of their colonizer or invader, then we can see that the immigrant story, staple of American culture, must actually be understood, in many cases, as a war story.

What the immigrant story supposedly registers is the difficult but ultimately rewarding struggle to become American, a transformation from wretchedness to righteousness, from victimization to voice. The mythical power of the immigrant story intoxicates. Even when the immigrant speaks explicitly of war as the origin of their Americanization, like Díaz and many others, many Americans hear them as speaking about the travails of being a new American and the horrors of the Old World. While not all war stories involve immigrants, and while war stories do not scar all immigrants, a vast territory exists where war story and immigrant story overlap. Segregating immigrant story from war story cools the seething histories of strangers who carry troubling memories of American wars, creating in their place narratives filled with damage, wound, and identity. Readers and writers often imagine damage, wound, and identity as the results of cultural conflict, being torn between two worlds, rather than what they often are, the calamitous consequences of war, colonization, and exploitation, conducted by foreign forces and domestic tyrants. The conventional immigrant story warms the heart, but the story of the immigrant as the collateral damage of American warfare warrants anger as much as tears.

The writer who is marked as ethnic or racial, who is categorized and looked down on for engaging in “identity politics,” must not simply accept or deny that pejorative. To do so is to be forced into accepting the impossible choice that a dominant society built on whiteness gives to its minorities: be a victim or have a voice, accept one’s lesser identity or strive to have no identity. To have no identity at all is the privilege of whiteness, which is the identity that pretends not to have an identity, that denies how it is tied to capitalism, to race, and to war. Inasmuch as victimization and voice are the particular and inevitable forms of alienation for minorities, so is whiteness the form of alienation for white people. Victimization and voice become the markers of difference and identity for minorities, while whiteness becomes unmarked alienation, manifest in the supposedly universal experiences of loneliness, divorce, ennui, and anomie, all of which are the cancerous costs of living in a capitalist society whose profits also accrue to whiteness. If it is true that identity politics is navel-gazing, then so is the whiteness of white people and the self-absorption of those in power. This whiteness and this power remains unchallenged by the kind of minority identity politics that does not call out the identity politics of whites or speak truth to the power of the war machine. Minorities must dissent from the terms that a regime of whiteness offers. They must call forth anger and rage, demand solidarity and revolution, critique whiteness, domination, power, and all the faces of the war machine. Southeast Asians must insist that the war that defines them in America is not only their war, but a war made by white people, a war that is not an aberration but a manifestation of a war machine that would prefer refugees to think of their stories as immigrant stories.

Even as a child, I always knew, however dimly, that the stories of my parents were not just immigrant stories but war stories. Some soldiers suffered more than my parents did, but my parents suffered more than many soldiers who served at the rear. These rear-echelon soldiers were never shot at or actually shot, threatened with a grenade, forced to flee, losing nearly everything, separated from their loved ones for decades, as happened to my parents and so many other refugees and civilians. Their stories needed to be told, but I always hesitated about telling them. “Terrible, terrible things,” my mother said, having told me some things, refusing to tell me others. “Haven’t you said enough?” my father said to her. I always wondered what was passed over in silence. I want to know and I also do not want to know, but the absent presence of the secret is enough, the secret that is theirs, not mine. Neither do I know the worlds evoked in those black-and-white photographs that arrived in the mail and sat on the mantel of my childhood home. These are the worlds where victims can be victimizers, where ghosts can be guilty, and where survivors can be inhuman. I could steal the stories of those victims, ghosts, and survivors, or make them up. But speaking for others is a simple and insufficient notion. Voice and humanity and victimization are not enough to fully comprehend what happened back then, over there. The aporia of the past always remains, the absence that I can neither know nor share, the silence that resists my speech, the ghosts who refuse resurrection. I would risk the substitute’s fate if I told only the part of the ghost’s story that humanizes its inhumanity. Ghosts are both inhuman and human and their appearance tells us that we are, too. To understand our fate and theirs, we must do more than tell ghost stories. We must also tell the war stories that made ghosts and made us ghosts, the war stories that brought us here.

8. On True War Stories

WHAT IS A WAR STORY, AND WHAT makes a good one? The question concerns both the content of a war story and how it is told, the former easier to address than the latter. Both comprise what we think of as aesthetics, or the problem of beauty and its interpretation, which is rendered even more challenging when considered in relation to war. On the one hand, the artist must convey both war’s seductions, the beauty to be found in parades, uniforms, medals, explosions, and glory, all the makeup painted on the face of nationalism, which is one of the primary justifications for war in our day. On the other hand, the artist must also address the evisceration of cities, bodies, and ideals, the waste left behind in war’s wake. Art’s relationship to war is not unique, just extreme, for even the most mundane aspects of life are marked by the simultaneity of beauty and horror, where the intimacies of love and betrayal are observed at close range. To do justice to both the beauty and the horror of war is difficult at the level of both content and form, and yet necessary. It is easier to retreat to the comfort of addressing the content of war stories, and yet if one speaks of doing justice in remembering war, one might also agree that such justice is found in the form of the artwork as well.

To begin with content, many people in many places think of soldiers and shooting when they think of war stories, but that is too narrow a definition. “Good” war stories that pump us up, get the blood going, that tell the “truth” about war through spectacular battles and sacrificial soldiers, also affirm the necessity of war. This limited way of thinking about war stories is one of the reasons why antiwar movies are often not actually against war. They continually place at their center the soldier, and her or his validation, as hero or as antihero, persuades even some reluctant viewers to be resigned to war. They submit to the passive-aggressive demand to “support our troops” if they oppose the war, for what ingrate would not affirm these patriots? But in providing solace to the soldier, we give license to the politicians, the generals, and the weapons-makers to continue their deceptive and cynical rhetoric of supporting the troops. This rhetoric is deceptive because what it really permits is continual war-making. It is cynical because the troops often are not supported when they come home, unprotected or inadequately protected from depression, trauma, homelessness, illness, or suicide. A true war story should tell not only of the soldier but also what happened to her or him after war’s end. A true war story should also tell of the civilian, the refugee, the enemy, and, most importantly, the war machine that encompasses them all. But when war stories deal with the mundane aspects of war, some may see them as “boring” or simply not even about “war.” These conventional perceptions of war stories blind us to war’s extensive nature, for these perceptions divide the heroic soldiers who seem to be the primary agents of war from the citizens who actually make war happen and who suffer its consequences.

Exposing the war machine fundamentally challenges these identities of soldiers, citizens, and wars. This kind of war story acknowledges how war exercises the entire body politic, the squeezing of the trigger hardly possible if the rest of the body was not involved, all of its organs and parts working in conjunction with mind, memory, imagination, and fantasy. Maxine Hong Kingston renders vividly the reality that the soldier cannot fight without the support of the entire nation in her story “The Brother in Vietnam,” from her book China Men:

Whenever we ate a candy bar, when we drank grape juice, bought bread (ITT makes Wonder bread), wrapped food in plastic, made a phone call, put money in the bank, cleaned the oven, washed with soap, turned on the electricity, refrigerated food, cooked it, ran a computer, drove a car, rode an airplane, sprayed with insecticide, we were supporting the corporations that made tanks and bombers, napalm, defoliants, and bombs. For the carpet bombing.¹

From carpets to carpet bombing, war is woven into society’s fabric. It is almost impossible for a citizen not to be complicit, not to find war underfoot at home or hidden behind the curtains, as artist Martha Rosler showed in her photomontage of an American housewife pulling back the drapes to reveal the war happening right outside her window, the one that she sees and yet refuses to see while she vacuums her curtains. Thinking of war as an isolated action carried out by soldiers transforms the soldier into the face and body of war, when in truth he is only its appendage. If we do not recognize the reality of war, we are as blind to it as the housewife.

Imagining war only through the soldier’s point of view paradoxically may not lead to a true war story, despite what author Tim O’Brien argues in “How to Tell a True War Story,” a chapter from The Things They Carried, one of the war’s literary classics. The narrator of this book of fiction, also called Tim O’Brien, outlines the features of the true war story:

War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. The truths are contradictory.²

O’Brien does not mention that war is profitable, even if it is also costly. This is one of the truest things that a war story can tell, since profit is one of the most important reasons humanity keeps fighting inhuman wars. To understand this aspect of war, one must look at it from the highest vantage point possible, as the superpowers well understand with their desire to conquer air and space. One must see with satellite vision that can show the operation of massive war machines, not just the limited vision of a grunt for whom the tank may be the biggest war machine. That grunt can tell a good story, and it may be a true war story, but it is a story that could be limited. He or she might see as far as the horizon, but war machines can see beyond the horizon, and so must anyone who wants to tell a true war story. Ethics is optics, Levinas says, but war is optics, too, as Virilio argued. Telling a true war story requires the right kind of panoramic optics, an ethical one and an aesthetic one that allows us to see everyone and everything involved in war.

While much of what O’Brien describes is also true for some civilian experiences of war, we generally do not associate civilians with war stories. There is not much fun or thrill in being a civilian involuntarily caught in war (although if one is a civilian who volunteers for war, as diplomat, journalist, contractor, aid worker, and so on, then that is a different story that can be akin to the soldier’s war story). For many spectators and readers, war stories must at least be fun and thrilling, even as they try to communicate the obligatory sentiment that war is hell. These good war stories lead boys and girls to dream of being soldiers, but no one dreams of war’s costs, or of being a civilian caught in a war, an orphan, a widow, or a refugee. Children playing soldier may fantasize about glorious death, but probably not dismemberment, amputation, shellshock, inexplicable and debilitating illness, homelessness, psychosis, or suicide, all of which are not unusual experiences for soldiers and veterans. And does anyone fantasize about being raped by marauding soldiers, which is an inevitable consequence of war? If war makes you a man, does rape make you a woman?

Rape is another horizon of war memory for many, even if it is one of the truest war stories ever. The first time one human tribe inflicted murder on another human tribe, rape very likely accompanied it. Rape is an inevitable expression of the collective masculine desire that drives men to war, for while not all soldiers are rapists every army rapes. Despite the endemic nature of rape in war, few would enshrine rape in those many sterile memorials dedicated to victorious war. There is no honor to being a rapist and there is neither glory nor fun to being raped, and so memorials to rape victims are rare. (Nanjing’s memorial to the rape of the city and its women by the Japanese army in World War II stands out as an exceptional example.) Nations are more likely to acknowledge the murders their soldiers commit than the rapes soldiers have done. Rape is embarrassing, the most extreme revelation of war as an erotic experience, a turn on, a way of getting off, nasty and fun. Rape is one of war’s most unspeakable consequences, denied in the heartwarming images of soldiers being sent to war or greeted on their return by faithful wives and adorable children.

