Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (45 page)

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

33
. Trinh,
Woman Native Other
, 7.

34
. Ibid., 98.

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

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

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

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

39
. Phi,
Sông I Sing
, 9.

40
. Ibid., 39.

41
. Ibid., 78.

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

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

44
. Ibid., 113.

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

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

8. ON TRUE WAR STORIES

1
. Kingston,
China Men
, 284.

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

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

4
. Ibid.

5
. Ibid., 15.

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

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

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

9
. Žižek,
How to Read Lacan
, 47.

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

11
. Žižek,
How to Read Lacan
, 47.

12
. Chang,
Inhuman Citizenship
, 14.

13
. Heinemann,
Paco’s Story
, 195.

14
. Ibid., 209.

15
. “The Latehomecomers,”
Entertainment Weekly
.

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

17
. Thiep,
The General Retires
, 102.

18
. Ibid., 104.

19
. Ibid., 113.

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

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

22
. Said,
Culture and Imperialism.

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

24
. Yang,
The Latehomecomer
, 46

25
. Ibid., 4.

26
. Ibid., 46.

27
. Ibid., 93.

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

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

30
. Jin,
The Writer as Migrant
, 4.

31
. Moua,
Bamboo among the Oaks
, 10.

32
. Bhabha,
The Location of Culture
, 87.

9. ON POWERFUL MEMORY

1
. Kipling,
Kipling
, 97–98.

2
. Trinh,
Woman Native Other
, 10–11.

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

4
. Um, “Exiled Memory,” 832.

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

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

7
. Ibid., 365.

8
. Ibid.

9
. Ibid., xv.

10
. Ibid., 365.

11
. Storr,
Dislocations
, 28.

12
. Ibid., xv.

13
. Scarry,
The Body in Pain
, 131.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22
. Morrison,
Beloved
, 44.

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

24
. Appiah,
Cosmopolitanism
, 85.

25
. Ibid., 144.

26
. Gilroy,
Postcolonial Melancholia
, 59–60.

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

28
. Ibid., 103.

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

30
. King, “Beyond Vietnam,” 151.

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

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

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

34
. Ibid., 158.

35
. Ibid., 83 and 47, respectively.

36
. Ibid., 96.

37
. Ibid., 83.

38
. Ibid., 86.

39
. Ibid., 104.

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

41
. Kingston,
Fifth Book of Peace
, 227.

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

43
. Kingston,
Fifth Book of Peace
, 61.

JUST FORGETTING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11
. Davies, “Vietnam 40 Years On.”

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