Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

Just Forgetting

WE MUST REMEMBER in order to live, but we must also forget. Too much remembering and too much forgetting are both fatal, certainly to ourselves, perhaps to others. This is why demands to always remember and never forget eventually face calls to reconcile and forgive. The cycle works in reverse as well, when we respond to amnesia by calling for history. But when can we forget? As Paul Ricoeur argues, there are unjust and just ways of forgetting, as there are unjust and just ways of remembering. Unjust ways of forgetting are much more common than just ones. They involve leaving behind a past that we have not dealt with in adequate ways. We ignore that past, we pretend it did not exist, or we write its history to serve a prejudicial agenda. Sometimes we conduct these actions under the guise of reconciliation, as when former enemies agree on treaties that allow them to be friends, without addressing the history of violence that binds them. In regard to my war, all of these modes of unjust forgetting have happened or are happening.

Whether we are winners or losers when it comes to war, the challenge of forgetting is inextricably tied to the question of forgiving. Winners may find it somewhat easier to be magnanimous and forgiving, while losers are perhaps easier to forgive, given their suffering. But most types of forgiveness are compromised, and a just forgetting will not happen unless we meet the conditions of just memory or until we extend genuine forgiveness. Forgetting can be difficult when both war’s winners and losers attempt to portray themselves virtuously, as they usually do. They see themselves as victims, never victimizers. Defeat aggravates this sentiment, as is the case in the community in which I was raised, the Vietnamese refugees in America who lost everything except their memories. They have valid reasons to remember their past, but they also tend to forget, particularly in public commemoration, the venality of the southern Vietnamese regime, the violence committed by their own soldiers — who happen to be their fathers, brothers, and sons — and how their sentiments may be viewed from elsewhere. Hence the bracing quality of Nguyen Huy Thiep’s short story, “Khong Khoc O California,” or “Don’t Cry in California.” The story’s narrator writes from Vietnam to his brethren in exile and says, “Vietnamese people, don’t cry in California,” which is “perhaps the most beautiful place on earth.”¹ He also calls out to all the outposts of Vietnamese exile: Louisiana, the thirteenth district of Paris, Berlin, Sidney, and Tokyo. He enjoins the diaspora to “Remember me, remember your homeland,” “the place you long to see.”² The narrator, something of a mess after his lover abandoned him for California, believes these Vietnamese exiles and refugees, steeping in their melancholy, loss, and rage, should recognize what they have gained as much as what they have lost. While they might justify crying for themselves, perhaps they would stop crying if they recognized others, namely their own people who had stayed in the land that they left behind. Otherwise, they suffer the fate of all exiles, who, to borrow from Baudelaire, are “relentlessly gnawed by longing.”

One way to overcome one’s own grief and to haul oneself out of the morass of memory is to remember others, to see oneself in relationship to others, and to look at oneself with detachment. Or, as spiritual guide Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, “People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”³ In not so spiritual a fashion, Thiep’s narrator struggles to see his own suffering in relation to the suffering of others. Recognizing that he is a “bum” with “decaying teeth” who “deals heroin,” he reaches out to his lost love and all those like her in exile. The story reaches the level of allegory when the narrator comes to stand in for Vietnam, describing himself as afflicted with “inflation,” someone “retarded” and “backwards.” This story of two lovers lost is really a tragic love story of abandonment and misunderstanding between homeland and diaspora. They are each stuck in the past, struggling to move forward and trying to forgive one another. As always, remembering and forgetting are in a seesaw relationship, never, perhaps, to achieve equilibrium.

Given this, how can the difficult operation of just forgetting be done? Can one just forget when one “feels the tremors of war transferred across generations,” as Mai Der Vang says? A writer of the second generation, raised in America, she speaks of another population of the war’s losers, the exiled Hmong who fled from Laos and came to an America intent on ignoring their existence, their hurt, and their sacrifice. “While a person can be evacuated from his war-torn country, he can never be evacuated from the trauma,” she writes. “Many of us are innately tied to this trauma as if it were strung into our DNA.… This war is my inheritance.” The demand for memory remains strong for her, but so is the need to turn to the future: “We must build a fortress of Hmong identity that can withstand the effects of exile and diaspora; one that won’t mourn what could have been, but instead, transforms the trauma into what we can fully be.”⁴

