Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

Notes

PROLOGUE

1. King, “Beyond Vietnam,” 144.

2. Ibid., 156.

3. For an overview of the connections that Americans have made between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, see Gardner and Young’s edited collection Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, and Dumbrell and Ryan’s edited collection Vietnam in Iraq.

4. King, 194–95.

5. Ibid., 143. For more on the controversial nature of King’s speech at the time of its delivery in 1967, and the tradition of antiwar protest among black intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois, see Aptheker, Dr. Martin Luther King, Vietnam, and Civil Rights.

6. Guevara, On Vietnam and World Revolution, 15. He was not the only Latin American to have this sentiment, as Macarena Gómez-Barris shows in her interview with the Chilean political prisoner Carmen Rojas. According to Rojas, she was “part of a generation that felt, in their own bodies, the struggle of Vietnam, and that vibrated during the anti-imperialist marches” (Where Memory Dwells, 99).

JUST MEMORY

1. The literary and academic body of work on war and memory is substantial. While much of that work will be cited throughout the book and in subsequent endnotes, I will mention here a number of other works that I found helpful: Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper, “The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration”; Winter, “From Remembering War”; and the following essays from War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, edited by Winter and Sivan: Merridale, “War, Death, and Remembrance in Soviet Russia,” Winter, “Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War,” Winter and Sivan, “Introduction,” Winter and Sivan, “Setting the Framework.”

2. On violence and the founding of nations, see Renan, “What Is a Nation?”

3. Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, Kindle edition, 196.

4. Two useful, concise overviews of the history of the war from both American and Vietnamese perspectives are Bradley’s Vietnam at War and Lawrence’s The Vietnam War. In writing this book, I also drew on longer histories by Young (The Vietnam Wars) and Logevall (Embers of War).

5. Um raises similar issues about the way the name of the war contains its meaning in her article “The ‘Vietnam War’ ”: What’s in a Name?”

6. In America’s Shadow and American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization, scholar William Spanos has placed the Vietnam War at the center of his critique of American empire in the twentieth century. Edward Said’s landmark Orientalism connects the European imagination of the “Near East” and “Middle East” with the American imagination of the “Far East.” For Said, the Oriental includes not just America’s enemies in the Pacific during the mid-twentieth century but its new enemies in the Middle East during the late twentieth century and beyond.

7. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, 8.

8. These percentages are based on my own calculations of Vietnamese casualties in relationship to census counts for northern and southern populations. For a more detailed exploration of casualties for Americans, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, see Turley, The Second Indochina War, 255–58.

9. Ginzburg, A Place to Live, 58.

10. For an account of the United States’ allied troops from Korea, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines and New Zealand, see Blackburn. For a discussion of the war’s international dimension, see Bradley and Young’s Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars.

11. For an account of how spaces of memory are limited for immigrants to the United States, see Behdad, A Forgetful Nation.

12. For additional important works on collective memory, see Olick, The Politics of Regret, and Lipsitz, Time Passages.

13. Young, The Texture of Memory, xi.

14. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 1–67, particularly 19–22.

15. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 218.

16. These ideas about the ethics of remembering one’s own and others appeared in an early form in my essay “Just Memory: War and the Ethics of Remembrance.”

17. For an illuminating exploration of the nuances of nostalgia, see Boym, The Future of Nostalgia.

18. For surveys of the idea of a memory industry and a memory “boom” that has exploded since the 1970s, see the following essays from The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy: Rosenfeld, “A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory ‘Industry’ ”; Nora, “From ‘Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory’ ”; and Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, “Introduction.”

19. On the memory industry and its relationship to power, see Sturken, Tourists of History.

20. Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 4.

21. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through.”

22. For some of these critiques of identity, see Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity and Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America.

