Viet Thanh Nguyen's Blog

From Viet Thanh Nguyen's website, vietnguyen.info

Alexandra Da Dalt discusses the impact of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s talk about refugees, immigrant, communities of color, and writing in this piece for Rain International.

 

“The xenophobic tendencies of American society, which have always been with us, are experiencing a resurgence.”

To celebrate the release of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, author, activist, and USC professor Viet Thanh Nguyen spoke at Kleinhans Music Hall as part of Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Babel series. Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Sympathizer, short story collection The Refugees, and editor of It Occurs to Me That I Am America and The Displaced, spoke about writing, memory, and how the United States often remains an unfulfilled promise, hostile to refugees, immigrants, and communities of color.

Nguyen’s appearance in Buffalo offered me, as a Canadian, an opportunity to revisit the United States post-Trump inauguration. I lived in New York City from 2009 – 2016, made my plans to leave while witnessing the toxicity of the election, and ultimately left the country a month before Trump was sworn in. Additionally, New York City isn’t upstate New York; though I grew up watching the local American TV channels that floated over Lake Ontario, my only interactions with Buffalo had been trips over the border to the outlet malls when the Canadian dollar was strong. I’d heard rumors that the city itself was experiencing a resurgence, and that some of artists, writers, and activists that had been pushed out of other cities had ended up there.

Climbing into a cab and declaring what had brought me to Buffalo, the taxi driver clicked the doors of his van closed and remembered the Vietnam War. He spoke about the refugees that conflict had sent to the United States, and how the lives of refugees look in his city now. He reported that after Trump’s win and threats against migrants and communities of color, taxi drivers in the city started driving members of the Haitian community as close as they could get to Canada to watch them walk across the border to claim asylum. People knew what could happen if the threats became real— mass deportation, ICE raids, families torn apart— and we know now that their fears were justified.

Later that night, as I waited for Nguyen in my seat, I reckoned with what it meant to be a Canadian in a space that was focused on the history and idea of America. It would be naive to dismiss the sweeping forces that have shaken the United States as exclusive to our neighbor to the South. The complacent Canadian rhetoric of “at least it’s not as bad here” has and is used to gloss over atrocities and structural oppression. Ontario recently elected conservative Doug Ford, who once claimed the province should “take care of our own” before providing assistance to new Canadians, and we are also grappling with increasingly bold forces of nationalism, xenophobia, and violent misogyny. Canada’s cooperation with the United States under the Safe Third Country Agreement prevents legitimate claims of asylum or refugee status at border crossings. Immigration detention continues in Canada, forcing innocent people like Ebrahim Toure into indefinite detention with no justification.

All of this was running through my head Nguyen walked onstage. He spoke movingly about his experiences as a writer of color, and read aloud from The Sympathizer, a book that had taken my breath away when I read it years earlier. He talked about identifying as a refugee, and when some stop using that term, and instead opt for “immigrant.” He spoke about being separated from his mother and father at four years old, and the trauma it cuts into both the child and parents.

Then Nguyen expressed his admiration for creators and activists, and the way both worked in tandem to imagine a future and then build it. It brought to mind philosopher Hannah Arendt’s definition of freedom— to imagine what you cannot yet conceive of, and to interrupt old processes with new ones. I was struck by the simplicity and beauty of this interpretation, that artists and activists work together to lay the blueprint and then begin constructing new realities. I walked out breathing somewhat easier. Amongst the noise of all the injustice that felt deafening, Nguyen had clearly outlined a path forward.

The next day after Nguyen’s talk, I saw what he was talking about everywhere. At the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women showcased the world of African American women reimagining reality in the face of a Black liberation movement that often ignored gender, and a feminist movement that disregarded race. Small local businesses like Burning Books bookstore are creating a community space and selling books that tell new stories and retell the ones we think we know, and lawns signs I passed beamed, “No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor,” in Spanish, English, and Arabic.

Over the border again, I have doubled down on immersing myself in the writing and art that plots the way forward, like The Displaced, A Different Pond, and Exit West. Authors, photographers, and artists have labored to imagine worlds and futures where borders and the violence around them related to nationhood and ideas of who has access to legitimate belonging in a country. In both the United States and Canada, we need huge policy changes. We need a reimagining of the way we even conceive of borders and movement on a global scale. However, we also need smaller and more personal imaginings of what that could be like, too. We’re up against those “xenophobic tendencies” Nguyen referred to, and they are getting bolder and bolder both south and north of U.S./Canada border. But those that are pushing back against them are getting stronger, too.

Here’s to imagining new futures, sharing them with each other, and making them real together.

You can get your copy of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives at your local bookstore. Support RAIN’s World Refugee Day 2018 campaign here.

