Nevertheless, this earlier version of you, this ghost of you with his horror story, will not let you go. His writing has found its reader, you, in words you wrote to yourself and archive in the milk crate as self-evidence. The further you move away from that time when your mother is in the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward, the more your memory changes it. For years afterward you think your mother is in the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward when you are a child, because the visit to the ward frightens you and makes you feel vulnerable.
Why, then, do your words from
that time indicate no fear
and no vulnerability?
Perhaps because you are a student at UC Berkeley and you feel, for the first time, that you are a part of a cause and a movement. By the spring of 1990, in your first semester, a sophomore transfer from UCLA, you are taking an introduction to Asian American history.
You are immediately radicalized.
You wonder why you never learned any of this history. It turns out that it is not you who is whitewashed. It’s AMERICATM that is whitewashed, erasing the Asians it has exploited and dehumanized. Also expunged, edited, or sanitized: the wars and conquests that brought so many Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants and refugees to the United States, from the American conquest and colonization of the Philippines, Hawai‘i, and Guam to the American role in Korea, Việt Nam, Laos, and Cambodia, countries where considerable numbers of the people did not want Americans there. And you, the Asian Invasion, realize that
Asians have never invaded AMERICATM.
It’s AMERICATM that has invaded Asia.
You join the Asian American Political Alliance, a group of equally angry and passionate students who claim descent from the college students of the late 1960s who refused to be called Orientals or Asians and re-invented themselves as something altogether new: Asian Americans. These Asian Americans claimed their place in the Third World Liberation Front, an alliance of radical students who believed liberation comes from cross-racial and international solidarity, from being not only anti-racist but also anti-war and anti-imperialist. You are no longer a faceless part of an Asian Invasion. You are an Asian American. You have a face, a voice, a name, a movement, a history, a consciousness.
A rage.
As part of a coalition of students of color and white allies, you Asian Americans stage protests to demand more diversity in a mostly white faculty and in a curriculum that marginalizes your histories and experiences. Your protests are not revolutionary, and yet there are those who see these efforts, then and now, as dividing the country and destroying Western civilization.
Your heroes are anti-colonial revolutionaries, public intellectuals, committed writers, galvanizing teachers. From the latter, you learn about the astounding concept of tenure: a professorial reward that guarantees academic freedom, because tenured professors cannot be fired.
Academia’s hook sinks into your eye.
It is still there, thirty years later.
In the classroom, you study history, politics, theory, and literature, focusing on moments and movements of decolonization, revolution, or resistance. Outside the classroom, you learn how to organize people, build a network, plan protests. You begin with marches and rallies. You end with taking over the campus administrative offices and then the chancellor’s office, dozens of you storming in, sitting down, refusing to leave. You raise your fists and chant, The people, united, will never be defeated!
You are having the time of your life!
And it’s only your first semester!
The campus police jab at you with batons. You back away, shrink from the front line. When you lock arms with fellow protesters, the police break up your blockade by bending your thumbs until you let go. They process you at a mobile booking station and send you on your way. This happens to you twice, not just once like most of your peers.
You didn’t come to Berkeley not to be arrested.
But there’s no jail. You’re nice college kids. At one of the protests, some Asian American friends wear suits and ties to show how respectable they are. A prominent civil rights attorney is good enough to represent you pro bono. Not good enough to get you acquitted, it is true, but that is because you are really, really guilty of two counts each of trespassing and resisting arrest.
You leave UC Berkeley with four misdemeanors,
three diplomas, two arrests, and an abiding
belief in solidarity, liberation, and the
power of the people and the
power of art.
Art can decimate as well as liberate. The popularity of Miss Saigon reminds you of this. This musical reheating of the Madame Butterfly story has become a huge theatrical hit. In it, an Asian woman falls in love with a white man and gives up her life so her child can live free in the West. The microwaved version moves from Japan to the brothels of Sài Gòn during the war, with the role of the Eurasian engineer given to a white man who tapes his eyes to slant them.
No matter how often you look at yourself in the
mirror, your eyes do not seem slanted. But perhaps
those with slanted eyes cannot see their own slant.
You write your first op-ed for the college newspaper, condemning Miss Saigon. A friend tells you that one of the most beloved English professors, whom you also like, does not approve. Perhaps you wrote a terrible piece. Perhaps you are a barbarian or a Philistine. Or perhaps the professor thinks someone else is you.