23. Charles Maier, for example, in his article “A Surfeit of Memory?” blames fragmentation and grievance — the telltale signs of identity politics, or “narrow ethnicity” (444) — for preventing an orientation toward the future and transformative politics. But perhaps it is these movements for transformative politics that have not adequately dealt with the wounds of the past, or which have not been inclusive enough, which would limit their transformative ability for those afflicted with “narrow ethnicity.”

24. Many scholars of memory have made the case for the mutually constitutive relationship of memory and forgetting. To name just two: Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” and Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory.

25. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 57.

26. Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 10, italics in original.

27. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 68.

28. Borges, “Funes the Memorious,” in Ficciones, 107.

1. ON REMEMBERING ONE’S OWN

1. For an overview of how Vietnam has dealt with its war memories, see Tai’s edited collection The Country of Memory.

2. Augé, “From Oblivion,” 473–74.

3. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 217.

4. For more on the mourning practices for dead revolutionary soldiers, see Malarney, “The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice” and Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam.

5. Didion, Blue Nights, 13.

6. Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, 8.

7. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, Kindle edition, loc. 735–850.

8. For a more detailed study of Vietnamese practices of remembering the American war, see Schwenkel’s The American War in Contemporary Vietnam.

9. For a detailed account of “Uncle Ho,” see Duiker’s Ho Chi Minh.

10. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 232.

11. Ibid., 42.

12. Ibid., 57.

13. On trauma and its repetitive remembering, see Caruth, Unclaimed Experience.

14. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 180. On trauma and the possibilities of a victim repeating the violence, which might explain Kien’s violent behavior, see Leys, Trauma.

15. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 204. On the prevalence and traumatic impact of rape, see Herman, Trauma and Recovery; on the shame of sexual stigmatization, and the haunting legacies of sexually traumatized women in the parallel case of war-torn Korea, see Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora; on rape in the Vietnam War, see Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting.

16. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 94.

17. Ibid., 233.

18. Vo’s The Bamboo Gulag, 209, provides more information on the statue’s sculptor Nguyen Thanh Thu.

19. Herr, Dispatches, 330.

20. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 88.

21. Ibid.

22. Aguilar-San Juan, Little Saigons, 64.

23. Nhi Lieu, The American Dream in Vietnamese.

24. On postwar American policies in regard to Vietnam, see Martini, Invisible Enemies.

25. Nora, “Between Memory and History.”

26. Quoted in Ch’ien, Weird English, Kindle edition, loc. 819.

27. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, viii, 41–48.

28. Davey, “In Kansas, Proposed Monument to a Wartime Friendship Tests the Bond.”

29. Cargill and Huynh, Voices of Vietnamese Boat People, 151–52.

2. ON REMEMBERING OTHERS

1. Ecclesiasticus 44:8–9, King James Bible. On the relationship of religion to memory and this war, see Tran, The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory, particularly the section on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (212–35).

2. Some useful accounts of the making of Maya Lin’s memorial, the controversies around it, and the power of its aesthetic, can be found in Ashabranner, Always to Remember; Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics; Griswold, Forgiveness; Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory; Hass, Carried to the Wall; Huyssen, Present Pasts; Lin, Boundaries; Marling and Silberman, “The Statue at the Wall”; Menand, American Studies; Shan, “Trauma, Re(-)membering, and Reconciliation”; Sturken, Tangled Memories; and Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.”

3. Isaacs’s Vietnam Shadows is an informative account of this postwar period and the impact of the war on American memory and life.

4. See McMahon’s “Contested Memory” for a pithy summary of how the war’s memory was transformed politically and culturally.

5. Dowd, “After the War.”

6. Appy, American Reckoning, Kindle edition, loc. 3689.

7. Assman, “From Moses the Egyptian,” 211.

8. Swofford, Jarhead, 5–6.

9. Lin, Boundaries, 5:06.

10. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 5.

11. Ibid.

12. Tatum, The Mourner’s Song, 9.

13. Ninh, The Sorrow of War, 180.

14. Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, 87.

15. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 496.