As the scholar Judith Herman notes, rape and sexual trauma are as damaging to its victims as the experiences of combat, but while soldiers are at least honored for their sacrifice, no such succor is granted to the women these husbands, brothers, and sons raped. The experiences of men raped by men are even more invisible and inaudible, anomalous to the entire notion of war as a rite of heterosexual passage. Rape destroys any lingering ideas of heroism, masculinity, and patriotism, those oily notions that keep the gears of the war machine running smoothly. Phung Thi Le Ly narrates this true war story from the perspective of a girl recruited at a young age to work for the Viet Cong, unjustly convicted of betraying them, and then raped by two of them as punishment. “The war — these men — had finally ground me down to oneness with the soil, from which I could no longer be distinguished.”³ At this point, she had already been imprisoned and tortured by her rapists’ enemies, the South Vietnamese and Americans. Caught in between these opposing forces, she realizes that soldiers and men of all sides “had finally found the perfect enemy: a terrified peasant girl who would endlessly and stupidly consent to be their victim as all Vietnam’s peasants had consented to be victims, from creation to the end of time!”⁴ To make sense of what happens to her, she cowrites her memoir under the name Le Ly Hayslip. Her kind of true war story, focused on women, children, peasants, and victims, as well as the unraveling trauma of rape, is the exceptional true war story that forces readers to contemplate the scenario of being raped and living to tell about it.

In the more typical true war story, the reader does not see himself as enduring being killed or raped, only being the witness to such acts, which itself may be an awful experience. Tim O’Brien’s stories are closer to this rule, an antiwar true war story that nevertheless can be assimilated into a reader’s patriotic, masculine imagination. A scene is repeated again and again: a mine blows a soldier into a tree, leaving his guts hanging from the branches for his comrades to retrieve — horrible, but expected, for this is war. In returning to this scene, O’Brien follows the logic of the ghost story laid down by Hayslip. She writes that “the teller must always specify how the victim died, usually in great detail.… Because the manner of death influences each person’s life among the spirits, the teller cannot leave out any detail, especially if the death had been sudden and violent.”⁵ The reader sees herself or himself as the soldier watching this happen, the survivor, not as the soldier who has been dismembered, liquefied, and turned into a ghost, if the writer or the reader believes in ghosts. The reader does not identify with those who die, the ghosts, because then the story would end, unless one tells ghost stories. In the type of true war story that is not a ghost story, the soldier who tells the story lives on, perhaps to suffer, but still alive to bear witness. This type of war story, the most common one in America and elsewhere, is bracketed by the extremes of rape versus banality, the erotic drive of the war machine versus its bland ideological face.

Both exist at the fringes of war memory, for as difficult as rape is to imagine or remember, banality is too boring to be recalled. Most Americans who served in the military during the war never saw combat, serving on ships, guarding bases, delivering supplies, pushing paper, condemned as “rear echelon motherfuckers” in the rich lingo of the combat troops. The epithet is meant to satirize their cowardice and privilege, and perhaps the envy of the combat troops, but something else lurks in the obscenity — the dim realization that contemporary war is a bureaucratic and capitalistic enterprise that requires its bored clerks, soulless administrators, ignorant taxpayers, contradictory priests, and encouraging families. If we understood that a war machine is a pervasive system of complicity that requires not only its front line troops but also its extensive network of logistical, emotional, and ideological support, then we would understand that all the politicians and civilians who cheer the war effort or simply go along with it are, one and all, rear echelon motherfuckers, including, perhaps, myself.

The obsidian myth of the heroic warrior allows rear echelon motherfuckers to see themselves as red-blooded patriots from the heartland. That myth took a near-fatal wound during the war for Americans, who tried to repair it by turning soldiers who were not seen as heroic warriors into wounded warriors. But soldiers are not warriors in the mythic sense, where every able-bodied man had a spear or battle-axe in his home, ready for the call to arms. Instead the rank-and-file soldier is a manifestation of the modern era, faceless, anonymous, at once an individual and a part of a mass, representing the entire nation. A true war story must not be only about what happens to combat soldiers and their guts, but also about the nation and its guts, about running one’s refrigerator, which might use a refrigerant made by Dow Chemical, the company that manufactured Agent Orange. This herbicide debilitated thousands of American soldiers and their progeny, as the U.S. government admitted, and also thousands of Vietnamese and their offspring, as the U.S.overnment will not admit. The quotidian story about opening one’s refrigerator and peering into its guts, stuffed with the plastic-packaged wonders of capitalist life, is just as true as and arguably more unsettling than the blood and guts story of throbbing disembowelment. The quotidian reminds us that war’s obscenity lies not only in broken bodies but also in the complicity of the citizenry. Under what might be called compulsory militarism, even those who oppose war still end up paying its costs, for while everyone can intellectually understand that war is hell, few can resist owning the refrigerator. This complete domestication of war is part of war’s identity, in the same way that some family, somewhere, has nurtured every rapist. We are all witnesses to banality and complicity, which is why we do not wish to recall them.

I am most interested in the kinds of true war stories and war memories capacious enough to include the blood and guts as well as the boring and the quotidian. True war stories acknowledge war’s true identity, which is that while war is hell, war is normal, too. War is both inhuman and human, as are its participants. Photographer Tod Papageorge’s American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War in Vietnam portrays war in exactly this fashion. The book features seventy photographs, all but one capturing American sporting events: the players and the fans, the press conferences and the team buses, the dugouts and the locker rooms, with the participants being men, women, young, old, black, white, ugly, beautiful. The last photograph is the one that does not depict a sporting event or its participants. It is of the War Memorial in Indianapolis, with these words on the facing page: “In 1970, 4,221 American troops were killed in Vietnam.” This is horror as an appendix to the banal, which is how many civilians experience war. Papageorge suggests that even as American soldiers die abroad, life continues at home, an experience repeated decades later with America’s wars in the Middle East, which often hardly feel like wars at all in the United States. While O’Brien’s stories may be true war stories from a soldier’s point of view, Papageorge’s photos are true war stories from a civilian’s point of view. The spectacular gore of a certain kind of true war story distracts us from the dull hum of the war machine in which we live, a massive mechanism greased with banalities, bolted together by triviality, and enabled by passive consent. To tell and hear these kinds of banal and boring true war stories is necessary for what philosopher William James called “the war against war.”⁶ So far as we imagine wars to be dangerous (but thrilling), wars will not end. Perhaps when we see how boring wars actually are, how war seeps into everyday life, then we might want to imagine stopping wars. The citizenry can end war at any time by refusing to go along with it, which is no easy matter — perhaps even utopia itself, versus the passive consent to the contemporary global dystopia of perpetual war.

If American war stories favor frontline vividness, for many Southeast Asians, wherever they happen to be, true war stories are both vivid and banal, since the war was fought on their territory, in their cities, on their farms, within their own families. For some readers or viewers, these kinds of true war stories are not “good” war stories because they lack the vicarious thrill found in stories about soldiers killing and being killed. Simply by their content, true war stories about civilians and banalities are, for some, boring and hence forgettable. This is true for large numbers of Southeast Asians, many of whom were born after war’s end and are impatient with their elders’ stories. But for many who lived through the war, its memory remains as bright as a magnesium flare, illuminating darkness and signaling danger. For those Southeast Asians cast overseas as losers, the need to remember their war stories is even more urgent. They sense that the war may be forgotten, or narrated differently than the way they remember. The genre of the true war story as told by (white) Americans frustrates them. Artist Dinh Q. Lê speaks eloquently of this frustration when he discusses his series From Vietnam to Hollywood, which

is drawn from the merging of my personal memories, media-influenced memories, and Hollywood-fabricated memories to create a surreal landscape memory that is neither fact nor fiction. At the same time I want the series to talk about the struggle for control of meaning and memories of the Vietnam War between these three different sources of memories. I think my concepts of what constitutes memory have changed over the years, from thinking of memory as something concrete to something so malleable. But the one concept I still hold on to is that, because Hollywood and the U.S. media are constantly trying to displace and destroy our memories about the Vietnam War to replace it with their versions, I must keep fighting to keep the meanings of these memories alive.⁷

These memories range from the horrific to the reassuring, the aesthetic spectrum for the war stories of Southeast Asians whether in their countries of origin or in their adopted countries. On the horrific end, the most powerful scene from Ham Tran’s epic film Journey from the Fall illustrates something that O’Brien gestures at. In O’Brien’s stories, the job of the living — at least the living writer — is this: “We kept the dead alive with stories.”⁸ But what if the living are already dead, and the dead are somehow alive? Journey from the Fall examines this convergence of living and dead through the war’s impact on one family after the fall of Saigon. After the husband is sent to reeducation for having been a soldier in the southern army, his mother, wife, and son flee as boat people. In a marginal American neighborhood, they suffer their losses in isolation from Americans and from each other, traumatized by the loss of country and patriarch, as well as the sufferings endured on the boat, which include rape. When the young son accuses his mother of forgetting the father, treating him as if he were dead, she says

Do you know what I’ve been through to be with this family today? Do you think your mother is still alive? She’s dead already. Dead already! I died the day they took your father. I died again out on that ocean, Lai. This person you call your mother is nothing but a corpse, living only to take care of you. But your real mother is already dead, son. I hope you know. She’s dead, son.

Tears do not come to my eyes often, but they did for this scene, the mother weeping at her confession, the son weeping at the revelation. This domestic scene set in a prosaic living room dramatizes war’s dreadful cost for civilians, women, refugees, children, and, ultimately, all those people in living rooms who think they are not at war when their country is at war.

The mother’s speech reveals that beneath the façade of the human lurks the inhuman, the undead among us and within us, which Westerners typically only confront through watching stories of the undead in zombie movies and television shows. As philosopher Slavoj Žižek says, “the ‘undead’ are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous ‘living dead.’ ”⁹ Among the refugees, some are the living dead. If one wants sociological evidence, look at how 62 to 92 percent of Cambodian refugees in America endure posttraumatic stress disorder, or how some of them suffer from a science fictional illness called hysterical blindness, where, for no apparent medical reason, those afflicted cannot see, or how some Hmong refugees, healthy by all appearances, and of youthful age, go to sleep and never wake up, their black hair turned white overnight.¹⁰ What has traumatized, blinded, or killed these people? Memories. What turns people into zombies? Memories. Because these people might be infectious and threatening, Americans may wish to quarantine their memories and war stories, their tales of being the living dead, which remind us that the inhuman is present within us. As Žižek tells us, there is a difference between not being human, which is “external to humanity, animal or divine,” and being inhuman, “which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being human.”¹¹ Riffing on Žižek’s insights, critic Juliana Chang says inhuman “implies dread and horror not only because we find it strange but also because we find it overly proximate … the inhuman is the alien that permeates the human, and the human that finds itself alien.”¹² This human, xenophobic fear of the alien and the refugee is based not on how they are unlike us, but on how they are too much like us. Not only is their condition something for which we might have some responsibility, but their wretchedness might become ours if something catastrophic happens to us. Even more, as Papageorge’s photos imply, isn’t there something inhuman and monstrous about carrying on our daily business — indeed, in enjoying ourselves — while people die because of our war machine? Do we look that different from zombies in our pursuit of oblivious pleasure? If the victims of a war machine made zombie movies, wouldn’t they cast themselves as the humans and the war machine’s soldiers and citizens as the zombies? Can the war machine’s soldiers and citizens see themselves as zombies, as inhuman? In short, do we who think we are human know that we are also inhuman?

