Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

1. On Remembering One’s Own

DRIVE ALONG THE HIGHWAYS of Vietnam for any extended distance and you may notice, if you are looking for them, the cemeteries abutting the roads. Marking each one is an obelisk, a monument, or a sculpture, usually of a trio of heroes, sometimes including a heroine, tall enough to be visible from a distance. Draw closer and you will see a stone stela, engraved with the names of the dead. Every town and village has its own necropolis, devoted to the martyrs who died in the twentieth-century wars to unify and liberate the country. These burial grounds exist in America, too, and perhaps if I drove its freeways and thoroughfares looking for them, I would see them and think that America was preoccupied with its sacrificed warriors. This seemed the case in Vietnam, but possibly only because I had tasked myself with looking for these cities of the dead, traveling to find them by motorbike, bus, train, and private car. These cemeteries impact the geography in a way that would not be possible in the United States, for while the country is smaller than California and larger than New Mexico, there were more than a million dead to account for, if you counted only those who fought for the winning side. These dead victors inhabited every neighborhood, their resting places constituting the most visible and brooding reminders in this country of the ethics of remembering one’s own.

Among these graveyards, the most spectacular is the Truong Son Martyrs Cemetery. I think of it as the capital of the dead, a place where over fifty thousand lay interred, nearly the same number as those American dead commemorated in Washington, DC, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This martyrs cemetery is found outside the provincial town of Dong Ha in the province of Quang Tri, its most prominent feature a gigantic white statue of Le Duan, the man who had taken the leadership of the Communist Party as Ho Chi Minh’s health and influence declined. Some fifty meters tall, the statue towers over a parade ground in the city center, as does a similar statue of Ho Chi Minh in the northern city of Vinh, near his birthplace. Perhaps to the locals these statues inspire awe, as they seem designed to do. To me and perhaps to other outsiders, their grandiosity seems so inconsistent with communist principles that they are absurd. But in the land of democracy and equality for all there broods a massive Lincoln on his throne, eyes fixed on the Washington monument’s white, phallic spire. Regardless of ideology, something in humanity seems to require towering heroes and monuments, as well as the more horizontal affirmations of the masses. Quang Tri, the province where Le Duan was born and the scene of terrible bombardment and warfare, offers those more democratic commemorations. They assume the form of cemeteries for tens of thousands of the war dead, regimented in death as in life. Once they stood tall; now they lay supine.

Quang Tri was home to the demilitarized zone that had divided the country. Nearby is the fabled Truong Son Road, known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Americans and much of the world. This is a landscape that remembers war and holds it close. Embedded in the earth are war’s explosive remnants, the bombs, shells, and mines that did not detonate as designed. Dormant and deadly, they at times activate and continue fulfilling their fate, ending the lives of over seven thousand provincial residents since the war officially concluded, and mutilating many more. No memorials commemorate these accidental dead, except for the prostheses attached to the citizens of Quang Tri who have lost limbs. In a clean and efficient lab, foreign agencies train local technicians to fabricate these artificial arms and legs. My traveling companion, a professional photographer, tries to take photos of these arms and legs. He cannot find an angle that pleases him. Every war has these human consequences that are not easy to frame in ways that would make them more acceptable, these amputees, these blind, these depressed, these suicidal, these insane, these jobless, these homeless, these side effects and delayed effects whose existence keeps memories of the war alive when most citizens would rather forget, or, at best, remember in circumscribed fashion.¹

The cities of the dead fulfill this desire for a memory quarantined in both space and time, for the burial of the dead is a burial of contagious memory. As Marc Augé notes of the war cemetery at Normandy, “nobody could say that this arranged beauty is not moving, but the emotion it arouses is born from the harmony of forms,” which “does not evoke raging battles, nor the fear of the men, nothing of what would actually restore some of the past realistically lived by the soldiers buried” there.² Beautiful, quiet war cemeteries mask the certainty, recorded in many photographs, that these dead died in heaps, in fragments, in piles, in pieces, their limbs bent at impossible angles and their muddy clothes sometimes ripped from their bodies by the velocity of the manmade force that took their lives. Their gravestones become what Milan Kundera calls “melancholy flowers of forgetting.”³ On memorial days or private anniversaries, families will gather at the gravestones of their dead, who all too often met their fates in their teens or early twenties. But during the rest of the year, the dead are noticed only by their caretakers, who do their work as cows wander among the tombs.

In daylight, the capital of the dead is a peaceful and reverent place, exempt from the crowds and the clamor of the cities of the living. The atmosphere is somber but not gloomy, the red-roofed temples with their ornate eaves serene and the tombs tended and tidy. Many of the capital’s features are shared with the smaller cities of the dead, the most important being the Mai Dich Martyrs Cemetery in Hanoi, reserved for the heroes of the Communist Party. Behind gated walls, nineteen luminaries rest on an elite boulevard, prestigious real estate lined with black marble tombs for the likes of Le Duan; To Huu, the party’s poet laureate; and Le Duc Tho, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize along with Henry Kissinger for their negotiation of the Paris Peace Accords (Kissinger accepted his award but Le Duc Tho declined, for there was no peace to speak of in 1973). The boulevard leads to the center of the groomed grounds where an obelisk stands, engraved with To Quoc Ghi Cong, the Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice. This slogan is inscribed in all the places where the honored dead dwell. The Communist Party draws its vitality from the marrow of those bones, most of which are found in cemeteries far less grand than Mai Dich.⁴ In these more proletarian burying grounds, Vo Danh marks many of the gravestones — nameless, anonymous, unknown. Most of the dead have died far from home, and while they are not disrespected, they often exist in shabby circumstances, too distant for relatives to visit, looked on askance by those locals who see themselves as having been conquered by these martyrs. Their provincial cemeteries are often dusty and neglected, the grass withered, the tombs arrayed on bare earth, the names on gravestones and shrines faded.

In these cemeteries, the masses of the dead lay as inert as facts, a million of them, not counting the contradictory facts of the losers and bystanders. These facts are not memory but are interpreted, revivified, and placed into stories by memory’s mechanisms, stories that change from time to time to suit the interests of the living. “Memory fades,” the writer Joan Didion says, “memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”⁵ Mutable and malleable memory calls for an ethical sense, a guide on how to remember in fitting ways. Perhaps this need for a guide is particularly urgent when it comes to remembering the dead, who may have died for us or the community to which we belong, whom we might have killed or whom someone killed in our name. This need to remember the dead properly extends to all those whom we consider kin, by blood, affiliation, identification, community, sympathy, and empathy. These are the near and the dear, as the philosopher Avishai Margalit calls them, people for whom we naturally feel a bond because they belong to us through what he calls the “thick” relations of family, friends, and countrymen.⁶

A sense of natural affinity is what gives the ethics of remembering one’s own its tremendous power, its capacity to draw from our emotions and to stimulate feelings that range from heartwarming to blood-boiling. We are in the thick of things when it comes to this kind of ethics, our feelings deep and our reactions quick, whether we speak of love in the private world or patriotism in the public world. Because these ethics emerge from relationships that we deem natural, they often lead to unquestioning loyalty to those we remember, at least in the heroic version of these ethics. When it comes to war, we usually remember our own as noble, virtuous, suffering, and sacrificial. Uncomfortable questions about these heroes are unthinkable or recede into the background, unless circumstances force us to confront them. If and when we can finally acknowledge that those of our own side committed acts that cannot be reconciled with law and morality, we sometimes excuse those acts and their agents by blaming extenuating circumstances, such as the stress of combat. At worst, we may consider these acts as reactive and justified simply because the enemy acted immorally first. Even so, we continue to think that those of our side are human, demanding understanding and empathy as people endowed with complexities of feeling, experience and perspective. Those of the other side, our enemies, or at least those unfriendly or alien to us, lack those complexities. To appropriate the language of the novelist E. M. Forster, they appear in our perception as “flat” characters.⁷ Those of our own side are usually “round,” three dimensional, observable from all angles, thick in flesh, bone, feeling, and history. When they feel, and what they feel, so do we.

One exception in the prominence of round characters for this kind of heroic ethics is that those of our own side can also be flat characters, so long as they are positive. After all, there is nothing flatter than the dead in a cemetery, marshaled as characters into a narrative not of their own making. They remain obedient to the generals and statesmen who continue speaking on their behalf, telling the story that the Fatherland remembers their sacrifice. This mournful but triumphant Vietnamese story exemplifies the ethics of remembering one’s own, unifying the cemeteries with the monuments, memorials, and museums that commemorate the war, where dead and living appear as both round and flat.⁸ The greatest and flattest character in contemporary Vietnamese storytelling and memory is Uncle Ho. While the historical Ho Chi Minh is round and complex, in life and in his biographies, the fictional Uncle Ho whose image is found everywhere is flat, featured most prominently on the country’s paper currency.⁹ This Uncle Ho is pure, sincere, and sacrificial, embodying all the ideals of the painful and glorious days of the revolution. So utterly attractive a character is he that even some of those from the losing side acquiesce to calling him Uncle. The persuasive, titanic, and heroic Uncle Ho proves Forster’s claim that flat characters are not necessarily worse, aesthetically, than round characters. Flat and round characters simply serve different purposes. This flattened Uncle Ho is the one whom the revolution must remember, his image and icon continuing to urge on the people the heroic version of the ethics of remembering one’s own, where their identity is one with that of party, state, and country.

Flat, heroic characters are commonplace, even fashionable, in Vietnam. They star on those billboards all over the country that exhort citizens to behave nobly and work for the nation. These billboards have their stylistic origins in wartime propaganda posters featuring revolutionary heroes and heroines, virtuous and smiling, chiseled and fierce, urging the people to unite and fight. Flat characters also dominate in the museums, from the Fine Arts Museum of Hanoi to the War Remnants Museum of Saigon, where the stories share a numbing sameness. In the common narrative of the country’s museums, a foreign invader, French and later American, occupies the land and terrorizes the people. Communist revolutionaries, at great cost to themselves, mobilize and organize the people. Following the guidance of Uncle Ho, the Communist Party leads the people to victory. In the aftermath, with Uncle Ho gone but under his benevolent gaze, the Communist Party moves from total war to collective industry, shaping the country’s increasingly prosperous economy. The shabby Museum of the Revolution in Hanoi presents this story for the entire country, beginning with black-and-white documentary photographs of colonial atrocities and legendary revolutionaries, ending with unintentionally pitiful displays of economic triumph: textiles and sewing machines and rice cookers behind glass.

On a smaller scale and in the middle of the country, the Son My museum that commemorates the My Lai massacre focuses on the singular tragedy of the five hundred people murdered — some raped — by American troops. The aftermath of their story is the same as the common narrative, the triumphant revolution eventually transforming the war-blasted landscape of village and province with verdant fields, new bridges, lively schools, and lovely people. While the photographs that decorate these museums feature real people, the captions underlining them have stamped them flat, as in the Son My museum’s display of Ronald Haeberle’s most famous photograph, underwritten with this: “The last moment of life for villager women and children under a silk cotton tree before being murdered by the U.S. soldiers.” Whoever these civilians and soldiers were in their complex lives and complicated histories, they exist in the caption as victims and villains in a drama that justifies the revolution and the party. The caption as genre echoes the slogan as genre, from Follow Uncle Ho’s Shining Example to Nothing Is More Precious than Independence and Freedom. Slogans like these exemplify the Communist Party’s story of itself, which has become, for now, the official story of the country and the nation.

Past these captions, slogans, and official commemorations, round characters do exist and are also a part of the ethics of remembering one’s own. They walk and breathe in a few works of art that deviated from the dominant story and yet found their way to readers and viewers. Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War was one, a landmark novel that expressed, for the first time, how the noble war to liberate the Fatherland was oftentimes horrific for the soldiers who fought in it. The novel begins in the months following the end of the war, with a team searching for the missing and the dead in the Jungle of Screaming Souls. Kien, the soldier at the novel’s center, hears the dead too well. Once an idealistic volunteer and now a collector of corpses, he has been “crushed by the war.”¹⁰ The sole survivor of his platoon, he vividly remembers the men and women he killed as well as his dead comrades. Still, he might have been able to bear these horrors but for the gangrenous disillusionment of the postwar years. “This kind of peace?” says the driver of the truck bearing the dead, among whom Kien sleeps. “People have unmasked themselves and revealed their true, horrible selves. So much blood, so many lives were sacrificed — for what?”¹¹ This is the universal question of the disillusioned soldier.

In an effort to make sense of death and disillusionment, of being surrounded by the dead, Kien becomes a writer. He is intent on imposing a plot on the past, “but relentlessly, his pen disobeyed him. Each page revived one story of death after another and gradually the stories swirled back deep into the primitive jungles of war, quietly restoking his horrible furnace of war memories.”¹² Gusts of images swirl from this furnace until they settle near the novel’s end, leaving him with two traumatic memories.¹³ The first is the fate of Hoa, a female guide who led his men toward the safety of Cambodia. When American troops hunt them, she stays behind as a decoy, killing their tracker dog. After they capture her, the Americans, black and white, take turns raping her. Kien watches from a distance, too afraid to save her. Remembering this horrible scene provokes Kien into recalling another scene that came before it. In the earlier event, a teenage Kien sets off to war, accompanied on the train by his beautiful girlfriend Phuong. He is so devoted to her that he cannot bring himself to make love to her, despite her repeated invitations. This purity is a symptom of weakness rather than strength, at least in terms of how he perceives his masculinity. His weakness is revealed to him on the train, when he cannot protect her from fellow soldiers intent on gang-raping her. Years later, “he suddenly remembered what he thought he had seen in the freight car and what could still be happening there. He was to remember that as his first war wound.… It was from that moment, when Phuong was violently taken from him, that the bloodshed truly began and his life entered into bloody suffering and failure.”¹⁴

Too late and too fearful to save Phuong from the rapes she has already endured, the teenage Kien murders his first man, a sailor who tries to be next in line. Eventually he becomes an able killer, but despite his lethal ability, he will not save Hoa and cannot save Phuong from “what could still be happening there,” raped by men driven by the same murderous urges found in Kien. If he gave in to murder, these other men gave in to rape, the erotic indistinguishable, at one extreme, from the homicidal. Rape is the hidden trauma, its climactic revelation destroying the masculine fiction that war is a soldier’s adventure and a man’s experience, or that war — over there — can be separated from the domestic world of the family, over here. “Can’t you see?” Phuong cries after the rape. “It’s not a wound! It can’t be bandaged!”¹⁵ The disturbing images of sexual violation at the novel’s end incinerate the gentler language earlier in the novel, when Kien thinks how “the sorrow of war inside a soldier’s heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past.”¹⁶ The novel traces this journey into the past, where war and love’s paper-thin abstractions are fed into memory’s hot furnace, the ashes revealing how the heady ideals of romance, purity, and patriotism devolve into rape, slaughter, and trauma.