16. President Obama proclaiming March 29, 2012, as Vietnam Veterans Day, commemorating fifty years since American involvement began in Vietnam, in “Presidential Proclamation.”

17. For a critique of Margalit’s distinction between ethics and morals when it comes to memory, see Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory.

18. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 82–83.

19. Duong, in Treacherous Subjects, shows how Vietnamese patriarchy of all ideological persuasions has often aimed its ire at women.

20. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 50.

21. Duong, Novel without a Name, 138.

22. Ibid., 84.

23. Ibid., 62.

24. Ibid., 256.

25. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 341.

26. Heinemann, Close Quarters, 261.

27. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 59.

28. Chong, The Oriental Obscene.

29. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 62–63.

30. Ibid., 82.

31. Lesser, “Presence of Mind.”

32. For a critique of how the United States has remembered Hmong soldiers, see Vang, “The Refugee Soldier.”

33. Moua, Bamboo among the Oaks, 61–62.

34. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 89.

35. Gilroy, Against Race, 115.

36. Ibid., 114.

3. ON THE INHUMANITIES

1. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, 168

2. Some of the scholars who have worked on the distinction between sympathy and empathy, or on the power or problems of one or both of those two feelings, include: Bennet, Empathic Vision; Berlant, “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding)”; Garber, “Compassion”; and Woodward, “Calculating Compassion.”

3. For a compelling study of another case where war survivors were reluctant to see themselves as victimizers, turning instead to being only victims, see Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces.

4. Butler, Precarious Life, 150.

5. Chong, The Girl in the Picture.

6. Turse, Kill Anything That Moves.

7. For an account of how South Vietnamese women functioned in the American imagination, see Stur, Beyond Combat, 17–63. For memories of Vietnamese women themselves, see Nguyen, Memory Is Another Country.

8. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 23.

9. Ibid., 51.

10. Ibid., 47.

11. Levinas says that “freedom comes from an obedience to Being; it is not man who possesses freedom; it is freedom that possesses man” with “the primacy of the same, which marks the direction of and defines the whole of Western philosophy” (45); “such is the definition of freedom: to maintain oneself against the other” (46). Such philosophy does not question injustice and leads to “power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny” (47).

12. Ibid., see 26–27 for a discussion of infinity and the relation of same to other.

13. Ibid., 225.

14. See Parikh’s An Ethics of Betrayal for another reading and application of Levinas to the place of minorities and others. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas has this to say about justice and its alignment with the Other: “justice consists in recognizing in the Other my master. Equality among persons means nothing of itself; it has an economic meaning and presupposes money, and already rests on justice — which, when well-ordered, begins with the Other” (72); “justice is a right to speak” (298); “the goodness of being for the Other, in justice” (302).

15. From the film Derrida, Derrida says: “In general, I try and distinguish between what one calls the Future and “l’avenir” [the ‘to come’]. The future is that which — tomorrow, later, next century — will be. There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future, beyond the other known future, it is l’avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.” But as I argue elsewhere in this book, the Other is not only possibly a sign of justice but of terror.

16. Herr, Dispatches, 20.

17. See Grossman’s On Killing for an examination of how distance to the target affects the killer.

18. Duong, Novel without a Name, 237.

19. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 225.

20. Ibid., 262.

21. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 4.

22. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 93.

23. This is the first lesson that McNamara offers in Morris’s film The Fog of War.

24. Chandler’s Voices from S-21 is a powerful account of the prison and its victims, as is Maguire’s Facing Death in Cambodia.

25. Becker’s When the War Was Over was helpful in understanding this history.

26. Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan, 277.