At least some refugees know they are inhuman, the living dead, and perhaps some soldiers do as well, like novelist Larry Heinemann, the war veteran whose novel Close Quarters scarred me at so young an age. He wrote the even more troubling Paco’s Story about a disabled veteran who is the burned, scarred, sole survivor of a company that is wiped out in a massive battle with the Viet Cong. Paco is a drifter who comes into a typical American small town whose citizens look down on him. These are the same people who shouted their support for their troops. The reader’s sympathies are with Paco until near the end, when he remembers the brutal gang-rape his company inflicted on a captured Viet Cong sniper, a girl of fourteen or sixteen years, who killed two Americans. Each of the soldiers line up for their turn to rape her, and when they are done, one of them executes the girl with a bullet to her head. Shortly after the gang-rape, Paco wounds another Viet Cong with a grenade, and then finishes the kill with a knife. The soldier pleads with Paco not to kill him, to no avail. “I am dead already,” the man says, right before he dies.¹³ Heinemann describes both scenes in excruciating detail, setting the stage for what happens next, Paco reading the diary of a young woman, his neighbor. She has written down her fantasies about making love to Paco, until the moment she imagines his scars touching her. “And then I woke up. I just shuddered.… It made my skin crawl.”¹⁴ By the next page, the novel is over. Paco leaves this typical American town to drift again. He cannot stand what we witnessed, his forced recognition of his inhumanity, his skin-crawling monstrosity, himself as alien. He removes himself but small town America has already cast him out, sensing the dis-ease he carries after having fought a dirty war in small town America’s clean name.

True war stories insist on this dreadful knowledge of the inhumanity that exists within the human, and the humanity of those who appear inhuman. But this is a hard tale to recount, especially for tellers of true war stories dealing with women, children, refugees, and banalities, in particular the banality of inhumanity. Unlike soldiers turned artists, these tellers have a heavy burden to bear in challenging the identity of the conventional war story and insisting that a war story is about many different things and people, not solely soldiers. Recasting war’s dramatis personae faces resistance from audiences who believe that war stories are about soldiers, men, machines, and killing. These tellers also struggle, like all other artists, with the judgment of their critics. These criticisms, while subjective, are often pronounced in objective ways, as when the glossy magazine Entertainment Weekly gave a B+ to Kao Kalia Yang’s The Latehomecomer. This is a good grade, but neither great nor perfect, two rungs below the top grade of an A in the American system.¹⁵ At an artist’s talk, the author brought up this matter of grading and I made a note of it, for the judgment clearly bothered her.¹⁶ I sympathize, and yet this is how aesthetic judgment often works, albeit not usually in such a blunt way that reveals how aesthetic judgment is similar to the classroom judgment that many artists also exercise in their function as teachers. Ironically, the professor and authority figure who objectively grades her or his students with blithe confidence may suddenly feel, on being evaluated in less than stellar ways by students, deans, peers, and critics, that these assessments are rather subjective.

Suddenly the person who professionally judges becomes aware that a grade brings with it unknown prejudices of personal and aesthetic kinds on the part of the critic. But writers and artists always render judgment, ruthlessly, on their own work as well as on the work of others, if not always in public. How else does one improve one’s art if one cannot judge in the most basic ways, especially in comparison to what one wishes to achieve in one’s own creation? What is crucial to admit is that this aesthetic judgment is an expression of identity, deeply subjective and perhaps flawed, yet always necessary. Recognizing this, some critics shy away from judging a work’s beauty in favor of considering how a work functions in certain contexts. Context is especially important when it comes to looking at minorities, women, the poor, the working class, the colonized, anyone whose art has often been deemed as inferior by authority figures, who in the West are usually white and usually men, but also sometimes women. These authority figures favor the stories of soldiers and men over those who seem only to be war’s bystanders. Because they are powerful, these critics can deny how their identities shape their judgments, even as they insist that the less powerful usually do not transcend their identities. These critics practice the unacknowledged identity politics of their profession when their judgments are delivered as objective, rather than being what they are: subjective expressions of institutionalized power, with the critic being a part of an entire system of art- and taste-making that begins in the schools, extends into the professionalized worlds of art, and incorporates both artist and critic.

Those critics who do not admit to their biases, to the way their tastes have been shaped by their worlds and their aesthetic industries, are being unethical. A stinging rebuke to unethical criticism is given by, not surprisingly, a writer, Nguyen Huy Thiep, the foremost short story writer in Vietnam of the 1980s and 1990s. His short story, “Cun,” from his classic collection The General Retires, features a writer and his good friend, the literary critic K. The writer tells us that K. “demands high standards in what he calls the character of a person. Hard work, sacrifice, dedication, sincerity, and, of course, good grammar are the qualities he requires”; “he understands our literary debates well (which I must confess I don’t).”¹⁷ K. tells the writer that K.’s father, the Cun of the story’s title, only wanted to be a human being throughout his short life, but failed. Intrigued by this cryptic fragment, the writer weaves a grotesque story, set during the Japanese-induced famine of 1944 that killed about one million people in the north, a time, my mother tells me, when she found people dead of starvation on her childhood doorstep. This story concerns the child beggar Cun, cursed by a “hydrocephalic head and soft, seemingly boneless limbs.”¹⁸ He drags himself on the ground everywhere, but his beautiful face makes him a compelling beggar. Despite his body’s inhuman ugliness, Cun is the only human person on his street of able-bodied people, all of whom behave inhumanely. Then Cun becomes wealthy through a windfall inheritance. A beautiful but destitute neighbor persuades Cun to give her his wealth in exchange for one sexual encounter, which is the only happy moment of his life. An illness kills Cun, but he lives just long enough to see her birth his child. This child is the literary critic K., who is, of course, appalled by the writer’s story, which he considers a fabrication. To prove what really happened, the critic shows a photo of his father, “a big fat man wearing a black silk shirt with a starched collar. He also wore a neatly trimmed moustache and was smiling at me.”¹⁹

The critic is the authority figure, the comfortable representative of the literary establishment, which is also, in Vietnam, part of the political establishment. His judgments on literature cannot be separated from his identity as a functionary of a regime that views literature as potentially dangerous to its own authority. More than that, he is a bad critic because he cannot bear to be confronted with criticism, especially criticism that questions his identity. In response to the story that mocks his heritage, the critic naively turns to a photograph to show that his father was in fact human, not inhuman, though this contradicts what he himself suggested previously.²⁰ But as Papageorge’s photos show, realistic photographs of human beings doing banal acts can just as readily be evidence of their inhumanity, their indifference to the things done in their name. The critic’s reaction is not just a breakdown of ethical standards but the fullest expression of his hypocritical aesthetic of propriety. He is so focused on his father’s humanity, and hence his own, that he cannot even discuss the child beggar, the main character of the story. The child beggar might be an embodiment of the dehumanized poor, or perhaps a reference to the inhuman horrors that Agent Orange created, or more simply one person whose tragedy is overlooked by the humans who see him and yet do not see him, including the critic.

It is fairly easy to imagine Western critics in a parallel vein, seeing through their own supposedly objective, humanistic standards and yet subjectively blind to the inhumanity in front of them. A vertically integrated system of aesthetic education and reward reinforces their standards, beginning in the earliest years of schooling and ending at the rarefied heights of universities, academies, organs of criticism, and prize-granting bodies. In America, this world typically focuses on the individualist, consumerist, and alienated values and feelings of a capitalist society. Capitalism privileges the individual author or auteur who can wield her or his art in ways considered refined and legitimate by the tastemakers, those people who, like their distant cousin K., rarely question how their identities as critics and their sense of taste, beauty, and goodness are intertwined with the values and ideology of their dominant class. They do not see that their aesthetic values, which they understand to be evidence of their humanity, are tainted and shaped by the inhumanity of the capitalist system and the war machine within which they live and whose profits and costs they take for granted.

As critic Pankaj Mishra says, Westerners, including Western writers, routinely expect non-Western writers to decry the oppressive regimes under which they suffer. Not to protest seems like moral failure to Western writers. These same writers often do not work up the same aesthetic outrage toward their own society’s crimes via a “selective humanism — blind to the everyday violence of one’s own side, and denying full humanity to its victims.”²¹ These Western writers lack the imagination to see how their drab stories of unhappiness, divorce, cancer, etc. — the very stuff of award-winning realism and the bad outcomes of white privilege over here—might be connected to, and made possible by, their society’s wars and capitalist exploitation over there. Culture, as Edward Said explains, is inseparable from imperialism, which can be read as humanity being inseparable from inhumanity.²² This selective humanism is, of course, not purely Western but universal, as Mishra is careful to note: “most novelists, in the West as well as the non-West, avoid direct confrontation with powerful institutions and individuals, especially those that not only promise fame and glory to writers but also, crucially, make it possible for them to stay at home and write.”²³

The same charge of selective humanism and complicity with power can be laid against most critics. This is part of the brilliance of Thiep’s story, his insinuation that the punctilious critic’s heritage may be inhuman, which is utterly shocking to the critic if not to his Western readers. As outsiders to communism, Westerners can easily see its hypocrisies and blind spots, the inhumanity at the heart of its ideology. The rebellious writer in Vietnam faces a system of power, prestige, and taste that defines what is acceptable and what is human or inhuman. The Westerner demands a heroic response! But what is obvious about Western values, when seen from the outside, is that they too reinforce propriety. This propriety prefers to deny the inhuman, the colonialism, imperialism, domination, warfare, and savagery found in the heart of whiteness. When this inhumanity is acknowledged, its connection to, and contamination of, Western humanity is often suppressed or disavowed by artists, readers, and critics who are blind to their own hypocrisies and contradictions, their participation in inhumanity, their own lack of heroism when confronted with the lures of institutional reward.

