War and Peace and Vietnam
War and Peace and Vietnamposted on nov 10, 2009 10:45:00 am by andrew lam
[ filed under: asia conflict ]
Andrew Lam Vietnamese-American Author and Co-Founder of New America Media was keynote speaker on the occasion of the 14th Anniversary of Peacetrees Vietnam, whose aim is to renew relationships with the people of Vietnam and promote a safe, healthy future for its families & children. It sponsors demining and mine risk education, survivor assistance, and community building projects in partnership with the people of Quang Tri Province. Below is his speech
Quang Tri has a special place in my heart because when I think about the Vietnam War, memories of that place resurface. I was privileged as a child because I saw it first hand after the carpet bombing of that province. My father was a general who oversaw Quang Tri and Hue near the end of the war and he took me and my siblings there. I saw a ruined city, empty streets, and B-52 bomb craters that were filled up with water after the monsoon and children were swimming in them. That image of children laughing and playing amidst destructions stays deep in my heart.
I struggle to figure out what exactly to say today about Vietnam. My relationship with it remains complicated, with so many contradictions and without any final resolution. But i think of that contradictory image, laughter amidst horror and my relationship with Vietnam is a little like that: complicated, and it keeps on changing with time.
(writing speech in Seattle)
I left Vietnam at 11 at the end of the war. We lost everything when we came to America. We started over as poor exiles. There was a period in which we lived as impoverished refugees, first in the camps, then sharing an apartment at the end of Mission Street in San Francisco with two other Vietnamese families. We struggled for sometime to make it to the middle class.
Vietnam as some of you who are old enough to remember was never an easy to quantify topic, a hard to frame story. The issue of Vietnam keeps changing but as a writer and as someone who came from that country I wonder if, looking at current writing that involves Vietnam, that we really are talking about the same country even after all these years.
Just googling the news last few weeks and here are some headlines:
-CNN: Afghanistan haunted by ghost of Vietnam
-London Telegraph: Barack Obama must stop dithering – or Afghanistan will be his Vietnam -New York Times: The Vietnam War Guide to Afghanistan
-Baltimore Sun: Afghanistan is Obama’s Vietnam
Often times when we mention the word Vietnam in the US, we don’t mean Vietnam as a country. Vietnam is not Thailand or Malaysia. Its relation to the US is special: it has become a vault filled with tragic metaphors – it stands for American lost of innocence, of tragedy, legacy of defeat, and failure. For the time in our history, Americans were caught in the past, haunted by unanswerable questions, confronted with a tragic ending.
So much so that my uncle, who fought in the war as a pilot for the South Vietnamese army, once observed that, “When Americans talk about Vietnam they really are talking about America. “Americans don’t take defeat and bad memories very well. They try to escape them,” he said in his funny but bitter way of his, “They make a habit of blaming small countries for things that happens to the united states. AIDS from Haiti, Flu from Hong Kong or Mexico, Drugs from Columbia, Hurricanes from the Caribbean.”
Then there’s my father who only talk about the Vietnam of wartime. His memories go back to the time when he was a big shot, a warrior, when he fought battles and won. But he couldn’t talk about the aftermath, about losing and the end and ensuing humiliation and the horrible losses. Of his comrades sent to reeducation camps. He can only go further backward to a time before the war was lost. He holds so much anger still on what had happened. He, like so man of his generation, hadn’t been able to go past vehemence, hadn’t been able to make peace with the past.
I’ve been back Vietnam many times. And even coming back I have been trying putting Vietnam into perspective. A long time ago, I moved out of my father’s point of view to my own. Here’s a passage from my book, Perfume Dreams.
“ Flipping through my United States passport as if it were a comic book, the young customs man at the Noi-Bai Airport, near Hanoi, appeared curious. “Brother, when did you leave Vietnam?”