But what is the relationship of these rounded characters of memorable fiction to the flat characters of the country’s cemeteries, museums, and propaganda? While round characters are sometimes antiheroic, and the flat characters of one’s own side are usually heroic, both enact the ethics of remembering one’s own. Regardless of whether those we remember are saintly or all too human, the ethical force of remembering one’s own reinforces the shared identities of family, nation, religion, or race. In the ethics of remembering one’s own, remembering those of one’s side, even when they do terrible things, is better than ignoring them altogether. Nothing is worse than being ignored, erased, or effaced, as the losers of any war or conflict can affirm. In memory wars, a victory is had in simply being remembered and being able to remember, even if one’s self and one’s own appear troubled, tortured, even demonic. The antiheroic version of this kind of ethics dwells in the nebulous world of the chiaroscuro, half-lit, half-obscured. No surprise, then, that by the end, Kien the writer vanishes from his apartment and into the shadows, leaving only his manuscript. The last words of the novel, spoken by the unnamed person who discovers Kien’s manuscript, commemorates why the warrior and writer must disappear: “I envied his inspiration, his optimism in focusing back on the painful but glorious days. They were caring days, when we knew what we were living and fighting for and why we needed to suffer and sacrifice. Those were the days when all of us were young, very pure, and very sincere.”¹⁷ The war and the Communist Party may be condemned in the pages of the novel, but not the young people and the true patriots who sacrificed themselves. Both an idealist in looking back and a cynic in looking at the present, Kien is not fit to live in a postwar society that only speaks about the glorious brightness of war. He, like many of the war’s survivors, men and women both, dwell in the crepuscular margins of melancholy, loss, and sorrow.

At least these veterans of the revolution are remembered by their country in some way, even if inadequately. In contrast, those who fought for the losing side are disremembered. They can be discovered by driving on from the Truong Son Martyrs Cemetery and heading further south on Highway 1A. This is the nation’s main artery, a crowded, noisy, and slow two-lane road running the length of the coast and lowland interior. This trans-Vietnamese route eventually reaches the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, or what many still prefer to call, for reactionary, sentimental, or simply lyrical reasons, Saigon (itself a name of memory and forgetting, given to a city conquered by the Vietnamese people on their great march south, a history remembered by the Vietnamese as a feat of nation-building rather than bloody imperialism). Past the industrial zone on Saigon’s edge where the sky is always a sheet of smog, one will see, on the border of the highway, a grand martyrs cemetery. A towering statue of a mother grieving for these martyrs gazes across the highway. The crowded landscape of factories, billboards, and roadside homes she sees is unremarkable, unless one knows what was once there. Many years ago, during the war years and before the victors built the martyrs cemetery, there sat on the other side of the highway another statue, a soldier of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, pensive on a rock as he gazed on the road from his modest six-meter height.¹⁸ Behind him was the vast national cemetery for this southern army.

In the days when the mourning soldier still surveyed the land, it was barren and sparsely populated, and the cemetery and pagoda behind him could be seen from the road. Of this time and this place, journalist Michael Herr noted that

there is a monument to the Vietnamese war dead, and it is one of the few graceful things left in the country. It is a modest pagoda set above the road and approached by long flights of gently rising steps. One Sunday, I saw a bunch of these engineers gunning their Harleys up those steps, laughing and shouting in the afternoon sun. The Vietnamese had a special name for them to distinguish them from all other Americans; it translated out to something like ‘The Terrible Ones,’ although I’m told that this doesn’t even approximate the odium carried in the original.¹⁹

More than thirty years later, the landscape has changed, but the abuse aimed at the cemetery has not. The mourning soldier, as he was known, has disappeared, as statues tend to do after wars end or regimes collapse. The cemetery itself is not marked by any signs and is invisible from the highway. Drive a hundred meters down a spur from the highway and one will see, at last, the cemetery’s entrance, a memorial gate overgrown by green foliage, the lettering on its faded pillars proclaiming the need for sacrifice and struggle. Workers on their noon break sit on the littered steps, smoking cigarettes. At the top of the stairs, another laborer dozes on a hammock strung between a pillar and the faded blue doorframe of the pagoda, its white walls serving as pages for lines of graffiti. Inside, the pagoda is empty except for a makeshift shrine on a wooden table, decorated with flowers in vases and an urn for incense. On my first visit, a corner of the room is charred from a fire where someone has burned something, a fire on a cold night or perhaps paper offerings to the dead. There is nothing else to see.

The actual cemetery lays a few hundred meters further west. No signs mark the route to the cemetery, which turns out to be closed for lunch. Its barred gate is rolled shut, the office is empty, and there is no indication of when anyone will return. I have traveled a long distance on a hot day, I am impatient, and over a lifetime I have learned lessons from the Vietnamese people about letting nothing get in our way. I crawl under the gate. The cemetery that I discover is the ugly, beaten, closeted cousin of the one celebrating the victors across the highway. There are the same rows of tombs nearly level with the earth, but they lay unloved, unpainted, and untended amid green meadows of uncut grass and groves of shade trees. In the center of the cemetery squats an unfinished gray hulk of a memorial obelisk, resembling an industrial smokestack. Most of the tombs are little more than neglected slabs and headstones, but a handful have been rebuilt recently. Composed of granite and marble, they appear cleanly swept and feature fresh photographs of their inhabitants. The desecrated tombs far outnumber these rehabilitated ones. Someone has vandalized the photographs of the dead on these desecrated tombs, scratching out the eyes and faces. I do not have time to count the numbers of defaced dead. Worried about my illicit entry, I return to the gate, where I find the staff has returned. My presence bemuses this handful of functionaries in sandals and short-sleeved shirts, who record my passport’s information in a ledger. When I return to visit the following year, a blue, solid metal gate on rollers has replaced the barred gate with the gap underneath. I cannot slip beneath this time. A brand new sign installed next to the gate proclaims this the People’s Cemetery of Binh An, which was not the name it bore during the war, the National Cemetery of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Once again I present my passport, and this time one of the staff follows me as I walk from grave to grave, put-putting on his motorbike.

These decaying tombstones and this neglected cemetery evoke in me the same emotion I sometimes felt in libraries of years past, encountering books whose checkout cards recorded last encounters with readers from decades ago. Forgotten people and forgotten books exude the same melancholy, for books, too, live and die. Bao Ninh writes of how Kien’s novel has its own autonomy, how it “seemed to have its own logic, its own flow. It seemed from then on to structure itself, to take its own time, to make its own detours.”²⁰ What alleviates melancholy in both The Sorrow of War and this Bien Hoa cemetery is the sense that both books and the dead live in their own ways. “As for Kien, he was just the writer; the novel seemed to be in charge and he meekly accepted that.”²¹ After the novelist disappears, his book remains. In the cemetery’s case, the dead are too dangerous to be unguarded, but also too dangerous to be bulldozed, or at least completely. They remain a precious resource, for the state might one day use them to reconcile with the country’s defeated exiles.

They, too, demand their share of memory. They have created plans for renovating this cemetery and display them in the only museum that commemorates their experiences, the Museum of the Boat People and the Republic of Vietnam. It stands in the History Park of San Jose, California, the city where I was raised and home to a Vietnamese community that is the second-largest outside Vietnam. A small, two-story Victorian house, the Viet Museum, as it is also known, is an apt metaphor for exilic memory, overstuffed with amateurish exhibits and historical relics kept in someone else’s home. Its hours are so irregular that the first two times I visit, the doors are locked. I peer through the windows to see mannequins outfitted in Republican uniforms and a bronze sculpture of a slightly larger than life southern soldier, all inhabiting what was once a parlor. On my third try, the museum is open, run by husband and wife custodians. The mood in the handful of rooms, denoted in the captions and narratives, is one of sorrowful memory and mourning for dead soldiers, forgotten heroes, and what I think of as oceanic refugees, a term that lends more nobility to the sufferings and heroism of those whom the Western press called the “boat people.” The soldier is not in a fighting posture. Instead, he kneels before a comrade’s grave, while nearby a small diorama shows a model of the national cemetery, as groomed and as green as it could be if the victorious state would allow it. Until that moment of reconciliation, the state and party will exclude the exiles and their dead from memory, for part of the ethics of remembering one’s own is the exclusion and forgetting of others.

But this forgetting also begets remembering (sometimes thought of as haunting). This is especially the case when forgetting is not accidental but deliberate, strategic, even malicious — in other words, disremembering. Thus, in the aftermath of any war or conflict, the defeated and disremembered will inevitably seek to remember themselves, although not as others. So it is that the refugees from this country and this war have also engaged in an ethics of remembering their own, knowing their country of origin has erased or suppressed their presence. The greatest work of collective memory these defeated people have created is not a museum or a memorial or a work of fiction but is instead their archipelago of overseas communities, the largest and most famous of which is Little Saigon in Orange County, California. Little Saigon and similar communities worldwide are “strategic memory projects,” as scholar Karin Aguilar-San Juan calls them.²² Little Saigon’s residents see it as the embodiment of the “American Dream in Vietnamese,” where capitalism and free choice reign.²³ Bolsa Avenue in Little Saigon is the most famous thoroughfare in the refugee diaspora, its eight lanes more commodious than Highway 1A, its sidewalks more usable than any in the country of origin, its restaurants cleaner and oftentimes offering better native food than that found at home. For more than a decade after war’s end, perhaps two, as the homeland suffered from failed collectivist economic policies, explosive inflation, the rationing of necessities, and an American embargo that was part of a continuing “American war on Vietnam,” Little Saigon’s malls were more spectacular and its entertainment industry more vibrant than the homeland’s.²⁴ Little Saigon was a triumph of capitalism and a rebuke against communism, and in this way it fulfilled its role as the ultimate, much belated strategic hamlet so desired by the southern government and its American advisors.

The original strategic hamlet program was designed to persuade the peasantry that their best interests lay with the southern government and the Americans, who coerced them into fortified encampments meant to isolate the guerillas from peasant support. In practice, the guerillas infiltrated the hamlets, while the residents often resented the government for forcibly evacuating them from their farms and ancestral homes. While these strategic hamlets were crude, blunt instruments, Little Saigon is an example of American capitalism and democracy operating at a refined level of soft power. If Ho Chi Minh City is now a better place to live than Little Saigon for many of those with privilege, it is because the Communist Party adopted the capitalist practices and consumer ideology of Little Saigon. As strategic hamlet, Little Saigon beckoned for years to the people of the homeland to come to America, as oceanic refugees, as Amerasians, as reeducation camp survivors, as family members reunited through immigration policy, as spouses of citizens. All were marginalized or punished in their homeland under communist rule and chose to flee or migrate to a land that promised wealth and inclusion. But Little Saigon as strategic hamlet is not just physical real estate. It is also mnemonic real estate, for according to the informal terms of the American compact, the more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering. This membership in the American body politic would be made possible not only by economic success, but also through winning those political and cultural rights of self-representation denied to the exiles and refugees when they lived under communism. Memory and self-representation are thus inseparable, for those who represent themselves are also saying this: remember us.

