I am Má’s descendant.
What does it mean to write my mother’s obituary, my mother’s story, to claim descent from her?
Especially since Má would not want me to write about her this way. Not that she ever forbade me. She trusted me, whose books she never read but was proud of anyway. And since she never consented to this story, written in a language she had difficulty reading, am I betraying her?
If I do betray her, can I be loyal at the same time? Her life is epic and yet quotidian, deserving to be told and known, according to me if not her. Her story matters because she is Má, but it also carries weight because it resembles those of many other (Vietnamese) refugees.
Heroic as she is to me, perhaps Má is not exceptional to anyone but those who love her. But saying my mother may be more typical than exceptional is no loss. When I hear stories of other refugees and what they survived
or not
I am immediately captured by their gravity. Not the same as Má’s, but similar. Not exceptional, but common. Not stereotype, but history. Each one deserving a story. Each one with potential to be portrayed. And perhaps betrayed.
I write about Má because I believe stories matter, but if stories can dismember as much as save, what does my version inflict on her? If I re membered everything about Má and wrote it down, is it betrayal? For example, in “War Years,” my adolescent narrator says that
my mother wore only a nightgown of sheer green fabric
without a bra. She wasn’t aware of how her breasts
swayed like anemones under shallow water, embarrassing
me whenever I saw those dark and doleful areolas with
their nipples as thick as my index finger. My mother’s
breasts were nothing like those of the girls in my class,
or so I imagined.162
Some readers are offended. Is it a defense to say Má wore such a nightgown in my adolescence, her way of relaxing after an exhausting day at the SàiGòn Mới, discomfiting me enough so that the memory seeks me out without my consent, even as I cannot seek out other memories, like what occurred in the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward? Or is mentioning the fact and memory of that nightgown already betraying Má?
Whereof one cannot speak, 163
thereof one must be silent
wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein. True for nations, corporations, individuals. But I have been silent for so long about so many things that now and then I find it hard to know when to choose silence or speech. Sometimes one speaks too much, while sometimes silence speaks for itself.
If recalling this memory for others to see is, possibly, a betrayal, what about forgetting? If blankness and whiteness riddle my imprecise memory of Má, is that also treachery?
Turning memory’s dial, we veer between what
Paul Ricoeur, the philosopher, calls
“unhappy memory” versus
“happy forgetting.” 164
Unhappy memory, all too common, is when the past
arises from the grave and arrives armed and
lethal, seeking revenge or justice.
I prefer justice, the condition for happy forgetting,
when the fatal and fateful past, satisfied, returns
to a peaceful slumber from which
it will not rise again.
But if we have happily forgotten,
how will we know the fact of
our own amnesia?
Days go by, weeks even, when I do not think of my mother, unaware even of my lack of reflection. Is that happy forgetting? If so, and if forgetting is necessary to moving on, why does the remembering of my forgetting feel like another betrayal?
Writing thus becomes a way of re membering, for the act of writing is when I most feel Má’s presence. But writing is also a way of forgetting, allowing me not to think of her after I am finished, Má and the past safely behind me.
Remembering and forgetting Má says something about her but also about me. The storyteller telling on himself. And what I can tell is that in writing about my mother as my own, someone who is part of me as I was part of her, my mother is also my Other.
The Other is someone too close to us.
I cannot not remember my mother. And
my Other. But how do I re
member her?
The easiest thing is to recall someone dearly my own (my mother) and someone who is an Other (also my mother) and thus represent her, and implicitly through her all Vietnamese refugees and their struggles, to make her, them, us, a part of AMERICATM and maybe even Việt Nam. To humanize us. To include us. This was my ambition when I began trying to write decades ago.
But to humanize and to include are mistakes.
Proving what does not need to be proven only
concedes our inferiority to people who never
question their own humanity, even as they
dehumanize us, invade us, murder us—
the colonized, the conquered, the Indigenous, the
enslaved, the exploited, the non-white, the non-
male, the non-straight—and then invite us to do the
same inhuman things to Others. In the name of
humanity. Kill the savages. In order to save them.
Then teach the survivors and descendants. The
language of the humanities. So they can speak.
Properly. Politely. Of this fraught history. That is
not history. But still present.
Đụ má!
Strange how an obscenity inspires nostalgia in me. But this is how some of us talk to each other! And yet the language in which I write is the master’s. I know very few Vietnamese who curse in the master’s language to the master’s face.
In this language, we hold our tongues,
for those who claim English as
their own are watching
and judging us.
But why refrain from obscenity when
our existence is due to the obscene?
So many of us who fell in love with stories feel the pain of being silenced, erased, distorted, raped, killed. So we demand for ourselves the power of speech, of narrative, of (self-)representation, about people like us. Like Ba Má.
But if (self-)representation
matters, it is also
not enough.
For those of us who are writers and storytellers, the masters tell us to show, don’t tell. A law of representation to keep us in our place. Since many of us have so much we want to tell. Even if we want to show the telling at the same time.
“You must not tell anyone,”165
my mother said,
“what I am about to tell you.”
