You learn some of these slurs from the casual racism of television, radio, and classmates. But you also learn some from the books of the public library, the immense white cube on West San Carlos Street named after Martin Luther King Jr. Every Saturday morning, Ba drops you off in front of the library, where you wait with a small crowd of other fanatical readers for the doors to open. Perhaps he and Má think the library is a safe place for you, although it is a place that they may not understand. You grow up in a household without books, except for the schoolbooks and library books your brother and you bring home. No Bible in any language, despite the devoutness of your parents, just Vietnamese newspapers, magazines, and church newsletters. Sometimes you wander into the living room to discover your mother reading with the aid of a magnifying glass. She reads only Vietnamese. Slowly and out loud.
What do Ba Má think when
they see you with your books?
You borrow a backpack full of books every week and read them all, totally absorbed. The more fluent you become, the further away from Ba Má that language carries you. Decades later it occurs to you that this might have been what you wanted. As much as you yearn to be closer to Ba Má, they work too much, have so little to say to you. They turn you over to the care of the library but do not realize how the library will steal you from them. By the time they do, you have been kidnapped by literature. By books. By English.
You cannot and will not read anything in Vietnamese, a tongue too thick in your mouth.
Vietnamese is your mother tongue,
but you barely talk to your mother.
Vietnamese is your native tongue,
but you left before memory.
English is your second language,
but you speak it like a native.
If your real world is limited to house, school, church, and the SàiGòn Mới, the library is its own limitless world. Displaced by crossing from one side of the world to another, you find your place in English, in the endless travel offered by stories. A freedom from a home with iron bars on its windows. No borders between books, no guards to prevent a curious young boy from scarring himself with words hot to the touch.
You have never forgotten the Executioner series, featuring Mack Bolan, an American sniper serving in Việt Nam when the Mafia forces his teenage sister into prostitution, leading their father to kill his family and himself.92 You can hear the rapid clicking of the typewriter keys in the staccato prose as Bolan returns to enact revenge and, while surveilling the Mafia, consorts with one of the women who work for them.
You take a break to visit your
high school–aged brother in his room,
waving the paperback, its cover featuring a
half-naked redhead with a mafioso holding a knife to
her throat as Bolan points a rifle at both.
What’s a prostitute? you ask.
Is that like a Protestant?
Your brother keeps his
gaze on his book for a
very long time.
Finally he says,
Look it up in the dictionary.
In the library, English is your adopted language,
even though it feels biological, and in the
library you are searching for a home,
though you already have one.
Alex Portnoy also feels uncomfortable at home. He is the star of Philip Roth’s 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint. Perhaps you knew about Roth’s reputation, since you read the San José Mercury book review for fun as you commence your teenage years. You also have inherited your brother’s copy of William Rose Benét’s The Reader’s Encyclopedia, which you also read for fun. You need to have more fun. What you have instead is a growing sense of literary history and what is considered important. Roth is important, the Great American Novelist who actually wrote a book titled The Great American Novel.
Is any other country on this earth so self-conscious about
using its name in the titles of its books? Roth would also
write American Pastoral, and there are also American
Gods, American Psycho, American War, American
Tabloid, American Spy, American Rust, American Son,
and many more, as well as variations like Purple America,
Americana, Americanah, Vietnamerica, and Amerika.
Perhaps one day you will write a Not So
Great American Novel titled
American America.
You read a few pages of Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus, see a glimpse of the movie adaptation on television with Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw. The Jewish world described by Roth twenty-five years earlier resonates with your Vietnamese world, especially as seen through the eyes of a younger, Americanized child who feels his ethnic difference from the norm of white people, sees the oddities of his parents and community, and understands intuitively that the shadows in the family home are cast by a nearly unspeakable history.
The Jewish people in Roth’s books are (in your memory) a little loud, somewhat uncouth by White Anglo-Saxon Protestant standards.
The white people you know are Catholics,
but news, television, and the movies
impress WASP ideals on you.
Roth’s Jews are determined to climb the social ladder and move to the suburbs, while feeling anxious about losing their roots and becoming too assimilated, especially as evidenced in their children. Not so different from Vietnamese refugees.
But honestly, all you remember for decades is that the
adolescent Alex Portnoy masturbates with a slab of
liver from the family fridge, after which he puts
the grossly violated meat back in its place for
the family’s dinner later that night.
Gross!
Who eats liver for dinner?
