hello, hollywood?

You are refugees, not exiles.

You are refugees, not expats.

You are refugees, not migrants.

You are refugees, not immigrants.

You are many, not few.

You are many, not one.

But though you are

a horde, you are also

nothing. You

refugees.

Perhaps some of the refugees of World War II received the Hollywood treatment, but very few Hollywood movies feature you, the refugees of the last few decades, though your lives have everything Hollywood desires: Drama! Tragedy! War! Romance! Separated lovers! Orphaned children! Divided families! Impossible odds! Heartwarming stories of reunion and success! (Ignore the ones not reunited, the ones not successful).

BUT—

and this is a big

BUT

—you refugees lack one crucial

element Hollywood needs:

You. Are. Not. White.

You own a house or rent an apartment. You live with your family or by yourself. You wake in the morning and drink your coffee or tea. You drive a car or a motorbike, or perhaps you take the bus. You go to work and turn on your computer. You go out at night and flirt and date. You watch movies and television shows and fantasize about seeing yourself on-screen. You live in a small town or big city, or maybe in the countryside. You have hopes, dreams, expectations. You take your humanity for granted. You still believe you are human when catastrophe renders you homeless. Smoke and fire shroud your town or city or countryside. You drive, run, walk, or catch a bus to the border or the sea. Only then, having fled, hoping to leave, or making it across the border or the sea, on foot, on boat, on raft, on truck, do you understand that those who are not refugees see you refugees as the zombies of the world, the undead rising from dying states to march or swim toward the borders of the living in endless frightening waves.

Those on the other side do

not see you as human at all.

This is the dread experience of joining the world’s 103 million forcibly displaced people, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees calls them. The refugees from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine receive a more hospitable welcome because they are a rarity: they are white. Perhaps Hollywood might even make a movie about the odyssey of Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Mexico and claiming asylum at the U.S. border, starring Angelina Jolie as a bedraggled but still beautiful refugee. But Hollywood will probably not make a movie about the African refugees fleeing from Ukraine, abused at the Polish border,8 or the Central American refugees kept waiting at the U.S. border while white Ukrainians pass on through.9

The nation of the displaced looms larger than New Zealand or Ireland, Norway or Denmark, Singapore or Hong Kong, Switzerland or Austria, Portugal or Greece, Belgium or the Netherlands, Taiwan or Australia, South Korea or the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia or Spain, Italy or France, Cambodia or Thailand, Germany or Iran.

Why even compare yourself to a nation?

People hate you, define themselves against

you, no longer part of a nation, reminder

of the fragility of homes and nations,

a threat to the existence of nations.

Even if they do not hate you,

they see you as a crisis.

You refugees.

This nation of displaced persons is a little larger than Việt Nam, ninety-seven million people, the world’s fifteenth-largest nation. Despite their demure appearance, your people really enjoy procreating! But as much as they might be driven by Eros, perhaps Thanatos also haunts them, shadowed as they are by three million war deaths and the hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of dead who preceded them from the other conflicts, famine, and colonization of the previous hundred years. You are proud of your lustful, fertile people, you who were one of them until you were

Dis-placed.

Dis place.

Dys-place.

This place that is no place that is still your place.

The forcibly displaced include the internally displaced and asylum seekers, as well as 32.5 million refugees (as a nation, larger than Malaysia, smaller than Angola).10 The countries sending forth or forcing out11 the most refugees are the Syrian Arab Republic, Venezuela, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and South Sudan. Force and violence beat refugees into existence. Fear and terror shape refugees. Things are done to refugees before they do things like flee. Escape. Say please. And thank you.

As for the European Jews who survived the Holocaust and became refugees, Hannah Arendt wrote:

We were told to forget;12 and we forgot

quicker than anybody ever could imagine.

You have done your best to

forget. You have become very good at

forgetting. And now it is difficult, having

forgotten so many parts of yourself and those you

love, to re member your many disremembered pieces.