The Vietnamese in America understood that strength and profit came in the concentration of their numbers. Thus, like other new arrivals, they gathered themselves defensively into ethnic enclave, subaltern suburb, and strategic hamlet, those emergent landscapes of the American dream distinct from the sidelined ghetto, barrio, and reservation of the American nightmare. Enclave, suburb, hamlet, ghetto, barrio, and reservation are examples of lieux de memoire, the sites of memory that have, in the modern age, substituted for history, or so says scholar Pierre Nora.²⁵ American society created these particular lieux de memoire through centuries of warfare, exploitation, appropriation, and discrimination, practices that tell the inhabitants of these sites to remember their place. These inhabitants also tell themselves to remember their place. They understand that if they have any hope of being remembered by Americans, they must remember themselves first. For Vietnamese refugees, the most important anniversary is April 30, the date of Saigon’s fall, which they call Black April (although white is the color of mourning in Vietnamese society, calling this day White April would likely offend, or at least confuse, white Americans, around whom the Vietnamese in America are usually on their best behavior, polite at the least and often solicitous at the most). On Black April, hundreds of veterans of the Republic of Vietnam’s military forces gather at the Vietnam War Monument located in Freedom Park on All American Way in Garden Grove, Orange County. A portable memorial showcases photographs of communist atrocities and ragged boat people. Commemorative wreaths decorate a shrine honoring dead soldiers. Speeches are given by local politicians and former generals and admirals, one of whom, during the memorial’s dedication in 2003, proclaimed the invasion of Iraq to be an extension of the Vietnam War. Once again, America was defending freedom, a claim with which no one disagreed. The national anthems of both the United States and the Republic of Vietnam play as honor guards march forth with the flags of both countries, parading before veterans displaying themselves in recreations of their old uniforms. The veterans are senior citizens, their supporters numbering in the several thousands at the dedication and in the several hundreds in subsequent years. Theirs is a ferocious display of patriotism, at once spectacular and yet small, inadvertently showing what Vladimir Nabokov calls the “gloom and glory of exile.”²⁶

This gloom and glory arises from how loss has stung exiles and the related breeds of refugees, immigrants, and minorities. They have lost their countries of origin, either by choice or circumstance, and their hosts often see them as others. This sense of loss and otherness inflects their memories differently from the memories of majorities. For majorities, the ethics of remembering one’s own can range from heroic to antiheroic. The power and privilege of being the majority usually provides enough security to allow the antiheroic, although this is not always the case, as in authoritarian societies where the state’s near-total grasp of power paradoxically breeds a great insecurity about power. In a related fashion, for those who see themselves as marginalized, dominated, excluded, exploited, or oppressed, the antiheroic takes time to develop. This is because weaker populations can ill afford to seem less than powerful to the powerful. Thus, the ethics of remembering one’s own as practiced by the less powerful is usually done first in the heroic mode. Their longing for their past is what scholar Svetlana Boym calls “restorative nostalgia,” the desire to reproduce, wholesale, what once was.²⁷ Only later, when the less powerful feel more secure in their host country, or after they give up on the host country’s promises, does the antiheroic mode flourish in stories of the morally flawed or culturally inassimilable. The antiheroic mode has not yet, for the most part, developed among the Vietnamese in America, with one of the most visible exceptions being the writer Linh Dinh, of whose grotesqueries I will say more later. Otherwise, Vietnamese American art, literature, and film, while often depicting the troubles of refugee life and the haunting past, nevertheless prefer the beautiful to the grotesque and the heroic to the antiheroic. Collectively, Vietnamese American culture, for better and for worse, foregrounds the adaptability of the Vietnamese and the promise of the American dream, albeit with some degree of ambivalence.

For these Vietnamese exiles in America and many of their descendants, remembering one’s own takes place in relationship to, and often antagonism with, the national projects of remembering one’s own in Vietnam and America. These projects often ignore them and when they do notice them, usually cast them in less than heroic terms. So it is that Vietnamese Americans, for now, insist on the heroic mode in remembering themselves. Since the most heroic are the dead, perhaps the most symbolic way these ethical practices of remembering can be reconciled is over the bodies of the dead. But even in pluralist America, the weak and the defeated find themselves rejected. American veterans have rebuffed the request of Vietnamese veterans to be included in their war memorials in places such as Kansas City, and no mention of Vietnamese veterans exists in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial of Washington, DC.²⁸ Arlington National Cemetery would also presumably turn these veterans away if they asked to be buried there. This was what happened, after all, to another American ally, General Vang Pao, leader of the Hmong soldiers who fought for the CIA in Laos during the so-called Secret War (which was, of course, not a secret to the Hmong who fought it, just as the Cold War was not cold to the Asians who killed and died for it). Good enough to die for American interests in vast numbers, good enough to lose their home to America’s enemies, these Hmong soldiers are not good enough to be buried alongside American soldiers. Their deaths, too, will remain secret to American citizens.

Come home, then. That should be the message that the countries of origin send to their exiles in the future, through the way these countries deal with the dead. At the Bien Hoa cemetery, the dead lay ready to be called on once more to serve a national cause, this time of reconciliation. Meanwhile, in Quang Tri province, arduous efforts to excavate dormant bombs, mines, and shells have also uncovered the bones of the dead from both sides. In a sunbaked field, a demining squad that has searched meter by meter for this ordnance has also uncovered the remains of six or seven southern soldiers. They were buried in a local cemetery. Not far away, in Dong Ha, the remains of two northern soldiers were also recently found. My guide from the demining organization tells me that national reconciliation means we should not distinguish between northern dead and southern dead. He speaks without bitterness or melancholy, even though the French killed his paternal grandfather and the Americans killed his maternal grandfather. Bespectacled and in jeans and a t-shirt, my guide looks no different than any of the Vietnamese who return from overseas. But my embittered Vietnamese American compatriots, remembering their losses and their own dead, may not so readily bring themselves to share his sentiment. It is difficult for them when stories like this, remembered by refugee Hien Trong Nguyen, interfere:

When [my brother] died in 1974, he was only 22 years old. Five years after my brother’s death, the Communists plowed the cemetery for Southern soldiers, where my brother was buried, in order to build a military training center. My mother decided to exhume his body and move him. During the next few days, my parents, uncle, cousins, and I went to remove his body. When I first looked at his body, I was amazed and frightened to see that he looked as if he were only sleeping. His body was wrapped inside a plastic bag, and the coffin had been specially made so that water would not seep in. My family took his body and removed all the skin and flesh so that only bones remained. The skin came off just like a glove. The bones were washed and put in a smaller box.²⁹

Generosity comes easier when one has won, and the victorious find it in their best interests to be magnanimous to the defeated. I do not mention this to my guide as we watch the men in khaki probe the earth, their work slow and hot. I think we are both aware that survivors do not so easily forget history. What once happened here could still be happening for many, the past as explosive as any of the remnants buried in this land.

2. On Remembering Others

A BLACK WALL STANDS in the American capital, embedded in the earth. Inscribed on its surfaces are the names of over fifty-eight thousand Americans who fought and died in the war. For many visitors, the power of the wall arises from these names of the dead, which evoke these biblical verses: “There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.”¹ The black wall saves from oblivion the names of those soldiers who had been forgotten or at least ignored by their fellow Americans for a period of time. Although the wall’s critics despise its aesthetics, which they see as evoking the darkness of shame, many others see it as the most powerful of American memorials.² Designed by the architect Maya Lin, the wall is a geographical site of memory that compels and depends on its verbal, visual pun: the sight of memory. Many things are seen at this site, with the three most important being the names of the dead, the presence of others, and the reflection of oneself as visitor in the wall’s dark mirror. The names call forth to visitors, who themselves, as pilgrims and mourners, call on these names and sometimes call them out. This site, these names, and these visitors create a congregation, a communal experience of memory that is visible and sometimes audible.

Given that the black wall has played an important role in how America remembers its war dead, it would be easy to mistake the black wall and the mourning it conjures as a pure expression of the ethics of remembering one’s own. The wall is the centerpiece and symbol of a mass American effort from the 1980s until the present to remember the American dead, a campaign born as a reaction to the civil war in the American soul that was America’s experience of the war, its most divisive since the actual Civil War. This division contributed to the decline in esteem of the American military and its soldiers. Many saw these soldiers as losers who fought in a dirty war that took the lives of innocents, civilians, and freedom fighters, and so it was that throughout the 1970s the war was a difficult subject for many to speak of, including veterans.³ Some of these veterans, inspired, perhaps, by the movements that struggled for civil rights and spoke out against the war, decided that they, too, should speak out for themselves and demand recognition. They led the campaign that created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, its intention to encourage Americans to remember these soldiers as some of their own, rather than as others who evoked only disgrace and humiliation.

Various surgical procedures of memory have healed the wounded reputation of the American soldier. The black wall is the most symbolic — a cut and a wound in the earth, but also a scar and a suture. Politicians and presidents have visited the wall and praised these soldiers. Filmmakers and novelists fought the war again and again in movies and literature, casting these soldiers as the main characters.⁴ Whether they appeared as heroes or antiheroes, as was often the case, they demanded sympathy and empathy for their virtues and their failures. The rise in compassion for the American soldier among the American public helped to create a resurgence of patriotic feeling, providing solid evidence of how the arts of memory are shaped by the world and shape it in turn. This patriotic feeling has been fundamental to America’s increasingly pugilistic stance since the 1980s, when it began to test its revised, all-volunteer military with small adventures in Grenada and Panama. The early results against vastly outnumbered foes were good, and the American public did not reject these efforts; thus encouraged, the United States struck against Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait. This Gulf War was an application of the lessons that some Americans learned from the earlier war: avoid guerrilla conflict and nation-building; refine American technological superiority; and apply overwhelming force in conventional land, sea, and air battles. With Saddam Hussein’s forces routed in spectacular fashion, President George H. W. Bush could claim: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”⁵

Presidents and pundits understand the “Vietnam syndrome” to be the fear of failure and the moral revulsion to war that have plagued Americans since their defeat in Vietnam. The shamed American soldier and the antiwar movement were symptomatic of this syndrome. Both had to be treated in postwar operations of memory, where absences became as telling as presences. Present in the black wall are redeemed American soldiers. Absent from the memorial are the casualties who are easier to forget, the veterans who suffer from trauma, or are homeless, or have committed suicide, as the memorial’s most astute critic, Marita Sturken, observes. Collectively, these postwar dead and wounded far outnumber the wartime deaths, but this nation, like other nations, has difficulty acknowledging them and their ills. Nations prefer that wars finish quickly, the wounds cauterized in memory through the conventionally understood “war story” rather than remaining open and infected. One version of the war story is captured in a catchy postwar slogan that might have been written by an advertising firm: Oppose the War but Support the Troops. As the historian Christian Appy notes, the slogan “has often been used as a club to dampen antiwar dissent.”⁶ The slogan implicitly evokes the memory among many Americans that they did not support their troops during the war in Vietnam and calls on them now to support the troops fighting in current wars. In doing so, the slogan also suppresses troubling questions. Perhaps one could support the troops if one only opposed the war on issues of foreign policy, or if one simply did not agree with the expenditure of American treasure on military adventurism. But if one opposed a war because it killed innocent people, then how could one support the troops who inflicted the damage? Do they not bear moral responsibility for killing? Might they not bear some political responsibility for a war that they implicitly supported through their votes, their attitudes, and their actions? The question of responsibility is particularly pressing for an all-volunteer army versus an army with many draftees, as was the case in Vietnam. Martin Luther King Jr. judged this draftee army, with its racially diverse soldiers, as one that behaved “in brutal solidarity” against the Vietnamese. Would not a volunteer army be even more prone to such a judgment?

The slogan’s refusal to judge soldiers also implies a refusal to judge the civilians. What lies behind the slogan is not only support for the troops but the absolution of the same civilians who utter the slogan. If the hands of the troops are clean, so are the hands of these civilians. As for the American dead, they have not died for nothing after all. This slogan has arisen in their memory, proving once again that the memories the living create of the dead — and the dead themselves — are strategic resources in the campaigns of future wars. Once the dead seemed to cry out against war, but now, just as plausibly, the dead seem to cry out in support of our troops who wage new wars. At least this is what the living say, and it is what the living say that really counts. As the scholar Jan Assman writes, “if ‘We Are What We Remember,’ the truth of memory lies in the identity that it shapes.… If ‘We Are What We Remember,’ we are the stories that we are able to tell about ourselves.”⁷ The story of supporting the troops affirms an American identity invested in the justice of American wars and the innocence of American intentions. This identity is the true “Vietnam Syndrome,” the selective memory of a country that imagines itself as a perpetual innocent.

Graham Greene both diagnosed and mocked this version of the Vietnam Syndrome in his novel The Quiet American, featuring the sober, idealistic, and almost virginal CIA agent Alden Pyle. In the name of supporting an anticommunist “third force,” he smuggles explosives into the post-French, pre-American Vietnam of the 1950s. Although it is not Pyle’s intention that this third force will kill civilians with these explosives in terrorist bombings, they do. Greene’s point is that both innocence and intention are excuses for the inevitably fatal consequences of American intervention. In this version of the Vietnam Syndrome where America is the dangerous naïf, war is something that Americans love rather than fear, despite any denials to the contrary. How else to explain the many wars that America has fought in its American century? What made Vietnam unique for Americans was that this love was unrequited, the war a tragic affair that ended badly, which Greene signaled in casting the fickle and enigmatic Phuong as Pyle’s lover. Pyle sincerely loves Phuong and wishes to marry her, but his demise, murdered by agents of the Viet Minh, seems not to bother her very much. While the campaigns in Grenada and Panama and the wars in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan have not generated these kinds of romantic allegories, they are efforts by American leadership to rebuild the American people’s love for war. The American soldiers who fought these wars make the emotional connection between past and present conflicts easily enough, or so argues former Marine Anthony Swofford as he describes the Marines preparing for Kuwait:

For three days we sit in our rec room and drink all of the beer and watch all of these damn movies, and we yell Semper fi and we head-butt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging. We concentrate on the Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals.⁸

These soldiers love war, or at least the idea of war, which is no surprise, as war is their calling. In order to love war and love their own side while hating the other side, they remember their own.

The black wall does not engage in such an obvious ethics of memory, although political interests have used it for that purpose. If the black wall engaged directly in this call to remember only one’s own, especially in the virile ways that the Marines enjoy, it would not be a very compelling memorial. Many memorials are more transparent and upright about celebrating wars, masculinity, heroism, and sacrifice, and few elicit the depth of attachment from visitors that the dark wall does. The wall’s power does not come from its complete commitment to war and soldiers but from its deep ambivalence about war and soldiers, who do not even appear personified as figures, faces, or bodies. The black wall is both mirror and barrier, and this is what shapes and creates the ambivalence. As a mirror, the wall shows the figures, faces, or bodies of its visitors over the names of the dead, while as a barrier, the wall separates the living from the dead. In this way, the wall foregrounds feelings of recognition and alienation, of intimacy and distance, of the relationship between the living and the dead. Both mirror and barrier, both a place that evokes sight and is a site, the wall captures how the dead belong to the living as their own but are also irrevocably other. And yet that otherness — the mystery and terror of death that is embodied by the dead — is one that will inevitably be shared by the living, who sense the otherness of their own inevitable mortality calling to them from behind that black wall. What makes the black wall powerful is its embodiment of remembering oneself as well as its evocation of otherness.