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From Viet Thanh Nguyen's website, vietnguyen.info

This commentary originally appeared in The New York Times on November 9, 2016.

A view of the Washington Monument from the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. (Jabin Botsford/The New York Times)

Worst-case scenario in the next four years: fascism, a wall, mass deportations, the end of Obamacare, a Trump brand on the White House and either a trade war or an actual war with China (since war is the easiest diversion from domestic unhappiness).

Best-case scenario: Ruth Bader Ginsburg refuses to retire or die, the Democratic Party finds a backbone, turns away from its fixation on the center and heeds the call for an economic revolt against the 1 percent, joined by Black Lives Matter, the Occupy movement, and resurgent feminism.

Both scenarios could happen at the same time.

The second scenario requires Democrats to put their status quo political model to rest. They already had a significant portion of the nonwhite minority vote locked up, but have lost too many working-class white people. Bernie Sanders might not have won over the wealthier whites who were voting with Trump against the seemingly rising tide of minorities, but he might have snared the white working class and some of the white middle class.

Here’s the bright side, for those, like me, who are on the liberal-to-left spectrum. If Hillary Clinton had won, she would have run again in 2020, which could have meant four more years of Wall Street liberalism and fire-and-forget perpetual warfare, conducted by drones and Special Operations over the horizon. Now perhaps Elizabeth Warren will be the 2020 Democratic candidate — a white woman, a feminist, and someone more progressive than Clinton.

But all this speaks largely about domestic electoral politics. The sickness of the American body politic remains untreated, and will remain untreated, or exacerbated, in a country run by clowns, conspirators, and collaborators.

That sickness is imperialism. America is an imperial country, and its decay might now be showing. The power that has brought so much benefit to the country — for white people — is now faltering in its ability to provide those benefits to all white people. The empire’s best hope is to be more inclusive, demographically and economically, but that runs counter to the imperial impulse to hoard power and profit.

Warren or someone like her might be better at extracting more social and economic justice for all Americans. But unless such a person finds a way to ease control from the financial-industrial complex, the prospects of halting our decline are weak.

Empires rot from the inside even as emperors blame the barbarians.

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From Viet Thanh Nguyen's website, vietnguyen.info

Vietnam War Memorial in Westminster, CA (via flickr)

Today is what many Vietnamese in the diaspora call “Black April.” For them it is the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. I understand their feelings. I grew up in a Vietnamese community in San Jose, and I absorbed their memories and their unspoken trauma. My own family was marked by separation and division, by people and property left behind. And yet, I could never wholeheartedly endorse this sense of loss and grievance, could never bring myself to say “Black April” (not least of all because if we were to to speak of mourning, we should say “White April,” but that would not go over so well in a white America). Like my narrator in The Sympathizer, I see every issue from both sides, and so I see that for some Vietnamese people this is not a day of mourning but one of celebration. The Fall is for some the Liberation.

And yet, it is important to mark this day because it is the symbolic moment when so many Vietnamese people became refugees. Many people have described me as an immigrant, and my novel as an immigrant story. No. I am a refugee, and my novel is a war story. I came to the United States because of a war that the United States fought in Vietnam, a war that the Vietnamese fought with each other, a war that China and the Soviet Union were involved in, a war that the Vietnamese brought to Laos and Cambodia, a war that did not end in 1975, a war that is not over for so many people of so many nationalities and cultures. For Americans to call me an immigrant and my novel an immigrant novel is to deny a basic fact of American history: that many immigrants to this country came because of American wars fought in the Philippines, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam. Immigrants are the story of the American Dream, of American exceptionalism. Refugees are the reminder of the American nightmare, which is how so many who are caught under American bombardment experience the United States.

As much as Americans fear refugees and seek to transform refugees into immigrants who fulfill the American Dream, the Vietnamese who stayed in Vietnam have a hard time understanding their refugee brethren. I had breakfast with a former Vietnamese ambassador in Hanoi and she said that the “boat people” were economic refugees, not political refugees. Probably every single Vietnamese refugee would disagree with her, and the ethnic Chinese who were persecuted, robbed, and blackmailed would say that the line between being an economic refugee and a political refugee is a very thin one.

One of my Vietnamese language teachers said that the re-education camps were necessary to prevent postwar rebellion. Perhaps rebellion was in the making, but reaching out a hand in peace and reconciliation would have done so much more to heal the country. The Vietnamese people overseas remember the re-education camps as the ultimate hypocrisy of the Vietnamese revolution, the failure of Vietnamese brotherhood and sisterhood. This, too, is one reason why so many Vietnamese people became refugees and why so many find it hard to reconcile with a Vietnam that will not acknowledge its crimes against its own people, even as it is so ready to talk about the crimes of the South Vietnamese, the Americans, the French, and the Chinese. Nothing is more difficult than to look in the mirror and hold oneself to account. The victorious Vietnamese are guilty of that. So are the defeated Vietnamese.