27. Panh and Bataille, The Elimination, Kindle edition, loc. 2110.

28. Ibid., loc. 418.

29. Michael Paterniti, “Never Forget,” 9.

30. Panh and Bataille, The Elimination, Kindle edition, loc. 678.

31. Ibid., loc. 3098.

32. Ibid., loc. 1298.

33. Ibid., loc. 2998.

34. Ibid., loc. 3004.

35. Ibid., loc. 2866.

36. Ibid., loc. 2164.

37. Ibid., loc. 1881.

38. Ibid., loc. 928.

39. Ibid., loc. 1736.

40. Ibid., loc. 2195.

41. Ibid., loc. 2202.

42. Dunlop, The Lost Executioner, 23.

43. Sebald quoted in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, loc. 591–93.

44. Panh and Bataille, The Elimination, Kindle edition, loc. 1547.

45. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 85–87.

46. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 303.

47. Ibid., “the Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed” (79).

48. Ibid., 261.

49. Ibid., 233.

50. Ibid., 71.

51. Ibid., 51.

4. ON WAR MACHINES

1. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 497.

2. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 89.

3. Herr, Dispatches, 260.

4. Rowe, “ ‘Bringing It All Back Home,’ ” 197.

5. The album is Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut album. The rock star is Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. A video of the MTV Cribs episode can be seen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXJVxwAdOUg.

6. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 8.

7. Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire.

8. An account of the work of and difficulties faced by North Vietnamese photographers can be found in Requiem, edited by Faas and Page.

9. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 131–32.

10. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 64.

11. On technologies of memory and this war, see Sturken, Tangled Memories, 9–10.

12. Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu, 3.

13. See “Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy” (no author) and Calverley, “Next Generation War Games.”

14. Bergson, in Matter and Memory, speaks of how “representation is there, but always virtual” (28), while our perceptions are “interlaced with memories” whose existence is implied as virtual, for “a memory … only becomes actual borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips” (72).

15. Makuch, “Destiny Reaches 16 Million Registered Users, Call of Duty Franchise Hits $11 Billion.”

16. See Keen, Empathy and the Novel.

17. Grossman in On Killing lays particular blame on video games for desensitizing children toward violence. His stance of moral outrage at video games obscures the more disturbing reality that it is the war machine that produces video games and which encourages violence in children through a lifetime barrage of messages concerning patriotism, nationalism, the evil of unknowable others, the holiness of the Second Amendment, and so on.

18. Apostol, The Gun Dealers’ Daughter, 122.

19. The evidence of American and other tourist reactions is found in the guest books available in many museums, which invite visitors to record their reactions and sentiments. See Laderman’s Tours of Vietnam for a look at some of these American tourist reactions to the War Remnants Museum.

20. See Becker, “Pilgrimage to My Lai,” for one account of this kind of journey.

21. For accounts of American veterans and their returns to Vietnam, including their encounters with Vietnamese memorials and memories, see Bleakney, Revisiting Vietnam.

22. McCarthy, The Seventeenth Degree, 268.

23. Irwin, “Viet Reparations Ruled Out.”

24. Johnson uses the phrase “empire of bases” several times, as a core concept of his argument, throughout The Sorrows of Empire.

25. Coppola delivered these lines at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979, a moment recorded in his wife Eleanor Coppola’s documentary Hearts of Darkness.

26. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 59.

27. Herr, Dispatches, 160

28. Swofford, Jarhead, 6–7.

29. Appy, Patriots, 216.

30. Karlin, Khuê, and Vu, eds., The Other Side of Heaven, 11.

31. Fitzgerald in Fire in the Lake discusses the American military’s use of “Indian country” to describe areas outside of their control, 368.

32. Virilio, War and Cinema, 26.

33. Trinh, “All-Owning Spectatorship.”

34. Espiritu, Body Counts, 83.

35. Chin and Chan, “Racist Love.”

36. “Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at the Conference on Vietnam Luncheon in the Hotel Willard, Washington, D.C.”

37. See Kim’s Ends of Empire for an accounting of how Asia and Asian Americans have been shaped by American Cold War conflicts and policies.

38. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 60.

5. ON BECOMING HUMAN

1. Cumings’s The Korean War provides the historical information on the war for this chapter.

2. See Gooding-Williams’s edited volume Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising for more on the events in Los Angeles.