Maya Lin’s reflections on the black wall’s design suggest that the world around her shaped her aesthetic and the memory of being both oneself and other. “To some, I am not really an American,” she writes with emphasis, reflecting on her childhood in the American Midwest and the controversy around her selection. Lin was a college student when she won the competition for the design of the memorial, and some viewed her selection as an affront. They could not understand how a woman, a youth, and a Chinese American could design a memorial for men, for soldiers, and for Americans. The “feeling of being other … has profoundly shaped my way of looking at the world — as if from a distance — a third-person observer.”⁹ Compare this late-twentieth-century experience with W. E. B. DuBois’s claims in The Souls of Black Folk, from 1903:

the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.¹⁰

Many minorities besides African Americans also claim double consciousness for themselves. They experience this distinction between America’s dominant self — the white self — and its darker others not only in a worldly way, as part of a group cast as other, but also in a personal way. “One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”¹¹ The black wall emerges from this divided way of seeing the world for Maya Lin, but what is also powerful about double consciousness is its universal quality, one that paradoxically arises from the particularity of black experience.

While minorities may experience double consciousness regularly, even daily, the power of the black wall is that it conveys that sense to individuals who are not used to experiencing it, and then reconciles that duality. These visitors experience the double consciousness of seeing themselves and being seen by the dead, the ghosts of the soldiers who together comprise, in the words of classicist James Tatum, “an insurrection of the dead.”¹² Perhaps what the visitor who touches the black wall and is touched by it feels is the sense that she, too, is a minority, regardless of race or culture. In this instance, one’s minority identity is to belong to the living, outnumbered by the hosts of the dead. But this moment of double consciousness is reconciled for many, if not all, by the commemorative, nationalist calls that have been delivered by presidents, soldiers, and veterans around the black wall. These nationalist calls allow visitors to mourn with and for the dead, and to submerge the potentially troubling manifestation of double consciousness into the singular consciousness of national identity, of the American, the patriot, the good citizen.

Through its design and its effect, the black wall reveals the porousness between the two ethical models of remembering one’s own and remembering others. In the crudest version of the ethics of remembering one’s own, we draw a clear line between us and them, the good and the bad, the here and the there, the living and the dead (for we will smite our enemies if they are not already dead). Such an ethics motivates people to fight wars against their enemies and draws from those “thick” relations of family, friends, and countrymen described by philosopher Avishai Margalit. Thick relations are apparently natural to Margalit, but in actuality these bonds must be made by us with people who are originally other to us. We solidify these bonds over time with the stories we tell ourselves about our love for our family, friends, and countrymen. The idea of family obscures this process of thickening because many people think of family bonds as natural, even though much evidence of alienation within family exists, from murder, abuse, violence and pedophilia to apathy, rivalry, and hatred. The biblical story of Cain and Abel tells us that it is as natural to kill those close to us as it is to love them, while Freud’s psychoanalytic story tells us that the gap between self and other begins within oneself soon after birth, at the mirror stage which Maya Lin’s reflective wall invokes. But despite this alienation from others and ourselves, the lucky among us discover that our family loves us, and we learn to love them in return. Gradually we extend the circle of the near and dear to those strangers who become our friends and neighbors, then our countrymen, until some of us learn the ultimate lesson, as Bao Ninh writes of Kien: “He would understand true sacrifice: friends who would die to save others.”¹³ But under the sway of patriotism and nationalism, we forget that we have learned how to remember these others, that our love is acquired rather than spontaneous.

The black wall and the controversies around it both illuminate and obscure how remembering one’s own and remembering others are always at play together. For many Americans, the black wall tells the story of how some among us were cast out, how they eventually came back, and how we welcomed them, at last restoring friendship, familial bonds, patriotic feelings, and good relations between citizen and soldier. Some of the controversies around the black wall arise, however, because some visitors feel that the black wall is not inclusive or reflective enough. This is the paradox of the ethics of remembering one’s own, that to be successful, it must convince the right others that they are recognized or should want to be recognized. This is also the problem of the mirror and the sight of memory: does the mirror reflect us, or the image of us that we would like to see? Does the mirror make us feel whole or does it make us feel like an other? Some veterans and their supporters did not see themselves reflected in the black wall’s memory; feeling themselves to be excluded, to be other, they demanded better representation. The visitor to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial thus encounters not only the black wall but also two sculptures nearby, one featuring black, white, and Latino GIs, weary and contemplative as they gaze at the wall, the other with three nurses tending to a wounded soldier. These sculpted soldiers and nurses are heroic, human, and embodied, commissioned by the memorial’s authorities to address the concern that the wall, without bodies and faces, could neither represent nor recognize the veterans. These sculptures also exist, then, to remember the nation’s own.

In order to do so, these sculptures require the nation to remember some of its historical others — minorities and women. Only a decade or two before the creation of the black wall, memorials, movies, or stories of American soldiers would not have featured minorities or women as the equals of white men, in the unlikely chance they were included at all. It would not be natural to include these others in a world where characters such as John Wayne or George Washington embodied the American soldier. In a society oriented around white men in power, women and minorities are what Margalit calls “strangers”¹⁴ and Paul Ricoeur calls “distant others.”¹⁵ And yet, thirty years after the black wall’s creation, what the sculptures show is that an American military without minorities is unthinkable. This narrative of an America made powerful through its diversity is embodied in America’s first black president, Barack Obama, who had this to say about the war:

The Vietnam War is a story of service members of different backgrounds, colors, and creeds who came together to complete a daunting mission. It is a story of Americans from every corner of our Nation who left the warmth of family to serve the country they loved. It is a story of patriots who braved the line of fire, who cast themselves into harm’s way to save a friend, who fought hour after hour, day after day to preserve the liberties we hold dear.¹⁶

The recasting of this war as a heroic and patriotic endeavor is thus intertwined with optimism about reconciling the differences within American society and its military. In another thirty years, it is possible that an American military without women, or gays and lesbians, will be unthinkable, even if, for Margalit, these populations would today be strangers and distant others to many of “us.” For him, ethics covers the thick relations between the near and the dear, while morality governs the “thin” relations between “us” and our strangers and distant others.¹⁷ If Margalit indeed accepts this distinction between thick and thin as natural, the example of the memorial shows us that this distinction is not inevitable, but acquired. As people able to learn both love and hate, we expand our circle of the near and dear to include others, and formerly thin relations become thicker.

Rather than think of “our” relationship to others as a thin one existing in a moral realm, influenced by religious codes, I think of this relationship as existing in an ethical realm where people can struggle to remember others through secular acts of inclusion, conversation, recognition, and hope. The remoteness of these strangers and distant others is not only a function of geography, as Margalit implies. Sometimes we detest our neighbors and feel more affinity for those far away, as is the case with some Americans’ attitudes toward Mexico and, say, England. Those who feel such affinity believe it to be natural, even though it is actually learned. The naturalness arises from our having forgotten how we came by this affinity whereby some Americans think that they share more culturally with the English than the Mexicans. In contrast to psychic intimacy, physical proximity is not a guarantee of creating feelings of nearness and dearness. Americans did not enslave those who lived far from them, but instead enslaved those who lived with them or next door to them, including their lovers and illegitimate offspring. Men denied the vote to their wives and daughters and constricted their lives. Today, of course, slavery and the denial of political franchise to vast populations no longer seem to exist as realistic options. But there is nothing “natural” about this current state of fragile, partial reconciliation around race and gender relations. Bitter political struggle led Americans to this point. This struggle included a multitude of intimate gestures and relationships between people who chose to learn about and live with others, even to love them. The moral demand to treat our fellow human beings as we wish to be treated becomes, through political effort, the ethics of seeing them as part of our “natural” community, sharers of our national identity.

We learn to develop habits of recognition and to see strangers as kin, oftentimes by creating sites of communal identity where the sight of others, as our own, is affirmed. What makes the ethics of recalling others explicitly political is that it goes against the grain of the natural and by doing so becomes visible. In contrast, the ethics of remembering one’s own is implicitly political, for it has the luxury of appearing to be natural and hence invisible. As Ricoeur says with considerable irony, “it is always the other who stoops to ideology,” which is the “guardian of identity.”¹⁸ He is implying that those with the power to define themselves in relation to others have the privilege of believing that they themselves have neither identities nor ideologies, neither biases nor politics. These worldly matters are left to others, the ones stuck in the muck of their small concerns and their provincial territories, their bodies not inherently dark but rather darkened by the shadow cast by the tower in which the powerful reside. These powerful believe themselves to be impartial, unbiased, fair, objective, and universal, and do not like to be reminded that they are not, or that their power depends on creating and targeting others. So it is that when someone calls on her people to remember others, she identifies herself — she stands out — by committing a political act. Asking her own side to remember others, she risks being called a traitor. At best, those of her own side may call her a cosmopolitan, with the pejorative connotation that she may be a citizen of the world but not of her own nation.

Not coincidentally, the charge of treachery is often leveled most viciously at women, the ones who are supposed to bear within them both the future and the past of the nation, embodied in its children and its culture.¹⁹ Take, for example, the Vietnamese author Duong Thu Huong, war veteran and one time member of the Communist Party. Her disillusionment with the Communist Party in the years after its revolutionary victory shaped her fiction, beginning with The Paradise of the Blind. In this novel, she examined the notorious land reforms of the 1950s, when the party sought to redistribute land from landowners to peasants and encouraged peasants to denounce landowners. The excesses led to the execution of even minor landowners and innocent peasants, targeted by their fellow peasants and zealous cadres. Thousands died and Ho Chi Minh apologized.²⁰ Huong’s denunciation of the party grew more strident and more contemporary in Novel without a Name, where she calls the party cadres of the postwar years “little yellow despots.”²¹ Their “blindness gave them extraordinary energy,”²² but the “herds of dreamy, militant sheep” that followed them deserved some blame.²³ The novel is also notable for its evocation of Vietnam’s imperialist history, its long march south to escape Chinese influence and to occupy the lands of numerous tribes and nations, including Cambodians and Cham. The hero of her novel visits the land of the Cham and dreams of his ancestor who had fled from the “barbarians from the north” who “hunted you down. You bore arms against those who lived in the south. It was an unending circle of crimes … history is enmired in crime.”²⁴ The party denounced her, censored her, and placed her under house arrest for committing the crime of remembering those whom the party considered to be others. Even worse, she remembered people of her own side as having committed crimes. But while the party considered her a traitor, Western publishers and readers considered her to be a dissident who spoke for justice, a heroic author who could not be contained by communism’s provincial ideology. Banned at home, her novels were published abroad, for the West likes to translate the enemies of its enemies.

Duong Thu Huong’s case exemplifies the troubling, threatening, and seemingly unnatural quality of remembering others. She shows how one can be denounced by one’s own while being praised by others for the same exact act of recall. Neither denunciation nor praise is innocent, because both emerge from the ideologies of one side or the other. Both sides — if there happen to be only two — prefer to see themselves as being without ideology, with the other side guilty of playing politics, as if politics was a dirty word. A laundering of these dirty politics occurs in the move from remembering others to remembering others as our own. “We” can be said once again, without remembering that those included in the “we” fought each other at one point. This is the hope expressed in a statue such as that of the three soldiers, with its portrait of benevolent solidarity, a hope already dashed by Martin Luther King Jr. in his demand that Americans recognize the brutal solidarity of these men, arrayed against those Vietnamese others who are invisible at the site of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The scholar Paul Fussell also wanted to jar his fellow Americans from the comfort of remembering only their own. As he wrote about the Great War and modern memory, a war sixty years in his past, what he saw was that

my American readers had also experienced in Vietnam their own terrible and apparently pointless war of attrition, which made body counts a household phrase.… I hoped that the effect of the book on such readers might persuade them that even Gooks had feelings, that even they hated to die, and like us called for help or God or Mother when their agony became unbearable.²⁵

Was I not one of these others to whom Fussell gives the proper name of the Gook and yet does not name properly? If so, then I can say it is true: Gooks do have feelings.

As a Gook, in the eyes of some, I can testify that being remembered as the other is a dismembering experience, what we can call a disremembering. Disremembering is not simply the failure to remember. Disremembering is the unethical and paradoxical mode of forgetting at the same time as remembering, or, from the perspective of the other who is disremembered, of being simultaneously seen and not seen. Disremembering allows someone to see right through the other, an experience rendered so memorably by Ralph Ellison in the opening pages of Invisible Man. His narrator, the titular hero, runs into a white man who refuses to see him, and enraged, strikes back to force the white man to see him. Even beaten, however, the white man refuses to see him the way he wishes to be seen. That is because the other’s use of physical force may make the other visible, but only to turn him into a target. If the other wishes to transform ways of seeing, then the other must deploy the psychic forces of remembering, imagining, and narrating as well. Not satisfied with being disremembered, we who are others find that it is up to us to remember ourselves. Having carried ourselves over, or been brought over, from the other side — we Gooks, we goo-goos, we slopes, we dinks, we zipperheads, we slant-eyes, we yellow ones, we brown ones, we Japs, we Chinks, we ragheads, we sand niggers, we Orientals, we who cannot be distinguished between ourselves because we all look alike — we know that the condition of our being and our self-representation is that we are both ourselves and others. We are never without identity and never without ideology, whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not. Those people who believe themselves to be beyond identity and ideology will, sooner or later, charge us with identity and ideology if we dare to commit that most unnatural act of speaking up and out.

