memorial

“War Years,” the story about my mother, takes me years to

write, and before that even more years to find the will to write. As for

the words in this memoir, this history, this memorial, this book that

could have been a Not So Great American Novel and perhaps even is

one if re membering is fiction as much as fact—

I waited my entire life to approach these words. Perhaps I also

waited for Má to pass away before I fabricated my stories about her,

or retrieved my stories about her, my tales nothing more than

garments shed by her ghost.

Má dies before the plague begins. If she had been alive,

would she be one of the thousands of elderly and infirm

trapped in their nursing homes? Would my last glimpse of

her have been through a window? During the disaster, not

yet over, more than a million Americans and more than six

million people all over the world die. The body count

continues. Who will memorialize them? And how?

The global plague exacerbates another illness that has always

existed in AMERICATM, our predisposition to murder. The

police murder George Floyd in 2020. In 2021, a white man

with a gun murders eight people in Atlanta, six of them Asian

immigrant women working in massage parlors.150

Soon Chung Park, 74

Suncha Kim, 69

Yong Ae Yue, 63

Hyun Jung Grant, 51

Xiaojie Tan, 49

Daoyou Feng, 44

Anger surges against Asians in many countries. In

AMERICATM and elsewhere, women compose the majority

of victims. Of physical verbal symbolic brutality. Of the

violence of stories that stir, seduce, and shatter (some of) us.

How many Asian women, often Vietnamese, have I seen

killed or murdered on-screen or onstage? Did this shape how

I saw Má, who, to some, looks like these dead women?

Sounds like them, too, with her imperfect English?

Apocalypse Now, 1979. Rambo: First Blood Part II, 1985.

Casualties of War, 1989. Miss Saigon, 1989. Outdated?

Watchmen, an HBO TV series in 2019, ends with the

spectacular death of a Vietnamese woman, the mysterious

Lady Trieu, a visionary scientist and a trillionaire

ANOTHER AMERICAN

DRIVEN OUT OF BUSINESS

BY THE VIETNAMESE

with utopian ambitions that her enemies see as dystopian.

Lady Trieu is played by (Vietnamese American)

actor Hong Chau, who could also portray my

mother in the story of her life that HBO will never

make, although HBO is producing a TV series of

my novel, which means if you haven’t read

The Sympathizer yet—you never have to read

The Sympathizer. Just watch it on TV.

Would the makers of Watchmen have dared to

kill Lady Trieu after the Atlanta shootings? Or would that

fantasy be too close to reality? Too disturbing to be

dismissed as just a story?

Lady Trieu met the inevitable fate of the Yellow Peril,

slaughtered by that most American method of mass

termination, aerial bombardment, albeit in a hail

of frozen squid dropped from outer space

(don’t ask). At least she got to say some

appropriate last words as she saw

her fate coming for her:

Đụ má.

Her words are subtitled:

Motherfucker.

The violent deaths of Asian women are not just a story. All

those who can walk away from a book, movie, or play do not

realize it is a privilege to dispose of stories. The privilege of

being part of a majority, when almost all the stories center on

them. They live in the luxury of narrative plenitude.

Few stories feature those of us who dwell in narrative

scarcity. When featured, we are, far too often, distorted. Each

appearance then matters. Too much. No story can handle the

weight. This onus of representation is unfair to us and to the

writers, artists, filmmakers, actors, and storytellers who speak

about us and for us whether we want them to, whether they

want to. And when a story attacks us, when a story repeats

over and over and over, it is no longer just a story. When the

story drills us, it inhabits our minds as narrative, as

mythology, as fantasy that can become reality, as

Full Metal Jacket shows.

As reality shows.

The white male shooter who murdered the

Asian women in Georgia is part of a lineage that

took root with the arrival of European settlers and

continues through the gunman who killed five

schoolchildren in Stockton. The killer says he is

not a racist151 but a sex addict bent on removing

temptation, as if sexual desires can be separated

from racial fantasies. Regardless of his lie or self-

deception, he targeted these women because

they are Asian women.

I watch Full Metal Jacket at home, sometime during college.

Me so horny, Papillon Soo as Da Nang Hooker says to a pair of

marines newly arrived in Sài Gòn. Me love you long time.

In 1989, 2 Live Crew scores a tremendous hit with

“Me So Horny” from the album As Nasty as They Wanna Be,

one of George Floyd’s favorites in high school.

152The refrain: Papillon Soo saying, over and over,

Me so horny.

Me love you long time.

This is how much of the country, perhaps the world,

sees and hears Vietnamese women. Perhaps all

Asian women sound like this to some non-Asians.

I cannot laugh at this movie, at Stanley Kubrick the auteur, at

his masterful cinema. I can stop watching. I don’t. I have

learned to watch women and keep looking.

In the climax, a character known only as VC Sniper

(Ngoc Le, in her sole film appearance) picks off marines in the

battle for Huế. When the marines capture the castrating sniper,

they are startled to see the sniper is a mortally wounded young

woman. Shoot me, she whispers over and over. Shoot me.

These marines are young men trained in boot camp to march

with phallic rifles on their shoulders while clutching

their crotches, chanting:

This is my rifle, this is my gun,

this is for fighting, this is for fun.153

Joker—the marine whom Papillon Soo propositions—

cocks his .45 pistol and shoots

VC Sniper.

