Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (28 page)

As Vietnamese American literature in English developed to meet this industrial standard, only one author emerged who was not college-educated or from the political or military elites, Le Ly Hayslip. Her two memoirs are also cowritten, which is as good as to be damned in the literary world. Her work may lack “competence” as defined by the literary industrial standard, but it possesses great vision—whether or not one agrees with that vision of humanity and reconciliation—which so many literary works lack. Outside of oral histories and besides
The Book of Salt
, her book is also the only major work that focuses on the life of a peasant. Most of the literature centers on those from the political, merchant, military, mandarin, elite, or middle classes, which all imply an elevated educational background in Vietnam for the protagonists or their parents. This elevated status shapes the worldviews of the protagonists—their vision, so to speak—and the settings of the stories, as well as their amenability to an anticommunist liberalism once they move to the United States (or once the American-born or raised protagonists come to consciousness). Given that the overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese are peasants, it is ironic that almost all the literature focuses on the classes above them. This irony is especially evident when American readers rely on a Vietnamese American literature produced by an urban, educated class to tell them something about the history and culture of the agrarian country and peasant people for which the war was fought.

While Vietnamese Americans are socioeconomically diverse, Vietnamese American authors are not, at least in terms of their education. This is especially evident with the wave of Vietnamese American literature that commenced in the 1990s with
Catfish and Mandala
and in 2003 gained momentum with
The Book of Salt
and
The Gangster We Are All Looking For
. Hayslip was the most visible Vietnamese American author until the arrival of this younger generation who, unlike her, could claim auteur status. They won major prizes and received wide recognition from the literary industry, their works considered “literary” in a way that Hayslip’s was not. While none of these authors had MFAs in creative writing, those that followed would, such as Aimee Phan and Nam Le. As Mark McGurl argues, the MFA program helped shape post–World War II American literature.
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Vietnamese American literature is no exception, being the expression not of Vietnamese Americans in general but of their most educated class. If using literature gives the Vietnamese American author a voice, it does not give a voice to the people for whom the author speaks, or is perceived to speak.

Class markers are evident in what Vietnamese American literature does not often address (the peasantry), as well as in an array of stylistic features that mark an authorial anxiety about being the educated elite of a racial minority, both resentful of and dependent on the literary industry. The most significant anxiety has to do with voice. College-educated writers, especially the American-raised ones, are aware of their status as the people who have the voice to speak of and speak for Vietnamese and/or Vietnamese Americans. This call to be both one’s self (which is how one becomes American) and to write about others (who, even if they are other, look like one’s self) is both a responsibility and a burden, as Monique Truong shows in her essay on “The Emergence of Vietnamese American Literature.” Truong’s essay takes place against two notable acts of speaking of and for Vietnamese Americans. In 1991, Robert Olen Butler won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of short stories written from the perspective of Vietnamese Americans,
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
. Earlier in 1986, Wendy Wilder Larsen cowrote a collection of poetry with Tran Thi Nga,
Shallow Graves: Two Women and Vietnam
. For Truong, both of these books are problematic. The acclaim given to Butler’s work raises the issue of whether American audiences prefer hearing an American speaking for the Vietnamese rather than the Vietnamese themselves (Truong does not consider whether Vietnamese American writers simply were not good enough at the time to interest American audiences). In Larsen and Nga’s case, Truong uses the metaphor of the bow and the violin to describe their creative relationship, where Larsen is the “active, narrative-generating bow” while Nga is the “passive instrument.”
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Against these American literary acts that appropriate or subordinate Vietnamese voices, Truong makes a persuasive call for a Vietnamese American literature written by Vietnamese Americans.

This urge for self-representation and self-determination is deeply embedded in ethnic literature in general. If “ethnic” means anything in relation to literature, it is the sign of the ethnic speaking of and for the ethnic population. But the issues Truong raises in terms of appropriation and subordination are important for both outsiders and insiders. The ethnic author as an insider is not immune to the risks found in speaking for and speaking of others, even the others of one’s own community. Truong’s
The Book of Salt
dramatizes these risks and embodies them. In the novel, the peasant cook for Stein and Toklas—Binh—discovers that Stein has secretly written about him. Spoken for and about, he steals the book in revenge. In depicting these acts of mutual theft, Truong depends on speaking for and of Binh. The relationship of author to fictional character here parallels the relationship of author to a real community. Do Vietnamese American authors also run the risk of ventriloquizing through the creation of fictional characters that are also rather distant to them? If Larsen’s bow plays on Nga’s violin, does Truong do the same to Binh? No, because Nga is a real person while Binh is a character of Truong’s imagination. But the risks in speaking for and of others are not erased because the other is fictional.

In the case of ethnic literature, the “ethnic” label collapses the distinction between author and character, so that an ethnic author using ethnic characters somehow appears more “authentic” than a nonethnic author doing the same. This implies the reverse: that an ethnic writer writing about her ethnic people is “natural” but also limited, whereas a writer writing about a population he or she does not belong to may be appropriating but is also being artistic in a way that the ethnic writer is not—hence the regard that Butler received. Despite the risks of authenticity, there is good reason to think that ethnic authors are more sensitive in depicting characters of their own ethnicity, and that they should have the opportunity to do so. In an economy of narrative scarcity where literary representation cannot be separated from larger social issues of equity and justice, ethnic authors should have equal opportunity to represent both themselves and ethnic characters. The drawbacks to this necessary move are twofold. One is the reinforcement of authenticity, the belief that authors who share a background with who they represent will tell a more truthful story. Authenticity, however, does not eliminate ventriloquism. If Butler’s short stories had appeared with a Vietnamese name on them, few would question their authenticity. A blind taste test of literature with authorial names stripped from book covers would probably prove that the author’s ethnicity cannot be determined from the content. But the author’s identity and body is relevant because art exists in a social world where readers and writers bring their prejudices to the act of reading. Ethnic authors need to speak for and of ethnic characters, but they must do so aware of the fact that all literature is an act of ventriloquism, depending, as the critic David Palumbo-Liu puts it, on the “deliverance of others,” of otherness itself, to readers.
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It is risky to claim an authenticity that is fictional at best and illusory at worst, but since race is forced on ethnic authors, ethnic authors are necessary to address the preexisting condition, or affliction, of race.