Thus, even though no one has called me, to my face, Gook or any of its equivalents, I know that that epithet exists to be aimed at me. No one had to call me that name, because American culture had already done so through the discourse of the Gook, myself as other struck by the slurs hurled from the airwaves of pop culture. My realization of my racialization, the first sting of a nervous condition untreatable by any type of medicine or surgery, except for the mnemonic kind, arrived early in my adolescence, through jarring encounters with fictions, with other people’s memories. At much too young an age, my preteen self read Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters (1977) and watched Apocalypse Now (1979). I have never forgotten the scene in Close Quarters where American soldiers gang rape a toothless Vietnamese prostitute, holding a gun to her head and giving her the choice of either blowing them all or being blown away. “After that, Claymore Face didn’t come around much, and nobody much cared.”²⁶ Nor did I ever forget the moment in Apocalypse Now when American sailors massacre a sampan full of civilians, the coup de grace delivered by Captain Willard when he executes the sole survivor — also a woman, since the Vietnamese woman is the ultimate Gook, different from the American soldier through race, culture, language, and gender. She is the complete and threatening object of both rapacious desire and murderous fear, the embodiment of the whole mysterious, enticing, forbidding, and dangerous country of Vietnam. These accounts of rape and murder were only stories by an author and artist intent on showing, without compromise, the horror of war, but fictional stories are another set of experiences as valid as historical ones. Stories can obliterate as much as weapons can, as philosopher Jean Baudrillard shows in his estimation of Apocalypse Now. Watching the movie, Baudrillard thinks that

the war in Vietnam “in itself” perhaps in fact never happened, it is a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and of the tropics, a psychotropic dream that had the goal neither of a victory nor of a policy at stake, but, rather, the sacrificial, excessive deployment of a power already filming itself as it unfolded, perhaps waiting for nothing but consecration by a superfilm, which completes the mass-spectacle effect of this war.²⁷

Baudrillard is not aesthetically wrong about the power of the story and the spectacle. He is just morally and ethically wrong. The war did in fact happen, and to suggest otherwise as he does only affirms the dread power of Western popular culture, its spectacles not even acknowledging the real bodies of the dead, only the dead extras on the screen.

Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememories,” from her novel Beloved, is useful here not only in clarifying the power of stories to both dismember the living and to bring the dead back to life, but to suggest that something needs to be done about such rememories. A rememory is a memory that inflicts physical and psychic blows; it is a sense that the past has not vanished but is solid as a house, present in all its trauma and malevolence. The most powerful kinds of stories, such as Close Quarters and Apocalypse Now, are rememories. Every time I thought of them, I experienced my readerly and spectatorial emotions all over again, intense feelings of disgust, horror, shame, and rage brought about by having witnessed what the scholar Sylvia Chong calls “the Oriental obscene.”²⁸ My body trembled and my voice shook, an emotional testament to the aesthetic power of these works as well as to their participation in the discourse of the Gook, herself a rememory. It was not that I was forgotten in these stories or that I did not see my reflection; no, I saw myself, but as the other, the Gook, and that, I knew, was how others might be seeing me, not just the audiences chortling in movie theaters but even thinkers such as Baudrillard, for whom the dead are an abstraction to be dismissed in favor of the more interesting topic, the power of the war machine and its cinematic squadrons.

To be forgotten altogether or to be disremembered — these are the choices left to the Southeast Asians of the former Indochina in the discourse of the Gook, as well as any other Asians unfortunate enough to be mistaken for such a creature. Even Maya Lin’s aesthetic triumph, itself a rememory, speaks in this discourse, despite, or perhaps because, Maya Lin herself can be seen in this racist fashion. When one is in hostile or indifferent country, the safest way to survive is to be silent and invisible, or, in Lin’s words, to see things from a distance as a third-person observer, far from the crossfire. If her body is invisible in the memorial, so are all the bodies like it, the ones belonging to those Southeast Asians whose names are nowhere to be found in the memorial. Marita Sturken states the case clearly:

the Vietnamese become unmentionable; they are conspicuously absent in their roles as collaborators, victims, enemies, or simply the people on whose land and over whom (supposedly) this war was fought.… Within the nationalist context of the Washington Mall, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial must necessarily “forget” the Vietnamese and cast the Vietnam veterans as the primary victims of the war.²⁹

The memorial shows that “remembering is in itself a form of forgetting,”³⁰ a mnemonic sleight of hand that many scholars of memory have observed, one that, in this case, substitutes fifty-eight thousand American soldiers for three million Vietnamese. As the photographer Philip Jones Griffiths observes, “Everyone should know one simple statistic: the Washington, D.C., memorial to the American war dead is 150 yards long; if a similar monument were built with the same density of names of the Vietnamese who died in it, [it] would be nine miles long.”³¹ This mnemonic reality for many Americans, where they and their soldiers are the victims, and not the three million Vietnamese, is nothing less than Orwellian.

But it is not only the Vietnamese who are invisible, forgettable, and unrecognized. The name of the Vietnam War erases other Southeast Asians, even from Sturken’s memory and sight (for if one cannot see people, one cannot remember them, and vice versa). Southeast Asians from Cambodia and Laos have not forgotten their living and their dead, as the poet Mai Neng Moua shows in her poem “D.C.”:

I stood my ground

It’s not enough that I am here

I want the imprints of their names

Some American proof that they were known

Their courage recognized

The sacrifices of their lives acknowledged.

Moua asks for recognition and acknowledgment of the Hmong soldier as a Vietnam veteran, just as South Vietnamese soldiers in the United States have done.³²

I know six who died there

Grandfather Soob Tseej Vws

Uncle Txooj Kuam Vws

Uncle Kim Vws

Uncle Looj Muas.

These foreign names must be spoken, must be written down, must be forced into the landscape of American sight, for recognition and acknowledgment only happen if one is remembered. In the absence of such recognition and acknowledgment, the forgotten and the disremembered must remember themselves, even if, as Moua concedes, memorial forms guarantee nothing. Tourists gathered

Around the memorial as if

It was an exotic exhibit

Talking loudly, laughing, downing

Their Evian in the humid heat

Disturbing the memories of chaos

Just another thing you do while you’re in D.C.³³

No aesthetic work is inherently powerful. Foreigners, youth, or the disinterested who do not carry these memories of the war may be unaffected, dismissive, blasé, bored, or unnerved. To them, and perhaps to the majority of future visitors, when living memory of the war is dead, the wall will be simply a wall.

Nevertheless, it is better to have a memorial that can be ignored than no memorial at all. Implicit in Moua’s poem is a common conviction among the forgotten and disremembered, which is that being forgotten, or forgetting others, is unjust, particularly if we are talking about a conflict in which it is in the interests of one side to suppress the memories of others. For the forgotten and disremembered, the important question is this: how can we recall the past in a way that does justice to the forgotten, the excluded, the oppressed, the dead, the ghosts? This question is central to an ethics of recalling others. It assumes both the injustice of forgetting others and the justice of remembering others. Ricoeur proposes the outlines for such an ethics of remembering others in his monumental Memory, History, Forgetting, where he argues that justice is a virtue always “turned toward others.… The duty of memory is the duty to do justice, through memories, to an other than the self.” And: “moral priority belongs to the victims.… The victim at issue here is the other victim, other than ourselves.”³⁴ In short, justice always resides with remembering the other.

Ricoeur’s approach to memory is powerful and persuasive, at least for anyone invested in resistance against forgetting or the demands of subordinated people for justice. In a similar vein, critic Paul Gilroy calls for a “principled exposure to the claims of otherness.”³⁵ Gilroy, like Ricoeur, and myself, too, advocates for the idea that “histories of suffering should not be allocated exclusively to their victims. If they were, the memory of the trauma would disappear as the living memory of it faded away.”³⁶ That is, it should not purely be the burden of victims to remember the injustices done to them. Placing the weight of memory solely on these injured parties would encourage them to see themselves only in terms of victimization. Treated as objects of pity, the temptation for victims is to mistake their otherness as their sole identity — the most visible and the most disparaged kind of identity politics, although not the only kind. An ethics of recalling others is defined, paradoxically, by acknowledging that those we consider to be others are neither other nor ideal. Instead, in as much as we consider ourselves to be subjects, these others, from their own point of view, are subjects as well.

As a subject, the other will resist being forgotten and will demand inclusion in the annals of memory. Like those who control the already established means of memory and who are content to remember only their own, this other will say always remember and never forget her experiences, her histories, and her memories. She will demand to have her name on the wall, her face on the sculpture, and the story of her people in the book. As something is always being forgotten and strangers are always appearing, this mode of remembering others is a perpetual motion machine, oriented toward inclusion and reconciliation. The ultimate goal of the most common form of this ethics is for the other to be incorporated in citizenship, commemorated in the nation’s rituals, cast in the nation’s epics, and blended into the ethical mode of remembering one’s own, until there is no meaningful difference between the other and the self. The secondary goal of this ethics, especially for those formerly cast as others, is to be empathetic to the ever-new others on the horizon.

If the ethics of remembering one’s own operates in every society, the ethics of remembering others is the refinement of remembering one’s own, at work only in those societies that see themselves as more inclusive, open, and tolerant. But as powerful as such an ethical model can be, it possibly can service war. This willingness to remember others and to allow others to remember themselves justifies the campaigns of open and tolerant societies against others not so ethically refined. America is the embodiment of such an ethics of remembering others, used both to call for greater inclusion of minorities within American borders and to justify war against strangers outside of the country. Southeast Asians were once these strangers and could be again, and those Southeast Asians who made it to America sometimes still feel themselves to be alien in American society. It is not surprising, then, that many Southeast Asian refugees and their descendants, brought to the United States by an American war, have been so willing to join the American military and American society in their War on Terror. As American history has shown, it has been the prospect of newer, more terrifying strangers that has encouraged us to bring familiar others closer, especially through enlisting them on our side in wars against these strangers. Fighting against terrorism and terror, these former others hope to affirm their belonging to America itself, in their own eyes and those of their fellow Americans.

3. On the Inhumanities

WHAT THESE REFUGEES AND THEIR descendants who wish to become American seek is recognition, which is intimately tied to memory. We remember those we recognize, and we recognize those we remember. Some of us, perhaps most of us, yearn to be remembered and recognized, by our intimates and our colleagues, by society and history. We want individuals whose regard we long for to recognize us, and we want to be seen as a part of the place in which we live or call home, where we claim belonging and where we ask for citizenship. Recognition becomes key to the movements for memory that create memorials, museums, and commemorations for victims, veterans, atrocities, battles, wars, and so on, all of which are tied, implicitly or explicitly, to the identities of interest groups and ethnic groups, cultures and races, nations and states. These ethics of recognizing self and others help to build inclusive societies and to heal wounds, but they also encourage us to overlook our ability to hurt others.

The temptation is always present to deny that we can do unjustified harm; it is the other’s ability to do damage that we tend to see as being unjustified. “If only it were all so simple!” protests Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”¹ Solzhenitsyn implies that while it is ethical and just to remember others and victims, it is also ethical and just to recognize our potential to harm, damage, and kill others, or to allow those actions to happen through complicity or turning a blind eye. Without such a recognition, we can make peace with old enemies only to continue wars with newer enemies not recognized as friends or even human. Identifying with the victim and the other in an act of sympathy, or identifying as the victim and the other in an act of empathy, has the unexpected, inhuman side effect of perpetuating the conditions for further victimization.²

Recognizing our potential for inhumanity contrasts with how calls for remembering one’s own and remembering others are based on the urge to think of one’s own as human, and then, ultimately, to think of others as human, too. But even as tolerant, humanistic societies have called for equality and human rights, they have never found a shortage of inhuman others to justify war and violence. Identifying with the human and denying one’s inhumanity, and the inhumanity of one’s own, is the ultimate kind of identity politics. It circulates through nationalism, capitalism, and racism, as well as through the humanities. Reminding ourselves that being human also means being inhuman is important simply because it is so easy to forget our inhumanity or to displace it onto other humans. The project of just memory is thus a work of the inhumanities rather than the humanities, for if the humanities have a hard time remembering the inhuman at the heart of civilization and culture, the inhumanities must remember the human, which is included in its very name.

If we do not recognize our capacity to victimize, then it would be difficult for us to prevent the victimization carried out on our behalf, or which we do ourselves. Likewise, the slogans to always remember and never forget, while seemingly inarguable on the surface, are sometimes, even often, tainted by piousness, sentimentality, or hypocrisy. When we say always remember and never forget, we usually mean to always remember and never forget what was done to us or to our friends and allies. Of the terrible things that we have done or condoned, the less said and the less remembered the better. More than this, what we really wish to remember and never forget is our humanity and the inhumanity of others. This model easily incorporates an ethics of remembering one’s own. As for an ethics of remembering others, it often encourages us to see others as human, which seems inarguably good. In contrast, however, an ethics of recognition says that the other is both human and inhuman, as are we. When we recognize our capacity to do harm, we can reconcile with others who we feel have hurt us. This ethics of recognition might be more of an antidote to war and conflict than remembering others, for if we recognize that we can do damage, then perhaps we would go to war less readily and be more open to reconciliation in its aftermath. Refusing to recognize our capacity to inflict damage does not preclude reconciliation with those who might have injured us, but it does encourage us to seek concessions and confessions from these others, who may themselves want the same from us. So it is that historically intractable conflicts continue, both sides seeing themselves as victims, or refusing to see themselves as potential or actual victimizers.³

Ricoeur’s ethical model, predicated on always identifying with the other and seeing the other as a victim, is powerful for those who see themselves as victims or sympathize and empathize with them. It urges us to see the other as damaged by injustice and compels us to take up the cause of justice for the other. But this ethical model also tempts us into believing that those we think of as others are always going to be so. This misrecognition stems from our refusal to grant the other the same flawed subjectivity we assume for ourselves. As we are not always just, neither is the other. The other can be unjust because even he or she can create others. And yet Ricoeur overlooks this by insisting that the other is a victim, or, as he puts it, “the other victim.” Ricoeur tends to mistake the other as always and ever the victim, and conversely, the victim as the other. This mistake tempts minorities and the Western Left as a whole and reveals two potential problems with the ethics of recalling others — either mistaking oneself as that idealized, innocent other, or idealizing the other as guilt-free while incriminating oneself. Both of these are variations of identity politics. When Rey Chow calls for an “ethics after idealism,” it is this idealization of identity and the other that she rightly speaks of and rejects, although she focuses her criticism on minorities as the ones who engage in identity politics. But nationalism is nothing more than an identity politics so triumphant that it can deny being about identity and politics, as nationalists accept both national identity and national politics as being simply natural.