I’ve heard more than once from Vietnamese foreign students in the United States that the past is over, that the Vietnamese at home understand the pain of the Vietnamese overseas, and that we should reconcile and move on. These students do not understand what the overseas Vietnamese feel–that they lost a country. It is easier to be magnanimous when one has won. But at least these Vietnamese students want to be magnanimous. At least they reach out a hand in friendship, unlike many of an older generation.

The younger Vietnamese Americans need to reach out that hand, too, even as they feel the deep need of filial piety. They wish to acknowledge the suffering and the pain of their parents and grandparents. If they do not, who will? They live in a country where most Americans know nothing about the Vietnamese people, or about Vietnamese Americans, where Americans care little to remember the Southern Vietnamese who they supposedly fought the war for. So the younger Vietnamese Americans feel that burden to carry on their parents’ memories. One day, perhaps, they can let that burden go, but it will be much easier to do so when Vietnam helps to carry that burden by officially acknowledging that every side in that war had its reasons, that every side had its patriots, that we cannot divide the past into heroes and traitors.

As for me, I remain a refugee. My memory begins when I arrived in the United States at age four and was taken away from my parents to live with a white family. That was the condition for being able to leave the refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. That experience remains an invisible brand stamped between my shoulder blades. I have spent my life trying to see that brand, to make sense of it, to rework it into words that I can speak to myself, that I can share with others. As painful as that experience was, what I learned from it was not to dwell only on my own pain. I needed to acknowledge that pain, to understand it, but in order to live beyond it, I also needed to acknowledge the pain of others, the worldview of others. This is why I cannot say “Black April,” because it is one story of one side, and I am interested in all stories of all sides.

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From Viet Thanh Nguyen's website, vietnguyen.info

 

The Sympathizer has critics everywhere buzzing. A highly praised cerebral thriller, Viet’s debut novel has made it on several mid-year best novel lists. See the full list below:

- 23 Books We’ve Loved So Far This Year, Washington Post, July 2, 2015

- Flavorwire’s 15 Best Fiction Books of 2015 So Far

- Amazon Editors’ Top 20 Picks for the Best Books of the Year So Far, 2015 (#5)

- Amazon.com Best Book of the Year So Far 2015, Literature and Fiction List (#8)

- Amazon.com Best Book of the Year So Far 2015, Mystery and Thriller List (#10)

- Public Picks of 2015 (most notable fiction of the year), Public Books

 

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From Viet Thanh Nguyen's website, vietnguyen.info

Michael Eric Dyson’s “Where Do We Go after Ferguson?” made diaCRITICS editor Viet Thanh Nguyen think about how hard it is to change attitudes about race. 

[If you're living in America, then you most likely have heard about the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot a black man, Michael Brown. If you haven't heard about it, read Dyson's article, which conveys the importance of Ferguson to America and its racial attitudes.]

I rarely talk about politics over the holidays, but I had a heated conversation over Thanksgiving dinner about Ferguson with an in-law (a southern white man of libertarian convictions, pro-responsibility but also anti-cop, would never consider himself racist, especially as he is partnered with a Vietnamese woman and the father figure for her sons) where many of the issues addressed by Dyson’s eloquent column came up. I said some of the same things as Dyson, but I wonder if it made any difference.

Michael Brown

My in-law probably felt the same way about me as I did about him, that our world views shaped how we saw this issue in ways that were unchangeable by what each of us considered rational argument. We came at this from very different beliefs and experiences. He recounted being assaulted by blacks in the south, which obviously left a deep imprint on his perception of them. I didn’t recount how the only time I’ve been called racial slurs to my face in the US has been by black kids, which didn’t make me anti-black because I didn’t blame them for what they said. We were both palpably angry, although not with each other, I think. Maybe with how intractable the situation of deeply ingrained history is or seems to be, how it repeats itself again and again, and how people with different world views interpret causes and solutions in radically incommensurate ways.

Police officer Darren Wilson

Dyson gets the pessimism of that, the sense that these race problems aren’t changing anytime soon, regardless of a black president. Solutions are to be found at the level of political struggle and policymaking, but meanwhile, perhaps each of these personal conversations can also move things by a millimeter, so that eventually a new generation can move a mile.

He may be president, but he’s still black to many Americans

What does this have to do with Vietnamese people? Many of my teenage nephews and nieces on my wife’s side were watching this conversation unfold. We had asked them whether they were keeping up with the news from Ferguson, and whether they were affected by racism. No, they said. They were born in America, grew up in San Jose or the suburbs around it, where the culture was diverse and where there were many Asians. They had never experienced racism. So should Ferguson matter to them? What does the death of a black man mean to someone who is not black and who has never felt racism directed at them? Do they look at black people like white people look at black people?