3. For an account of Korean immigrants in Los Angeles, see Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams.

4. Jager, “Monumental Histories,” 390.

5. Moon describes militarized modernity thus in relation to South Korea: “The core elements of militarized modernity involved the construction of the Korean nation as the anticommunist self at war with the communist other, the constitution of members of the anticommunist body politic through discipline and physical force, and the intertwining of the industrializing economy with military service. The militarization of national identity as such revolved around the ideologies of anticommunism and national security. In other words, South Korea was founded as an anticommunist nation against the ‘archenemy,’ North Korea. This ideological construction of the nation enabled the modernizing state to deploy disciplinary techniques of surveillance and normalization, as well as institutionalized violence, in its remolding of individuals and social groups. It also resulted in the ascendance of militarized national security over any other sociopolitical issues and justified the construction of the strong modern military and the integration of men’s military service into the organization of the economy” (Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea, 24).

6. Cumings connects Korea’s sanitized memory of the Korean War with its sanitized memory of its role in this war in his article “The Korean War.”

7. See Lee’s “Surrogate Military, Subimperialism, and Masculinity,” 657, for the characterization of South Korea as a subempire. The idea of East Asian nations, particularly Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as subempires who have a neocolonial relationship with the United States comes from Chen’s Asia as Method.

8. The book was first translated into English in 1994 and then again in 2014, both with the same translator. I cite from the later edition. For more on the significance of this novel, see Hughes’s “Locating the Revolutionary Subject.”

9. Korean names have been romanized in different ways. Hwang Suk-Yong, for example, also appears in different editions or critical discussions as Hwang Suk-Young and Hwang Seok-young. I follow the romanization of author, director, and character names according to the way they appear in the editions of the texts, covers, and movies I cite.

10. Hwang, The Shadow of Arms, 65.

11. Ibid., 66.

12. Park, “Narratives of the Vietnam War by Korean and American Writers,” 76.

13. Hwang, The Shadow of Arms, 137.

14. As both Moon (Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea) and Choi (“The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory”) argue in different ways, South Koreans have an ambivalent relationship to the West and what it represents. For Moon, the South Korean embrace of Western modernity is tinged with an awareness that Western modernity is a legacy of colonialism. Choi argues that South Korea still suffers from a neocolonial relationship with the United States. This ambivalence about being formerly colonized, but implicated in helping the United States colonize or dominate other countries, helps shape Korean attitudes toward the Vietnamese.

15. Hwang, The Shadow of Arms, 41.

16. Ibid., 399.

17. Ibid., 46.

18. See Ryu (“Korea’s Vietnam,” 106) for the full lyrics and for an account of the song’s popularity and the eventual movie based on it. Kwon (After the Massacre, vii) affirms the song’s popularity, recounting how he sang the song as a youngster during wartime. In popular cultural accounts circulating within Korea after the war, the Korean veteran of the war is featured in “proud, boastful reproductions of the legendary ROK,” or Republic of Korean soldier (Ryu, “Korea’s Vietnam,” 102). Perhaps this is not surprising, given how the Korean public did not oppose the war and, according to Moon, did not participate in the global movement against the war that was strong even in nearby Japan. Instead, that public was subject to the Korean state’s efforts at “mass mobilization and propaganda,” whereby “students were exhorted to send comfort letters and comfort goods to Korean soldiers serving in Vietnam. The mass media produced a plethora of images and stories supporting the everyday mythology of brave and ferocious Korean soldiers fighting in the war” (Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea, 26).

19. Hwang, The Shadow of Arms, 67.

20. The presence of soldier and prostitute are evidence of what Lee calls “sexual proletarianization,” where Korea encouraged poor rural men to volunteer for Vietnam as “military labor” and poor women to export themselves as sexual labor (“Surrogate Military, Subimperialism, and Masculinity,” 656). Hwang mentions Korean soldiers sending appliances home on p. 239 of The Shadow of Arms.

