Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (44 page)

23
. Ahn,
White Badge
, 289.

24
. Ibid., 40.

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

26
. Ahn,
White Badge
, 40.

27
. Ibid., 155.

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

29
. Ahn,
White Badge
, 154.

30
. Ibid., 155.

31
. Ibid., 78.

32
. Ibid., 278.

33
. Ibid., 314.

34
. Ibid., 155.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

48
. Kwon,
After the Massacre
, 29.

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

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

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

52
. Ibid., 339.

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

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

6. ON ASYMMETRY

1
. Yamashita,
The I-Hotel
, 2.

2
. Gustafsson,
War and Shadows
, xiii.

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

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

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

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

7
. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 29.

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

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

10
. Faas and Page,
Requiem
, 315.

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

12
. Young,
The Texture of Memory
, 5.

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

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

7. ON VICTIMS AND VOICES

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

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

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

4
. Nguyen-Vo, “Forking Paths,” 159.

5
. Kingston,
The Woman Warrior
, 3.

6
. Ibid., 19.

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

8
. Gordon,
Ghostly Matters
, 187.

9
. Espiritu,
Body Counts
, 23.

10
. Sollors,
Multilingual America.

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

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

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

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

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

16
. Waters,
Ethnic Options.

17
. Le,
The Boat.

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

19
. C. Wong, “Sugar Sisterhood.”

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

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

22
. Wittgenstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
, 89.

23
. Espiritu,
Body Counts
, 101.

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

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

26
. McGurl,
The Program Era.

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

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

29
. Duong,
Treacherous Subjects
, 1–22.

30
. Nguyen,
Pioneer Girl.

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