To be Vietnamese in America–to be Asian in America–is to benefit from the racism directed against blacks. Because Americans as a whole are more fearful of blacks, other minorities get the benefit of the doubt, from white people as well as from everyone else. Asians as a whole are seen by whites as the model minority, well-behaved and hard-working, unlike blacks, or so it seems. Even those Asians who are not the model minority, the ones who live on welfare and don’t go to college and join gangs, are not as bad as blacks, or so it seems. The immigrant who comes to America may be strange and different, but as long as he or she is not black, he or she enters America with an advantage over black people–the advantage of not being black. This advantage is passed on to their Americanized children.

It used to be that racial domination in American society meant that people were defined as white or nonwhite. Now one could argue that racial domination is defined as being black or nonblack. Under the old regime, Asians were nonwhite, and therefore lesser than whites. But in the new regime, Asians are nonblack, and hence oftentimes aligned with whites against blacks. It’s an easy advantage to take, to feel that one is not the object of racism, while participating in a system and a society that allows one to enjoy the profits of racism directed against blacks.

For nonblack people not in America, looking at these events from afar, I wonder what the message of Ferguson is. It must be that America has a race problem. But beyond that, what? Is it that black people are the problem? Or that white people are the problem? Or that if they, as nonblack people, come to America, regardless of how they may struggle, they can at least be guaranteed the instant privilege of not being black? Like many privileges, this one is invisible. It’s easy to take it for granted, not even to be aware of it. But if we do want to move that hard mile, millimeter by millimeter, then we need to see those privileges that guarantee our complicity and our silence.

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From Viet Thanh Nguyen's website, vietnguyen.info

The author writes about the real people who appear in his forthcoming novel, The Sympathizer.

I received the copyedited manuscript of my novel today. Attached to it was a style sheet where the copyeditor had made some interesting lists drawn from my novel, including key words (“chastity-locked,” “Great American novel, the,” “goddammit,” “scotch,” and “whiskey” were among them), a timeline, character names, and “real personages” that appear in the novel.

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So here are those real personages, who together foreshadow many of the novel’s concerns:

Baudelaire

Beauvoir, Simone de

Borgnine, Ernest

Brando, Marlon

Buttinger, Joseph (Vietnam scholar)

Capone, Al

Chandler, Raymond

Chernyshevsky, Nikolay

Coburn, James (actor)

Columbus, Christopher

Coward, Noël

Crosby, Bing

Davis, Angela

Didion, Joan

Duc Huy (Vietnamese singer)

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

FitzGerald, Frances (Vietnam War journalist; won Pulitzer)

Fonda, Jane

Ford, Gerald

Ford, Tennessee Ernie (singer)

Gable, Clark

Gabor, Zsa Zsa

Gardner, Erle Stanley (author, Perry Mason)

Gauguin, Paul

Goebbels, Joseph

Guevara, Che

Hayworth, Rita

Hedren, Tippi (actress)

Hepburn, Audrey

Heston, Charlton

Ho Chi Minh

Holden, William (actor)

Holiday, Billie

Hope, Bob

Joplin, Janis

Khanh Ly (Vietnamese pop singer)

Lee, Bruce

Lenin, V. I.

Loren, Sophia

Mao, Chairman

Marcos, Imelda

Marcos, Ferdinand

Marx, Karl

Mitchum, Robert

Murphy, Audie (decorated soldier, WWII)

Ngo Dinh Diem (first president of South Vietnam)

Nguyen Du (Vietnamese poet)

Nin, Anaïs

Nixon, Richard

Pham Duy (Vietnamese songwriter)

Phan Boi Chau (Vietnamese nationalist)

Phuong, Elvis (Vietnamese pop singer)

Presley, Elvis

Reagan, Ronald

Rooney, Mickey

Sinatra, Frank

Springfield, Dusty

Summer, Donna

Taylor, James

Thich Nhat Hanh

Thieu, President

To Huu (Vietnamese poet)

Trinh Cong Son (folk singer)

Wayne, John

West, Mae

Whitman, Walt

Williams, Hank

Williams, Tennessee

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From Viet Thanh Nguyen's website, vietnguyen.info

Viet Nguyen’s novel, THE SYMPATHIZER, will be published in April 2015. Here he talks about why he wrote it.

The novel, THE SYMPATHIZER, begins in April 1975, as Saigon is about to fall to communist invasion. Soon enough it does, and the war is over. Or is it?

Black comedy, historical novel, and literary thriller, THE SYMPATHIZER follows a nameless spy who has infiltrated the South Vietnamese army and is ordered to flee with its remnants to America. His mission: report on their efforts to continue their lost war. As the aide to a general who refuses to admit defeat, he observes the struggles of the Vietnamese refugees to survive in a melancholic Los Angeles. Among them, the general believes, are communist agents. So our spy’s double life continues, hunting communists while helping the general organize a covert army.