The countries hosting the most refugees are Turkey, Colombia, Germany, Pakistan, and Uganda. Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the West had not welcomed most of the world’s refugees since World War II, despite the cries of some Westerners that too much is asked of the generous, liberal, cosmopolitan West, which has, among other civilized accomplishments, invented the fork—so much easier to use than chopsticks, so much cleaner than one’s hand—as well as the napalm dropped on Phan Thị Kim Phúc, the camera and the film that recorded her burned and naked, and the entire apparatus of mechanical reproduction that etched her into people’s memories all over the world, to the point that her face and body now stand in for Việt Nam, country of war, country of victims, deserving of pity from the West and most of the rest.

Are you a Westerner?

You must be a Westerner.

San José is in the West, and

you know the way to San José.

You were born in Ban Mê Thuột, now spelled Buôn Mê Thuột or Buôn Ma Thuột, its name changed by the victors, along with many other things. Get rid of French influences, restore some Sinicized roots, or just rename after new heroes. Sài Gòn becomes Hồ Chí Minh City, and if you land at the airport and call it phi trường instead of sân bay, or if you call a bank nhà băng instead of ngân hàng, people will know you left in 1975. As for your hometown, Buôn Ma Thuột is closer to Ƀuôn Ama Thuột,13 the name used by the people who first lived there, the Ê Đê.

You remember nothing of what the New York Times called a

sleepy, charming highlands town

where the last emperor, Bảo Đại, once had hunting lodges. By the time you are born, American military advisers occupy those lodges. American-made jeeps and trucks rumble through paved two-lane roads and streets, driven by southern soldiers. Ban Mê Thuột has changed, for when President Ngô Đình Diệm visited in 1957, around the time Ba Má moved there, the town was little more than a village with dirt roads, known for its coffee, its waterfalls, and its ethnic minorities, including the Rade who

padded barefoot14 through its streets

or rode on hulking elephants.

The Rade are now the Ê Đê. You, an ethnic minority in the United States, are the majority, the Kinh, in Việt Nam.

The Kinh are an imperial, warlike people, who marched

south from China to seize the lands of the Cham, the

Cambodians, and dozens of Indigenous highlander

peoples whom the French called Montagnards.

You called them Mọi. “Savage.” You, the

colonizer now colonized by the

French, staff the French

colonial bureaucracy,

almost white but

not quite.15

If a movie was made of your family’s epic refugee journey, most likely a low-budget passion project by a Vietnamese filmmaker with a diasporic history like yourself, it would begin with a quiet prelude in early March 1975, when your handsome father boards a plane for Sài Gòn on business. He carries a briefcase with gold and cash to buy a house in Sài Gòn. The plan is for you and your brother to be educated there instead of your provincial hometown.

Perhaps Má takes you to the Phụng Dực airport with its burnt-orange control tower and small terminal the length of two or three railroad cars. Perhaps Ba hugs you in farewell, for you have just turned four and are still in need of hugs. Perhaps you wave bye-bye and watch his plane take off from the red earth runway, soaring past the military helicopters and transport planes. You return to your home to the west of the airport on Ama Trang Long street. Your family’s quarters are above the family business. This one sells jewelry and auto parts and evolved from the original business with which Ba Má began their ascent: a one-stop shop where Má sold cloth and Ba did the tailoring, a first-of-its-kind innovation in the local economy.

You are unaware that you are about to enter History. Not far away, the communist army is assembling nineteen divisions to launch its decisive surprise invasion of the south. Its first target: Ban Mê Thuột.

You are grateful for all those things you do not remember. You do not remember the artillery barrage that begins at 3:00 a.m. on March 9, the sapper attacks on the Phụng Dực airport, the gun battles between northern and southern troops, the latter armed with M16s and protected by American helmets. The sounds of war would be familiar to Má, parts of town having been burned down almost exactly seven years before in February 1968, during the Tết Offensive.

Decades later, at a stranger’s suburban party in San Gabriel

Valley, California, the host pulls out an AK-47 and shoots into

the ground to ring in the New Year. The clamor is deafening.

You can feel the impact of the bullets on the ground as the

gunner empties his magazine. Multiply by a thousand to generate

the volume and the velocity of flying metal and the fear your

mother felt. You leave the party as fast as you can after the

twentysomething host walks around with the AK-47, shaking

hands. Your friends tell you he frowns as you leave, but you

don’t care. You’re a coward. You intend to stay that way.