Kingston begins The Woman Warrior this way, naming the taboo and breaking it at the same time. In so doing, Kingston creates a parable of the writer’s ultimate task:
find what must not be told
and tell it.
But is this honesty or betrayal?
Sometimes telling the secret is both.
I see Má’s face as she exhales her last. Did she ever forbid me from telling her story? No. Because she never thought I would. She trusted me, who cannot trust my own memory.
Having been represented by me, does she now matter more than when she wasn’t? So many stories have already been created about women somewhat like her by writers somewhat like me, ambivalent about telling on their mothers, revealing their secrets.
If Má’s life had secrets and
is itself perhaps a secret, let it be said
that two kinds of confidences exist
to be confessed and told on:
the private secret and
the open secret.
Private secrets are common enough in the storytelling world: illness, divorce, alienation, infidelity, and the like.
Like Má’s life.
And death.
These are the kinds of secrets expected of a book like this. Matters of the self, and only the self, not the collective, are the drama for an American storytelling world that honors showing over telling; that sneezes when politics nudges too close into fiction, poetry, movies, and television; that associates telling with the uncouth acts of writers who are barbarians or, even worse, communists.
Art, in the free West, in AMERICATM, is above politics. Instead of being sentenced to reeducation camps and forced labor, instead of being disciplined by socialist realism and Writers Unions, free writers in the West, especially AMERICATM, are dispatched to campuses to work on their craft as creative writers.
“Creative”—a curious and anxious adjective, as if writers exist who do not want to be creative, as if being creative were more important than anything else, like being critical.
To be creative without being critical risks being apolitical. A lack of politics is the politics of the dominant American literary world, leading many American writers to avoid certain open secrets.
The open secret dares us to acknowledge its presence. If we
tell on the open secret, we anger the many
who do not want it called out.
The open secret of AMERICATM is that white people founded it on
colonization, genocide, slavery, war, and white supremacy,
all of which continue shaping the self
and the Other.
The open secret of AMERICATM is that we
do not call colonization by its name.
Instead, we give colonization
another name:
the AMERICAN DREAMTM
|
But, some protest, we do talk |
Yes, but we contain their |
|
about these horrors, especially |
disturbance through |
|
in books! |
(self-)representation! |
And yet (self-)representation is a euphemism.
Open secrets spawn euphemisms,
the deadly dialect of the powerful.
Open secrets and euphemisms abound. The “special military operation” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The “Department of Defense” for a United States almost always at war. Or the “Cold War,” a frigid euphemism allowing great powers to distance themselves from the hot wars they fought, instigated, or supported in other countries. The latest battlefield: Ukraine.
The American Pentagon press secretary becomes emotional talking about Vladimir Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine:
It’s difficult to look at166 some of the images and
imagine that any well-thinking, serious, mature
leader would do that. I can’t talk to his psychology,
but I think we can all speak to his depravity.
When was the last time an American official was teary discussing the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by American weaponry and sanctions, or by the warlords and strongmen we support?
It was a pity167
the idealistic and innocent CIA agent Alden Pyle
says of Vietnamese civilians killed by his bombs
in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American
but you can’t always hit your target.
Anyway they died in the right cause. . . .
In a way you could say they
died for democracy.
For Americans, the open secret is our own depravity,
which must be passed over in silence.
To learn a little of these open secrets and hot wars, readers can turn to writers like me, born elsewhere and rebirthed in AMERICATM as literary proxies for the less powerful, ethnic representatives in the so-called culture wars over the nation’s past, present, and future. As the novelist Rabih Alameddine, also an American, among other identities, says:
Those of us who fall outside the dominant culture168
are allowed to speak as the other, and
more importantly, for the other.
. . . I get Lebanon.
My assignment: Việt Nam.
The euphemism of (self-)representation is that we proxies usually do not get assigned AMERICATM itself. Too big of a subject for our little selves. No, AMERICATM belongs to the Great White American Male Novelists. They write from and about the bright center of empire, without ever calling it as such, while we write from the shadows and far reaches.
Our power comes from witnessing death and suffering, or witnessing the trauma endured by our parents. We are called on to offer testimony about this pain, but we are not the prosecutors, defenders, and magistrates who make the case, write the definitive opinion, hand down judgment. We are expected to show our grief, not to tell on why this grief exists.
This grief . . .
When Má dies, I gently close her eyes,
as Ba asks. Then he tells me
to close her mouth.
Her skin is already cold when
I lift her jaw, and when
I let it go, her mouth
falls open again.
Her voicelessness invites me to
speak for her. That is also
representation’s
temptation.
Can I be her representative?
Make her story mine?
Through Má and others like her, can I,
can we, demand our share of
representation in this country,
in the world?
When we make that demand, those who oppose us no longer say stories are just stories. Instead, they blame us for destroying (Western) civilization, or at least AMERICATM, by demanding narrative plenitude for our voices, experiences, memories, and histories in the curriculum, the canon, the country.