I see this novel not as a Vietnamese or Vietnamese American story, or even a Vietnam War novel. It is a post-Vietnam War novel. Set in the years after the war, it’s my fictional response to, and revenge on, all those movies and books that did such a fine job with the American point of view and a rather miserable one with the Vietnamese. I grew up reading books and watching movies about America’s Vietnam War, but among all of these, precious little was said about the Vietnamese, who were depicted as stereotypes and foils to American heroes and played by bit actors. This was one motivation for me to write this novel, but far from the only one. By the conclusion, the novel shows how some of the practices of our contemporary war on terror have their roots in the Vietnam War. In the end, I hope that what I accomplish, besides providing a good read with lots of violence, intrigue, drugs, music, humor and sex, is to conjure in our observant spy a narrator who can see the beauties and the horrors of both America and Vietnam.

I came to writing this novel after many years of scholarly work on the Vietnam War, and after having finished a yet-to-be published short story collection, EVERY WORD NEVER WRITTEN. The collection deals with the lives of those touched by the war, from Vietnamese refugees to the Vietnamese left behind, as well as the Americans who knew them, loved them, or hated them. Stories from the collection have appeared in Best New American Voices 2007 and TriQuarterly, and other stories from it have won prizes from, and been published in, Gulf Coast, Narrative Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune (for its Nelson Algren Award competition). In their own very different ways, the collection and the novel allow me to look at the domestic traumas and political histories which have made me the writer that I am, a refugee born in Vietnam but made, for better and for worse, in America.

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From Viet Thanh Nguyen's website, vietnguyen.info

The Guardian runs this interesting profile of Suboi, Viet Nam’s most popular female rapper. Check out the improvised rap she does for the article. She is known as “Vietnam‘s queen of hip-hop, an outspoken artist who raps via coded lyrics about family, love, social pressures and illegal substances in a country where artists regularly worry about being visited by the authorities.”

Suboi’s “Chẫt Riêng Của Tôi”–so much better than the usual pop fluff

Suboi “taught herself English by rapping along to Eminem. ‘All he does is curse – that’s why my English is so bad and rude,’ she laughs. ‘I remember one song he wrote for his ex-wife, Kim: ‘Bitch, I’m-a kill you, you don’t wanna fuck with me.’ That was what I learned first.’”

Suboi raps with Thai Viet G, and does a better job

Suboi has the right attitude for a rapper: ”You don’t know who I am, or whether I’m right or wrong,” she raps…then explains: “I’m no gangster, but I do get mad a lot. And if they don’t like it, I don’t care.”

Suboi raps in English in Những Đứa Bạn (Friends)

 

Viet Thanh Nguyen

_____

“Suboi, Viet Nam’s Female Rapper” was originally published on DiaCritics.org on September 12, 2013.

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From Viet Thanh Nguyen's website, vietnguyen.info

…this is for fighting, this is for fun.

This is an article about the recent massacre of six Sikh Americans by a white supremacist US Army veteran, but I begin with this, a United States Marine Corps chant to remind new recruits in boot camp that their weapon was not just a GUN, but more importantly a RIFLE. Military types and weapons specialists care about these distinctions. Stanley Kubrick satirized the unconscious psychosexual energies behind wielding a gun in Full Metal Jacket, when Marine recruits parade with their weapons doing this chant of “This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for fun.” They seize their crotches at “gun” and “fun.” When I showed it to my students, some were puzzled at how to interpret this moment that seems so clear to me. The rifle is a phallus, an extension of the rock-hard cock, and in Kubrick’s film, the narrative is completed in the battle for Hue, when a female sniper castrates the Marine squad by killing a few. She herself is surrounded and killed by the surviving Marines in a moment that the critic Susan Jeffords, in The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War, calls a symbolic gang rape.  The fact that the killing and the rape are not just about gender and sexuality but race and nation is fairly obvious.

Why am I thinking of this? Because just when I thought I had gotten some anger out of myself,  there are now more things to get me angry. The Batman massacre in Aurora, Colorado, which happened the night before I saw The Dark Knight Rises (my tickets bought in advance). Then the massacre of Sikh people in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, yesterday of the day I am writing this, when an Army veteran and white supremacist invaded a temple and killed six before being killed himself. This is not a post about gun control, as I am sure my position on gun control is evident, and nothing I say will change any minds. This is instead about pointing to the direct line from the core of American culture and history to the Viet Nam War to the Oak Creek massacre and a couple of other massacres many of us have already forgotten about.