Writers new to the West or who are minorities enter a world where their audience is not likely to be aware of its own inhumanity. At the same time these writers may feel the need to prove their own humanity, given that it will be questionable under Western eyes. The Entertainment Weekly review of The Latehomecomer inadvertently shows this dilemma. Given its emphasis on celebrities and entertainment, this magazine may not be the best venue for literary discussion, but its déclassé nature allows it to display Western values about writing rather bluntly. The entirety of the review is this:

When your grandmother once outran a tiger, you know perseverance is in your blood. Meet the Yangs, a Hmong family who evaded Pathet Lao soldiers after the Vietnam War by crossing the Mekong River into Thailand, only to float between refugee camps for eight years. They found asylum in Minnesota, but lived on welfare. The toll all of this takes on readers is lightened by Kao Kalia Yang’s tranquil descriptions of the cultural divide — e.g., the smell of green parrot soap compared with Head & Shoulders shampoo — in The Latehomecomers [sic], a narrative packed with the stuff of life.

Why the book warrants a B+ is never explained, except in the mention of “the toll all of this takes on readers,” evidently alleviated by the “stuff of life.” The somewhat cryptic comments that accompany the grade are similar to what a college student might get on a midterm paper from an overworked professor. And while a B+ is a good grade, it is little comfort to those clamoring to get into medical or law school, or those striving to enter the MFA program, publish a book, win prizes, and earn recognition. The demands placed on artists by their aesthetic industries differ little from those placed on students. Once graduated, having learned by heart what it means to be graded, artists still strive for perfect grades, manifest in laudatory reviews, rich grants, dazzling awards, and so on. Aesthetic success as being akin to educational success — with the artist as a good student — is shown explicitly in the Entertainment Weekly review, as well as in the story The Latehomecomer tells. In both cases, making the grade covers up the opposite, the haunting possibility or even past reality of being degraded.

While The Latehomecomer is a history of Yang’s family and the Hmong people who sided with the United States, it is also a story of how a refugee became a writer. Yang, born in the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand, begins by tracing the history of her family and their struggle to reach a refugee camp across the border of Laos into Thailand. The exodus, by foot, takes four years. Once in the refugee camp, the Yangs are assigned numbers by the United Nations, which requires them to have birthdays. Since these are unknown for some, the Yangs make up dates. “For many of the Hmong,” Yang writes, “their lives on paper began on the day the UN registered them as refugees of war.”²⁴ Yang alludes here to how the Hmong did not even have a written language until the 1950s. They were indeed undocumented, and paperless, until they entered Western bureaucracy. For Yang to write the first book in English by a Hmong author continues the transformation of Hmong people’s lives on paper. Her memoir signals that the Hmong have a representative who can speak for them, in all the complicated ways we have already seen:

For many years, the Hmong inside the little girl fell into silence … all the words had been stored inside her.… In the books on the American shelves, the young woman noticed how Hmong was not a footnote in the history of the world.… The young woman slowly unleashed the flood of Hmong into language, seeking refuge not for a name or a gender, but a people.²⁵

The memoir is the documentary evidence of these Hmong refugees being transformed into ambivalent Westerners, of entering into a system that assesses both the weary, terrified refugee who supposedly has no voice and the writer who gives voice to the refugee in a language understood by the West.

Being a writer is one way the refugee sheds her inhumanity — the degraded “toll”—and becomes human, the higher-graded “stuff of life.” But this refugee who becomes a writer, who wishes to take the true war story away from those who insist that it belongs to men and soldiers, leaves one fraught territory to enter another one nearly as perilous. In the first instance, as a refugee, what Yang encounters in Ban Vinai is this: “the dominant feature of the camp was the stench of feces. There were toilets, but they were all flooded.”²⁶ Seven years later, the Yang family is finally sent to the Phanat Nikhom Transition Camp to the United States. “The building we were assigned smelled like the toilets that I had dreaded back in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp,” Yang recalls. “In fact, it had been used as a bathroom. There was always human waste between the buildings and amid the cement blocks and large rocks throughout the camp.”²⁷ Filth, especially the untreated waste of human excrement, haunts other Hmong accounts of life in the camps, and many stories of other Southeast Asians in other camps.²⁸ This is no surprise, since refugees are what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” or “naked life,” just alive enough to know they are human, close enough to death to know they are less than human. Confronting one’s own waste and the waste of others, living among it, smelling it, stepping in it, confirms for these refugees their inadequate humanity under bureaucratic eyes. Living in shit is a true war story and a traumatizing one. O’Brien conveys some sense of this when he writes about how the soldiers of The Things They Carried are ambushed in a “shit field,” used by villagers as a toilet. The Indian named Kiowa is killed, or, in GI slang, wasted.²⁹ Kiowa sinks beneath the shit, waste beneath waste. But awful as it is, the field is a temporary stop for American soldiers who can go home after a year, if they live. For Yang’s refugees, the pervasive presence of shit is a part of everyday life that can go on for many years, even decades. That is one crucial difference between a soldier’s war story of his terminal tour of duty and a refugee’s war story of a possible life sentence.

One difficulty in writing a true war story is the aesthetic challenge of dealing with shit and waste, the unpleasant facts of death, neglect and inhumanity for both soldiers and civilians. One must write about the shit even as one wipes it off one’s shoes or feet, making the story aesthetically decent enough to be brought into someone’s house. Writing, or spilling one’s guts, is thus the second dangerous territory encountered by the refugee who wants to tell a true war story. Writers have to deal with shit if they spill their guts, which includes the figurative shit thrown their way by readers and critics such as myself. By learning to write at all, by learning to write in English, by earning degrees, by publishing, Yang and other Hmong American writers are judged by both the minority community they come from and by their national audience. Ha Jin, a Chinese writer living in America, describes this dilemma as the tension between “the spokesman and the tribe.”³⁰ As Mai Neng Moua, editor of the first Hmong American literary collection, says of the Hmong in the United States, “this is a community that is very private … and may very well be threatened by the writings of its young people.”³¹ To tell a true war story is thus a risky enterprise, not least of all because it is inevitably a story not only about war and memory but also about identity. This is as true for soldiers as it is for refugees.

A true war story ultimately challenges identity because war radically challenges identity, from the soldier who must confront himself as well as the enemy on the battlefield to the civilian who discovers she is less than human when she becomes a refugee. Blown up, dismembered, wasted bodies on the battlefield also fundamentally disturb human identity for those who killed them, witnessed their demise, or buried them. Those bodies also unsettle national identity when a country divides itself over a controversial war, or when the body politic persuades soldiers to kill others even if in so doing they bring their own humanity into question. The false war story ignores this challenge to humanity by owing its allegiance to war and national identity. The false war story affirms in sentimental, selective, and dishonest ways the idea that “we”—its protagonists and its audience — are human, even though we might be more like chickens clucking our heads over the oh-so-sad loss of life we have just witnessed. A good or great true war story forcefully articulates war’s challenge to identity and humanity in content and form, balancing the tension between war’s degrading nature and the need to make the grade as a war story.

Perhaps one reason why The Latehomecomer might get a good but not great grade is that it does not fully recognize the challenge to identity that it poses. This challenge is found in the transformation from being degraded — of living in shit — to being able to earn a grade, to foreground “the stuff of life.” Yang exhibits faith in the power of her story to represent herself and her people, but she does not see the pitfalls of victimization and voice. The refugee who speaks in a language that her adopted national audience can hear faces a dilemma: she is no longer a refugee even as she speaks for the refugee, and no longer a victim even as she speaks of victimization. Her ability to tell the story to an audience not made of refugees has changed the author’s identity. This is why the refugee community may turn against its writers, because it knows its identity is no longer the same as that of the writers. In the West, the refugee writer is an auteur, whereas the community he or she supposedly speaks for is a collective, their condition enforced on them by a general public that cannot hear them even when they do speak.

Since Yang has chosen the form of the written memoir, her identity has been alchemically altered. In leaving the inhuman, degraded world of the refugee camp and its fields of waste behind her, she enters a hallowed world of higher grades where no one says shit, where waste is flushed away behind closed doors, where the aesthetic achieves a certain level of odorless, porcelain refinement. Likewise, a Southeast Asian academic colleague of mine who facetiously (I think) proclaims of having gone from “refugee to bourgeoisie” laughed when I said that I, too, was a refugee. “You don’t look like a refugee,” my colleague said, no longer joking. And my colleague is right. I no longer have refugee hair or refugee clothing; I no longer have a refugee accent or refugee grammar, if I ever did; I no longer smell like a refugee; and I know better than to do refugee things like talk about money, except in private. I am a Westernized critic, as Yang is Westernized writer, both of us subject to Western standards while also being subject to the standards of our original communities. Like every such writer, she may be unhappy about judgments rendered on her, but the only solution offered from within a world that privileges authorship and the auteur, the accomplishment of the individual in a capitalist society, is to achieve the perfect grade, the A. If one stays within this world, how does one achieve this? What are the standards? Or, as many students have asked their professors: What are you looking for? As a professor, I give the student a rubric by which he or she will be graded. But critics do not provide checklists of aesthetic criteria by which an artwork is to be assessed, like a car at a tune-up. The critic supposedly knows what is (good and bad) art, just like the judge knows what an obscenity is — when he (or she) sees it. So I refrain from providing criteria for how an artwork gets a perfect grade, since any such criteria are as subjective and mutable as identity itself.

What concerns me is how the experience of an artist who works on a true war story, and who aspires to the perfect grade, itself constitutes another kind of true war story. As O’Brien understands very well in The Things They Carried, a true war story is not only about the story itself but is also about how the story is told, heard, and passed on. This is why he creates a character in his book called Tim O’Brien, who shares his name and his occupation as the writer of the book’s stories, but who is not the same as the Tim O’Brien in the world. The struggles of the character Tim O’Brien express in a perhaps filtered way the struggles of his creator in both war and storytelling. Self-reflexivity is partly what gives this true war story its kick, its recoil. In a parallel fashion, Kao Kalia Yang’s encounter with being graded like a student is as much a true war story as the story in her book. As the soldier faces two rites as ancient as those depicted in The Iliad and The Odyssey, war and then the journey home, the refugee also goes through those rites, except in an inverted manner. If war makes the surviving soldier a man, a privileged member of his society, it makes some civilians into refugees, the trash of nation-states and war. If the soldier struggles to go home both literally and figuratively, battling external and internal demons, the refugee struggles to find a new home. The soldier typically achieves validation in the epic form of the novel, the memoir, the movie blockbuster, the grandiloquent speeches of kings and presidents. The refugee rarely merits such validation. Hence the burden on Yang’s memoir, the grade she has to make, where good is not enough. Good enough is how men or the majority often grudgingly assess women and minorities, or how the colonizer judges the colonized to be “almost the same but not quite,” “almost the same but not white,” as the theorist Homi Bhabha says.³²

Not all soldiers who write make the grade, but soldiers who write can make the grade, as O’Brien does, because the war story belongs to them. The difficult transformation from soldier to writer is not a change in her or his already granted humanity. But for a refugee to become a writer is for the refugee to go from being inhuman to human. While the refugee who becomes a writer is given the license to tell a refugee story, he or she is not seen as writing an actual war story, at least not one that is given the same weight as a soldier’s. To get a good or great grade in either respect, as a storyteller of the refugee experience or the true war story, is considerably more difficult for the refugee turned writer. This difficulty is inseparable from the war that created the refugee in the first place and hence created the conditions for grading the refugee turned writer.