An image of northern soldiers in olive-green uniforms and pith helmets sitting on tanks flashes out of your ocean of amnesia, but no picture of your mother, frantic as she is unable to call your father, all lines of communication cut. Má makes a decision. She flees with Bác Quý, your ten-year-old brother, and you, leaving behind your sixteen-year-old (adopted) sister to guard the family property. Your mother believes your family will return. The war has gone back and forth for years. Why would it end now?

When you are sixteen, you are a high school student working your first job, at Great America amusement park. Your major concern: finding a girlfriend. Your sixteen-year-old (adopted) sister faces a different coming of age. She watches her mother and brothers abandon her. Was it daylight? Most likely it was the dark of night, to evade communist patrols. She shuts the door, locks it. Her heart beats fast. She cries alone. A child facing an immense and terrifying future.

You do not know that any of this happened, but what else could have happened? You do not know whether you cry when you leave her, but you hope so, giving her a sign that she would be loved and missed.

You do not remember this moment or your (adopted) sister at all.

Your parents will not see her again for nearly twenty years.

You will not see her again for nearly thirty years.

This is a war story.

Your brother remembers dead paratroopers hanging from the trees, although you do not. You also do not remember whether you walked the entire 184 kilometers to Nha Trang, or whether your mother carried you, or whether you got a ride on the cars, trucks, carts, motorbikes, and bicycles clogging the road. Perhaps she does remember, but you never ask about the exodus, about the tens of thousands of civilian refugees and fleeing soldiers, the desperate scramble to get on a boat in Nha Trang, some of the soldiers shooting civilians to clear their way, using American M16s rather than AK-47s.

Má hired strangers to carry you, your brother says.

Má strapped gold to your brother’s legs, your father says.

But forty-five years later, Ba also says,

I really don’t know what your mother underwent.

You do not remember the weather, but in the months of March and April it must have been good, not too hot, not too wet. You do not remember finding your father in Sài Gòn, or how you waited another month until the communist army attacked the city, or how terrified your parents must have been, or how their days were spent trying to find ways to leave the city, and how, on the last day before the city’s capture—or liberation, depending on one’s point of view—you tried to get into the airport, then the American embassy, then somehow fought through crowds at the docks to reach a boat, how your father became separated from the rest of you but decided to jump on a boat by himself anyway, how your mother did the same, both trusting themselves to God but also, as always, taking their lives into their own hands, and then how you were reunited on a larger ship, how you floated for three days, how your family is a part of THE FALL OF SAIGON with the picture of the helicopter on a roof, a line of human beings who are becoming refugees climbing up a ladder.

Are you a witness to history

because you were there?

Can you be a witness to history

if you do not remember it?

You remember a kind man sharing milk with your mother for you, or perhaps you just remember Má telling you this story. Perhaps the milk is rotten. Or perhaps, even if the milk is good, you associate its taste with a crowded boat, frightened people, a sea you have never seen before. In the future, Má mixes sugar into milk to get you to drink it, but you never overcome your distaste of milk and cheese, gagging even at the soft, bland wedges of Laughing Cow that Ba likes to eat with bites of banana. You think you might have been six feet tall if it weren’t for your allergy to dairy, one minor consequence of being a refugee embedded into your taste buds and your body.

Or perhaps you’re just lactose intolerant.

You remember the blue sea. You remember soldiers on your boat opening fire on a smaller boat of refugees trying to approach.

Your brother says, That never happened.

What if he is wrong?

New Life—this is the name of the haphazard American operation to rescue American allies from the Republic of Việt Nam, a country that no longer exists except in the imagination of its global refugee diaspora of more than five million people,16 a country most of the world remembers as South Việt Nam. After a war that kills three million Vietnamese people; several hundred thousand Laotians, Cambodians, and Hmong; more than fifty-eight thousand Americans; some five thousand South Koreans; and hundreds more from other countries, perhaps this is an appropriate name.

Or is it?