“Two days before National Defeat Day,” I said without thinking. It was an exile’s expression, not his. “God! When did that happen?” he asked. “The thirtieth of April, 1975,” I answered. “But, brother, don’t you mean National Liberation Day?” he said, while trying to suppress a giggle. If this conversation had occurred a decade or so earlier, the difference would have created a dangerous gap between the Vietnamese and the returning Vietnamese-American. But this happened a couple of decades after the war had ended, when the walls were down, the borders porous, and as I studied the smiling young official, it occurred to me that there was something about this moment, an epiphany. “Yes, brother, I suppose I do mean liberation day.” Not everyone remembers the date with a smile. It marked the Vietnamese Diaspora, boat people, refugees. On April 28, 1975, my family and I escaped from Saigon in a crowded C-130 cargo plane a few hours before the airport was bombed. We arrived at the Guam refugee camp to hear the BBC’s tragic account of Saigon’s demise: U.S. helicopters flying over the chaotic city, Vietcong tanks rolling in, Vietnamese climbing over the gate into the U.S. embassy, boats fleeing down the Saigon River toward the South China Sea. In time, April 30 became the birth date of an exile’s culture, built on defeatism and a sense of tragic ending. For a while, many Vietnamese in America talked of revenge, of blood debts, of the exile’s anguish. Their songs had nostalgic titles: “The Day When I Return” and “Oh, Mother Vietnam, We Are Still Here.” April 30, 1976: A child of 12 with nationalistic fervor, I stood in front of San Francisco City Hall with other refugees. I waved the gold flag with three horizontal red stripes. I shouted (to no one in particular): “Give us back South Vietnam!” April 30, 1979: An uncle told me there was an American plan to retake our homeland by force: “The way Douglas MacArthur did for the South Koreans in the fifties.” My 18-year-old brother declared that he would join the anti-Communist guerrilla movement in Vietnam. My father sighed. April 30, 1983: I stayed awake all night with Vietnamese classmates from Berkeley to listen to monotonous speeches by angry old men. “National defeat must be avenged by sweat and blood!” one vowed. But through the years, April 30 has come to symbolize something entirely different to me. Although I sometimes mourn the loss of home and land, it’s the American landscape and what it offers that solidify my hyphenated identity. This date of tragic ending, from an optimist’s point of view, is also an American rebirth, something close to the Fourth of July. Assimilation, education the English language, the American “I”—these have carried me and many others further from that beloved tropical country than the Cargo plane ever could. Each optimistic step the young Vietnamese takes toward America is tempered with a series of betrayals of Little Saigon’s parochialism, its sentimentalities and the old man’s outdated passion. When did this happen? Who knows? One night, America quietly seeps in and takes hold of one’s mind and body, and the Vietnamese soul of sorrows slowly fades away. So -National defeat Day? National Liberation Day? “It was a day of joyous victory,” said a retired Communist official in Hanoi. “We fought and realized Uncle Ho’s dream of national independence.” Nhon Nguyen, a real estate salesman in San Jose, and a former South Vietnamese naval officer, said: “I could never forget the date. So many people died. So much blood. I could never tolerate Communism, you know.” Mai Huong, a young, smartly dressed Vietnamese businesswoman in Saigon, had another opinion. Of course it was National Liberation Day, she said. “But it’s the South,” she told me with a wink, “that liberated the North.” Indeed, conservative Uncle Ho has slowly admitted defeat to entrepreneurial and cosmopolitan Miss Saigon. She has taken her meaning from a different uncle, you know, Uncle Sam.
The customs man, on the other hand, stamped my passport, said: “In truth, brother, there are no winners, no losers. You’re lucky, brother. You left Vietnam and became an American.”
**
But that piece was written 15 years ago. I’ve been back several times since then. And I find that there’s always new ways of looking at that country.
A few years ago, for instance, I went back to Vietnam to make a documentary called My Journey Home and I did the touristy thing: I went to the Cu Chi Tunnel.. near Tay Ninh Province, bordering Cambodia, a complex underground labyrinth in which the Viet Cong hid during the war many years ago.
There were several American vets in their late 60s there – they fought in Vietnam and lost friends. They were back for the first time. They were very emotional.
They went to Vietnam to look for the meaning of the past.
But the young tour guide saw it completely different: The old tunnels had mostly collapsed, she told me. It was tourism that forced the Vietnamese to dig up the old hideouts. The young tour guide then told me: “It was a lot smaller back then. But now the New Cu Chi Tunnel is very wide? You know why? To cater to very, very big Americans.”
I jokingly call it Cu Chi 2.0. Another Vietnam vet responded that he now alls it like Charo, the Mexican singer would call it, Cuchi-Cuchicu..