Chue and Nhia Thao Cha realize Vang’s understanding of refugee history and memory in their story cloth, a unique art form born from the Hmong refugee experience.⁵ Created on a double bed — sized piece of commercial cloth in a refugee camp, this story cloth narrates an epic history of the Hmong people, from their origins in China; to their settlement in the mountains of Burma, Thailand, and Laos; to their refugee odyssey on foot and across the Mekong River; to their life in Thai refugee camps and their embarkation, in the bottom left hand corner, onto an airplane bound for the west. The story cloth puts Hmong people on the map, their country scattered across many nations.⁶ The story cloth is itself a map that contradicts how Western maps of foreign worlds are usually empty of people. Western accounts of new lands often describe them as wildernesses, with the people already there not existing under Western eyes. Those Western maps serve, eventually, as the guide to aerial bombardment. But this story cloth insists that there were people under the bombs, and that their memory and history persists, although not in the linear fashion favored by the West. Instead, the story cloth, by being about both space and time, shows what Vang claims: history and trauma are always present at every moment in Hmong refugee identity.⁷ For the Chas and for Vang, war, memory, and identity are inextricable because Hmong identity in the United States does not exist without war. As for the transformation of trauma, as with the possibility of just forgetting, neither is possible without just memory. Vang’s words, and the Chas’ story cloth, take us toward that just memory.

As I have argued throughout this book, just memory proceeds from three things. First, an ethical awareness of our simultaneous humanity and inhumanity, which leads to a more complex understanding of our identity, of what it means to be human and to be complicit in the deeds that our side, our kin, and even we ourselves commit. Second, equal access to the industries of memory, both within countries and among countries, which will not be possible without a radical transformation, even a revolution, in the distribution of wealth and power. And third, the ability to imagine a world where no one will be exiled from what we think of as the near and the dear to those distant realms of the far and the feared. I have foregrounded an imagination that thinks and sees beyond the nation because the nation dominates how we carry out our struggles over culture and race, over economy and territory, over power and religion. As the poet Derek Walcott says of the stakes involved—“Either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.”⁸ The nation seduces us, particularly if we happen to be cast out of it as refugees, a population that now numbers at least sixty million, a floating, global archipelago of human dispossession.⁹ But as powerful as Walcott’s line is, I prefer another, more hopeful line by him from the same poem: “I had no nation now but the imagination.”¹⁰ Here the poet rejects the fiction that the only alternative to the nation is one’s negation and corrects cosmopolitanism’s idea of a citizen of the world. Since such a stance might overlook the citizen’s other, the refugee forced to flee, the artist turns from claiming the world or a nation to claiming the imagination. In this act, we have one way toward both just memory and just forgetting.

This kind of forgetting is rare and much more difficult to accomplish than the kind of unjust forgetting occasioned by accident, time, amnesia, or death, which are normal and require no effort. The sign of unjust forgetting is repetition. If we repeat a history of violence, then we have not addressed the root causes of that violence. Hence our current predicament in America: we are caught in a time warp of perpetual violence. America’s wars have seemed to go on forever, at least for Americans, who live eternally in the present. That is why the journalist Dexter Filkins, in writing of the wars in the Middle East, collectively calls them “The Forever War” in his book of the same title. He borrowed it from the novelist Joe Haldeman, who wrote the science fiction classic The Forever War. Haldeman was an American combat veteran of my war who dealt with its absurdity by writing a science fiction allegory. In his fictional war, Earth’s best and brightest are drafted to battle bug-like aliens on foreign planets. The military desensitizes the soldiers to killing and programs them to hate and destroy the aliens in a war that turns out to have occurred from miscommunication. Traveling by spaceship and subject to the laws of relativity, the soldiers return to Earth to discover that while they have aged only months, Earth has aged decades. Unable to readjust, the soldiers volunteer for more missions, knowing they will return only after their relatives are dead. For the soldiers, war goes on forever. War also goes on forever for the civilians on the home front, desensitized as they are to the perpetual war that is part of their everyday routine. Theirs is an eternity, but not one of the divine kind.