The refugee shares this plight of being graded with many of those classified as other: women, minorities, and the colonized. These others may believe in the grading system so much that they grade themselves and find themselves wanting. The specter of the slightly less than perfect grade is particularly haunting and daunting for them. A failing grade might signal rebellion and an alternate world of possibility, of badness, of rejecting the terms forced on a student by the authorities. But a slightly less than perfect grade is the true failure for those who have genuinely tried, for it affirms that they are slightly less than human, slightly less than those doing the grading. So it is that at the beginning of Chang-Rae Lee’s first novel Native Speaker, a well-known work of (Asian) American literature that foregrounds in its title the role of speech and belonging, the protagonist Henry Park receives a letter from his alienated white wife that calls him a “B+ student of life.” This grade is meant to sting. While Henry Park, the son of Korean immigrants, struggles with this grade, I can’t help but feel that Lee the novelist also worries about being given the same grade. In a career marked by deep concerns about war, memory, and identity, Lee has tried mightily to be the perfect student and has garnered his fair share of great grades, including being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for The Surrendered, his novel of the Korean War. And yet, as beautifully written as his novels are, there is something of the anxious student in them, the longing for belonging, the evident desire never to write a bad sentence, and indeed always to write the perfect sentence, which sometimes leads to overwritten sentences and lyrical conclusions that may not be earned, as the creative writers say.

But that is just my feeling about Lee’s writing. The same things I say of Lee could be said of me as a novelist. Who am I but one of those who may be slightly less than human in the eyes of some, the equally anxious student who cannot help but see himself through the eyes of others, my perception and taste clouded by my own desire for approval? Lee, like Yang and myself, is caught in the struggle to tell the true war story and is in the middle of a true war story: the one about how writers and critics who inherit the legacies of wars find themselves caught between being degraded and given the perfect grade, judged by an aesthetic system implicated in the war machine. This does not mean that artists who struggle to tell true war stories cannot speak or cannot strive for a perfect grade; it does mean that they should question their own identities as artists as well as the identities of the forms they choose, since both these kinds of identities are part and parcel of the triad of war, memory, and identity.

The struggle over how to tell true war stories is about both remembering wars fought elsewhere and conflicts fought here, at home. In communist countries, one usually has to go to war against the state to tell true war stories, since the state is only interested in bad war stories, the dishonest kind that justify war and glorify the state. In America’s case, culture wars divided America throughout the twentieth century, their momentum building through the rise of civil rights, workers’ struggles, feminism, gay rights, and queer empowerment, surges of restlessness that came together with the antiwar movement to gain explosive force in the 1960s. These culture wars subsided in the 1970s but returned with ferocity in the 1980s, when defenders of a homogenous America cried out against the barbarians at the gate, those colored hordes who had climbed their way up the hill of civilization to the city of shining light. Kao Kalia Yang and Chang-Rae Lee are among these barbarians, whether they want to be or not, as am I. Reluctantly or fervently, we, the barbarians, are also cultural warriors, demanding to be let in to civilization, haunted by the inhuman wars of that civilization. We, too, wish to tell true war stories, which are impossible to disentangle from the battles we fight to tell those stories.

9. On Powerful Memory

IN AN 1899 ILLUSTRATION OF Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” Uncle Sam and his British counterpart John Bull climb up a mountain “towards the light” of civilization, each carrying a basket on his back full of “your new-caught sullen peoples / Half devil and half child.” Kipling’s proimperial paean about the tragic necessity of waging “savage wars of peace” was addressed to Americans, then waging war to subdue the Filipino rebels who thought at first that the United States had come to liberate the Philippines from Spain. Kipling warns Americans of “the hate of those ye guard.” And for all the blood and treasure that Americans would expend, he cautions that they will “Watch Sloth and heathen folly / Bring all your hopes to nought.”¹ This characterization of the natives certainly describes how many Americans view the people they are supposedly trying to help. A century later, his poem may as well describe my war and its aftermath in our current American wars in the Middle East. All a reader need do is replace the light of civilization with the promise of democracy and freedom, the one that Americans offered to the people of the Middle East after offering it to us. As for those people being carried ever upward, among whom I count myself, we remain half devil and half child in much of the American and Western imagination.

If Kipling proved prescient in implying the need for civilizing warfare, at least from the perspective of the civilized, so did his illustrator, Victor Gillam. What he depicts is that we do not descend toward enlightenment, civilization, or God, for that is too easy. We must carry our burden upward, toward peaks rather than valleys, closer to the eternal heavens, the ultimate high ground, which of course we can never reach in this life. I understand this impulse, as well as Kipling’s tone of self-satisfied suffering and resignation in describing the savior’s pain in saving an ungrateful people. Although I may be half devil and half child, forever ready to nip at the hand of my benefactor and to reject any piety, I have also been baptized and dressed in the clothes of civilization. I know what it means to aspire, to climb, to carry, and to speak and write in the language of my masters. This entire book is an exercise of labor to reach the moment of revelation and inspiration, and ultimately of publication, which takes place not in the depths where a text cannot be seen but in the bright heights, where God also delivered to Moses the commandments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I turn to high-minded ideas about ethics to challenge the idea that we need to burden ourselves with war, that war must always be a part of our identity.

But writing this book also involved excavation. My insights, so far as they exist, come not only from achieving some airy plain, or finding respite in a clean, well-lit, and air-conditioned archive, or thinking enlightened thoughts, but from walking and crawling through caves and tunnels where ghosts dwell, or sweating in museums with peeling walls and barred windows, or swearing at the heat and the grime and the vomit and the nauseating toilets and the rough roads and the swindlers and the cheats and the broken finger incurred in Vientiane, which led to infection and two surgeries in two countries. All of this is to say that the high ground, as desirable as it may be to some of us, including myself, is also compromised. From the high ground, we cannot see into the caves and tunnels where the ungrateful and unrepentant and uncivilized hide from our gaze, our armed force, our moral authority. They live to subvert, and to curse. I am not immune, either as the one who curses and who is cursed, or as the one who takes on the authority of calling for ethical behavior. I am among that group of “committed writers,” as the critic Trinh T. Minh-ha calls us, “the ones who write both to awaken to the consciousness of their guilt and to give their readers a guilty conscience … such a definition naturally places the committed writer on the side of Power.”² And power, even when carried out with the elevated intention of justice, incites rebellion from those below and suppression from those above.

With this warning about the danger of power and commitment — after all, taken to the extreme, power and commitment justify the greatest of excess, regardless of ideology, from death camps to atom bombs — this final chapter is on the need for a powerful memory to fight war and find peace. As fraught as engaging with power may be, one must confront it and hope that one can manage it, and oneself, ethically. Our use of power must be done with the full awareness of our own humanity and inhumanity, our capacity for both good and bad. Even those who seek to withdraw from power, to some kind of hermetic or monastic life, must emerge if they seek to change more than themselves. One might be able to climb the mountain toward enlightenment individually, but one cannot change the world without touching on, or being touched by, power. Struggling with power, one might be tempted to see oneself as someone carrying a burden up that mountain. So it is that the story of heading upward as a sign of progress seeps into my narrative as I begin from the low ground and work my way to the high ground.

Both territories are crucial for powerful memory: the low ground forces us to confront our persistent inhumanity, the high ground reminds us of our potential for humanity. Under the cone of utopian light by which this book is written, the high ground is where we need to be, but in the dystopian shadows that surround this light, the low ground is where many of us are now. The power of the low ground was most evident to me on my first visit to the museum of Tuol Sleng, formerly the Khmer Rouge political prison S-21, in the summer of 2010. On the same day, I also made my pilgrimage to the killing fields of Choeung Ek, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, a typical foreigner’s itinerary for a day in the city (most Khmer tourists prefer to visit the beautiful Royal Palace, and who can blame them?).³ I must specify the time, for the museums and memorials of Southeast Asia transform over the years, much as memory and forgetting themselves do. Museums, memorials, and memories change because their countries change. What is suitable at one moment in time becomes a hindrance, or out of fashion, in another moment. As for me, I too changed, so that my second visit a few years later to Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek did not impact me as much. I was a little more hardened, as I was on my second and third trips to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. My eyes, now habituated, were mostly concerned with taking good photographs. Looking at the same thing twice — even an atrocity — can have that effect.

But that first time, I was still left numb even though I had read about Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek before visiting, and so knew what to expect. Archivists are sorting through the documents that the security apparatus maintained at S-21, which include the photographs taken of all the inmates on their entry, and other photographs taken of some after death. Many of those black-and-white photographs are arranged in display cases in neat geometrical rows that resemble the layout of photos in American high school yearbooks, except that almost none of these prisoners are smiling, and none are named. A visitor cannot help but look at these faces with knowledge of their doom, and many of those photographed probably had a sense of what was to come. Foreboding thickens the air, but at least the museum is mercifully quiet, most of the time. The tourists speak in low, sometimes nervous voices, for what should one say, exactly, as one walks through interrogation rooms where shackles and bloodstains remain, preserved as visceral proof of the tortures inflicted on so many by teenage guards, some of whom were also fated to have their photograph taken.

And what does one say if one confronts an actual survivor of the prison. Chum Mey emerged from a room in one of the wings and looked exactly as he did in Rithy Panh’s disturbing documentary S-21, where Mey and the painter Vann Nath, another survivor, returned to the high school that had been turned into a prison. Under the punishing gaze of Panh’s camera, Nath confronted several of the prison guards in a dialogue about what they did and who bore responsibility, but Mey was too overcome with emotion to participate. His family died here, and he survived by mere chance. What the scholar Khatharya Um says is true: “The feeling conveyed by survivors is one of living with ‘one body, two lives’—one before, and one after Pol Pot.”⁴ He wore a short-sleeved red shirt and gray slacks in the film, the same ones he wore when I saw him. His white hair was trimmed short in the same manner. He took me to a narrow brick cell like the one where he had been imprisoned and reenacted how he was shackled and made to use a rusty American ammunition box for a latrine. As my interpreter translated, he described the torture done to him, and he wept as I saw him weep in the film and in the testimony that he offered at the trial of the prison commandant, Duch. Does he weep every time he tells his story to someone like me? I cannot remember now whether I asked for a picture, or whether he offered, but we stood side by side and he embraced my sweaty back with his arm and pulled me tightly to him. I think I smiled — it is not a photograph I care to look at again — because that is what one is supposed to do.

