good, bad, and ugly

Even if others call you an immigrant, don’t call yourself an immigrant.

Call yourself . . . a refugee.

That is what you are, or have been. Immigrants choose when to leave and where to go. Refugees run anywhere they can. The question is: When do they stop running? If you can ever be called a (former) refugee, the adjective will always be parenthetical.

Even now you move and hustle, always working, never satisfied, fearful of what Ba Má experienced. The only insurance is to ensure you have enough to survive the next disaster. You have all you need in your basement, except guns.

So don’t call yourself an American yet.

Call yourself a refugee, not an immigrant, because your first solid memories—­when you know exactly where you are and with whom—are of a refugee camp. Of separation from Ba Má.

Call yourself a refugee because too many refugees call themselves immigrants.

If Hollywood made an epic

about the refugee experience,

you would be cast as:

A) Dirty Refugee

B) Desperate Refugee

C) Screaming Refugee

D) Grateful Refugee

Perhaps in Europe it’s more beneficial to call oneself a refugee, as reporters inform you when they interview you in France in 2017. They tell you Europeans are more accepting of refugees because they are fewer in number and come for political reasons, unlike immigrants or migrants, who come in masses for economic reasons. But only three years later, in the fall of 2020, the Paris police violently break up an encampment101 of refugees on the Place de la République, where you had stayed in a hostel during your first visit to Paris as a backpacker with bleached blond hair. Everyone mistakes you for Japanese. You have never heard Konnichiwa! so many times in your life. Everyone seems friendly because the Japanese, even if there might be too many of them, visit as tourists with money.

Refugees arrive with nothing and threaten to stay. If

there are enough of them, meaning too many,

they induce unease or worse.

In this anti-refugee climate, you think you should advocate for refugees, so you give a talk in Boise, Idaho, to a program for refugee high school students. They have written stories, essays, or poems about fleeing from Egypt, Myanmar, Rwanda, Cambodia, and many more countries. What they survived reminds you of this lesson:

The best way to kill a cocktail

party conversation is to

say you’re a refugee.

Refugee experiences unsettle and discomfort people who never had to flee. You don’t blame them. You also do not know what to say when faced with emotionally complicated situations.

Start with an easy question for the students. How many of you are refugees? Two, three hands go up. How many of you are immigrants?

Everybody raises their hands.

These students have already absorbed the message: AMERICATM is a nation of immigrants. Not a country of refugees.

As for your fellow Vietnamese, they may call themselves refugees in Vietnamese, but in English, they often call themselves immigrants. In 1975, some move to Louisiana, where they encounter Hurricane Katrina thirty years later. Tens of thousands of New Orleans residents are rendered homeless, some stranded on rooftops trying to escape rising floodwaters, others trapped in a football stadium trying to survive. When some reporters describe the displaced as refugees, President George W. Bush is outraged.

The people we’re talking about102 are not

refugees, he says. They are Americans.

Many of the displaced are Black, and for

perhaps the only time in history, the civil rights

leader Jesse Jackson agrees with George Bush:

It is racist to call American citizens103

refugees. . . . To see them as refugees 104is to

see them as other than Americans.

You are bemused. It seems that refugees have

succeeded in bringing a racially divided

AMERICATM together.

This is because refugees are anathema to the AMERICAN DREAMTM. Forget for the moment that Black people have a long history of being fugitives and refugees from slavery and Jim Crow. Forget that the Pilgrims were not only religious and political refugees—they were also the Original Boat People! But in the American imagination, AMERICATM was never founded by refugees and can never become the kind of failed or repressive country that produces refugees.

Other countries—primarily non-white of the so-called Third World, large swaths of Asia, Africa, and Latin America—gush refugees because they are broken or breaking apart, or because they break their own people.

AMERICATM cannot be broken or breaking.

AMERICATM can welcome refugees because it is great. So to call Americans refugees is a shock that reveals a truth: the USA can engender refugees. Because these refugees move only within the United States, the United Nations would officially classify them as displaced people. But if they look like refugees and smell like refugees, perhaps they actually are refugees. And no country is so great that it will not produce climate refugees.

Using words to force us to see anew is critical, if discomfiting (for some). Once, when you visit a college and say that Japanese Americans were imprisoned in concentration camps, an outraged (white male) marine veteran in the audience berates you. But “concentration camp” is the term President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used until the Nazis spoiled it. When it comes to concentration camps, Hitler, claims the poet Aimé Césaire, applied

to Europe colonialist procedures105 which

until then had been reserved exclusively

for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of

India, and the blacks of Africa.

