Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (32 page)

True war stories insist on this dreadful knowledge of the inhumanity that exists within the human, and the humanity of those who appear inhuman. But this is a hard tale to recount, especially for tellers of true war stories dealing with women, children, refugees, and banalities, in particular the banality of inhumanity. Unlike soldiers turned artists, these tellers have a heavy burden to bear in challenging the identity of the conventional war story and insisting that a war story is about many different things and people, not solely soldiers. Recasting war’s dramatis personae faces resistance from audiences who believe that war stories are about soldiers, men, machines, and killing. These tellers also struggle, like all other artists, with the judgment of their critics. These criticisms, while subjective, are often pronounced in objective ways, as when the glossy magazine
Entertainment Weekly
gave a B+ to Kao Kalia Yang’s
The Latehomecomer.
This is a good grade, but neither great nor perfect, two rungs below the top grade of an A in the American system.
¹⁵
At an artist’s talk, the author brought up this matter of grading and I made a note of it, for the judgment clearly bothered her.
¹⁶
I sympathize, and yet this is how aesthetic judgment often works, albeit not usually in such a blunt way that reveals how aesthetic judgment is similar to the classroom judgment that many artists also exercise in their function as teachers. Ironically, the professor and authority figure who objectively grades her or his students with blithe confidence may suddenly feel, on being evaluated in less than stellar ways by students, deans, peers, and critics, that these assessments are rather subjective.

Suddenly the person who professionally judges becomes aware that a grade brings with it unknown prejudices of personal and aesthetic kinds on the part of the critic. But writers and artists always render judgment, ruthlessly, on their own work as well as on the work of others, if not always in public. How else does one improve one’s art if one cannot judge in the most basic ways, especially in comparison to what one wishes to achieve in one’s own creation? What is crucial to admit is that this aesthetic judgment is an expression of identity, deeply subjective and perhaps flawed, yet always necessary. Recognizing this, some critics shy away from judging a work’s beauty in favor of considering how a work functions in certain contexts. Context is especially important when it comes to looking at minorities, women, the poor, the working class, the colonized, anyone whose art has often been deemed as inferior by authority figures, who in the West are usually white and usually men, but also sometimes women. These authority figures favor the stories of soldiers and men over those who seem only to be war’s bystanders. Because they are powerful, these critics can deny how their identities shape their judgments, even as they insist that the less powerful usually do not transcend their identities. These critics practice the unacknowledged identity politics of their profession when their judgments are delivered as objective, rather than being what they are: subjective expressions of institutionalized power, with the critic being a part of an entire system of art- and taste-making that begins in the schools, extends into the professionalized worlds of art, and incorporates both artist and critic.

Those critics who do not admit to their biases, to the way their tastes have been shaped by their worlds and their aesthetic industries, are being unethical. A stinging rebuke to unethical criticism is given by, not surprisingly, a writer, Nguyen Huy Thiep, the foremost short story writer in Vietnam of the 1980s and 1990s. His short story, “Cun,” from his classic collection
The General Retires
, features a writer and his good friend, the literary critic K. The writer tells us that K. “demands high standards in what he calls the character of a person. Hard work, sacrifice, dedication, sincerity, and, of course, good grammar are the qualities he requires”; “he understands our literary debates well (which I must confess I don’t).”
¹⁷
K. tells the writer that K.’s father, the Cun of the story’s title, only wanted to be a human being throughout his short life, but failed. Intrigued by this cryptic fragment, the writer weaves a grotesque story, set during the Japanese-induced famine of 1944 that killed about one million people in the north, a time, my mother tells me, when she found people dead of starvation on her childhood doorstep. This story concerns the child beggar Cun, cursed by a “hydrocephalic head and soft, seemingly boneless limbs.”
¹⁸
He drags himself on the ground everywhere, but his beautiful face makes him a compelling beggar. Despite his body’s inhuman ugliness, Cun is the only human person on his street of able-bodied people, all of whom behave inhumanely. Then Cun becomes wealthy through a windfall inheritance. A beautiful but destitute neighbor persuades Cun to give her his wealth in exchange for one sexual encounter, which is the only happy moment of his life. An illness kills Cun, but he lives just long enough to see her birth his child. This child is the literary critic K., who is, of course, appalled by the writer’s story, which he considers a fabrication. To prove what really happened, the critic shows a photo of his father, “a big fat man wearing a black silk shirt with a starched collar. He also wore a neatly trimmed moustache and was smiling at me.”
¹⁹

The critic is the authority figure, the comfortable representative of the literary establishment, which is also, in Vietnam, part of the political establishment. His judgments on literature cannot be separated from his identity as a functionary of a regime that views literature as potentially dangerous to its own authority. More than that, he is a bad critic because he cannot bear to be confronted with criticism, especially criticism that questions his identity. In response to the story that mocks his heritage, the critic naively turns to a photograph to show that his father was in fact human, not inhuman, though this contradicts what he himself suggested previously.
²⁰
But as Papageorge’s photos show, realistic photographs of human beings doing banal acts can just as readily be evidence of their inhumanity, their indifference to the things done in their name. The critic’s reaction is not just a breakdown of ethical standards but the fullest expression of his hypocritical aesthetic of propriety. He is so focused on his father’s humanity, and hence his own, that he cannot even discuss the child beggar, the main character of the story. The child beggar might be an embodiment of the dehumanized poor, or perhaps a reference to the inhuman horrors that Agent Orange created, or more simply one person whose tragedy is overlooked by the humans who see him and yet do not see him, including the critic.