This is science fiction, but it is also the present, a time when humans live intimately with their inhumanity, accepting it to be normal and eternal. Fiction, and storytelling and art in general, is one way to show us the absurdity of this normality. If the first time we fight a war is tragedy, and the second time a farce, then what do we call the third time, much less the fourth time and the fifth, ad nauseam? Perpetual war, eternal war, Forever War, in which my war was only an episode, an interruption, an aberration in the chronology that America sees for itself.

That chronology centralizes the triumph of the American way of life, marked by the conflation of democracy and freedom with capitalism and the profit motive. This is a timeline in which democracy is unimaginable without capitalism, and vice versa. A deep investment in this timeline compels many Americans who visit my country of origin to resort to a comforting story about progress and the inevitability of the American way of life: even though Americans lost the war, capitalism has won in the end. The recurrent motifs in foreign reportage about the country of my birth is that the majority of the people are born after war’s end, have little desire to remember it, and are instead focused on the same materialism that motivates their communist leaders.¹¹ The revolution has died. The dollar has triumphed. Long live capitalism! (The situation is similar in Laos and Cambodia.) Despite all the remembering that occurs in both America and Vietnam, an unjust forgetting is winning. This is the case because Vietnamese official memory is unjust, unable to confront the failure of the revolution in bringing freedom and independence to all of the people. American official memory is unjust, too, for it learns no lessons from my war except the lesson to fight the Forever War more efficiently.¹² The reconciliation between Vietnam and America, so far as it has happened, is the reconciliation of two forms of unjust memory and unjust forgetting.

If the precondition for just forgetting is just memory, perhaps it is an impossible forgetting. When, exactly, will we have a time of ethical awareness of our inhumanity, where the industries of memory are available to all, where the artistic will to claim the imagination is norm rather than exception? This is utopian. Yet, at one point, the human imagination had difficulty thinking beyond the light cast by the fire, then of the distance that the tribe could walk, then the walls of the city-state. So why can we not imagine a future where nations at war seem absurd? Novelist Doris Lessing puts it this way:

I’ve lived through Hitler, ranting and raving; Mussolini too; the Soviet Union, which we thought would last for all time; the British Empire, which seemed impregnable; the color bar in Rhodesia and elsewhere; the heyday of European empires. It was inconceivable to think these would disappear. They seemed permanent. Now not one of them remains — and I think that is a recipe for optimism.¹³

The impossible might yet be possible at some point in the future, which is again where art, among other agents, plays a guiding role. Sometimes art does so by imagining utopia, or, through negative lessons, dystopia. Sometimes it does so by offering us models for how to be more human or more ethical in our behavior to one another, or by demanding that we see how inhuman and unethical we can be. And sometimes art, simply by being art, by calling us into a relationship with it, is the template for reflective, contemplative, meditative thinking and feeling that might allow us to become citizens of the imagination. This is an individual, mysterious realm where art and imagination offer some hope and salve to the harsh histories of war, violence, bloodshed, hatred, and terror that continue to affect us. But while art can provoke an ethical awareness of our inhumanity that is necessary for just memory, it cannot achieve just memory alone, not while the industries of memory remain unequal.

Still, art’s potential for the individual points toward one way that solace can be achieved during times of unjust memory and unjust forgetting, during our times today. That solace is also found in forgiveness of the most genuine kind, what the philosopher Jacques Derrida called “pure” forgiveness, an “exceptional” and “extraordinary” forgiveness.¹⁴ For Derrida, pure forgiveness is distinct from the kinds of forgiveness tainted by political, legal, or economic considerations, found in acts of amnesty, excuse, regret, reparation, apology, therapy, and so on.¹⁵ Pure forgiveness arises from the paradox of forgiving the unforgivable. All other forms of forgiveness are conditional — I will forgive, if you give me something. The act of forgiving is compromised, as it is between Vietnam and America. Vietnam will forgive America, so long as America invests in it and offers protection against China. America will forgive Vietnam, so long as Vietnam allows itself to be invested in and permits the use of its territory — land, sea, or air — for America’s fight against China. Americans who return to Vietnam and feel wonderstruck by how the Vietnamese seem to forgive them do not understand that such forgiveness is conditional. While the Vietnamese surely extend some generosity of spirit to Americans, an undertone of profit exists, for Americans are walking wallets. Such forgiveness is also made possible by the deeper animosity the Vietnamese at home hold against the Vietnamese overseas, whose returns to the homeland can be ambivalent or even fraught. And the reconciliation between the Vietnamese and their French or American invaders must be measured against the hostility the Vietnamese hold against the Chinese. The Vietnamese and the Chinese have their own version of the Forever War, which began when China colonized Vietnam for a thousand years. Neither the Chinese nor the Vietnamese have forgotten that history of conflict, which is why they still repeat it.