AMERICATM,

a pro-life nation,

indivisible, under God,

has watered its dark fields

with blood spilled from

colonization,

genocide,

slavery

& war.

Born in the Year of the Pig as Nguyễn Thanh Việt, reborn in AMERICATM as Viet Thanh Nguyen. History performs your caesarean, as it does for all refugees to AMERICATM, delivering you as that mythological subject, the amnesiac, rootless, synthetic New American.

Contrary to sentiment and compliment, newborn

babies—purple, slimy, and screaming, eyes

screwed shut against the alien light—

are generally kind of ugly.

You are no exception.

The sandcastle of your memory really begins to rise after your stops at a chain of American military bases in the Philippines, Guam, and, finally, Pennsylvania. From bases in the Philippines and Guam—as well as Thailand and Japan—the United States launched bombing strikes on Việt Nam, Laos, and Cambodia with B-52 Stratofortresses manufactured by Boeing, the same company that makes most of the airplanes you now fly on as you jet around the world. But by the time you stumble onto those bases, confused and dazed, they have taken a pause from death-dealing to giving New Life to refugees fleeing from countries once colonized by the imperial French. You are escaping to

AMERICATM

(Cue song of the same title by Neil Diamond,

son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia,

whose birth name really is Diamond and

whose lyrics you cannot afford to reprint.)

America the Great!

America the Exceptional!

A country

fundamentally

opposed to

imperialism and

colonialism!

Except when AMERICATM colonized the Philippines, Guam, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, Samoa, the Virgin Islands, the Thirteen Colonies,

and pretty much the western three-quarters of what is now

the United States of America, which did buy 828,000

square miles for $15 million17 from a French dude,

the world historical equivalent of you buying a

really cheap, brand-new Sony PlayStation

from the trunk of some guy in

a parking lot who says,

It’s all legit, bro.

From the bases of the American empire in the Pacific, 130,000 of you are flown, probably on Boeing planes, to temporary digs in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas; Eglin Air Force Base, Florida; Camp Pendleton, California; and Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. From these domestic military bases, the apparatus of government and charities disperses you throughout the country, diluting your refugee intensity so the American body politic can more easily swallow your strangeness and bitterness. The Hmong, fellow refugees from Laos, land in the wintry states of Minnesota and Wisconsin as well as sunny California. Your family arrives in Pennsylvania. You refugees, who say Cali for California and Los with a long oh for Los Angeles and Chick-ah-go for Chicago, must have looked at the name of Ben Franklin’s state and sighed one long, long sigh.

Your parents, Joseph and Maria? Refugees twice.

Joseph and Mary of the Bible? Refugees once.

You and 22,000 other Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees get to the unpronounceable state in early summer 1975. Instead of the stable that Joseph and Mary found, you are housed in one of the fort’s many two-story barracks, marked T for “temporary” though they were built in the 1930s.

Each barracks can house sixty soldiers18 or ninety-six refugees in bunk beds. Seventy-two square feet per soldier, forty square feet per refugee. No partitions for privacy. The one common bathroom features a row of exposed toilets and a cramped, dark shower room with no windows or stalls. You see these details when you return for a tour forty-seven years later, but you remember nothing of the camp, certainly not the lessons in pronunciation and vocabulary that the comedian Richard Pryor says are taught there:

You got all the Vietnamese19 in the army

camps and shit, takin’ tests and stuff,

learnin’ how to say “nigger,”

so they can become

good citizens.

Your people are good at taking tests. Have you passed this one?

Pryor isn’t wrong, except that some refugees already know the difference between Black and white. Your Americanization starts in Việt Nam, where the Americans exported everything, including their racism, like the French before them. This is why so many Vietnamese despise the Amerasian or Eurasian children of Black fathers much more than the Amerasian or Eurasian children of white fathers.

Although you are semi-Americanized, you need American sponsors to leave the camp. Families and churches throughout the country take in refugee families. No one wants your entire family. One sponsor takes your parents, another your brother. A third comes for you. You are four.

Go where it hurts,

the writer Bharati Mukherjee, your teacher, once told you.

Cut to the bone.

This . . . is where it hurts.