First: Americans conquer people, okay? For the obvious reasons of territory, resources, and power, but for the more controversial reasons of culture, hate, and psyche. Richard Slotkin argues that American culture and masculinity are built on the need for “regeneration through violence,” which means that American men see mastering violence as a necessary test of their masculinity and, eventually, patriotism. They master violence in using it against the frontier, the wilderness, and its inhabitants, the others to (American) civilization. Eventually (and here this is my argument and that of many others) that frontier crosses the Pacific to the Philippines and Asia, culminating in the Viet Nam War. In the American confrontation with Asia, “Orientalism” merges with regeneration through violence, meaning that American soldiers use their violence and prove their heterosexual manhood by killing, raping, and conquering Orientals. In the US, when we say “Oriental” and the “Orient,” we think of East and Southeast Asia, but when Edward Said wrote Orientalism, he was discussing French and British Orientalism, which defined the Orient as the Near and Middle East. So the massacre of Sikhs in Wisconsin by a white veteran supremacist is only the culmination of a complex history of Orientalism that has been blended with American historical and cultural urges towards white supremacy.

Another direct expression of homicidal American Orientalism was the 1989 Stockton, California, massacre of four Cambodian children and one Vietnamese child in an elementary schoolyard, committed by one Patrick Purdy. In looking for some online information about this massacre, which happened when I was in college near Stockton, I discovered that the first hit for the keywords Stockton, massacre, Patrick Purdy is a site called Murderpedia.org. I’m glad we have enough murders to require an encyclopedia. Here are some tidbits:

“Patrick Purdy, a disturbed drifter and former Stockton resident, opened fire on the school playground with a Chinese-made Type 56 semi-automatic rifle, killing five children and wounding twenty-nine others and a teacher…. Four of the dead children were Cambodian, one was Vietnamese. Most were born in Thailand in refugee camps as their parents fled the genocidal regime of Cambodian ruler Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.”

Here are their names: Raphanar Or, Ran Chun, Sokhim An, Oeun Lim and Thuy Tran. Who remembers them now?

But that was 1989. That is ancient history. Most of my students were not even born in 1989. Then what about Jiverly Wong, aka Jiverly Voong? Who remembers him? And his infamous feat happened in 2009. As it happens, Murderpedia.org does remember. Here are some tidbits:

“The perpetrator…was 41-year-old Jiverly Antares Wong (December 8, 1967 – April 3, 2009), a resident of Johnson City, New York. Wong was born into an ethnic Chinese (Hoa) family in South Vietnam. He first came to New York in the late 1980s before moving to California…Several sources suggested possible motivations for Wong’s actions, including feelings of being “degraded and disrespected” for his poor English language ability, frustration over losing his job, and difficulty in finding work in New York. Wong had also allegedly made comments such as “America sucks” and talked about assassinating the president, to his former co-workers at Shop Vac…The Binghamton shootings took place on Friday, April 3, 2009, at the American Civic Association immigration center in Binghamton, New York, United States. At approximately 10:30 a.m. EDT, a naturalized immigrant Jiverly Antares Wong (aka Jiverly Voong) entered the facility and shot numerous people inside. Fourteen people were ultimately confirmed dead, including the shooter, and four were wounded in the incident.”

Here is a list of the dead:

Parveen Ali, age 26, a migrant from northern Pakistan
Almir Olimpio Alves, age 43, a Brazilian Ph.D. in Mathematics and visiting scholar at SUNY Binghamton, attending English classes at the Civic Association
Marc Henry Bernard, age 44, a migrant from Haiti
Maria Sonia Bernard, age 46, a migrant from Haiti
Li Guo, age 47, a visiting scholar from China
Lan Ho, age 39, a migrant from Vietnam
Layla Khalil, age 53, an Iraqi mother of three children
Roberta King, age 72, an English language teacher who was substituting for a vacationing teacher
Jiang Ling, age 22, a migrant from China
Hong Xiu “Amy” Mao Marsland, age 35, a nail technician who migrated from China in 2006
Dolores Yigal, age 53, a recent immigrant from the Philippines
Maria Zobniw, age 60, a part-time case worker at the Civic Association, originally from Ukraine

So here is a case of what Malcolm X calls the chickens coming home to roost. He was talking about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and for anyone who follows Vietnamese history, the particular chicken returning to the coop was the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem just a few months earlier, authorized by Kennedy. Malcolm X took a certain pleasure in making his pronouncement, but the problem with chickens coming home to roost is that chickens are not particularly intelligent animals (are they?). To press the metaphor, they’re not homing pigeons. They’re not precise. They can come to roost in your backyard as well as anyone else’s. So Jiverly Wong is an example of this, a hybrid product of American adventurism in Asia combined with an assimilation into an American culture predicated on the necessity of violence, particularly against foreign others, either outside the country or inside. So we have the obvious irony: a racialized immigrant killing other racialized immigrants, expressing all kinds of psychic contradictions and complications. I am not arguing that this explains everything about Jiverly Wong, or any mass killer. Perhaps he was ill. I’ve seen enough mental illness to know that we do not deal with it adequately in American culture. Who knows what else was going on in Wong’s mind, or Purdy’s? But even insane people pick their targets for a reason. Perhaps one motivation for Jiverly Wong was to express his rage at the very (im)possibility of Americanization and those who would aspire to the thing that he could not obtain, except by picking up a gun and killing a lot of innocent people.