Faced with how individuals and states compromise, abuse, and exploit forgiveness and reconciliation, its related term, Derrida argues that forgiveness “is not, it should not be, normal.”¹⁶ Rather, “forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself,” something not dependent on the repentance of the person or entity one might forgive.¹⁷ I must admit that on first encountering Derrida’s notion of forgiveness, I struggled with it, for it was, in his own words, “excessive, hyperbolic, mad.”¹⁸ If something is unforgivable, how can it be forgiven? Mass bombing, massacres, death camps, genocide, not to speak of the loss of an individual life — can any of these be forgiven? Not having experienced any of these myself, I cannot say. What I lost was a homeland that I sometimes do not even enjoy visiting; a relationship with an adopted, left-behind sister whom I have seen once in forty years; perhaps a happier childhood; and perhaps happier, healthier parents. But then again, if the war had not been fought and I had not lost these things, I would not be writing these words. I might not be a writer at all to whom the question of forgiveness never occurred until I wrote this paragraph. Now I think, yes, I can forgive, in the abstract, America and Vietnam — in all their factions and variations — for what they have done in the past. But I cannot forgive them for what they do in the present because the present is not yet finished. The present, perhaps, is always unforgivable.

What about pragmatic moments of forgiveness that allow things such as reparations, returns, or recognitions to happen? Are they inconsequential? In the case of my war, even these pragmatic acts are rare. The United States pays a pittance to remove the tons of unexploded ordnance that it dropped in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It refuses to admit that Agent Orange damaged and damages human beings and the land in Southeast Asia. Many Southeast Asian exiles and refugees continue to hate their communist enemies, do not recognize the communist government, and are afraid or unwilling to return. The communists in Vietnam and Laos have never apologized for reeducation camps and the persecution of people who turned into refugees. The Cambodian government is reluctant to acknowledge the widespread complicity of many people, including its own politicians and leaders, in the Khmer Rouge. A list of sensible things that people and governments could do to admit to the errors and horrors of the past include: truth and reconciliation commissions to encourage face to face dialogue between enemies; trials of war criminals, or at least offers of amnesty which acknowledge that certain people committed criminal acts; returning the homes and property of refugees, which may now be owned by other historical victims; erecting memorials to dead refugees and dead soldiers of the other side; constructing a curriculum that acknowledges all sides; allowing a civil society that can dissent and discuss the past freely; and staging dramas of genuine and mutual apology, instead of the more typical dramas of grief and resentment. Any of these would be enormously difficult but would help to heal the wounds of the past and encourage people and governments to move forward without denying the past.

Instead, we have well-intentioned if flawed efforts such as the United Nations — sponsored Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia, its mandate to prosecute only five high-ranking individuals for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. The trial has gone on for years and will go on for years, at least until all the aging defendants are dead, or, in the case of one, demented and beyond prosecution. This is literally political theater, one with the duration of a hit Broadway musical and much more expensive to produce. In a country where the average salary is hundreds of dollars per year, the cost of the trials runs into the tens of millions of dollars. In order to visit this theater outside of Phnom Penh, one must make reservations and arrive early. No pictures are allowed, as is the case with any theater. On the morning I visited, high school students occupied most of the seats. This drama was pedagogical, for the Cambodian people receive little education in regard to the genocide. While the court will mete out some kind of justice, this is also a show meant to assure Cambodians that their government is addressing the past, even when its efforts are weak. And it is a show meant to assure the world that the United Nations carries out its mission of staunching the bleeding of the world’s injuries, even when it cannot do so.