Representation matters, but inasmuch as it is a cure, representation is also an affliction, condemning us to isolation as proxy and alibi.
have I found my voice
do you hear me
or must I translate for you
As an esteemed, white-haired Ivy League Americanist once said with a genteel smile after I visited his graduate seminar and spoke for an hour of my work on the war in Việt Nam:
It is a cri de coeur!
Yes. It is.
The powerful are not frightened by the less powerful claiming their one small grief, uttering their soulful, heartfelt, irrational howl. A ration of grief keeps the less powerful alive but weak, divided from each other, blaming each other, more easily conquered.
To unscrew ourselves from the colonizer—or his replacement, risen from the ranks of the colonized, someone who looks like us but is more than willing to screw us—we must imagine solidarity with others who do not seem to be like us but whose sorrows we can and must share. As the powerful share their secrets in order to become even more powerful, the less powerful must share their griefs to prevent their one grievance from becoming a poison.
Unscrewing ourselves and undoing representation’s curse goes by another name:
decolonization.
Decolonization tells us representation matters, but that we fool ourselves, curse ourselves, if we believe that representation is enough. We must also own the means of representation. And production. And that if colonization is always about the land and its violent appropriation, decolonization is about returning the land and dispelling the greatest euphemisms of all: “civilization” and “humanity.” In whose names the massacres have been committed. In whose names the corpses have been disremembered.
Writers who see themselves only as individuals practicing art in isolation, who can only show but never tell, are less able to protest being cast as a representative and a voice for the voiceless, a cursed condition writers may bemoan to no end—
no end unless writers see themselves as engaging
with open secrets, refusing euphemisms, and being
but one voice among many, including the dead
with all their private secrets.
Now Má is one of the dead. She has taken most of her secrets with her and left me with a few.
The title of her story, “War Years,” refutes how Americans and perhaps people the world over usually understand the lives of immigrants and refugees, burdened by private secrets as they chase the AMERICAN DREAMTM. Understanding that the AMERICAN DREAMTM is the gold-plated brand name of American colonization, I understand Má’s private secrets as shaped by the open secrets of wartime, a time in which I also live. A time in which everyone who inhabits the war machine lives.
Wartime compels me to grieve, to share in more than the one grief my fellow Americans give to me, or the one grief denied me by my fellow Vietnamese in the country of my birth. These Vietnamese, after freeing themselves from the French and the Americans, repeated the brutality of their colonizers on the defeated. This brutality must not be mentioned, which is why the government will not allow the television adaptation of The Sympathizer to be shot on Vietnamese land. The members of the Approval Committee say that the story is
not suitable with Vietnamese standpoint169 when building
the image of a soldier in the revolutionary cause of
national liberation and reunification.
The story will
definitely smear the image of the Vietnamese
army and people.170 Because the Vietnamese people’s
war is righteous, and the Vietnamese people’s
treatment of prisoners is always humane, never
using savage and cruel tortures as described.
But the very existence of the Approval Committee proves that there exist open secrets that must be denied. Cannot be approved. Spoken out loud.
What is the greater treachery: the nation that betrays its ideals
or the person who speaks of those betrayals?
The American Revolution, waged for the freedom of all (white men), leads to perpetual wartime and the United States taking over la mission civilisatrice in Việt Nam from the French and replacing the City of Light with the AMERICAN DREAMTM.
The Vietnamese revolution, waged for Hồ Chí Minh’s sacred slogan—
NOTHING IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN
INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM
meaning independence and freedom are
the most important things of all
—leads to a postrevolutionary society where
nothing is more precious than independence and freedom
meaning independence and freedom are
worth less than nothing.
I bet Groucho would guffaw at this pun I heard in Sài Gòn in 2004, although Karl might see nothing funny. Laughter could help the Vietnamese and the Americans recognize not only the idealism and valor of their holy revolutions but the inevitable absurdity and hypocrisy, because nothing is so holy that the human species will not fuck it up. Instead of laughing about this, a good number of Vietnamese and Americans remain intent on idolizing their revolutions, nursing their wars, and fixating on their griefs.
But for the colonized or their descendants—
as well as the descendants of their colonizers—
we must not only accept our grief but also share in the grief of others.
Má is dead, but even in my lament, my cri de coeur, my need to chia buồn, I recognize that her life and death are not unique to anyone except those who love her.
Millions of others lived lives as
difficult, if not worse. Millions lived
lives as courageous, if not more so.
Understanding this does not diminish my mother in any way. If anything, I understand Má better when I see her story against the backdrop of history. And so my mother’s death and her memory stay with me. In “War Years,” I describe Má as she appeared to me in my childhood:
Whenever she spoke in English,171 her voice
took on a higher pitch, as if instead of
coming from inside her, the language was
outside, squeezing her by the throat.
Or is it my language
in my hands
around her neck
making her speak?
And yet when I remember Má, I hear her speak only the mother tongue, caressing me with the love and affection she bestowed on me throughout my childhood, giving me the confidence needed to portray her. And betray her.
Now Má is silenced, but her voice remains with me.
Her mouth is open and I
cannot close it.