21. On Korean attitudes toward whiteness and blackness, and how those have been shaped by the United States and its military presence in South Korea, see Kim, Imperial Citizens.

22. Armstrong accounts for the movie’s Korean title of White War (Hayan chonjaeng) in “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam,” 539n22.

23. Ahn, White Badge, 289.

24. Ibid., 40.

25. See Cumings (“The Northeast Asian Political Economy”), Woo (Race to the Swift, 45–117), and Woo-Cumings (“Market Dependency in U.S. — East Asian Relations”) for the details of the Korean economy’s relationship to the Republic of Vietnam during the war and the consequences of the relationship for Korea’s rise.

26. Ahn, White Badge, 40.

27. Ibid., 155.

28. Ibid., 69. “Hungry and poor, they were eager to prove their masculinity,” says Lee. The Korean soldiers became miniaturized versions of Americans, “vengefully mimetic and reiterative” (“Surrogate Military, Subimperialism, and Masculinity,” 663–64).

29. Ahn, White Badge, 154.

30. Ibid., 155.

31. Ibid., 78.

32. Ibid., 278.

33. Ibid., 314.

34. Ibid., 155.

35. Cumings, “The Northeast Asian Political Economy,” 129.

36. For a detailed reading of the novel and its film adaptation, see Williams, “From Novel to Film.”

37. See the essays in Stringer’s New Korean Cinema for more on this topic.

38. Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America, and Kim, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema.

39. As Ryu argues, the vengeful female ghost exists as a sign of what Koreans continue to find unthinkable, the fact that Korean soldiers, as implied in the movie, carried out “unspeakable tales of gendered violence” that included “an entire range of sexual activity from rape to prostitution to abandonment of Vietnamese common-law wives and children that formed the off-the-battlefield reality for so many soldiers” (“Korea’s Vietnam,” 111).

40. The theme of ghosts, haunting, and trauma surface also in a South Korean musical about the Vietnam War, Blue Saigon, which was performed in 2002 at the National Theater in Seoul and was presumably known by the makers of R-Point. The musical follows the sole survivor of a Korean unit, Sergeant Kim, as he lies dying in contemporary Korea of illness brought on by American-sprayed Agent Orange (another reference to the black-faced Sergeant Kim of popular song). Sergeant Kim’s daughter is also disabled by the effects of Agent Orange on her father, while his half-son from a Vietnamese bar hostess and Viet Cong agent has finally come to visit Korea, where he is disillusioned by what he finds. As Sergeant Kim lies dying, a ghostly woman appears by his bedside, singing “Blue Saigon.” In many ways, then, Blue Saigon occupies the same territory of memory as the other works mentioned here. For the summary of the musical and the intentions of its producers, see Kirk, “Confronting Korea’s Agony in Vietnam.”

41. The motif of “friendly fire” is prevalent in American memories of the war, as Kinney shows in Friendly Fire. Korean movies about the war evoke these Hollywood themes for the same purpose, to make the war about Koreans rather than Vietnamese.

42. Jager and Jiyul in “The Korean War after the Cold War,” 234, describe this claim.

43. In Vietnamese, the part about Korean soldiers calls them “Park Chung Hee’s mercenaries” (bọn lính dánh thuê Pắc Chung Hy).

44. Ky writes that “many South Korean and Thai volunteers … bought cheap appliances in American PXes and either shipped them home to be sold on the black market or sold them to a Vietnamese for triple their cost. But these men … were poor and underpaid, and I understood from personal experience why they did wrong” (Buddha’s Child, 164).

45. Brigham, ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army, 60.

46. Michèle Ray’s segment from the omnibus antiwar film Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, directed by Joris Ivens et al.) discusses how the “Vietnamese don’t like and fear these Koreans” (at the 1 hour and 11 minute mark).

47. Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places,198.