The trial is set on a stage in front of the auditorium, reinforcing the theatrical quality. A wall of glass, and behind that glass, a curtain, separates the audience from the participants — judges, lawyers, defendants, witnesses, translators, stenographers, and guards. When the audience files in and sits down in the air-conditioned auditorium, the curtain is drawn. The show begins, the curtain opens, and the actors arrive on stage to assume their places in this pseudo-trial. The guaranteed convictions that will result from this trial, while worthwhile, will only lead to a pseudo-reconciliation with the past. The inequality and injustice that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge still remain, and the unforgivable will not be forgiven. Even the one who asked for forgiveness, Duch, the commandant of S-21, the first one convicted and sent to prison, will not be forgiven. As for the thousands of other Khmer Rouge still alive, many in power or at least in relative peace, and the governments of Vietnam, China, and the United States — none of them will ask for forgiveness, even if they were on trial, which they are not.

But Derrida does not deny pseudo-forgiveness and pseudo-reconciliation a role to play in dealing with the past. It is only that the peace they realize is temporary, an absence of war and violence rather than their negation. Instead of compromise, he only insists on the impossible standard of a pure forgiveness. As unreasonable as it may sound, pure forgiveness is commensurate with the unbearable weight of history’s accumulated horrors and our own individual responsibilities. Why is it possible to murder millions and yet impossible to imagine pure forgiveness or just forgetting? Shouldn’t mass murder be impossible? The fault is our own. There is no one else to blame for the limits of our spirit and our imagination. We submit to the pragmatists, the profiteers, and the paranoiacs who insist that war is part of humanity, our identity. They are half-right but all wrong in believing that we cannot convert the recognition of our inevitable inhumanity into a different kind of realism, a realism that believes we must imagine peace, no matter how impossible it may seem. It is perpetual war that is unrealistic. Perpetual war is madness, engineered in the rational language of bureaucracy and the high-flown rhetoric of nationalism and sacrifice, operating through campaigns that could lead to human extermination. This madness can only be matched by the logic of perpetual peace and the excessive, utopian commitment to a pure forgiveness, which the species needs to survive. If we wish to live, we need a realism of the impossible.

Thich Nhat Hanh, who inspired Martin Luther King Jr., provides another perspective on “the situation of a country suffering war or any other situation of injustice.” Rather than laying the blame on one side or another, he says, “every person involved in the conflict is a victim.” This is obviously a difficult perspective to adopt for those who consider themselves to be victims or the descendants of victims. Nevertheless, “see that no person, including all those in warring parties or in what appear to be opposing sides, desires the suffering to continue. See that it is not only one or a few persons who are to blame for the situation.” But in saying that no one single agent is to blame, he does not absolve us of blame. “See that the situation is possible because of the clinging to ideologies and to an unjust world economic system which is upheld by every person through ignorance or through lack of resolve to change it.” Even more, the duality of conflict itself, the either-or of war and hatred, is illusory: “See that two sides in a conflict are not really opposing, but two aspects of the same reality.” Increasingly, Vietnam and America appear to be part of the same reality. Once symbolic of Cold War division, these two countries now participate in the onward march of global capitalism, military-industrial complexes, the dominance of self-interested political parties, the survival of nation-states, and the perpetuation of power for the sake of power. What, then, was the war good for, if in the end all that will happen is yet another war? “See that the most essential thing is life and that killing or oppressing one another will not solve anything.”¹⁹

What Jacques Derrida and Thich Nhat Hanh ask for, what Immanuel Kant and Martin Luther King Jr. call for, is both simple and difficult, the need to challenge the story about war and violence that so many find easy to accept. This story says that we must resign ourselves to the necessity and even nobility of war. By now war and violence are certainly a part of human identity, but identity is not natural. It can change, if we tell another kind of story and seize the means of production to circulate such a story. This story foresees a just rather than unjust forgetting, pivoting on just memory and pure forgiveness. As philosopher Charles Griswold says, “resentment is a story-telling passion,” which can be addressed through another kind of storytelling driven by forgiveness, “which requires changes in resentment’s tale.”²⁰ Griswold, like Thich Nhat Hanh, argues that “unchecked, resentment consumes everything and everyone, including its possessor.”²¹ Forgiving others and letting go of resentment is an act both for others and for oneself. As Avishai Margalit says, “the decision to forgive makes one stop brooding on the past wrong, stop telling it to other people.”²² Only through forgiveness of the pure kind, extended to others and ourselves, can we actually have a just forgetting and a hope for a new kind of story where we do not constantly turn to the unjust past.