That someone else is the other Viet Nguyen, also an English major. He is short and gay and looks nothing like you, or he looks exactly like you, depending on who is looking. The other Viet Nguyen’s professor dislikes him and thinks you are him when you apply for graduate school. For this, you almost do not get a fellowship, which would prevent you from accepting Berkeley’s offer of admission.
Or perhaps the professor didn’t appreciate your application. Influenced by the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory, you believe SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. Literary criticism, you argue, can change the world.
Oh, youthful illusion!
You do not realize that your criticism
can never hope to change the world
if you cannot also change yourself.
Thirty years later you write another op-ed about the revival of Miss Saigon, this time for the New York Times. Challenging art with politics, and vice versa, brings out the critics then and now. Your hate mail has a common theme: How dare you reduce Art and Love to politics! How dare you trample Freedom of Speech and Artistic Freedom and AMERICATM with your Soviet Russian Chinese Maoist North Korean Totalitarian Writers Union Authoritarian Communist Socialist Marxist Anti-American Drivel!
These freedom-loving critics would likely laud the brave dissident
writers of China, North Korea, Russia, etc., and look down on
the apolitical conformist writers of those regimes. But is
nothing in the West worthy of political wrath when it
comes to art and writing? It must be so wonderful to
be free of anger, to have nothing threatened by the
outrages committed by your society, to have
never been on the receiving end of your
society’s wars police actions missiles
guns bombs whips nooses batons
coups death squads black sites
laws statutes policies
epithets jokes gazes
denials and
silence.
In fact, you take Art and Artistic Freedom and Freedom of Speech and the Exchange of Ideas very seriously. So seriously that you ask a beautiful young woman to go to New York City and spend a huge amount of money (for students) on fourth-row seats for Miss Saigon so you can See for Yourself Rather Than Just Judge.
All around you and your gorgeous date are audience members weeping at the climactic spectacle, the heartbreaking tragedy of an Asian woman killing herself for a white man and giving him their child. There’s even a Huey helicopter! Like the one that landed on the roof in Sài Gòn to rescue desperate Vietnamese! Like the ones from which American soldiers slaughtered innocent Vietnamese!
When your lovely companion is equally unmoved—disgusted, really—you sense that you have made the right choice, and vice versa. Lan, your future wife and first reader, an aspiring scholar and an aspiring writer like yourself, takes a photo of you gagging under the marquee, a document now lost or otherwise you would share it, because you are that kind of person.
Watching Miss Saigon continues your education into how a part of AMERICATM and the West enjoys seeing Asians. You think you know something about this AMERICATM because you grew up surrounded by white American culture, so much so that your first publication in college is a long essay for Asian Week on “Growing Up in White America.”
The essay earns you a seat in Maxine Hong Kingston’s nonfiction writing seminar along with thirteen others. Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior, a 1976 landmark of feminist memoir and Asian American literature. A classic of American writing. You are lucky to be in this cozy, dim seminar room. Every day you sit on a couch a few feet from this writer whose The Woman Warrior is said to be the most widely taught book in college classes, and every day—
you fall asleep.
At the end of the semester—December 1990—Kingston writes each student a note. You bury yours in the milk crate of school folders and notebooks, but the paraphrase glows in your memory:
You seem very alienated. You should make use of
our university’s counseling services.
You never make use of the counseling.
You become a writer instead.
You haven’t turned out
so bad, have you?
Have you?
Thirty years later, the writerly you digs up Kingston’s letter and rereads it:
I believe you are trying again and again to
approach the heart of your story (mother
lands in the hospital). But you have not gotten
to the center of things.
My observation is that you seem alienated
and depressed. You said that falling asleep in
class is your normal behavior; I think it is a
sign of withdrawing and not functioning.
Taking joy in life and being generous in the
giving of yourself (such as giving praise or
criticism to other students) are healthy states
that I want for you to work on and achieve.
Did you notice that I asked you to give me
questions? There are no questions in your
letter. Questions are creative and dangerous.
To ask a question is to be open to change. For
you to be a good writer, Viet, you need to be
open, engaged, speaking, hearing, awake.
These are the questions you should have asked yourself:
Are you, in fact, alienated and depressed?
Can you be generous to your fellow writers?
Can you be open, engaged, speaking, hearing, awake,
especially if you have never been before?
Can you get to the heart of the story?
Can you go where it hurts?
Can you cut to the bone?