48. Kwon, After the Massacre, 29.

49. Ryu calls the song a “mega-hit” (“Korea’s Vietnam,” 104).

50. On how memories of Korean soldiers and their actions affect postwar relations between Vietnamese civilians and the Vietnamese state, see Kwon’s After the Massacre.

51. King, “Address at the Fourth Annual Institute of Nonviolence and Social Change at Bethel Baptist Church,” 338.

52. Ibid., 339.

53. For the Korean American perspective on the Los Angeles rebellion, and an account of the death of the lone Korean American, see the documentary Sa-I-Gu.

54. I owe great thanks to Heonik Kwon for providing me with the directions to the memorial. His work on the memorial in After the Massacre informs much of my discussion of the memorial, as does Kim’s “Korea’s ‘Vietnam Question.’ ”

6. ON ASYMMETRY

1. Yamashita, The I-Hotel, 2.

2. Gustafsson, War and Shadows, xiii.

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

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

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

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

7. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 29.

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

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

10. Faas and Page, Requiem, 315.

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

12. Young, The Texture of Memory, 5.

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

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

7. ON VICTIMS AND VOICES

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

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

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

4. Nguyen-Vo, “Forking Paths,” 159.

5. Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 3.

6. Ibid., 19.

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

8. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 187.

9. Espiritu, Body Counts, 23.

10. Sollors, Multilingual America.

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

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

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

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

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

16. Waters, Ethnic Options.

17. Le, The Boat.

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

19. C. Wong, “Sugar Sisterhood.”

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

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

22. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 89.

23. Espiritu, Body Counts, 101.

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

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

26. McGurl, The Program Era.

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

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

29. Duong, Treacherous Subjects, 1–22.

30. Nguyen, Pioneer Girl.

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

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

33. Trinh, Woman Native Other, 7.

34. Ibid., 98.

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

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

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

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

39. Phi, Sông I Sing, 9.

40. Ibid., 39.

41. Ibid., 78.

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

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

44. Ibid., 113.

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

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

8. ON TRUE WAR STORIES

1. Kingston, China Men, 284.

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

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

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 15.

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

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

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

9. Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 47.

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

11. Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 47.

12. Chang, Inhuman Citizenship, 14.

13. Heinemann, Paco’s Story, 195.

14. Ibid., 209.

15. “The Latehomecomers,” Entertainment Weekly.

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

17. Thiep, The General Retires, 102.

18. Ibid., 104.

19. Ibid., 113.

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

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

22. Said, Culture and Imperialism.

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

24. Yang, The Latehomecomer, 46

25. Ibid., 4.

26. Ibid., 46.

27. Ibid., 93.

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

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

30. Jin, The Writer as Migrant, 4.

31. Moua, Bamboo among the Oaks, 10.

32. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 87.

9. ON POWERFUL MEMORY

1. Kipling, Kipling, 97–98.

2. Trinh, Woman Native Other, 10–11.

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

4. Um, “Exiled Memory,” 832.

5. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 457.

6. Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, xiv.

7. Ibid., 365.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., xv.

10. Ibid., 365.

11. Storr, Dislocations, 28.

12. Ibid., xv.

13. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 131.

14. Utley, “12 Reasons Why America Doesn’t Win Its Wars.”

15. Some of the sources that inform this discussion on sympathy, empathy, and compassion are Berlant, “Introduction”; Edelman, No Future, 67–100; Garber, “Compassion”; Keen, Empathy and the Novel; Song, Strange Future, 87–90; and Yui, “Perception Gaps between Asia and the United States of America,” 71.

16. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 101.

17. Hirsch, “From ‘The Generation of Postmemory,’ ” 347. See also Hirsch, Family Frames.

18. Ollman, “Dinh Q. Le at Shoshana Wayne.”

19. Cotter, “Two Sides’ Viewpoints on the War in Vietnam.”

20. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 70.

21. The analysis of Lê is adapted from my essay “Impossible to Forget, Difficult to Remember: Vietnam and the Art of Dinh Q. Lê.”