This is why storytelling specifically and art in general inhabit such an important place in this book. Storytelling allows us to tell a different story about war and its relationship to our identity. In this way, storytelling changes how we remember and forget war. The moving documentary The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) makes explicit how storytelling addresses betrayal and resentment. Betrayal happens at least twice in this film about a Laotian family whose father fought with the royalists and the Americans during the war. First, the Americans betrayed their Laotian allies and abandoned them to the communists. The father is sent to reeducation and his family become refugees, forced to flee to a ghetto of New York. Second, the father betrays his family when, after being released from reeducation, he finds another wife. The dual betrayals nearly destroy his first wife and children emotionally, sending them into poverty and tearing apart the family. But the eldest son, Thavisouk Phrasavath, is befriended by a young filmmaker, Ellen Kuras, and together they film the family’s story. The ending of the story is not exactly happy. After Laotian gang members murder Thavisouk’s half-brother, the son of his father and his other wife — the killing one of the war’s long-term repercussions, as Lao turn against Lao with violence — Thavisouk and his father begin a fragile reconciliation. The father acknowledges his culpability in the war, when his job was to call for American bombings. “Indeed, I regret what I have done,” the father says. “I collaborated with the Americans to bomb my own country to save it. I was part of great destruction of my country with foreigners. Indescribable destruction.” Thavisouk gets married, becomes a father, and returns to visit Laos, where he reunites tearfully with two sisters left behind—“the heaviest sorrow” for his mother — but who he cannot take with him to America. “I run between what I remember and what is forgotten, searching for the story of our people whose truth has not been told,” says Thavisouk. “As we move further from the Laos of our past, we are travelers moving in and out of dreams and nightmares. What happens to people in our land, a place we call home?”

The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) does not heal all the wounds inflicted on the family because of the war, but the story gestures toward just memory and toward forgiveness between family members. Just as importantly, The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) refuses the lure of the Hollywood spectacular or the vanity of auteurship. Instead, it is filmed over decades, a long and patient collaboration. The relationship between Phrasavath and Kuras requires trust and giving, which, lest we forget, is a part of forgiving. The film and its makers work actively to prevent the betrayal of memory, and this film is their gift to those who have seen it. Each time I encounter a meaningful work of art, I feel like I have received an unexpected gift, something to cherish. While storytelling and art are not the only ways we can give and receive gifts, they are one form of the ultimate gift, the one that comes without expectation of reciprocity. This idea of gift giving prevails among the spiritual and religious, especially those we perceive to be martyrs who have given their lives, from Jesus Christ to Thich Quang Duc to Martin Luther King Jr. But gifts can be secular as well, and small, and this book has explored a myriad of such small gifts, each one a step toward just memory and just forgetting.

At least in English, the meaning of “to forgive” once included giving or granting. In contemporary meanings of forgiving, the idea of giving lingers, when “to forgive” means to give up and cease to harbor resentment or wrath. Implicit in this definition is the idea of surrendering, not as defeat but as a kind of victory over war in that one refuses to fight further. “To forgive” is also to pardon an offense, to give up a claim to requital, to abandon one’s claim against a debtor, or to forgive a debt.²³ These definitions of giving and forgiving include not only the personal, emotional, and spiritual meanings of such acts, but have material and economic implications as well. One can forgive a debt, but in giving, one can also accrue a debt. The recipient may feel the need to return the favor, or may understand that accepting the gift is a form of submission. The gift can then be mired in the expectation of exchange or reciprocity.

Going back to the white man’s burden, when the West assumes the burden of the Rest, it expects indebtedness, gratitude, and obligation from those to whom it gives the gift of civilization. To forgive that debt, as the West occasionally does, is not to forget that debt. Debt is premised on economic exchange, which in a capitalist system is based on unjust forgetting.²⁴ As Marx argued, the commodity we love so much — the thing—depends on our forgetting the human beings who worked to create it. So it is that the inhuman thing becomes more real to us than the human worker. This is why the West often forgets the Rest, while loving the things that the Rest makes.