Your family does! But you have not masturbated yet, which is why this scene is hilarious, disturbing, and confusing. The same bewilderment grips you on reading a book about an adolescent boy by Judy Blume, kept in your sixth grade classroom’s library, about which all you remember is that his hard-ons embarrass him. You have no idea what a hard-on is. When a girl in your fifth grade class says penis to you, you have never heard of it, having been raised in a monolingual Vietnamese Catholic household where sex, and the biology associated with it, is unspeakable.
At some point in this preadolescent era, you walk home from Saint Patrick with two classmates, one of whom wants to show you his father’s collection of Playboy and Penthouse magazines, which you have never seen before. The three of you study the pictures and centerfolds, which confuse you. In one picture and its caption, naked twins compare their anatomy. Is “anatomy” a dirty word? Soon after, you see the word “anatomy” in a children’s book about a seal and become even more confused. You never go to the dictionary to look up the word.
You cannot find Playboy or Penthouse at the library, but they exist somewhere in a broad rainbow of storytelling and imagination, one end of which reaches into the heavens while the other end embeds in the muck of the earth. Portnoy’s Complaint may be rarefied art, but its energy derives from Roth’s willingness to delve into smut, that lovely word and lovely world. That smut burns in your memory and in your loins, to use another wonderful word you learn from books.
You acquire another word from Mourning Glory, an American marine’s war memoir you have never forgotten. You stumble across it in the library because you like to browse the war section, for which you must ride the escalator to the second floor, where there are no other children. The marine has sex with a Vietnamese prostitute, then shoots his sperm onto her belly button. What is sperm? Is this where a man is supposed to shoot it? Can a woman get pregnant through her belly button? Decades later you find the book, reread the passage, and realize you have blocked out what preceded the marine’s climax:
I reached down to the floor93 and picked up the
loaded .45. I cocked the hammer back and put
the yawning barrel to the girl’s temple.
Would Ba Má have been more shocked at you reading these books or by you risking your life at Great America? Reading these books is risking your Catholic life. Your purity is violated. Your mind, contaminated. Sex confuses. War confuses. Việt Nam confuses. Their tangle is what Americans mean when they say Vietnam, signifying the war, not the country. American shorthand, and a common reference point for the whole world.
Some years later—1998—future president 
,
vascular channel for AMERICATM’s seminal id,
human Viagra for a limp white or white-
identifying body politic, describes his
overactive sex life by saying, It’s
Vietnam. It is very dangerous. 94
So I’m very, very careful.
When you are fourteen, you board a bus and travel across town to meet a couple of your friends (actually, your only friends) and watch the global blockbuster Rambo: First Blood Part II in the movie theater, circa 1985. American war veteran Rambo, played by perpetually half-naked Sylvester Stallone, returns to Việt Nam to rescue American soldiers kept prisoner by the Vietnamese communists, an enduring myth in the American imagination,95 one with no evidence. A beautiful mixed-race Vietnamese woman named Co aids Rambo.
Co—properly spelled Cô—means
“aunt” or “older lady.” Co is
played by Julia Nickson,
of Chinese descent.
Co loves Rambo and dies for him when the evil communist captain ambushes them and shoots her. Roaring in rage, Rambo wipes out the captain’s squad with his AK-47.
You do not think too much of this.
Asian sidekicks and lovers die for
white saviors all the time.
You enjoy the movie, albeit with a twinge of unease as a member of the Asian Invasion watching the white savior wipe out the Vietnamese commie hordes. Seeing the movie again as an adult, you notice how the actress wears an áo dài in the middle of the jungle, her hair and makeup perfect in the steamy humidity, lipstick gleaming moistly as she utters her dying words in a vaguely accented English:
Ram . . . bo . . . you . . . not . . . forget . . . me?
Rambo embraces Co as her eyes close, her head falls back, and her mouth opens in a shuddering groan, their pose one of orgasmic lovemaking as much as death.
The movie is also screened for Hmong refugees in Thai refugee camps. Even afterward, one (former) refugee writes you, her parents continue to watch the movie because
its characters closely resemble96 faces that
looked like ours. As an adult now, I can say that
Rambo was part of the indoctrination of
our love for white saviors.
This is long-distance Americanization. Your Americanization is up close and personal. In 1989, your teenage relatives from Việt Nam, the grandchildren of Má’s oldest sister, immigrate to AMERICATM. You are in Southern California at your last-choice college, driving your brother’s hand-me-down Buick Skylark coupe. Why don’t you take them out? Má asks.