My interpreter drove me on her motorbike to Choeung Ek, where the S-21 guards took prisoners at night, by truck. As one enters the park-like grounds with its green lawns, a majestic stupa is the focal point. Drawing closer to the stupa, one sees behind its glass windows racks and racks of bones and skulls. The empty sockets return one’s gaze. These remains serve as both the guardians of this site and its prisoners. If there are ghosts, are they angry that so many strangers trespass on the place of their demise, or are they pleased to be remembered? As for the green lawns, which dip and swell gently, handwritten signs indicate the locations of mass graves, point to the tree where the killers bashed the heads of babies, and inform visitors that bones still emerge from the soil after it rains. Thousands died here, clubbed over the head as they knelt before the open graves, the sounds masked by the hum of a generator. This was not a place I would ever visit at night, without lights. I prefer to take my photos during daylight, as does the monk in the saffron robe who stands at the edge of a swell, framing the scene in his digital camera. The heat is oppressive. When I return to my hotel, the first thing I do is shower. Then I lay down and the numbness seeped down deep into my mind and body.

I had visited the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich, and while it was a solemn experience, I had not felt as immobilized, exhausted, and shocked, emotionally and physically, as I did in my boutique Phnom Penh hotel. Was it because this history seemed closer to me, in time, in history and in culture? Or was it because by the time I visited Dachau in 1998 the veil of memorialization had already been lowered? The horrors of that place could no longer be seen so immediately, but were instead filtered through a gauze created by the erasure of the visceral, through years of exposure to other people’s memories of the Holocaust and its transformation into a mnemonic relic, like Christ’s body hanging on a cross in every Catholic church, bloody but remote. It was not that historical detail was absent in Dachau. The degree of detail, and its polish, was much more evident there than at either Tuol Sleng or Choeung Ek. The Germans had processed their history over decades, and with the resources of a wealthy country had built the finest of memorials and museums dedicated to the Holocaust, attuned to Western standards of aesthetics that had become universal by dint of Western power. The archives of photos, from the victims in happier days to the victims in their skeletal phase, were rich in extent, presentation, and captioning. Victims’ mementoes, from personal belongings and clothing to even things like locks of hair, were artfully exhibited. The grounds of the concentration camps were manicured, belying the corpses that were once strewn there. This is the work of memory conducted from the higher ground, erected with the power of industrial memory. This work calls for sobriety, contemplation, reflection, for respect and reverence for the dead. It urges us to further our resolve never to allow this atrocity to be forgotten or repeated. But what I also took away from my visits to Germany’s memorial network was how horror can be framed in beautiful ways. For many of us, even horror must be rendered artfully, lest one disrespect the dead or discomfort the living.

What I saw in Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek; in the killing caves of Battambang; in the small stupas full of skulls and bones that rose here and there on the Cambodian landscape; in the unlit cavern of Tham Phiu in Laos; in the homes near the Plain of Jars that used the casings of American bombs and shells for décor; in the neglected village cemeteries of martyrs and unknown soldiers throughout Vietnam; in the 2003 iteration of Saigon’s War Remnants Museum housed in a handful of small buildings and which featured the bottled, deformed fetuses of Agent Orange victims — what I saw was far from beautiful. I saw the poverty of memory found in poor countries, in small places. The typical signs of wealthy memory were absent. There were no vast expanses of marble and granite, no imposing sheets of glass, no precision-cut etchings, no grammatically perfect captions and commentaries in any language. Absent were extensive historical documentation, perfectly shaded lighting, a modulated ambiance of sound, sight, smell, and temperature cossetting one’s body and senses. Also missing were fellow well-trained visitors who had already been socialized, like returning churchgoers, into the customs and rituals of silent mnemonic worship. In poor countries, these characteristics of wealthy memory are reversed. As a curator at the Documentation Center of Cambodia told me, referring to the state of affairs at Tuol Sleng and future plans for its renovation, “It could be more beautiful.”

If one compares houses of remembrance, from the mansions to the shacks, one gets the sense that the physical environment shapes memory and our feeling of it. Usually, in mnemonic places of poverty, the mood is not one of horror, but of shabbiness and sadness, at least for someone like me, because of what is shown and how. But sometimes one does confront the horror fully, as in the photographs of the dead with their eyes open at Tuol Sleng, or the thankfully blurry photograph of a grisly corpse on a torture bed exhibited in the same torture chamber where the prison’s Vietnamese liberators found it. It is sobering to realize that as horrific as these images are, there was a time when they were not the most graphic. Once there had been a map of Cambodia composed of human skulls — imagine seeing that in person — but now only a picture of the map remains. Just three of the skulls are still displayed, in glass cases, an echo or a foreshadowing of multimillionaire artist Damien Hirst’s work of “art” that consists of a platinum skull encrusted with diamonds and real human teeth. Which skull is more profane? Which one more obscene? Which one more unforgettable? Which one more revolting? My answers are predictable. Profligate and obnoxious displays of wealth and consumption, underneath their shiny veneer, are more disgusting than raw and disturbing displays of poverty, even if society as a whole values the glitter more. In a world where the rich buy this kind of art and the poor starve, the diamond-encrusted skull encourages us to forget our complicity. In the most generous reading, however, the very excess of the work of “art” may be nudging us to remember that complicity. Likewise, the sight of people in their death throes, or in rigor mortis, may be unforgettable, or so we hope.

The depressing evidence indicates that we do indeed forget these images, or expect them to come from certain places and to depict certain people whose fate some may feel to be inevitable, marked as they are for death and suffering by dint of their origin. Nevertheless, I defend this shadowy sublime that occurs in small places, in poor countries, on the low ground. These rough, crude, unfinished, imperfect, disturbing examples of a wretched aesthetics will change over time as poor places and poor people become wealthier and less wretched. This can be seen in the Vietnamese Women’s Museum of Hanoi, transformed from a provincial space of simply mounted exhibits during my first visit in 2003 into one of the most polished museums in the country by 2013, with the help of French curatorial collaborators who put into place many of the features of wealthy memory. Tuol Sleng, too, is changing, with the assistance of curators from the stunning Okinawa Prefectural Peace Museum, where Cambodian curators have trained. The museum is one of those very rare places that remembers the dead of all sides, military and civilian, in vast hallways and exhibition rooms and on memorial grounds at the edge of a cliff where the names of all those gone — some two hundred thousand in the battle for Okinawa during World War II, or the Pacific War — are engraved on massive blocks of stone that face the sometimes calm, sometimes turbulent sea, the natural sublime. Who would not want to be remembered in such a way?

Memory in Southeast Asia will change, and people should not be denied their right to the trappings of wealthy memory, just as they should not be denied their right to own cars, refrigerators, luxury handbags, and all those other features of a consumer lifestyle that the wealthy already own, whose price tag is the destruction of the environment, the alienation of human beings from one another, and the perpetuation of a system of global inequality. These seem to be the true cost of producing our goods and desires. But although the poor should not be denied what the wealthy possess, including their industries of memory, we should also be cognizant of what the costs are of the poor repeating the behavior of the rich, no matter where that occurs, including in the realm of memory. For while Tuol Sleng, Choeung Ek, and all the other places of the shadowy sublime disturbed me, they also imprinted themselves on me in ways physical, mental, and spiritual. These places were unrelenting in reminding me, and anyone else who stumbled across them, of inhumanity. They do so not just by telling horrible stories, but also by showing that horror, through the very roughness and bluntness of their wretched aesthetics of memory. This is memory that confronts and exhausts. It is a slap in the face rather than a sermon from the mount.

From low to high, from profane to divine, we need both kinds of memory work. But when do we need each, and in what proportion to the other? Let’s turn to some examples of powerful memory conducted from the high ground to try and answer that question. Le Ly Hayslip stakes her memoir on the moral high ground, speaking from what Paul Ricoeur calls “the height of forgiveness.”⁵ In her prologue, she condemns the war machine but forgives its soldiers: “If you were an American GI, it was not your fault.”⁶ Her memoir is framed by this “Dedication to Peace” and an epilogue, the “Song of Enlightenment,” whose purpose is “to break the chain of vengeance forever.”⁷ The memoir offers conciliatory gestures to American soldiers and to the American nation, as when she says that she is “very honored to live in the United States and proud to be a U.S. citizen.” But the memoir resolutely places Vietnamese peasants at the center of their own story.⁸ “We were what the war was all about,”⁹ she writes. “We peasants survived — and still survive today — as both makers and victims of our war.”¹⁰ As the filmmaker Rithy Panh does, she claims this war for her people, a direct rebuttal to the persistent American belief that this war was all about Americans. As the people who helped make the war and became its victims, the peasants earned both moral responsibility and the right to forgive. Part of Hayslip’s appeal comes from the way she extends forgiveness to everyone in her memoir, which was not something guilty Americans could extend to themselves. While some American veterans, peace activists, and concerned civilians have visited Vietnam to attempt reconciliation with the Vietnamese people or their own pasts, few have used the language of forgiveness to address the Vietnamese. Perhaps they knew they had no standing on the moral high ground to forgive. But as one of the “displaced persons of the American conscience,”¹¹ Hayslip offers the hope of humanity after recounting many episodes of inhumanity.

Photographer An-My Lê offers another take from the high ground, more clinical than spiritual. The MacArthur Foundation awarded her a grant that carries a prize of over half a million dollars, an amount for one individual that outstrips the budget of many a small museum in a small country. In her series 29 Palms, she embeds herself, in the Orwellian language of the American military and media, with U.S. Marines as they train at a desert base in California. One of the most striking shots, taken at night, shows a squadron of armored vehicles firing their weapons, the barrage of tracers an intense web of lightning and glare through the darkness. Photographed from on high, the armored vehicles assume the size of toy trucks and cars. Lê does not have Hayslip’s moral weight of being a victim, of surviving intimate encounters with combat, rape, and torture. Lê cannot forgive, but through her lens, her aesthetic, she assumes another high ground, the related one of vision. Optics concern both war and ethics, and Lê’s camera shows both the soldiers and a glimpse of the war machine. While Tod Papageorge shoots the war machine from the civilian’s point of view, Lê shoots it from the military’s point of view. The individual soldier and his feelings matter less in this photograph and others in Lê’s series than the ensemble and the equipment, the war machinery’s collective presence and force. Depersonalized through uniforms, weapons, and armor, these individual humans transform into an inhuman mass seen from on high, the viewpoint of aerial reconnaissance, drones, satellites, and strategic vision. Generals and presidents make decisions based on the movement and placement of these mass units, to which the individual, the human, must be sacrificed. In her photograph, Lê captures the essentially inhuman face of the war machine, which transcends human beings and human bodies into something sublime, something seductive, in its man-made beauty and horror.