How much difference exists, Kubrick implies,

between a woman saying fuck me and shoot me

in the war-saturated masculine imagination,

which is also mine?

The novelist Larry Heinemann understands this

imagination, too. Reading his Close Quarters as a boy, I

am scarred forever by a scene in which American soldiers

gang-rape a Vietnamese sex worker154 whom they call

Claymore Face because of her acne scars. Like the

marine in Mourning Glory, they, too, hold a pistol to her

head. This, the real climax. The battle that follows against

Vietnamese enemies, terrible as it is, is the denouement.

Heinemann wants to disturb his readers because war, which

he experienced, disturbs. In his novel, idealistic young men

transform into monsters. Not just killers. Rapists.

If I am infuriated by the violation and depiction of

Claymore Face, if I am horrified because I have never

raped anyone and cannot imagine myself capable of this

human behavior, am I disturbed at all that soon after

reading the novel I begin looking at girls and women,

feeling great pleasure and therefore becoming complicit in

what is done to them or what might be done to them?

And if I have never aimed a gun at a human being, I am

still complicit in the American machinery of death,

whether aimed at fellow Americans or our

Others beyond our borders.

Even if at times I am also an

Other to my fellow Americans.

The novelist Laila Lalami, born in Morocco but an

American citizen like me, says that Others like us are only

conditional Americans, our citizenship suspect due to

origins, ancestries, religions.155 Sometimes this

suspicion results in murder.

Americans might mourn the victims of the lone white male

gunman, but for the most part they do not mourn the

millions of victims of the greatest acts of anti-Asian

violence, the wars and colonization that AMERICATM and

other colonizing countries have carried out in Asia.

How many people, including the French, know

the French navy shelled Hải Phòng in 1946 and

massacred 6,000 Vietnamese people?156

Many Asians flee or migrate to the very countries that

bombed, shelled, invaded, or colonized them. Even with

conditional citizenship, it must be safer inside the

AMERICAN DREAMTM than outside,

behind the guns than in front.

Until it isn’t.

Before being murdered, Xiaojie Tan claimed her

AMERICAN DREAMTM by opening a

massage parlor in a shopping center:

Cherokee Village.

Ba Má, my brother, me. We began our AMERICAN DREAMTM

in a refugee camp at an American military base:

Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. The

early settlers in this region157

says the fort’s official history

worked hard to make a living

coexisting with the native people.

The region’s boosters say

a fortification was established in the area 158

of Fort Indiantown Gap, during the

French and Indian Wars, to protect the

settlers of the area from the

Susquehannock Indians.

There are probably no Cherokee, or very few, in Cherokee

Village. The American military forcibly expelled the

Cherokee from Georgia in 1838, then compelled them to

migrate west on the Trail of Tears, what the Cherokee call

the Trail Where We Cried.

More than four thousand Cherokee perish. 159

The Susquehannock, also known as the Conestoga, numbered

as many as seven thousand in the year 1600. Diseases

brought by the colonizers diminish them, as do wars with the

colonizers and other Indian nations. Only a few hundred

survive by century’s end. In 1763, twelve years after Ben

Franklin’s speech praising the whiteness of his Pennsylvania

and the need to keep it pristine, vigilantes called the Paxton

Boys murder almost all the remaining Conestoga, peaceful

farmers and craftsmen. The killers, white men who

suffered no legal consequences for their actions

come from Paxton Township.160 The township is sixteen

miles from Fort Indiantown Gap, where we arrived and

where we were grateful. My parents claim our AMERICATM

by buying their first home in Lower Paxton Township.

Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim,

Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, and Yong Ae Yue

may or may not have known of the Trail Where

They Cried. But when Asian immigrants and

refugees like them, like Ba Má and me, come to

claim AMERICATM, we also claim this history.

And sometimes this history claims us.

For most of my life, I do not think about the name of Fort

Indiantown Gap, do not seek out its history or memory.

That, too, is the power and violence of stories. Of

mythology. Of the fantasy that Ba Má and I are not

touched by the history of AMERICA™ and its genocidal

origins, by its ongoing colonization; that we and others

like us do not perpetuate that history and present by

coming here as refugees, immigrants, or settlers and

becoming shareholders in the war machine, the

ultimate condition of our citizenship.

The Lancaster County sheriff recorded the names of the

Conestoga people murdered by the Paxton Boys. So far as I

know, this record is their only surviving obituary.

Murdered at Conestoga Town:161

Sheehays

Wa-a-shen (George)

Tee-Kau-ley (Harry)

Ess-canesh (son of Sheehays)

Tea-wonsha-i-ong (an old woman)

Kannenquas (a woman)

Murdered at the Lancaster Workhouse:

Kyunqueagoah (Captain John)

Koweenasee (Betty, his wife)

Tenseedaagua (Bill Sack)

Kanianguas (Molly, his wife)

Saquies-hat-tah (John Smith)

Chee-na-wan (Peggy, his wife)

Quaachow (Little John, Capt. John’s son)

Shae-e-kah (Jacob, a boy)

Ex-undas (Young Sheehays, a boy)

Tong-quas (Chrisly, a boy)

Hy-ye-naes (Little Peter, a boy)

Ko-qoa-e-un-quas (Molly, a girl)

Karen-do-uah (a little girl)

Canu-kie-sung (Peggy, a girl)

Survivors on the farm of Christian Hershey:

Michael

Mary (his wife)

Their descendants live.