Their English is about as bad as your Vietnamese. You will not have to talk too much at a movie. You choose Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War as their first American movie theater experience.
Michael J. Fox plays an idealistic soldier who cannot stop Sean Penn and his squad from gang-raping and then murdering a young Vietnamese woman. In her death scene, she has been raped, stabbed, and left for dead on train tracks overlooking a river. But she is not dead. Rising, she stumbles along the train tracks toward the soldiers who have abandoned her, dazed, her clothing soaked in her own blood. Shoot her! yells Penn. Shoot her! The squad hesitates but then obeys. The camera focuses on her face and body as she is caught in the cross fire of an M60 machine gun, two M16 automatic rifles, and a pistol. Her body jerks from the impact of multiple bullets as she screams and screams before she falls off the train tracks in slow motion. Fox looks over the edge of the tracks and sees her broken body lying on the rocky banks of the river below, limbs in impossible angles, face smeared by blood.
Raped and murdered,
desired and objectified,
servile and suppliant,
silenced or screaming,
these are the fates of
Asian women in the
Western imagination,
which is yours as well.
This particular rape and murder is based on the
death of twenty-one-year-old Phan Thi Mao in 1966.
Phan Thi Mao is played by Thuy Thu Le, who graduated
from the University of California at Berkeley, just like you.
Her nickname is Tweety Bird. Her height: an impressive
five feet six. Thuy Thu Le has no more movie roles.
Phan Thi Mao’s name with diacritics might be
Phan Thị Mạo or Phan Thị Mão, but you cannot
find anything about her online in Vietnamese.
The white and Latino soldiers who rape and murder Phan Thi Mao range in age from twenty to twenty-two, the same as many of your university students, some of whom come in military uniform to your class on memory and the war in Việt Nam. They have returned from combat in Iraq or Afghanistan or are preparing to be officers in the army, navy, air force, or marine corps. You wonder what, if anything, they will remember from your course.
The longest prison sentence for the rape and murder of Phan Thi Mao is eight years, with eligibility for parole in half that time.
You and your cousins do not say a word
about the movie when it concludes.
Welcome to AMERICATM.
Phan Thi Mao’s death scene has lingered with you for decades. As has the scene of the family being massacred in Apocalypse Now, and the mother being shot in the head by an American sergeant in Platoon, and the circle of vicious cursing, cackling Việt Cộng torturers who threaten Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter and force them to play Russian roulette. As much as you have tried to forget your refugee history and as much as AMERICATM has tried to forget your shared war, neither of you has succeeded. But if you have not forgotten, you have not totally remembered either. And for you, and for the Vietnamese, and in particular for the Vietnamese woman, who stands in for Việt Nam itself, if you are all
invisible and hypervisible
as a condition of your existence in the scene and on the screen of the Western imagination
you are not just forgotten or remembered,
you are both at the same time,
you are seen and misunderstood,
seen and distorted, seen and instantly
forgotten, seen and unseen,
you are remembered and dismembered
you are disremembered
but—
even as you are the Other who is
disremembered, you also
disremember Others.
When you are twelve or thirteen, your best friend, Chuy, takes you to his friend’s house. The friend, a kid your age or a little older, possesses what you and Chuy, Catholic schoolboys, have been searching for without success: pornographic magazines. The Penthouse and Playboy magazines you pored over and the nude bodies of women with their vast expanses of flesh gave you a strange, hot, overpowering feeling that you could not resist. These naked women are very visible, as bodies or body parts, even if women in general are often invisible, at least to men.
You are an aspiring man.
The friend sleeps in the garage and, under his creaky bed, hides copies of Oui, Cheri, Genesis, and Hustler. But before you can get your hands on those magazines, you must pass a test.
Hey, Chuy says, grinning. Or maybe it’s the friend.
Have you popped your cherry yet?
You have no idea what a cherry is or what it means to pop one.
The right answer is: Have you?
Or: I know I popped your mama’s cherry.
But under peer pressure, your mind is blank. Whether you say yes or no, the answer is wrong. You don’t remember whether you hesitantly say yes or no, but both burst out laughing.
In Việt Nam, American soldiers
called replacements freshly
arrived from the States
Fucking New Guys.
Or
Cherries.
This is your self-education into something like manhood.