The young Vietnamese guide does not see the past: She has a dream for a cosmopolitan future. She spoke fluent English, made lots of friends overseas due to her job and dreams of Disneyland. She crawled through the same tunnel with foreigners routinely but she emerged with different ideas. Her head is filled with the Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars and two-tiered freeways and Hollywood and Universal studio. “I have many friends over there now,” she said, reflecting the collective desire of Vietnamese youth. “They invite me to come. I’m saving money for this amazing trip.”
I stood there looking at the mouth of tunnel and in the end there may never be final conclusion about that war.. There can never be one story about that war, any war for that matter. Here’s a young woman who looks at tunnel that was the headquarters of the Vietcong and what does she see? Disneyland. The cu chi tunnel leads some to the past surly but for the young tour guide it may very well lead to the future.
It’s a complicated by multiple point views, many sided versions of the same thing, and many stories. In that sense when we talk about Vietnam we should not simplify but expand, so much so that it becomes the story of people, of human beings rather than metaphor of tragedy.
**
My own story is that, through the years, I made my own peace with it.
James Baldwin once asked piercing essay, “Which of us has overcome his past?” and promptly answered in another: “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” But with due respect, one can chase Baldwin’s grim discernment with M. Scott Momaday’s astute council: “Anything is bearable as long as you can make a story out of it.”
The more mature respond to one’s tragedy is not hatred nor resentment but the spiritual resilience with which one can, again and again, struggle to transcend one’s own biographical limitations. History is trapped in me, indeed, but history is also mine to work out, to disseminate, to discern and appropriate, and to finally transform into aesthetic self-expression.
And it is in stories about Vietnam, in looking at its current needs and its current problems, and trying to offer some insights, that I find my way home.
And I am not alone.
A young Vietnamese American friend of mine from Los Angeles whose sister was killed by Thai pirates while escaping Vietnam recently returned to Saigon where she is now a thriving entrepreneur. Another, the son of a colonel who spent 14 years in re-education, spent his honeymoon in Vietnam, despite his dislike of the Hanoi regime. Yet another friend, whose father was governor of Hue and was in solitary confinement came back, wrote a book and now has a bar in Hanoi.
My cousin whose family’s was robbed of everything has returned from France, married a woman, raised a family, and works in Hanoi. He’s prospering where his father once suffered. That was, he told me, his best revenge.
Another friend went a step further: she was forced to escape as a boat person with her family in the late 70s, has returned with money raised in Silicon Valley to help create a program to help impoverished families in Mekong Delta from selling their children to traffickers. She’s changing the destinies of many others like her for the better.
Having lost the war, these people have emerged as the victors of the peace.
They’ve managed to remake themselves and go on with their lives, and more important, by refusing to let rage and need for vengeance dominate their hearts, some have become active agents in changing Vietnam itself.
So in the end – Defeat or victory, National Loss or liberation, metaphor of tragedy or progress – none of that really matter.
Only lives lived every day matter, only in trying to influence the future for the better matter. Only by addressing present day needs and sufferings that the ghost of the past can be appeased.
And only when one looks at Vietnam not through the view that’s rooted in historical vehemence but through the view of human kindness that does the country open itself up.
Who was it that said “there’s no East or West when you look up to the blue sky?” There is no East or West either when you look at each other with an open mind and an open heart.
If we want see Vietnam beyond its geo-politics, its troubling history with the US, then we need to open our heart. More important, if we want to see human liberty then we best try to uphold human dignity. And if we want to find peace, we must first find a way to forgive.
And lastly, I just want to leave you with a wise council from the Dalai Lama:
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
It is easier said than done. But it’s certainly what I strive for. And in the face of enormous human suffering, I hope that’s what we all strive for.
** ** **
PeaceTrees Vietnam’s program have touched more lives and created more friendships than we could possibly know or measure. Please help us in continuing these humanitarian achievements and invest with us to save and support the lives of children and families who live daily with the explosive remnants of war.
go to http://www.peacetreesvietnam.org/donate_now.htm
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About Andrew
Andrew is a syndicated writer and an editor with the Pacific News Service, a short story writer, and a commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." He co-founded New America Media, an association of over 2000 ethnic media in...
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I have nothing more to say
I have nothing more to say at this time than to be grateful to you for writing this. I must read this post again, as well as your others, before I can comment intelligently, but know that you have opened a thoughtful door to the previously unexplainable. Thank you. Mara Buck