For Ricoeur, the way out of this inhuman cycle of giving and indebtedness is to give without expecting reciprocity. Citing Luke 6:32–35, Ricoeur says, “you must love your enemies and do good; and lend without expecting any return.” The Christian gift of love and forgiveness serves as a model for the personal act of just forgetting, where one lets go of the past, of resentment, of hatred without the expectation of any profit other than that one’s enemies will return one’s love.²⁵ Forgiveness is also at the heart of the Buddhist practice offered by Thich Nhat Hanh and, intriguingly, in the secular, artistic work offered by some war veterans. They visit their former enemy’s land or commune with those enemies through their writing, as is the case with American writers such as John Balaban (Remembering Heaven’s Face), W. D. Ehrhart (Going Back), Larry Heinemann (Black Virgin Mountain), Wayne Karlin (Wandering Souls), or Bruce Weigl (The Circle of Hanh). Forgiveness on the part of these veterans also involves letting go of the need to be remembered on the terms of nationalism, which is implicitly built on an antagonism toward others. This is the hidden price of the memorials and the monuments erected toward a nation’s veterans. This is why Ehrhart writes, “I didn’t want a monument.… What I wanted was an end to monuments.”²⁶

Evident in this model of giving and forgiving, of letting go and surrendering, is the gratifying picture of two enemies making peace, acting out the binary of giver and receiver. The model is laudable but vulnerable because it can encourage us to overlook what does not fit this dualistic scheme. So, when it comes to my war, its complicated history is often reduced to a conflict between Vietnam and America. What happens to Laos and Cambodia, the South Vietnamese, the diversity within all of these countries? For many, it is easier to overlook these and other differences in favor of the image of (victorious) Vietnamese and (defeated) Americans reconciling. The model of two enemies making peace is also vulnerable because the reciprocity of gift giving still implies indebtedness, the expectation of getting something in return for a gift, even if it is love and friendship. Thus, the reconciliation of Vietnam and America has not actually led to peace, unless one defines peace as the lack of war. Reconciliation has led to the return of business as usual, two countries negotiating for power and profit in the former Indochina and the South China Sea region. Those invested in capitalism and militarism steer this corrupted reconciliation, which masks the self-interested exchange between the two countries. In this exchange, gifts turn into commodities and peace turns into alliances for present profit and potential war. If we wish for true peace, pure forgiveness, and just forgetting, we must remember the labor that makes commodities, we must remember the history of war that lurks behind the façade of peace.

Giving without hope of reciprocity, including the gift of art, is one model for pure forgiveness and just forgetting. Rather than think of giving as involving only two people or entities, imagine giving as part of a chain in which the gift circulates among many. The one who receives a gift need not return it but can instead give a gift to another, with the giving itself a gift. In this manner, the giver eliminates the problem of reciprocity and expectation. Critic Lewis Hyde proposes this when he discusses the work of art as a gift that the artist sends out into the world, to be passed along to others. For Hyde,

art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective.… So long as the artist speaks the truth, he will, whenever the government is lying or has betrayed the people, become a political force whether he intends to or not.²⁷

Giving in its pure form is a way of forgiving the world, the one that accepts the inevitability of warfare and capitalism, blood and debt. Is not such a world unforgivable to those who wish only to give? Giving without expectation of return is a way of working toward a time when just forgetting and actual justice exist in all ways of life, including in memory. The work of art crafted in the spirit of truth is a sign of justice and points toward justice, even if it cannot completely escape the material and unjust world that can turn the gift into a thing to be bought and sold. Still, the artist who gives her gift to others remembers the gift of art given to her by other artists. She gives and forgets about any debt owed to her. This true artist hopes for an era when all people can be artists if they wish, to give if they wish, to live in a time when the just forgetting of the unjust past has happened.