If “internment camp” is a euphemism for “concentration camp,”

then perhaps “AMERICATM” is itself a euphemism.

An American president embracing the euphemism is unsurprising. But Jesse Jackson—companion to Martin Luther King Jr., presidential candidate, leader of the National Rainbow Coalition who inspired you when you saw him speak at Berkeley—he undoubtedly knows AMER­ICATM is a myth. A sales pitch that whitewashes enslavement and its consequences. And yet Black people have fought hard to be fully equal Americans. For some, that means claiming AMERICATM and rejecting any association with refugees.

Refugees are no different. People do not fight their way into AMERICATM only to reject it or criticize it (except for ingrates like you). Refugees claim to be immigrants because Americans understand the immigrant typology. Here are the steps for anyone wanting to write their own immigrant saga for the American and Western marketplace:

STEP ONE

Hard life in the old world—poverty, war, patriarchy, homophobia, religious persecution, dictatorial regime, etc. If AMERICATM had a hand in stoking any of the turmoil, do not mention, or downplay, or point out that other countries are worse.

STEP TWO

Daunting challenges in the new world—language barriers, cultural misunderstandings, racism, and condescension, as well as starting at or near the economic bottom, above many Black people (sometimes visible) and Native people (usually unmentioned). Gentle criticism of American racism and capitalism is permitted, even embraced, so long as it is not explicitly decolonial or Marxist and so long as Step Four (see below) is achieved.

STEP THREE

Generational conflict—parents don’t understand their Americanized children; American-born or American-raised children don’t get their old-world parents. Describe generational conflict as the result of personal differences, familial tensions, and cultural conflict, but not as the direct intimate consequence of colonization with the resulting upheavals of millions, events that AMERICATM has often instigated.

STEP FOUR

Reconciliation—your grandparents have achieved the AMERICAN DREAMTM, and if they didn’t, your parents did, and if they didn’t, you did. For self-published books, self-help books, and the memoirs of people who are not writers: state reconciliation baldly. Flag-waving is acceptable. For writers hoping to win literary prizes, express reconciliation with great subtlety, mixed with regret and melancholy. Flag-waving: less acceptable.

STEP FIVE

Remember that your people are only the backdrop for your personal struggle to become an individual, someone who has shed your ethnic, cultural, or group heritage as a political identity (although keeping that heritage as a cultural identity is acceptable). Your only political identity is as an American, which is, paradoxically, synonymous with being an individual. Not with being part of a collective.

BONUS POINTS

As an individual, serve as your people’s ambassador. Be apologetic for their excesses and their irreconcilable differences with AMER­ICATM specifically or the West in general. Assume, explicitly or implicitly, that your audience is white. Incorporate food into your title, and/or use excessively spiritual or natural imagery. Use food liberally as a metaphor for cultural differences and assimilation. For example, you could write:

I introduced my corn-fed, Iowa-raised fiancé/e to a bowl of my mother’s delicious pho—a beef broth noodle soup that every Vietnamese person loves . . .

Ignore the fact that no Vietnamese person would need to have phở explained to them. Do not wonder if the Great White American Male Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote, in an early draft of The Great Gatsby:

I offered Daisy a delicious sandwich—two slices of bread between which there is ­something delicious . . .

Never forget: you are not writing first and foremost for your own people or even the world, as Fitzgerald assumed.

Variations are permitted: perhaps the old world isn’t too bad, or perhaps there isn’t too much generational conflict. But major variations deeply confuse Americans, particularly with Steps Four and Five. Together they compose the Hollywood ending, where all that has gone wrong is set right, where the individual is affirmed. The American variation of this happy ending accentuates how AMERICATM, for all its flaws and challenges, is

THE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH

The curtain drops. The immigrants or

their children have become American.

THE END.

Or is it?

When you write The Sympathizer, you write against this immigrant saga. You write for two years in an oasis of privilege whose roots are planted by Ba Má. They paid for your education through college; fed, clothed, and insured you; gave you a moral grounding in a Catholicism you find problematic but from which you extract a sense of justice and a potent symbology; provided you with their own example of relentless work and sacrifice for others (meaning you); protected and nurtured your ego and self-esteem; and donated, free of charge, a good portion of the down payment on your house overlooking the eastern end of Sunset Boulevard, which, one day, the great-granddaughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald will purchase from you.