Another drawback to ethnic authorship concerns betrayal. In the fictional world, Binh steals the book about him and Nam’s father burns his story. They resent their depictions by the authors within these stories. This implies that the authors of books take the chance of exploiting people through telling their stories, both in relationship to their characters and their communities. Betrayal is hence an omnipresent theme in Vietnamese American literature, although for more than formal and racial reasons. Betrayal is a part of Vietnamese history as well, particularly in the twentieth-century era of war and revolution, when politics encouraged partisans to betray each other, or to betray family members of different political stripes, or to betray certain sides or the entire nation. But as Lan Duong says, betrayal in Vietnamese culture is the other side of collaboration. The positive aspect of collaboration, or working together, is fundamental to artistic work and to building the nation. The negative dimension of collaboration is found in its being seen as an act of treachery, of working with foreigners to betray the nation, an especially volatile charge when applied to women, as it so often is.
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Likewise, authorial depiction of others is an act of collaboration—explicitly so when those are “real” others, people like Nga, and implicitly so with fictional others, as in the cases of Truong and Le. Their fiction shows what can happen when the others who are spoken for do not desire this collaboration. Throughout Vietnamese American literature, however, collaboration’s positive aspect is also present. Nguyen Qui Duc wrote his memoir
Where the Ashes Are
partially as a story about his father, turning a self-oriented genre into one about others. Andrew X. Pham goes a step further in
The Eaves of Heaven
, writing in his father’s voice to depict a man rarely seen in American literature, the southern Vietnamese soldier of a lost regime. He and his father also collaborated on the translation of Dang Thuy Tram’s diary into
Last Night I Dreamed of Peace
. Even the self can be the site of collaboration, as Lan Cao shows in
The Lotus and the Storm
. One of the central characters has multiple personalities, caused by terrible trauma, but even they eventually move from conflict to cooperation.

The ambivalence between collaboration and betrayal in Vietnamese American literature signals ambivalence in the literature itself. Vietnamese American literature is collaborative in its relationship to American culture. The literature engages in tactics of translation and affirmation, fulfilling a role it shares with ethnic literature in general, that of America’s loyal opposition, bringing up the past in order to lay it to rest, or attempt to do so. As such, the literature can raise the troublesome past of war and even the difficult present of racial inequality, so long as it also promises or hopes for reconciliation and refuge. But signs of betrayal are scattered throughout the literature of loyal opposition, criticisms so serious that they threaten the ways that Americans like to see themselves. At times, the same work exhibits impulses toward both collaboration and betrayal, like
The Lotus and the Storm
does. The novel ends on reconciliation between Vietnamese and Americans, but it also indicts America for not learning from its war with Vietnam as it fights new wars in the Middle East. At other times, the betrayal is hinted at obliquely, through ruptures where the past cannot be forgotten, as in GB Tran’s graphic novel
Vietnamerica
. The frenetic, color-saturated narrative ends in the blackness of an airplane hold as the cargo doors shut on frightened refugees fleeing the fall of Saigon.
Vietnamerica
’s timeline does continue past this point in the plot of the book, with the refugees fleeing to America and then eventually returning to Vietnam, but the book’s ending on this note of claustrophobic blackness suggests that the loss of their nation and American betrayal will always entrap Vietnamese refugees.

While Vietnamese American literature that avoids the war is developing slowly, as might be found in Bich Minh Nguyen’s writing, the refusal to discuss the war can still be seen in light of the war itself.
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Somewhere the corpse continues to burn, as poet Galway Kinnell says, and even if we avert our eyes and pretend we cannot smell it, the odor lingers, its flickering shadow occasionally leaping into our peripheral vision.
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The odor and the flickering shadow of war’s burning corpse still haunts Vietnamese American literature, as
The Gangster We Are All Looking For
makes evident. The narrator flees by boat from Vietnam and survives, but her brother does not. His ghost shadows her, becoming one sign of the past that will not go away. The author’s postscript to the 2004 paperback edition makes haunting even more explicit, recounting that her name is not her own but her older sister’s. The author and her father had fled on a separate boat than the mother and older sister did, and, after being rescued by an American ship, her father had mistakenly identified her with her sister’s name when filling out paperwork. When the family is reunited, the mother reveals that the older sister drowned at a refugee camp, and asks that the younger sister—the author—keep her older sister’s name. “My mother saw my father’s mistake as propitious; it allowed a part of my older sister to come to this country with us. And so I kept my sister’s name and wore it like a borrowed garment, one in which my mother crowded two daughters, one dead and one living.”
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Ghosts like this that tie Vietnam to America must be honored if Vietnamese American literature is to stop being an ethnic literature that ultimately affirms America.