To all those who demand that we must forget even without justice if we wish to move on — forgetting at all costs will one day cost you or your descendants. The violence and injustice you wish to leave in the past will return, perhaps in the old guise or perhaps in a new and deceptive one that will only be another face of perpetual war. Yes, you can forget, but you will not move on. Just forgetting only happens as a consequence of just memory. Remembering in this manner remains a task that seems impossible, given the irony that many of us prefer to carry the burden of injustice instead of putting it down, a reluctance that makes us bound to our past and present. Until that impossible moment of just memory occurs for everyone, some can undertake the task of just forgetting by giving and forgiving, working alone or, preferably, in solidarity with others.

Meanwhile, the future of memory remains unknown. On my last trip to Southeast Asia, I visit the far reaches of Cambodia to catch a glimpse of that future, to the border town of Anlong Veng, thirteen kilometers from Thailand and in a district that was the Khmer Rouge’s last bastion. It takes two hours by private car from Siem Reap, and we drive up mountain roads past an old monument to the Khmer Rouge, carved from a boulder. Someone has beheaded the statues of the Khmer Rouge soldiers who once proudly stood there. Driving past the monument and Anlong Veng, we continue to the border crossing with Thailand, where we have no difficulty finding what I am looking for. On the side of the road, a blue sign that says “Pol Pot Creamation” points to the grave. It is twenty meters away amid a camp of shacks and tarps where people live in poverty, with the ones doing well selling things like gasoline in old Johnny Walker bottles. What remains of Pol Pot lies in a small and barren dirt lot. A rope keeps out visitors, but the guard lowers it for a dollar. The dusty and neglected tomb is a knee-high, rusty tin roof over a low, rectangular mound of earth, fenced off and decorated with a few sad flowers. Here rests someone who embodied the human and the inhuman in the extreme, an idealist who learned his ideas about taking Cambodia to Year Zero in Paris, City of Light.²⁸ The antimemorial he has at present suits him perfectly, its form as ugly as his legacy, but I can only hope that it stays that way. After all, his tomb exists almost literally in the shadow of a casino under construction a hundred meters away, across the highway. By the time I write these words, the casino should be finished, and its proximity to Pol Pot’s tomb can only lead to more tourism for both. There will be no giving here, much less forgiving.

A few kilometers away down a badly cratered red earth road stands the tourist future, “Ta Mok’s House Historical Attractive Site,” marking the residence of Pol Pot’s last ally and possible murderer, nicknamed the Butcher. Hidden behind a screen of weeds and saplings is the decrepit shell of the home, its walls marked with insults against Ta Mok. In a clearing nearby, restaurants and bungalows invite people to eat, drink, and relax. A young couple cuddles in one of the bungalows as they gaze at the view of the plains beneath the mountains. Perhaps one day Pol Pot’s grave will be ringed with bars. Why not, if money is to be made from people like myself. In the small town of Anlong Veng itself there is another Ta Mok tourist attraction, a compound where he once lived. A few vanloads of Khmer tourists wander around the barren houses of the compound, devoid of furniture but still decorated with wall paintings of Angkor Wat. Children lounge on the balcony of an open-air room facing fields where the homes of other Khmer Rouge senior leaders — Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary — once stood. The homes have disappeared. A demolished truck that was Pol Pot’s mobile radio station crouches in the front yard. Under the shade of a pavilion, on cement, stand two gigantic wire chicken coops that once caged prisoners. In Ta Mok’s day, he kept the cages and the prisoners under the sun. A woman fingers a cage door and smiles, half-laughing. I doubt she finds this place funny, but as the journalist Nic Dunlop has written in regard to the genocide, “Confronted with the enormity of what had happened, how was one to react?”²⁹ I take her picture.

Perhaps tears and sorrow are not enough. Perhaps one should smile and laugh when confronting these places, not because they are humorous but because they are strange, these rememories where despair mixes with hope. In these places, we cannot separate the absurd from the tragic. Here are two men who died for a revolution that sought to murder a country in order to save it, a lesson learned from the French and Americans. Now, as ghosts, they inhabit a poor, traumatized country where the forces of unjust memory and unjust forgetting outnumber the forces for just memory. An unpredictable future waits to be built on the literal bones of the past. Will these bones serve only as a lesson against madness, if even that? Will they also speak against the deprivations that led to that madness, the myriad injustices of the past that survive to this day? Will the past be just forgotten, or will there be a just forgetting of the past?