So far as idealizing the other, the way the global antiwar movement usually saw the Vietnamese — and often still does — is an archetypal case of treating the other as victim and the victim as other, freezing them in perpetual suffering and noble heroism. Thus the antiwar movement elevated Ho Chi Minh to iconic status, waved the flag of the National Liberation Front, praised the communist Vietnamese as heroic revolutionaries defying American imperialism, accepted communist propaganda that the South Vietnamese were traitors or puppets, and was mostly blind to the Stalinist direction of the Vietnamese Communist Party. In the postwar years, the philosophical interventions of Ricoeur and his philosophical allies, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, have not completely persuaded some Western artists, critics, and leftists to avoid idealizing the other. Take, for example, the corollary to the discourse of the Gook, its not-so-distant cousin found in the discourse of the raghead, the hajji, and the sand nigger, epithets for the Muslim, the Arab, and the terrorist as the other. The impulse exists today for some to treat the Muslim and the Arab, and to a lesser extent the terrorist, in the same idealized fashion as the antiwar movement treated the Vietnamese.

Some of the work of philosopher Judith Butler after 9/11 illustrates this temptation, although she is not alone in succumbing to it. It is not that Butler is an idealist or not aware that terrorists should be held responsible for their actions. In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, she stresses the heinousness of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, as well as the viciousness of the American response in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo. But the force of the book is aimed at American accountability and the inability of Americans to grieve for the deaths of others. She demands that we reframe our understanding of war to include the losses of others and to contest the terms of recognition that dictate what we see and whom we recognize. The book concludes with an invocation of Vietnam: “it was the pictures of children burning and dying from napalm that brought the US public to a sense of shock, outrage, remorse, and grief. These were precisely pictures we were not supposed to see.” Without such pictures of Afghans, Iraqis, or Guantanamo detainees, “we will not return to a sense of ethical outrage that is, distinctively, for an Other, in the name of an Other.”⁴ Butler is right in being outraged at the vastly disproportionate death and suffering inflicted on America’s others by Americans, from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror. But ethical outrage is not enough, even though it may be more than many can allow themselves. The danger of ethical outrage is that it continues to reassert the centrality of the person feeling that emotion, which justifies viewing the other as a perpetual victim — hence the return to the infamous, horrific images of Vietnam, which remains a war rather than a country, and to the napalmed Tran Thi Kim Phuc, the “girl in the picture” as her biographer has called her, her arms forever extended in a pose somewhat like the crucifixion.⁵ For Americans, Iraq and Afghanistan may also, in the future, remain wars rather than countries for the exact same reasons of guilt, denial, and outrage.

In the urgency and the immediacy of her work, responding to American apathy and to an ongoing war, Butler cannot or will not treat the other as much more than a victim, or at best as an agent with vaguely understood motives and histories. As much as I also feel Butler’s ethical outrage, it appears to me that seeing the other only as a victim treats the other as an object of sympathy or pity, to be idealized or patronized. Existing as the object of or excuse for one’s theory or outrage, the other remains, at worst, unworthy of study, and, at best, beyond criticism. Not criticizing others and theorizing on their behalf further subjugates them by relegating the real work of empathy to ourselves. We are the antiheroes, the guilty ones who deserve criticism, which makes us the center of attention. In the case of Butler, the “we” is the West of which the Western Left is a part of and apart from. While the West may deserve criticism, this judgment need not come at the expense of turning others into (nearly) idealized victims or (almost) unknowable enemies. In her book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, which focuses on the war in Iraq, Butler is right in demanding the recognition of Western responsibility and Iraqi victimization. But she does not demand the recognition of Iraqis as political subjects, who not only are others but who themselves make others. Correct in pointing to Iraqi losses as lives that the West will not grieve, she nevertheless draws too clear of an opposition between Americans as killers and torturers and Iraqis as victims. Iraqis killed and tortured one another as well, and regardless of American culpability in creating the conditions for such warfare, the responsibility for such killing and torturing falls on those Iraqis who committed the acts. To be a subject, rather than to be an other, means that one can be guilty, and such guilt can be and should be examined as fully as Western guilt.

The kind of antiwar sentiment that keeps others in their (innocent) place also manages to keep the (guilty) West’s upper hand above the (pitiful) Rest. This maneuver toward continued superiority, through being able to feel guilt, and made the center of attention, is staged through Western dramas of self-flagellation. Thus, much of the American artistic and cultural work about the Vietnam War, even as it engages in anti-American criticism, places Americans firmly and crudely at the story’s center. Exhibit one: Brian de Palma’s film, Casualties of War, which depicts the true story of American soldiers who kidnap, gang rape, and murder a young Vietnamese woman. The result, cinematically, is a horrific rendition of victimization, where both the soldiers and de Palma brutalize the Vietnamese woman and silence her for good. Seen in one way, de Palma’s vision of the Vietnamese as victim forces viewers to confront what the journalist Nick Turse argues was standard American policy: “kill anything that moves.”⁶ But seen another way, de Palma’s story is not about the Vietnamese at all; it is about American guilt only, played out over a poor victim. He would go on to make Redacted, also based on a true story about American soldiers in Iraq who kidnap, gang rape, and kill an Iraqi girl. The movie not only repeats the graphic victimization, but also implies that the war in Iraq repeats the war in Vietnam. In both movies, the victim elicits pity and sympathy, but is silenced. Her lack of a voice allows Americans to talk on her behalf. She and all the others like her are transformed into perpetual victims interchangeable with their traumas, visible to Americans only when they stimulate American guilt.⁷ As victims, or as villains and revolutionary heroes, these others are never granted full subjectivity by the West, unlike those Westerners who hate them or sympathize with them.

An ethics of recognition involves a change in how we see the other, and in how we see ourselves as well, especially in relation to the other. “Ethics is an optics,” as Levinas argues, one intimately tied to war, violence, and the perception of the other.⁸ For Levinas, the “face of the Other” can either incite us to violence or invoke goodness and the possibility of justice.⁹ “Power, by essence murderous of the other, becomes faced with the other and ‘against all good sense,’ the impossibility of murder, the consideration of the other, or justice [sic].”¹⁰ He implies that the face of the Other — the sign of otherness itself — is found on actual others such as the widow, the stranger, and the orphan; we might say that the face of the other is found also on the slave, the refugee, the guerrilla, the enemy. This distinction between the other, who is a real person, versus the Other — a difficult philosophical concept expressing that which is prior to and beyond our selves — is the distinction Ricoeur glosses over when he says that memory is always for the other, always for justice. When speaking of justice, neither he nor Levinas are much concerned with actual others, despite briefly naming them as categories, in the case of Levinas. To deal with actual others, we would have to confront their lives, their cultures, their particularities, their names, and so on. In doing so, we would see that they are, like ourselves, generally self-interested. Their self-interest brings with it the uneasy, contradictory contaminations of worldly politics and histories.

Thus, while Ricoeur assumes that ethical memory is always oriented toward justice and the other, he avoids the question of what happens when competing claims to justice exist. Competing claims to justice always exist in regard to any contested event, such as war and its aftermath, but Ricoeur is not explicit about adjudicating justice, or at least the dirty, impure, pragmatic justice that actual others may care about. He is also silent on another, related question: if we deem some memories to be ethical, then must conflicting ones be unethical? Many on opposing sides of memory, presumably most, consider themselves ethical in regards to their remembrance of the past, although such subjective feeling does not mean they are indeed ethical. Implied in Ricoeur, and more explicit in Levinas, is the idea that these worldly claims to ethics and justice among actual others belongs in the realm of what Levinas calls “totality.” War, violence, and self-interest rule in totality, which is where we struggle for “freedom” at the expense of the other, whom we wish to turn into the “same.”¹¹ For Levinas, the face of the Other belongs to “infinity,”¹² where “the force of the Other is already and henceforth moral.”¹³ For Levinas and Ricoeur — and for Butler, too, who draws from Levinas — the ethical orientation and meaning of justice is not in dispute, for ethics and justice are always oriented toward others and an always-vanishing otherness, not toward the self or the same.¹⁴

The uncompromising, ethical demand for justice is inspiring and points toward the utopian horizon of a time when reconciliation, hospitality, and peace — all without limitations or compromises — is possible. But as Levinas says, and as Derrida says after him, and as so many of Derrida’s followers have repeated, that time is a future always yet “to come,” arriving under the sign of the Other.¹⁵ What is to be done in the present, with actual others, where the struggle over ethics and justice is often tied to people’s deeply rooted sense of past recriminations, where any ethical achievement will be inevitably compromised, where any act of justice has a limit, where small wars and total war continue to be fought? In this worldly realm of totality, many feel that they are the ones for whom justice needs to be done, even if they are the ones who invaded, conquered, or occupied. An ethics of recognition aims not only at the utopian world of infinity but also at this disagreeable and dirty world of totality, toward what the self has done, and the conditions that make those actions possible. Recognition draws on the visual language that Levinas uses when he thinks of ethics as optics, a way of seeing anew — in this case, seeing what we are capable of as individuals and collectives, given our role in creating the conditions for individual action. Without the latter kind of panoramic recognition, what Butler calls a reframing and what one might colloquially call seeing the bigger picture, the danger is that blame and responsibility would fall only on the self and the individual, rather than on societies, cultures, industries, states, and war machines.

Nevertheless, ethical recognition is oftentimes intimate rather than panoramic, explicitly about individuals, beginning from face-to-face confrontation, particularly at the moment of violence. Ethical recognition’s visual dimension is matched by trauma’s visual shock, the sight of horrible things leaving trauma “stored there in your eyes,” as Michael Herr says.¹⁶ The killer, or even the witness to killing, is traumatized by the act of killing, especially the most intimate kinds where the victim’s face can be seen. Long-distance killing by artillery and missiles does not have the commensurate effect on gunners, pilots, and bombardiers as killing someone with a knife, a gun, or perhaps a drone, when the killer can see the face of the one being killed.¹⁷ The face of the other returns to haunt the killer, as in Novel without a Name, where Duong Thu Huong describes how the war dead “would never leave us, those faces … accusatory, demanding justice.”¹⁸ Perhaps that is why, in the republican cemetery outside of Saigon, somebody scratched out the eyes and faces of the South Vietnamese dead.

As for rape, it cannot be conducted except on face-to-face terms, which is one reason why it is traumatic for its victims, and perhaps for its perpetrators; it’s hard to say about the latter, since so few admit to rape, while many will admit to killing. The admission to rape is one of the most striking and disturbing parts of Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters. Claymore Face’s nickname is telling, especially if we think, as Levinas does, that “violence can only aim at a face.”¹⁹ Her acne-scarred visage is ruined as if blasted by a claymore mine, an antipersonnel device that spews deadly bursts of pellets. Already defaced by the Marines through the image and language of her nickname, she will be defaced again by their choice to orally rape her. What happens to her, and what the reader feels about her fate, illustrates the claim by Levinas about the face “making murder possible and impossible” (we could substitute rape for murder, since rape is a violent act on a continuum with murder).²⁰ On the one hand, her name evokes the face of the other as it incites the murderous, sexual, and industrial violence of the American military machine, embodied in the claymore mine and the Marines. On the other hand, her face should make murder or rape impossible, at least for those readers who feel rage, grief, or at least discomfort at what they have witnessed. That the face of the other makes murder and rape both possible and impossible shows that we who see the other as human or inhuman are ourselves both human and inhuman. We are tempted to identify with the other and also to eliminate the other, the two impulses able to exist in the same person, and certainly in the same culture.

The tendency to remember only the just, ethical part of ourselves that identifies with the other, and forget the unjust, unethical part which would kill the other, can be seen in yet another comforting cliché of memory: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”²¹ Milan Kundera’s oft-quoted words are a beautiful statement concerning the human will. Everyone who agrees with Kundera identifies with man and memory against power and forgetting. The opposition, however, is false, beginning with its separation of man from power, with man on the side of “memory,” while power is interested in “forgetting.” Perhaps true power does not reside with any individual, as the philosopher Michel Foucault claims, instead circulating beyond the grasp of any individual, so that “power is everywhere.”²² But even on Foucault’s terms, man as a whole is inextricably intertwined with power. Notions of man or humanity are constituted through power, through the ability of some to claim their humanity (while denying the humanity of others). Outside of Foucault’s concerns, individuals do commit acts of power, and the state or the group that abuses power and wishes to erase the traces of its abusiveness is composed of individuals. Man, individual or collective, is just as interested in forgetting what he has done as he is in remembering what was done to him. And the powerful are not only interested in forgetting whom they have abused but also in remembering what they have accomplished. Man is ever and always implicated in power, and no one is innocent except the infant and the most abject victim. Power must be used, and the only question is whether it will be used ethically. Kundera’s epigram turns power into something that can only be abused, even as it foregrounds the struggle against power, which can itself only be a form of power. Rather than retreat from our implication in power, we should consider exercising power as a necessary action in need of ethical principles that look beyond the idealizations of heroes and villains, good and bad, and us and them. With neither ethical principles nor an awareness of our implication in power, we are tempted, as in Kundera’s epigram, to take up the humanist cry of remembering humanity against an inhuman state, conveniently forgetting that an inhuman state would not exist without the inhumanity within man, and vice versa. The state, of course, is us.