What is more frightening than insane people are sane people who kill people. Isn’t that why the first reflex that many have on hearing of mass murders is to describe the perpetrators as insane? Au contraire. I speculate that many of them are quite sane, and it is their rationality that is truly terrifying, the consequence of centuries of European-American history and the intersection with Asians, Orientals, immigrants, others. The Wisconsin shooter may or may not have been insane, but he was the product of a rational American culture that prioritized the necessity of violence, guns, and using them. Mass murder in the end is always both irrational and rational. Irrational, because things have gotten out of control and can backfire, but rational, because the act is a historically specific expression of an entire culture and system. So the Holocaust was not just some aberration of insane people; it was the irrational expression of rational thinking taken to the extreme. So the American culture of mass murder, overseas and domestically, is not an aberration, and its incidents are not to be regarded with the astonishment that is always paraded: it couldn’t happen here, he was the nicest guy, and so on. The fact of the matter is that nice guys commit murder all the time. Sometimes it is as an individual massacring American civilians. Other times it is as a US soldier in an American military whose entire training apparatus since World War II has been scientifically tuned and dedicated to turning nice, average American boys into killers.

This Army veteran, the Wisconsin shooter, was probably a nice, average American boy at some time. Now he will be held up by the press and the politicians as an example not of regenerative violence but of degenerative violence. Still, I am sure there will be some out there who will see him as an example of necessary regeneration, the purging of nonwhite, non-Christian elements from a supposedly white and Christian country. Jiverly Wong, however, will never be a candidate for such martyrdom. He, like most men of color who exercise violence outside of the law, will always be an example of degenerative violence.

I have no desire to change that mythology, to argue that equality in this country will have to come from the barrels of guns wielded by heroic men of color. I write this only to say that the pressures of Americanization are exerted on both white people and people of color. “This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for fun,” is a chant not only done by young white men in boot camp, and not only by young white men who fantasize about being in boot camp, but also by men of color. Some of them have learned that one of the fastest ways to prove their manhood and their American selves is to shoot a gun, not at white people, but at people who look like themselves.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

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“This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun” was originally published on DiaCritics.org on August 7, 2012.

The post This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun appeared first on Viet Thanh Nguyen.

From Viet Thanh Nguyen's website, vietnguyen.info

There are some things we should be angry about, but we need to be artful in expressing that anger. The issue here is that art and anger are an uncomfortable mix for some readers or viewers. It’s an uncomfortable mix for a lot of writers and artists too. What’s the proper proportion of art to anger? For whom are we mixing this particular concoction? One person’s rant is another person’s honesty, but the flip side is that one person’s subtlety is another person’s obfuscation.

What I’m suggesting is that every minority writer, however defined, has had to deal with this issue of how to mix or balance or address or ignore the relationship of art to anger. Here’s a wild guess on my part: even minority writers who don’t seem angry on the page have had to at least think about the kinds of anger that are tied to being their particular minority and decide to evade it or sublimate it into something else. For those of us from Viet Nam or Southeast Asia, there is so much to be angry about, whether it’s on the vast geopolitical/historical scale of countries and warfare and colonialism or whether it’s on the much more intimate scale of families and love or the lack of love or the loss of love and so many other things. Even on the intimate scale, though, the horizon lines go directly to the macro-history of all the screwed up decisions and events that shaped us.

Like the day I wrote this, I read about how Hillary Clinton visited Laos and met with survivors of US bombs that blew up years after they were dropped on the country. I’m glad she visited, even if it was only for four hours, and that she had pictures taken of herself at a prosthetics workshop and with someone with no hands or sight as a result of a US bomb. But I’m angry too that the US did this to this country that I had the first chance of visiting this past April, a spectacularly beautiful and peaceful country. And I’m angry that the US is contributing all of $9 million a year to help find the tens of thousands of unexploded ordnance that the US dropped in the first place. And I’m angry that the US is considering increasing that contribution to (only) $10 million a year. The Pentagon spends that much money in approximately seven and a half minutes.