To confront the war machine and to tell the true war story, the artist, the activist, and the concerned citizen, or resident, or alien, or victim, must climb to the high ground. This is an ethical and aesthetic move, a double gesture that involves both moral standing and strategic vision. Morally, one must be above the fray in order to renounce and to forgive the bloodletting, as well as to see the (potential) culpability of oneself and one’s allies in past, present, and future conflicts. Strategically, one must be able to see a vast landscape if one wants to comprehend the war machine in its totality and its mobility, as well as the war machine’s other, the movement for peace. “War can teach us peace,” says Hayslip.¹² This task requires, among others, the artist. To imagine and dream beyond being the citizen of a nation, to articulate the yearning for a citizenship of the imagination — that is the artist’s calling. To imagine and dream in this manner, one must work for peace as well as confront the war machine. Whereas the war machine wants acts of imagination to focus only on the human face of the soldier, the artist needs to imagine the war machine’s totality, collectivity, enormousness, sublimity, and inhumanity. The artist must refuse the identity that the war machine offers through the human soldier, whose dead, sacrificed body, scholar Elaine Scarry argues, persuades the patriotic citizen to identify with the nation.¹³ The artist must instead show how the inhuman identity of the war machine incorporates the patriotic citizen and renders her or him inhuman as well.

This is where art plays a crucial role in both antiwar movements and movements for peace, which are not the same. Antiwar movements oppose and react. They can repeat the logic of the war machine, when, for example, antiwar activists treat victims of the war machine solely as victims, taking away the full complexity of their flawed (in)humanity in the name of saving them. When a particular war ends, so may the antiwar movement opposed to it. Understanding that war is not a singular event but a perpetual one mobilizes a peace movement. This movement looks beyond reacting to the war machine’s binary logic of us versus them, victim versus victimizer, good versus bad, and even winning versus losing. Perpetual war no longer requires victory in warfare, as what happened in Korea, Vietnam, and now the Middle East shows. Stalemates or outright losses — if not too damaging — can be overcome. The war machine can convert stalemates or losses into lessons for future wars and reasons for further paranoia by the citizenry, both of which justify continuing psychological, cultural, and economic investment in the war machine. While victories would certainly be wonderful, the war machine’s primary interest is to justify its existence and growth, which perpetual war serves nicely. An endless war built on a series of proxy wars, small wars, distant wars, drone strikes, covert operations, and the like, means that the war machine need never go out of business or reduce its budget, as even some conservatives admit.¹⁴

A peace movement is required to confront this inhuman reality. This peace movement is based not on a sentimental, utopian vision of everyone getting along because everyone is human, but on a sober, simultaneous vision that recognizes everyone’s unrealized humanity and latent inhumanity. Powerful memory from the low ground presses our noses against this inhumanity in a negative reminder of our capacity for brutality. This memory activates our disgust and revulsion. Powerful memory from the high ground reminds us positively of a more transcendent humanity that can emerge from looking at our inhuman tendencies. It does so through promoting empathy and compassion, as well as a cosmopolitan orientation toward the world that places imagination above the nation. Empathy, compassion, and cosmopolitanism guarantee nothing, but all are necessary to break the connection between our identity and the war machine. Both Hayslip and Lê value empathy and compassion over politics and ideology. Hayslip empathizes not only with those like her, but extends compassion toward her enemies and her torturers of all sides. She imagines herself as a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, living beyond all artificial boundaries of border and race. Lê immerses herself in the war machine, from those who rehearse and drill for war to those who reenact battles. In a striking photograph from her Small Wars series, Lê inserts herself into a scene of American civilians who reenact my war, dressing up with uniforms and weapons from that time. She takes the role of reenactor herself, playing a Viet Cong sniper aiming her rifle at American soldiers. If one knows the shooter herself is being shot, the picture amuses. But the photograph also reenacts something never recorded by an American camera, an ambush from a Viet Cong perspective. Empathy marks this act of imagination, as Lê sees through the viewpoint of the other to both Americans and to herself, a refugee from the Viet Cong. This empathy underlies the ethics of remembering oneself and others.

In contrast, the war machine requires that one limit empathy and compassion to those just like us, on our side. Those who call themselves political know that the most effective way to mobilize their adherents quickly is to terminate that empathy and compassion for others. The artist who submits to this kind of political demand may create interesting art, but it will be art hampered by an inability to imagine those others that may be most troubling to the artist. For the artist, “politics” may mean choosing a side in life and art, but it also must eventually mean more than choosing a side. The good artist must expand her scope of empathy and compassion to embrace as many and as much as she can, including even the war machine’s participants. The genuinely political artist can see across all kinds of borders, beginning with those that separate selves from others. For the artist, politics should ultimately be about abolishing sides, venturing into the no man’s land between trenches, borders, and camps. We need an art that celebrates the humanity of all sides and acknowledges the inhumanity of all sides, including our own. We need an art that enacts powerful memory, an art that speaks truth to power even when our side exercises and abuses that power.

For this purpose, the problem is that empathy and compassion are tools, not solutions. They lead to no political, or even moral, certainty, as is the case with empathy’s weaker cousin, sympathy. The criticism against sympathy is that it may only compel pity for someone. But it may also breed a sense of shared suffering, and this fellow feeling may urge us toward action, an urge that empathy may also encourage in its ability to make us identify with, or even as, an other. This empathetic identification may take place through our relationship to works of art, particularly those that explicitly stage or narrate compassion. But while these narratives ask readers to witness scenes of suffering, they may purge readers of the need to take political action.¹⁵ This is why “compassion is an unstable emotion,” according to Susan Sontag. “It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”¹⁶ If this is the case, what good is compassion or its related emotions of sympathy and empathy? I advocate for them because they point the way to the high ground, no matter how they might mask more troubling things. The identification with others that arises from compassion often conflicts with our self-interest or instinct for self-preservation, as when the other threatens our survival. Or we carry out our feelings for others from a distance, seeing the other’s suffering but doing absolutely nothing. At most we might offer charity that only alleviates rather than solves problems. But while compassion may allow us to disavow our complicity, without compassion we could never move the far and the feared closer to our circle of the near and the dear. Such a move is crucial to art and is fundamental to forgiveness and reconciliation, without which war will never cease.

The artist Dinh Q. Lê, born in Vietnam but raised in the United States, exemplifies how compassion produces powerful, moving, and vulnerable art. His best-known work, his series From Vietnam to Hollywood, grapples with what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory, a recollection passed along from someone else, “transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”¹⁷ The problem with postmemory, as with memory, is that it might lead one to be concerned only with the suffering of one’s own. Lê works against that solipsism in his series Cambodia: Splendor and Darkness, where he draws attention to Cambodian suffering. In the late 1970s, Khmer Rouge attacks on Vietnamese border towns drove Lê’s family from their home, but instead of regarding himself only as a victim, he reaches out to see another people’s pain. “Untitled Cambodia #4” features his trademark technique of cutting images and weaving them together in order to fuse the “splendor” (of Cambodia’s past) with the “darkness” (of Cambodia’s genocide). One image is the photograph of a Khmer Rouge victim at Tuol Sleng prison. The man emerges from, and merges with, the stone carving of a temple at Angkor Wat, and as in the rest of Dinh’s weaving work, “one image relinquishes itself to another. Faces and figures coalesce, then dissolve again into pure pattern in a continuous rhythm of revelation and concealment.”¹⁸ Here the work reveals and conceals the monumental past, embodied in Angkor Wat, and the countless dead. But while remembering that past as splendorous is tempting, critic Holland Cotter points out how darkness overshadows its beauty, since Angkor Wat was built by the labor of many as a tribute to kings: “The message is clear: art has always been as much an accomplice as a deterrent to human brutality.”¹⁹

By turning the dead into a work of art, perhaps Lê runs the risk of being an accomplice, grave-robbing the dead and stealing their images. As Sontag points out, “the more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.”²⁰ The living can take the images of the dead because they are strong and the dead are weak. In so doing, the living also may allow themselves to forget the ugliness of the dead’s passing, which is the danger of powerful memory done from the high ground. The benefit with such risk comes from the sense that the splendor of these lost lives cannot be terminated because of the way they died. Lê urges us to look at the dead again, past their victimization.²¹ Resurrected through art, the dead touch us, warning us against our latent inhumanity and telling us that the past can repeat if, paradoxically, we do not remember. This art also shows us, in the words of Toni Morrison, that “nothing ever dies,” an insight both terrifying and hopeful.²²

This is one of the ways that art resists the war machine. But the war machine finds ways to counter art, most seductively through rewarding it, particularly art of the cosmopolitan kind. Dinh Q. Lê and An-My Lê can both be characterized as cosmopolitan artists whose globally appealing work stands above and in stark contrast to the straightforward, even brutal art of the dead found in the Tuol Sleng museum. Cosmopolitan artists are valued by the people and the institutions in power, such as galleries, museums, festivals, foundations, and trade publishers with prestigious literary traditions. At the same time, cosmopolitan art, as well as cosmopolitan literature, may not do much to help the poor or exotic populations whom it speaks of and for. Given this vulnerability, can cosmopolitanism resist the war machine? Even if cosmopolitanism can cultivate within us a greater compassion for others and strangers, can it compel us to action in meaningful ways beyond the individual? Will cosmopolitanism and compassion lead us toward what Immanuel Kant calls “perpetual peace,” the antidote to perpetual war?