The very material conditions for the writing of your anti-immigrant saga are themselves part of the immigrant saga. Even if the spare bedroom in which you write is sparsely decorated, even if you write facing a blank wall, you have a spare bedroom. You possess the celebrated room of one’s own that a writer needs, that Virginia Woolf called for. But remember:

the English writer in her example gets that room of

her own through five hundred pounds a year

willed to her by an aunt in Bombay,106

India—an English colony.

And you possess more than a room—you own a house. What a contradiction! And contradictions are great places from which to write novels. You decline the bonus points and the subtle happy ending of the immigrant saga, even as you live in subtle happiness. Your protagonist, disenchanted with communism (acceptable) and deeply critical of AMERICATM (confusing), does not run to AMERICATM at book’s end to gorge himself on Happy Meals at McDonald’s and transmogrify into a freedom-loving, alienated, moderately obese individual suffering a midlife crisis, which might have made the confusing aspects of the book more acceptable to New York literary editors. Instead, as one of them puts it, he

just had too much trouble

crawling all the way

inside the voice.

Is this why thirteen out of fourteen editors reject your novel? Is your voice too foreign? Too weird? Is it that you even have a voice, uttering words in English, that is strange? Even after The Sympathizer is published, another white American editor asks you if your work has been translated into English.

All you know for certain is that the fourteenth editor who

bought the book, Peter Blackstock, is not American but

English, of mixed race with a Malaysian mother, and someone

who had studied Russian and German, and who edits books

for Grove Press, which publishes the American editions of

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin,

White Masks, works of revolution and decolonization you

have turned to and returned to for thirty years. Perhaps for all

these reasons he sees something in your novel that

the white American editors could not.

While you reject the immigrant story insofar as it can obscure AMER­ICATM’s settler colonialism and its frequent betrayal of its revolutionary ideals, some of your fellow immigrants, or refugees, also reject the immigrant story, but for a different reason, one magnified in the age of :

these immigrants and refugees

want to shut the door behind them.

One elderly Vietnamese refugee107 says of ’s refugee policies:

I tell you, this idea he has of keeping out

Muslims is the right thing to do. . . . We are the

good refugees. They’re not political refugees

like we were. There are two types of people who

want to come to America—those who seek

freedom and those who go out to destroy it.

Oh, noble sentiment! Oh, freedom-loving, heroic Vietnamese people who genuflect before AMERICATM and who also toot their own horn and are quick to snitch on those darker, browner, less trustworthy people with the wrong god sniffing at the Golden Door! Oh—

It suddenly occurs to you that you grew up in the second-largest Vietnamese refugee community in the world after Little Sài Gòn, Orange County, California, and you remember that

there were

a lot of bad

Vietnamese refugees!

Taking welfare benefits while working for cash in the ethnic economy? Receiving government housing subsidies while renting out rooms to even poorer refugees? Faking marriage to get immigration status? Faking divorce so supposedly single parents and their children could get additional benefits? Faking car accidents and injuries for insurance money, and treating nonexistent patients to fraudulently claim government reimbursements? Abusing children and wives? Racially discriminating against the Amerasian children of American soldiers, including those children used as passports to the United States by their families, who then sometimes abandon them? Assaulting and robbing fellow refugees, as well as stealing microchips, extorting businesses, running brothels, and dealing drugs? Assassinating journalists with unpopular opinions about the homeland? Going to the homeland and pretending to be rich even if one is a busboy? Finding a girlfriend, mistress, or second wife and living a doubled existence, or, fuck it, just abandoning one’s diasporic family altogether for the sweet life back home?

You did all these things, but let’s be clear: this is all very colorful!

Without this kind of behavior, what kind of stories could you

tell? Italian Americans have also been rather colorful.

Imagine AMERICATM without The Godfather

or Goodfellas—impossible!

The Mafia story is the

B side of the AMERICAN DREAMTM,

because crime is as American as apple pie, as

American as stealing land and calling it Manifest Destiny,

as American as enslaving people and . . . well, let’s not talk about that.

All this colorful behavior is now forgotten, or if not forgotten, not spoken of. Instead, Americans extol your people as proof of the greatness of AMERICATM in accepting the unwanted, while your people extol themselves as evidence of the immigrant saga of success.

And yet the majority of Americans

in 1975 did not want to accept

Southeast Asian refugees. 108

Forgetting this allows anti-immigrant Americans to say they want only the good immigrants, even though today’s good immigrants were yesterday’s bad immigrants.

As one immigrant put it:109

First thing I did after my citizenship?

Climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty,

gazed upon this great land,

and shouted:

FUCK YOU,

IMMIGRANTS!!!