How did I get from biracial rage to unexploded ordnance? In my paranoid, angry mind they’re both connected by an understanding that we live in a world where there exists an Orientalist imagination that fetishizes Asian women and sees Asia as weak, feminine territory to be conquered by force of arms (see Edward Said, Orientalism, for the full treatment–you can cheat and just read the introduction–or David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly, for the pop culture version). This is what anger does–it allows us  to connect the dots we might not otherwise connect. The danger, of course, is that we can connect the wrong dots, and it’s certainly the case that if we don’t agree with someone else’s rage and anger, we think they’re connecting the wrong dots. That’s why the Tea Party version of rage and anger makes me groan in frustration and reach for my pen, while my version of rage and anger makes them reach for their guns.

Few people like anger and rage in general, but in American society, if you’re white, you’ll get more leeway to be angry than if you’re a minority. Some people may not like the Tea Party, but the Tea Party gets major airtime. Compare their reception to the Black Panther Party’s reception and you get an idea of the inequity. A white man (and now a white woman) with a gun is a hero(ine). A black man with a gun is a criminal. In general, people from any given majority, however defined, almost always hate it when a minority gets angry. Men don’t like angry women, whites don’t like angry people of color, straights don’t like angry gays, colonizers don’t like angry colonized, and so on. Generalizations, perhaps, and with exceptions, but still true. So Americans and French generally don’t like angry Vietnamese or Southeast Asians, and westerners don’t like angry Asians. That’s why it’s easier to be a writer or an artist of an Asian background who isn’t angry, on the surface. It’s okay to talk about the problems of history and war and race and gender and immigration and what not if one doesn’t do so in an angry fashion, which is to say, anger at the dominant society. But confusion? To be expected. Disfunction? By definition. Self-hatred? Even better. Sadness? Nice! Melancholy? Terrific. Comedy? We need more of that. Romance? Absolutely. Hope? Of course! But anger? Absolutely not, with one very big exception. If you are angry at other Asians, namely your parents, your family, your abusive husband, your ungrateful children, or your old world country, that’s cool. We can sell that. Anger at non-Asians–oh, let’s be honest and say anger at whites–not so much.

Let’s talk about Vietnamese Americans as one example of how intra-minority anger is acceptable. Who are Vietnamese Americans most likely to be angry about in public? Other Vietnamese Americans or the Vietnamese in Viet Nam. See: any incident charged with allegations of Communism in Orange County. There are a lot of angry anti-Communists in Orange County. They hate Communists of any color, true, but they save all their rage for the Vietnamese American (or Vietnamese) ones. I can see that point of view, but really, the USA had nothing to do with the plight of the Vietnamese people after the war? We can’t be angry about white people? They are, to be frank, the ones ultimately responsible for screwing Viet Nam, from French colonialism to American occupation. And yet, if we don’t get angry with white Americans, we’re plenty angry about those other Americans, namely black people and Mexicans (the Vietnamese use “Mexican” to refer to all Latinos, so far as I can tell). Vietnamese Americans are not not racists, they just speak their racism in Vietnamese so other people can’t eavesdrop. But white people–Vietnamese Americans may not think much of their parenting habits, but that’s about all they’ll say about white people in private, much less in public. And you know what? That makes me angry.

The general public looks at how angry (some) Vietnamese Americans get about Communism and they wonder what the big deal is. Anti-communism is so 1988. But at the same time, “dominant society”–that faceless hegemony, that other name for power–is happy that (some) Vietnamese Americans are angry about Communism because it prevents them from being angry about a lot of other things, like poverty, domestic violence, structural inequality, etc., or asking dangerous questions about things like mega-tons of bombs and Agent Orange and free-fire zones and whether the use of them in Viet Nam was a war crime. (But the Communists committed war crimes, someone is saying…yes, they did. How does that make an American war crime less of a war crime?) Now I’m a little less angry for having said that.

Then there’s the issue of how other minorities see Vietnamese Americans, or Asians in general. (See the comment thread on Paisley Rekdal’s post for one elaboration of this.) Let’s put it this way: it’s a no-no to be angry at white people in America, but if you want to hate your fellow minorities or other minorities, go ahead. Who stole your lunch money? Who seized your job opportunities? Who took your Ivy League college seat? Who’s bringing down property values in your neighborhood? You know who, says Mitt Romney. Not people like me.

So a little biracial rage directed at supposedly monoracial societies and their representatives is not a bad thing. And a little more anger on the part of Vietnamese Americans at American society would be nice, too. Not the kind of anger that only gets spoken of behind closed doors, or that gets spoken in Vietnamese, knowing no one can understand, but the English kind. The kind that Americans can’t say they didn’t hear, even if they don’t like it.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

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“On the Uses of Rage and Anger” was originally published on DiaCritics.org on July 19, 2012.

The post On the Uses of Rage and Anger appeared first on Viet Thanh Nguyen.