If we cannot recognize our ability to use and abuse power, then we make it easier to see ourselves purely as victims. Even more, we are able to justify vengeance against those who we believe have done harm to us. It is no coincidence that Kundera makes his claim in a Cold War environment, where his anticommunist statement circulates as cliché in an anticommunist world that cannot see itself as able to abuse power, unlike the communist world. The stereotypical, reassuring dynamic of memory and forgetting, of (free) man against the amnesiac state and its abuse of power, is inseparable from the Cold War climate, where trite claims make us feel warm and fuzzy about how we are on the side of memory and liberation, incapable of victimization. The War on Terror inherits these claims and the associated logic of seeing ourselves only as victims, as Americans did after 9/11. In one frame, it is true that Americans were victims. In another frame, as Butler argues, this point of view isolated 9/11 from the complicated history preceding it and justified unleashing inhuman acts of war by the United States on those deemed as enemies. But an ethics of recognition should apply not only to Americans; it should also apply to America’s enemies or perceived enemies, who also see themselves as victims. Any side in a conflict needs the optical character recognition provided by this ethics, the ability to see not only the flaws of our enemies and others but our own fundamentally flawed character. Without this mutual recognition, a genuine reconciliation will be difficult to achieve.

Perhaps such an ethics of recognition would lead only to retribution or resignation. Retribution can be seen in how some Americans in the postwar era learned that what they needed to do was to “empathize with the enemy,” in the words of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.²³ The implication is that such a mode of empathy helps us understand our other better in order to control him (or kill him). Thus, the counterinsurgency field manual for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was written by General David Petraeus, who drew on his experiences from the war in Vietnam to refine military techniques and to encourage greater cultural sensitivity among American forces toward the peoples of the lands they occupied. For Americans, multiculturalism at home finds an overseas corollary via culturally sensitive warfare. In both cases, studying difference and understanding the other are instrumental: they serve the purpose of domesticating others and rendering them harmless. As for resignation, it is the sense that if we are indeed human and inhuman, then nothing can be done about the inhumanities we commit. Resignation takes the form of inaction, which is the most common way by which those who see themselves as human condone inhuman behavior.

Retribution and resignation can be found in the Khmer Rouge era of Cambodia and its aftermath, but we also find here an ethics of recognition and a struggle to see the face of the Other. This ethics is exemplified in the work of filmmaker Rithy Panh, the most important artist to confront the genocide. For him and many others, the policies and horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime are symbolized in S-21, the infamous prison and death camp located in the capital of Phnom Penh.²⁴ During the Khmer Rouge reign of 1975 to 1979, some seventeen thousand men, women, and children entered S-21, where they were photographed, interrogated, tortured, and killed. Seven survived by one count, a dozen by another, perhaps a couple hundred at most (as is usually the case in a poor country, the bureaucracy has yet to catch up with the disaster). S-21 was the most extreme manifestation of an extreme regime whose policies of execution and forced labor led to the death, through murder, starvation, and illness, of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians out of a population of about 7 million. During this time, the Khmer Rouge created the faceless Angkar, or Organization, that ruled all of Cambodian society, mandating uniform haircuts and clothing, eliminating family relations and human affections, and transforming the entire population into a compulsory labor force. Khmer Rouge policies were retribution against an entire society and the “new people,” a population who embodied Western influence and class inequality (in contrast to the “base people,” the peasantry).²⁵ “Only the deaf, the dumb, and the mute would survive,” becoming faceless parts of a revolutionary society, a utopia that would erase the unequal past and begin anew from Year Zero.²⁶ This was the drive for totality of which Levinas speaks, the impulse to subsume everything, all difference, all others, into the same. Colonialism was also an expression of this drive for totality. What the French did to the Khmer foreshadowed the extermination that the Khmer would do to themselves and any others they found in Cambodia.

The United Nations refuses to use genocide to describe what happened to the Cambodian people, reasoning that it was Khmer killing Khmer in most instances, while a genocide is one ethnic group singling out another. Rithy Panh refuses this bureaucratic interpretation when he (along with cowriter Christophe Bataille) says that “the invention of a group within a larger group, of a group of human beings considered different, dangerous, toxic, suitable for destruction — is that not the very definition of genocide?”²⁷ Panh calls this culling “the elimination,” the title of his powerful, spare, unsentimental memoir of having survived the genocide as a teenager and ultimately confronting the only Khmer Rouge official convicted at that time of any crimes against humanity, the commandant of S-21, Duch. The Elimination is a meditation on the effects of the genocide and the psychology of the perpetrators, represented by Duch, who allows Panh to interview him repeatedly, face to face. “He’s a man who searches out and seizes upon the weaknesses of others. A man who stalks his humanity. A disturbing man. I don’t remember that he ever left me without a laugh or a smile.”²⁸ Duch’s defense lawyer, Kar Savuth, himself a genocide survivor, said

when he first met Duch, the former Khmer Rouge commandant had cried, overwhelmed by guilt, then gathered himself, pointing out that the first commandant of S-21 had been killed and that he knew it was only a matter of time before he himself would have been killed, too. Duch asked Kar Savuth a question: If they told you they were going to kill your family, what would you have done? And Kar Savuth said, “I would have done exactly what you did.”²⁹

Duch tries to impress on Panh that he, too, would have done the same, an implication that Panh refuses. While Duch says he convinced Kar Savuth that he might have done the same things, Panh tries to convince Duch that he must take responsibility for his actions. Both are versions of this ethical need to recognize the inhuman within the human, and vice versa. “He’s human at every instant,” Panh says of Duch. “That’s the reason why he can be judged and condemned. No one can rightly authorize himself to humanize or dehumanize anyone. But no one can occupy Duch’s place in the human community. No one can duplicate his biographical, intellectual, and psychological trajectory.”³⁰ Duch is both man and human and someone outside of the human community. He is an other even as he eliminated others, a creature who can only reclaim his humanity through acknowledging what he has done.

Panh does not urge this recognition only at the level of the individual. Duch is “man, entirely man,” but he is also the face of the regime.³¹ Duch is a unique perpetrator, and perhaps victim, but the catalog of horrors he oversaw, exceeding anything dreamed up by Hollywood, are an outcome of history and the species:

The crimes committed by Democratic Kampuchea, and the intention behind those crimes, were incontrovertibly human; they involved man in his universality, man in his entirety, man in his history and in his politics. No one can consider those crimes as a geographical peculiarity or a historical oddity; on the contrary the twentieth century reached its fulfillment in that place; the crimes in Cambodia can even be taken to represent the whole twentieth century. This formulation is excessive, to be sure, but its very excess reveals a truth: It was in the Enlightenment that those crimes took place. At the same time I don’t believe that.³²

Panh hesitates on whether the genocide is the culmination of Western thinking, but he does not hesitate, in the end, on demanding that we see how “the history of Cambodia is in the deepest sense our history, human history.”³³ The genocide, while extreme, was not marginal, provincial, or aberrant, but as fundamental an expression of inhumanity — and therefore of humanity — as a number of horrific events before and since, as universal, in its abomination, as great art is in its beauty. “I believe in the universality of the Khmer Rouge’s crime,” Panh says, “just as the Khmer Rouge believed in the universality of their utopia.”³⁴

Confronting this universality of the genocide and the simultaneous inhumanity and humanity of Duch, the Everyman of the Khmer Rouge, Panh does not allow himself either retribution or resignation. If one sign of inhumanity is destruction, then one sign of humanity is creation, something Panh knows well as an artist. Panh creates art to address Duch, the genocide, and his personal experience of survival and witnessing most of his family die from starvation and illness. He recounts the experience through The Elimination as well as through his feature film The Missing Picture, a moving and brilliant autobiography and documentary about his family’s and country’s fates. In an unexpected gesture, Panh recreates the world of the Khmer Rouge era through the use of hand-carved figurines that stand in for himself and the people of whom he talks. The aesthetic decision is as persuasive and satisfying as Art Spiegelman’s turn to comics in Maus for addressing the Holocaust. He drew Nazis as cats and Jews as mice, and Panh, facing an equally incomprehensible death world, turned to inhuman figurines as one way to approach inhumanity. The immobilized faces of these figurines achieve an expressive, emotional transfiguration when fused with the film’s music, narration, and miniature mise-en-scènes, the diorama-like recreations of the labor camps, fields, huts, and hospital where Panh’s family worked and died from starvation and illness, as well as the room where Panh, lying under a picture of Sigmund Freud, interrogates his memories as his dead relatives observe him. Immobility is part of the aesthetic, for like characters in photographs, these figurines do not move but are fixed, as memories sometimes are. Unlike photographs, however, these figurines and their settings are three-dimensional, carved into existence by the artist Mang Satire. Artistic efforts such as Panh’s and Mang’s are the opposite of resignation, and they are not retributions. Instead, these artists seek to return, again and again, to the scene of the crime in an effort to understand it. Their art is one crucial way of seeing the faces of others, possibly even the face of the Other.

Addressing the past and the most horrific of horrors, Panh expresses faith in the power of his art: “My films are oriented toward knowledge; everything is based on reading, reflection, research work. But I also believe in form, in colors, in light, in framing and editing. I believe in poetry. Is that a shocking thought? No. The Khmer Rouge didn’t break everything.”³⁵ Form also interested the Khmer Rouge. People needed to behave, dress, and speak in certain ways, on penalty of death. “Control of bodies, control of minds: the program was clear. I was without a place, without a face, without a name, without a family. I’d been subsumed into the big, black tunic of the organization.”³⁶ Once free from that Organization, Panh would endeavor over decades and multiple works of art to find the form that could speak to the past and to the difficulty of seeing the human in the inhuman, and vice versa. The result, The Elimination and The Missing Picture, are two of the finest works of art and memory to deal with the genocide, powerful partly because they abolish the sentimentality, the aesthetic weaknesses, and the fear of assigning responsibility to Western countries that limit so many works from other Cambodians about the genocide. He confronts the difficult possibility that

after thirty years, the Khmer Rouge remain victorious: The dead are dead, and they’ve been erased from the face of the earth. Their commemorative stele is us. But there’s another stele: the work of research, of understanding, of explication. This isn’t some sad passion; it’s a struggle against elimination. Of course such work doesn’t raise the dead. It doesn’t seek out bad ground or ashes. And of course this work doesn’t bring us rest. Doesn’t mellow us. But it gives us back our humanity, our intelligence, our history. Sometime it even ennobles us. It makes us alive.³⁷

The elimination was characterized by erasing not only the dead but effacing the living, stripped of their individuality. “I had no family. I had no name. I had no face. And so, because I was nothing anymore, I was still alive,” Panh says.³⁸ “When you don’t have a name it’s as though you don’t have a face; you’re easy to forget.”³⁹

As he works to remember, Panh is concerned with “the faces of the torturers. Obviously I’ve met a certain number of them. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they’re arrogant. Sometimes they’re agitated. Often they seem insensible. Stubborn. Yes, torturers can be sad too.”⁴⁰ In his documentary S-21, Panh meets several of the prison’s guards and torturers and persuades them to recreate and repeat their daily actions, their acts of interrogation and torture, grown men recalling their lives as teenagers. From Panh’s point of view, these men are others, living embodiments of a mystery he seeks to understand — how did this genocide happen? How did people do this? Why is no one held responsible? These questions also interest filmmaker Socheata Poeuv. In her documentary New Year Baby, she brings her father from America back to Cambodia and surprises him by arranging a meeting with a former Khmer Rouge cadre. Her father, a survivor of the era, hates the Khmer Rouge and does not want to meet the cadre, but Poeuv says, “I want to see his face.” Like many others, “I didn’t understand how a whole country could suffer through this and not demand justice.” But in a country divided into new people and base people, in which many were the active agents of death but many more were silent witnesses and complicit spectators who did nothing in order to survive, is it a surprise how difficult it is to achieve justice? Who is responsible? While the United Nations and the Cambodian government are jointly involved in prosecuting the five highest-ranking Khmer Rouge leaders (of whom Duch, the lowest-ranking, was the first convicted), the legal effort to bring justice is at best symbolic, since thousands of real murderers will not be prosecuted, and hundreds of thousands of complicit Khmer will not be touched or named.

Like some of the Khmer Rouge who have, more or less, confessed, Duch admits to certain actions (and not others), but deflects his responsibility by pointing to a force beyond him, Angkar, or the Organization, whose faceless presence so terrified the victims of the Khmer Rouge. The Organization spoke through its cadres, but it was unclear to almost everyone, including most of the cadres, who the Organization was. To Cambodians, was the Organization not power itself, separated from any individual man? Is this excision what allows Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era to deny responsibility, eliminating themselves from power, from being a part of or complicit with the Organization? Even the most senior Khmer Rouge, the ones on trial, deny knowledge of hundreds of thousands dying (if, they said, hundreds of thousands even died). Would reconciliation be possible between the victims and the victimizers if the victimizers recognized even their complicity, much less their responsibility? The problem is that few are willing to acknowledge themselves as victimizers, even after admitting to performing certain harmful deeds. Can they face their deeds? Can they face their inaction? Can they come face to face with themselves?