22. Morrison, Beloved, 44.

23. The commentary on cosmopolitanism is extensive. For a few sources, see Appiah, Cosmopolitanism; Archibugi, “Cosmopolitical Democracy”; Brennan, At Home in the World and “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism”; Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics; Clifford, Routes; Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness; Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire; Gilroy, Against Race and Postcolonial Melancholia; Hollinger, “Not Universalists, Not Pluralists”; Kant, To Perpetual Peace; Kaplan, Questions of Travel; Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”; Srikanth, The World Next Door; and Vertovec and Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism.

24. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 85.

25. Ibid., 144.

26. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 59–60.

27. Scarry, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” 105.

28. Ibid., 103.

29. Kingsolver, “A Pure, High Note of Anguish.”

30. King, “Beyond Vietnam,” 151.

31. For accounts of the book’s impact and popularity, see the essays by Fox, “Fire, Spirit, Love, Story”; Vo, “Memories That Bind”; and Vuong, “The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram and the Postwar Vietnamese Mentality.”

32. Tram, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, 27 and 111.

33. Ibid, 114. The quotations are drawn from the English edition of the diary, although I have cross-checked these translations with the original Vietnamese edition.

34. Ibid., 158.

35. Ibid., 83 and 47, respectively.

36. Ibid., 96.

37. Ibid., 83.

38. Ibid., 86.

39. Ibid., 104.

40. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” 6.

41. Kingston, Fifth Book of Peace, 227.

42. The arguments about compassion, cosmopolitanism, and peace in this chapter have been adapted from my article “Remembering War, Dreaming Peace.”

43. Kingston, Fifth Book of Peace, 61.

JUST FORGETTING

1. Thiep, “Don’t Cry in California,” 602, italics in original, my translation from his story “Khong Khoc O California.”

2. Ibid., 599 and 600, italics in original.

3. Hanh, Fragrant Palm Leaves, Kindle edition, loc. 1837.

4. Vang, “Heirs of the ‘Secret War’ in Laos.”

5. For insightful accounts of the genre of the Hmong story cloth, see Conquergood, “Fabricating Culture,” and Chiu, “ ‘I Salute the Spirit of My Communities.’ ”

6. The Chas’ story cloth can be found in Cha, Dia’s Story Cloth.

7. This paragraph is adapted from my article on “Refugee Memories and Asian American Critique.”

8. Walcott, “The Schooner Flight,” Collected Poems, 330.

9. UN News Centre, “UN Warns of ‘Record High’ 60 Million Displaced amid Expanding Global Conflicts.”

10. Walcott, “The Schooner Flight,” Collected Poems, 334.

11. Davies, “Vietnam 40 Years On.”

12. Among many such articles, Pincus’ “In Iraq, Lessons of Vietnam Still Resonate” was published as I wrote the last few chapters of this book.

13. O’Reilly, “Q&A: Doris Lessing Talks to Sarah O’Reilly about The Golden Notebook,” loc. 11316.

14. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 31–32.

15. Ibid., 27.

16. Ibid., 31.

17. Ibid., 33–34.

18. Ibid., 39.

19. Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Kindle edition, loc. 741.

20. Griswold, Forgiveness, 29.

21. Ibid., 30.

22. Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, 193.

23. “Forgive,” Oxford English Dictionary.

24. Connerton in How Modernity Forgets discusses how forgetting is an integral part of capitalism and modernity, which the gift is supposed to counteract through compelling memory (53).

25. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 481.

26. Ehrhart, “The Invasion of Grenada.”

27. Hyde, The Gift, 258.

28. Short’s Pol Pot was a helpful source in studying the life of the Khmer Rouge leader.

29. Dunlop, The Lost Executioner, 22.

EPILOGUE

1. Marker, Sans Soleil.

2. Ibid.

3. Spiegelman, Metamaus, 60.

4. Parts of this epilogue are adapted from my article “War, Memory and the Future.”