The skeptics say that cosmopolitanism imagines a world citizen who is impossible without a world state. If such a world state existed, it would be a totalitarian order, as no competing power will exist to check it. Cosmopolitanism also underestimates how many of us remain viscerally attached to our nations or cultures, which compel real love and passion in a way that cosmopolitanism does not. To some, cosmopolitans seem to be rootless people without loyalty, more inclined to love humanity in the abstract than people in the concrete. Dependent on a vision of the individual as a citizen of the world, particularly of the jet-setting, capitalist kind, cosmopolitanism may not be good at mobilizing masses of people, particularly the noncitizens such as refugees. At the same time, cosmopolitanism’s Western origins, arising from the Greeks, may mean it is unattractive to non-Western societies opposed to cosmopolitanism’s global ambitions and belief in individual rights and liberties.²³ Cosmopolitanism may also be just as useful for war as for peace, as the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah implies. Echoing the claim of Levinas that justice requires a face-to-face dialogue, he endorses the cosmopolitan urge to converse with strangers, where conversation is “a metaphor for engagement with the experience and the ideas of others.”²⁴ But “there are limits to cosmopolitan tolerance … we will not stop with conversation. Toleration requires a concept of the intolerable.”²⁵ Appiah does not mention how tolerant cosmopolitans will deal with the intolerable, although scholar Paul Gilroy provides a name for this: “armored cosmopolitanism.”²⁶

As Levinas said, the face of the Other can elicit both justice and violence. The terrorist who does not want to talk with us tempts us to take up arms ourselves, even preemptively. Armored cosmopolitanism is the new spin on the white man’s burden, where the quaint idea of civilizing the world becomes retailored for culturally sensitive capitalists in the service of the United States, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund. The idea and the imagination of being a citizen of the world, driven by compassion, may seem fairly anemic in a world dominated by such entities, to whom we could add the G8, the World Bank, Google, the Hollywood film industry, and so on, most of them staffed by fairly cosmopolitan people. This is why Elaine Scarry argues that we should not simply accept a “pleasurable feeling of cosmopolitan largesse” as the best measure for “imaginative consciousness.” Instead, such a consciousness must result in a “concrete willingness to change constitutions and laws.”²⁷

Still, because “the human capacity to injure other people is very great precisely because our capacity to imagine other people is very small,” Scarry says that imaginative works are important in expanding human consciousness.²⁸ Without cosmopolitanism’s call for an unbounded empathy that extends to all, including others, we are left with a dangerously small circle of the near and the dear. Literature and art play an important role not only in expanding our compassion, but in circumscribing and compelling it, too. Our community exerts implicit and explicit pressure to empathize with our own, first by offering only stories about people like us. The absence of stories featuring others, or the presence of stories that render them as demons, stunts our moral imagination. We may not even think of others at all, or when we do we might wish them harm. And when we think of others generously, our community may penalize and threaten us, as happened to the novelist Barbara Kingsolver for what she wrote only days after 9/11. She mourned the victims but reminded her fellow Americans that bombings of that scale were hardly unusual and that Americans often carried them out. “Yes, it was the worst thing that’s happened, but only this week,” she wrote. “Surely, the whole world grieves for us right now. And surely it also hopes we might have learned, from the taste of our own blood … that no kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.”²⁹

Kingsolver’s refusal to feel only for America’s own recalls Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech opposing the war in Vietnam:

here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.³⁰

King labels the other not as a stranger or a foreigner but as the enemy, countering the sentimental inclination to say that we are all human. Acknowledging the other as the enemy, as the face of terror, as the inhuman, reminds us that the other is also not likely to see us from a generously compassionate point of view. Indeed, the other is also subject to low feelings, to the compulsory empathy demanded for and limited to the other’s own side. The other is as inhuman, and human, as we ourselves are. Appiah’s gesture at the intolerable shows how difficult it can be to achieve a conversation when two mutual enemies feel equally aggrieved, equally mired on the low ground, equally hateful of each other. While women, the colonized, and the minority can speak, their speech is often not heard by more powerful others unless it is on terms dictated by those others. Shut out from these conversations, or muted in them, these populations may resort to violence as a form of speech. Appiah calls this violence intolerant, and in some cases it is. But in other cases some may feel that violence is the only alternative when confronted by an unjust power that refuses to listen, to converse, and to change.

Understanding that the violent ones, our enemies, are motivated not only by hatred but also by compassion and empathy — in other words, by love — gives us a mirror to recognize that our own compulsory emotions are just as partial, prejudiced, and powerful. Understanding this, we can see that we, too, inhabit the low ground, ready to exert violence despite any heady ambitions for transcendence. Powerful memory from the low ground provides this kind of reflection, although we can identify with or reject that image. I conclude with an example of a mirror image that shows how the enemy feels as viscerally as we do, if we are Americans: Nhat Ky Dang Thuy Tram (The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram). Dang Thuy Tram was a twenty-seven-year-old North Vietnamese doctor serving in the south when U.S. troops killed her in 1970. The American officer who recovered her diary kept it for decades before returning it to Tram’s family in 2005. Published in Vietnam later that year, the diary sold some 430,000 copies.³¹ For the English version, Tram’s family and the publisher selected the title Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, a sentiment extracted from two occasions in the diary.³² Mostly the diary is marked by its “hatred” as “hot as the summer sun” for the U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries.³³ The emotion she offers differs little from the patriotism that Kingsolver criticizes, a patriotism shored up by deep feeling for one’s own and fear of the other. As Tram says, this diary “must also record the lives of my people and their innumerable sufferings, these folks of steel from this Southern land.”³⁴

The diary’s power for American readers arises from Tram’s love for her own comrades and her anger against Americans, not so much from the gestures at peace. She dreams of a peace that arises after the defeat of the enemy, the “vicious dogs” and “bloodthirsty devils” against whom she yearns for revenge.³⁵ “It’s not my love for a certain young man that makes me feel and act the way I do,” she writes. “This is something immense and vibrant within me. My longings extend to many people.… What am I? I am a girl with a heart brimming with emotions.”³⁶ Her diary makes clear that romantic love, revolutionary love, and compassion for one’s comrades and for the nation all share the same roots. Of a soldier who has just died, she writes that “your heart has stopped so that the heart of the nation can beat forever.”³⁷ She describes feeling that she and her adopted brothers share “a miraculous love, a love that makes people forget themselves and think only of their dear ones.”³⁸ But while being “profoundly compassionate” toward her wounded comrades, she also decries “American bandits.”³⁹

Ironically, Americans who patriotically hate others can understand Tram’s patriotic hatred for them. The compassion that American audiences can now feel for Tram and their former Vietnamese enemies comes from this shared patriotism and the kind of low feeling that originates in the gut. And while this compassion is belated, it emerges in a present indelibly shaped by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In reading Tram’s diary at the time of its publication, the English title may evoke a cosmopolitan feeling on the part of readers, a sense that we should reconcile with our current enemies if we can make peace with our former enemies. So while “Last Night I Dreamed of Peace” is inaccurate in foregrounding a relatively insignificant theme in Tram’s writing, it nevertheless signals a hope for a broader peace than the one Tram imagined.

Cosmopolitanism and compassion magnify these glimmers of peace. Just as warfare needs patriotism, the struggle for peace needs cosmopolitanism to imagine the utopian future. Without such an imagination and without the expansion of compassion beyond the borders of our own kin, we resign ourselves to the world we inherit. Art, particularly narrative art, makes possible a “cosmopolitan education,” the philosopher Martha Nussbaum says, where we see others empathetically and see ourselves from the perspective of the other.⁴⁰ Cosmopolitan education seeps into our minds and emotions through assumptions that our cultures create about the humanity or inhumanity of other cultures. An average American need never have gone to England or to a university to know Shakespeare’s name and hence feel, however dimly, a human connection with English culture. Even American tendencies against intellectuals, the elites, and the French would not prevent an average American from feeling that the French have done something worth being saved (or so I hope). This cosmopolitan education about certain others is enacted environmentally, through schools, encounters with works of art, and mass culture. Cosmopolitan education helps limit the violence we inflict on those we see as closer to us on the human scale, but cosmopolitan education also justifies us pouring ever-greater torrents of violence on those not included in our curriculum, on those we see as further away on the animal horizon.

We can measure the degree to which we have been educated about others via our approach to bombing. How many bombs are we willing to drop? What kinds of bombs? Where, and on whom? The indiscriminate, massive American bombing of Southeast Asia was possible because Americans already considered its residents inhuman or less than human. The nuclear bomb is another bomb test. In The English Patient, the novelist Michael Ondaatje depicts the atomic bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective the Indian sapper Kip, a soldier in the British Army. When he hears of the atomic bomb’s detonation, Kip has a flash of understanding: white people would never drop the bomb on a white country. For Kip, the harsh illumination provided by the bomb begins his decolonization, his recognition of the racism in Western civilization that allows Western technology to be used against non-Western people. As a novel, The English Patient both depicts what happens when one culture does not recognize another culture as equally human and is itself evidence against the racist belief that only whites can write. Against the terror of the bomb, The English Patient proves Maxine Hong Kingston’s claim in The Fifth Book of Peace that “war causes peace” through producing revulsion on the part of war’s witnesses.⁴¹

Some might regard this as an overstatement, since writing back against racism, empire, and war, as Ondaatje does, takes place not on the universal scale but on the intimate scale of the individual artist and work. Scarry points to the inadequacy of individual works of art to enact significant change, with rare exceptions such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Many people likely share Scarry’s view about art, although with a less generous spirit. Those suspicious people who do not read literature or look at art may be skeptical about their purpose or use, questions not normally directed toward law, business, or government. But does the average lawyer or businessperson or bureaucrat make more difference, inflict more damage, or do more good than the average writer or artist? The average writer and artist, and the average book and work of art, need to be measured against their equivalents: average people in average jobs. Individual works of art should not be measured against daunting standards of making a universal difference or changing the world. Against such high standards, most of us count as failures, not just the average work of art or the average obscure writer. So compare the midlist novelist to the vice president of a regional bank; compare Shakespeare to Bill Gates; compare the novel to the computer; compare cosmopolitan education to war. Only with the appropriate comparisons can we say whether art, and the cosmopolitan impulse to see art as a means to peace, makes a difference.⁴²

Kingston goes on to say that “peace has to be supposed, imagined, divined, dreamed.”⁴³ This kind of dreaming will not happen without cosmopolitanism and compassion and their persistent, irritating reminder that waging war is easier than fighting for peace. If peace begins with the individual, it is realized collectively with peace movements, for peace is not simply a matter of praying or hoping, although they, like dreaming, do not hurt. Instead, peace happens through confronting the war machine and taking over the industries that make it possible, which include the industries of memory. It is no surprise, then, that peace seems so much harder to achieve than war, which offers us an immediate profit. Exploiting our fear and our greed, the cynical supporters of war can convert even powerful memory to weaponized memory. This is the kind that encourages patriotism, nationalism, and the heroic sacrifice of soldiers for the country. The strength of weaponized memory is why appeals from the high ground alone cannot stop war or realize peace. Calls to our humanity have often turned into justifications for war. This is why a need remains for memory that forces us to look at our inhumanity, which we might wish to deny. Recognizing our inhumanity, we begin remaking our own identity so that it does not belong to the war machine, which tells us that we are always and only human, and our enemies less so.