At S-21, Panh films the former guards and notes: “The torturer’s face: lost amid the images that none of them explicates, as if there were an insuperable boundary. The unnameable.”⁴¹ Panh alludes here to both the images of horror that exist in the mind’s eye for witnesses and for those who have only heard of the crimes, and also to the faces of all the prisoners, photographed on entry to S-21. Some of those photos are now featured in the museum that S-21 has become. They are victims, but given the lack of captions, names, and identification, most visitors do not know that a good number of these victims were themselves Khmer Rouge cadres who had fallen afoul of the Organization, including former torturers and guards at S-21.⁴² The Khmer Rouge used S-21 to torture and kill its own cadres, as well as foreigners, minorities, intellectuals, and so on. The faces of victimizers who became victims are the most visible rendition of the general problem that the Khmer Rouge era and its aftermath represents for a human and inhuman history: the reluctance to recognize and to reconcile with one’s capacity to harm others. When we refuse to see victims as capable of violence, we allow ourselves to imagine that we are the same way.

So it is that the rest of the world looks with horror at Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge and wonders how the genocide happened, when the reality is that it could have happened anywhere with the right “inhuman conditions,” to steal Pheng Cheah’s title. Cheah’s thinking illustrates the poststructuralist tendency in one branch of the humanities, which Panh departs from. Cheah, like his influencer, Foucault, argues that it is a mistake to think of the human and the soul as being divine creations. Instead, they are created by power and should be seen as effects of power. This power is not human in the sense that it is not wielded completely by any individual. Power exceeds individuals, and we are subject to it. This is the inhuman condition, according to Cheah. Derrida also influences Cheah, and in a typically Derridean reversal, Cheah argues that the inhuman precedes the human, not the other way around. In conventional thinking, inhumanity is a deformation of an original humanity, which is what leads to the usual sentimental, humanist hand-wringing over the inhuman behavior of various individuals, tribes, parties, and nations. For Cheah, to insist on the priority of humanity is a fundamental misrecognition, leading to a focus on the inhuman as a moral aberration instead of as a condition for humanity. But while Cheah is not interested in the more mundane, moral notion of the inhuman, Panh insists that it is impossible to think of the inhuman only on the philosophical terms that Cheah proposes.

While it is critical to recognize inhumanity as an outcome of civilization and its privileging of the human, one must also confront the inhuman in terms of individual culpability and action, as a deformation of the human, as a question of responsibility that cannot be deflected by a turn to the structuring force of power. For Cambodian society in general, horror consists not only of being victimized but also of victimizing others. To speak of Cambodians in this way is not to deny history or power: the responsibility of the French in colonizing Cambodia, the Americans in bombing the country, the North Vietnamese in extending their war through the country, or the Chinese in supporting the Khmer Rouge even with knowledge of their atrocities. To speak of Cambodians as bearing widespread responsibility for the genocide is not to point to them as culturally unique in their ability to commit murder or allow it to happen. As the writer W. G. Sebald points out regarding Germans, “it’s the ones who have a conscience who die early, it grinds you down. The fascist supporters live forever. Or the passive resisters. That’s what they all are now in their own minds … there is no difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration — it’s the same thing.”⁴³ What is perhaps unique is that unlike the German or other instances of mass murder, Cambodians of the ethnic majority who killed each other or witnessed each others’ deaths wore the same (ethnic) face. So it is that Cambodians cannot solely blame their crimes on the incitement of outsiders or (ethnic) others, which compels them to look at themselves as one reason for what happened, a task they may have a hard time doing.

The Khmer Rouge rendered others inhuman in order to destroy them with inhuman behavior, but in the aftermath of their rule most of those differences disappeared, leaving it clear that those others were not really other, if we speak only of the ethnic majority. For Panh, Duch is the face of this situation, where the line between human and inhuman has been crossed, as it was for the rest of the former Khmer Rouge, now embedded too deeply in Cambodian society to be extricated easily. But between victim and victimizer exists a population in between — the complicit, the witness, the bystander, the resigned. The Khmer Rouge invoked this population as the reason for their cause — peasants exploited by French colonization and Cambodian hierarchy, then bombed by American planes and misled by the Khmer Rouge. Panh points out that they are still poor. If they were not on the side of justice during the Khmer Rouge era, they are also people for whom justice has not been done in the years afterward. Their situation is absurd, horrible, a low-level and continuous crime that has lasted centuries.

Does Duch laugh because he sees this absurdity? “I could hardly believe it — it was too beautiful, too easy: Laughter bursts out in the midst of mass crime. Duch has a ‘full-throated’ laugh: I can’t think of another way to describe it.”⁴⁴ Strangely enough, a laughing face stands out amid all the faces of the dead and the soon to be dead at S-21. It seems inexplicable that anyone could laugh in this place, the most disturbing museum or memorial I had ever visited, including the extermination camps of Europe. This is a drawn face, not a human face, the slash through its laughing visage the universal sign of prohibition, here commanding the visitor not to laugh. The sign itself says Keep silent. Sign and face testify that someone has laughed here, and not just Duch. While I was there, teenage foreign tourists laughed in the corridor of the isolation cells. Why do some visitors laugh? Out of nervousness, perhaps, for if one is a foreigner visiting this place during one’s lunch break or on holiday, what is one supposed to say? Or if one is local, perhaps the laughter covers up the tears or the disbelief, a polite way of hiding how distraught or uncomfortable one may be. Perhaps what the laughter mocks is not the dead, but the authority embodied in memorials. This authority is pedagogical, and who has never wanted to laugh at authority and pedagogy? This authority trains visitors in the proper etiquette of memory and mourning. This authority says that this is not a laughing matter and to always remember and never forget. This authority wants us to forget its own power, and how the crimes recorded by these memorials were not committed by monsters and enemies of the state. These crimes were committed by humans whose deeds would have been lionized if their state and side had triumphed. Although laughter may not be a polite response, even an inhuman one, it is possibly understandable, aligning the one who laughs with the devil’s subversion, as Kundera claims in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The laughter of angels, he says, is the sound of those in power. But should one always be aligned with the angels? Rather than just believe that devils are fallen angels, might it not be the case that angels are triumphant devils?⁴⁵

In the terms of Levinas, the face of the Other calls out for goodness and for justice, demanding that “You shall not commit murder,” especially against what he calls the Stranger.⁴⁶ In his quasi-religious language — the Other exists on high, in God’s realm, in infinity⁴⁷—Levinas is on the side of the angels, feeling sympathy for the Stranger rather than the Devil, looking down on an earthbound totality where warfare and imperialism are the law of the land. He wills himself to believe in his ethics, in the idea that “to be for the Other is to be good.”⁴⁸ But he concedes that “the Other … is situated in the region from which death, possibly murder, comes.”⁴⁹ When the Khmer Rouge arrived triumphantly in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, they were strangers and others to the city’s population. If everyone on all sides treated their others as if they themselves wore the face of the Other, then perhaps the ethical and moral goodness called for by Levinas would be achieved. But the others who were the Khmer Rouge brought death, and who is to say that the face of the Other worn by them was not just as real as the one Levinas longs for? What if the face of the Other heralded not justice but terror? In our contemporary wars waged for and against radical Islam, could the masked face of the terrorist be the face of the Other to the West? What if justice and terror were one and the same? The Khmer Rouge and the radical Islamists certainly believe that they are on the side of justice, as do the Western states with their beliefs in tolerance, free speech, freedom of religion, and airpower.

No wonder that some philosophers, like many other people, turn away from the possibility of hell and resort to faith in heaven, the future that is yet to come. The philosophical equivalent of faith is the secular belief that the Other compels us to justice (which, in poststructuralist thinking, need never be defined). If we wish to live as a species, we need to hold on to that faith, but we also need to confront our doubt. It is possible that the Other is a killer, and that we ourselves may be killers or complicit in killing. If so — and if Duch is simply another case of the “banality of evil,” the term Hannah Arendt coined to speak of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann — the lesson to be learned from Duch’s example is that the banality of evil has generally been reserved by the West for itself, as a sign of subjectivity, of agency, of centrality, even for the most unimportant of Westerners who functioned as nothing more than cogs in the war machine. Excluding others from the banality of evil denies them that same right to subjectivity found in villianous behavior. In contrast, to make others the subject of the banality of evil is to renounce the patronizing pity of the West, which is tempting for others to themselves assume. Pitying oneself, for others, is always detrimental, for those who believe that they cannot do evil will in the end do evil, which is what happened in Cambodia and in many nations that threw off Western domination.

To put this ethical conundrum of the Other in the most schematic way possible, here is how the various modes of ethical memory work. In the ethics of remembering one’s own, the simplest and most explicitly conservative mode, we remember our humanity and the inhumanity of others, while we forget our inhumanity and the humanity of others. This is the ethical mode most conducive to war, patriotism, and jingoism, as it reduces our others to the flattest of enemies. The more complex ethics of remembering others operates in two registers, the liberal one where we remember our humanity and the radical one where we remember our inhumanity. In both registers, we remember the humanity of others and forget their inhumanity. The liberal register where we remember our humanity is also conducive to war, although war usually carried out in humanitarian guises, as rescue operations for the good other (which may require us killing, with great regret, the bad other). The more radical version, where we remember our inhumanity, is the driving force behind antiwar feeling, as we worry about the terrible things we can do. And yet there is a level of deception in this radical register, too, for if we also see only the humanity of others, and not their inhumanity, we are not seeing them in the same way we see ourselves. So it is that in the name of the other’s humanity, we consign the other to subordinate, simplified, and secondary status in contrast to our more complex selves. While we are capable of dying and killing, of tragedy and guilt, of the whole panoply of human and inhuman action and feeling, the other is only capable of being killed, perpetually pegged as an object of our seemingly well-intended pity. To avoid simplifying the other, the ethics of recognition demands that we remember our humanity and inhumanity, and that we remember the humanity and inhumanity of others as well. As for what this ethics of recognition asks us to forget — it is the idea that anyone or any nation or any people has a unique claim to humanity, to suffering, to pain, to being the exceptional victim, a claim that almost certainly will lead us down a road to further vengeance enacted in the name of that victim. The fact of the matter is that however many millions may have died during our particular tragedy, millions more have died in other tragedies no less tragic.

Rithy Panh’s memoir and films foreground this ethics of recognition and make a daring claim: Cambodia belongs in the center of world history because of the humanity and the inhumanity of the Khmer. This is an important claim for two reasons. The first and most obvious reason is simply that the claim moves Cambodia and the Khmer people from margin to center. This is also the less interesting reason, given that making the marginalized more visible leaves the periphery intact for new others to inhabit. The more important reason is the assertion of inhumanity, for the other’s move from margin to center in Western discourse is most often premised on asserting the other’s humanity. By rejecting this sentimental, heartwarming reasoning, Panh’s work affirms the importance, and the difficulty, of grappling with inhumanity, both the inhumanity of the West and the inhumanity of its others (which is to say, from the perspectives of those others, us). The face of the Other is thus, even in its name, a misnomer. It tempts us to pity others, to see only the singular face of their suffering. In reality, the Other always has at least two faces, human and inhuman.

These two faces are both evident in one picture on the walls of S-21, on a second-floor exhibition room, where Duch is shown at trial. There is his face, but it has been defaced. Visitors have scrawled insults and obscenities over it. He is only a man, perhaps one of exceptional ability but not an alien, and they do not like what they see, precisely because he looks no different than us. His resemblance to us and our resemblance to him causes fear, which is why some visitors deface him. An ethics of recognition would prevent us from defacing him, from misrecognizing him as the devil incarnate, for the resemblance to the human is what we must remember if we hope not to repeat atrocities. Ethics is optics, and it demands that we see how Duch is man, human and inhuman. We must continue to look at the horrors done by humans like him if we are to learn anything, if we are to imagine not just a hopeful utopian future but also an alternate dystopian one where, if the Khmer Rouge had succeeded, Duch would not be a devil but an angel. This would force us to ask whether those we imagine as angels today are not simply triumphant devils who have written their own stories, in the manner of so many bomb-launching bureaucrats and elected officials with ghostwritten memoirs.

For artists, looking, remembering, and creating art are themselves ways of recognizing the ambiguities of the human and inhuman. As Panh says toward the end of The Missing Picture, “There are many things that man should not see or know. Should he see them, he’d be better off dying. But should any of us see or know these things, then we must live to tell of them.… I make this picture. I look at it. I cherish it. I hold it in my hand like a beloved face. This is the picture I now hand over to you, so that it never ceases to seek us out.” Unlike Levinas, who turns the face of the Other into the face of goodness, Panh sees two faces — the beloved face he offers us and the face of Duch, torturer, tormentor, and teacher. Panh nevertheless follows Levinas when the philosopher calls “justice this face to face approach, in conversation,”⁵⁰ which is “an ethical relation.”⁵¹ The interviews with Duch are this conversation, this relationship with the other that aims for justice through dialogue. The relationship with the reader of The Elimination and the viewer of The Missing Picture are conversations as well; Panh is our other and we are the others to him. Justice is found in this aesthetic relationship, too — justice on the ground of art and in even more worldly terms, on the ground of history and our understanding of humanity and inhumanity. In wanting to recognize Duch as both human and inhuman, Panh enacts an ethics of recognition that both affirms the importance of infinity and justice, the way we want the world to be, and which also demands a confrontation with totality, the way the world was or is. An ethics of recognition that confronts the totality around us and within us reveals the stereoscopic simultaneity of human and inhuman. So it is that Panh turns to figurines to approach the humanity of victims, and the S-21 museum turns to the picture of the laughing face to approach the inhuman response to suffering. Missing in both of these renditions is the actual human face, the photographed face shown in S-21. With this absence comes the suggestion that we need the artist as well as the philosopher to sketch for us an ethics of recognition, to create for us a picture of the inhuman face.