It is fairly easy to imagine Western critics in a parallel vein, seeing through their own supposedly objective, humanistic standards and yet subjectively blind to the inhumanity in front of them. A vertically integrated system of aesthetic education and reward reinforces their standards, beginning in the earliest years of schooling and ending at the rarefied heights of universities, academies, organs of criticism, and prize-granting bodies. In America, this world typically focuses on the individualist, consumerist, and alienated values and feelings of a capitalist society. Capitalism privileges the individual author or auteur who can wield her or his art in ways considered refined and legitimate by the tastemakers, those people who, like their distant cousin K., rarely question how their identities as critics and their sense of taste, beauty, and goodness are intertwined with the values and ideology of their dominant class. They do not see that their aesthetic values, which they understand to be evidence of their humanity, are tainted and shaped by the inhumanity of the capitalist system and the war machine within which they live and whose profits and costs they take for granted.

As critic Pankaj Mishra says, Westerners, including Western writers, routinely expect non-Western writers to decry the oppressive regimes under which they suffer. Not to protest seems like moral failure to Western writers. These same writers often do not work up the same aesthetic outrage toward their own society’s crimes via a “selective humanism—blind to the everyday violence of one’s own side, and denying full humanity to its victims.”
²¹
These Western writers lack the imagination to see how their drab stories of unhappiness, divorce, cancer, etc.—the very stuff of award-winning realism and the bad outcomes of white privilege
over here
—might be connected to, and made possible by, their society’s wars and capitalist exploitation
over there
. Culture, as Edward Said explains, is inseparable from imperialism, which can be read as humanity being inseparable from inhumanity.
²²
This selective humanism is, of course, not purely Western but universal, as Mishra is careful to note: “most novelists, in the West as well as the non-West, avoid direct confrontation with powerful institutions and individuals, especially those that not only promise fame and glory to writers but also, crucially, make it possible for them to stay at home and write.”
²³

The same charge of selective humanism and complicity with power can be laid against most critics. This is part of the brilliance of Thiep’s story, his insinuation that the punctilious critic’s heritage may be inhuman, which is utterly shocking to the critic if not to his Western readers. As outsiders to communism, Westerners can easily see its hypocrisies and blind spots, the inhumanity at the heart of its ideology. The rebellious writer in Vietnam faces a system of power, prestige, and taste that defines what is acceptable and what is human or inhuman. The Westerner demands a heroic response! But what is obvious about Western values, when seen from the outside, is that they too reinforce propriety. This propriety prefers to deny the inhuman, the colonialism, imperialism, domination, warfare, and savagery found in the heart of whiteness. When this inhumanity is acknowledged, its connection to, and contamination of, Western humanity is often suppressed or disavowed by artists, readers, and critics who are blind to their own hypocrisies and contradictions, their participation in inhumanity, their own lack of heroism when confronted with the lures of institutional reward.

Writers new to the West or who are minorities enter a world where their audience is not likely to be aware of its own inhumanity. At the same time these writers may feel the need to prove their own humanity, given that it will be questionable under Western eyes. The
Entertainment Weekly
review of
The Latehomecomer
inadvertently shows this dilemma. Given its emphasis on celebrities and entertainment, this magazine may not be the best venue for literary discussion, but its déclassé nature allows it to display Western values about writing rather bluntly. The entirety of the review is this:

When your grandmother once outran a tiger, you know perseverance is in your blood. Meet the Yangs, a Hmong family who evaded Pathet Lao soldiers after the Vietnam War by crossing the Mekong River into Thailand, only to float between refugee camps for eight years. They found asylum in Minnesota, but lived on welfare. The toll all of this takes on readers is lightened by Kao Kalia Yang’s tranquil descriptions of the cultural divide—e.g., the smell of green parrot soap compared with Head & Shoulders shampoo—in
The Latehomecomers
[
sic
], a narrative packed with the stuff of life.

Why the book warrants a B+ is never explained, except in the mention of “the toll all of this takes on readers,” evidently alleviated by the “stuff of life.” The somewhat cryptic comments that accompany the grade are similar to what a college student might get on a midterm paper from an overworked professor. And while a B+ is a good grade, it is little comfort to those clamoring to get into medical or law school, or those striving to enter the MFA program, publish a book, win prizes, and earn recognition. The demands placed on artists by their aesthetic industries differ little from those placed on students. Once graduated, having learned by heart what it means to be graded, artists still strive for perfect grades, manifest in laudatory reviews, rich grants, dazzling awards, and so on. Aesthetic success as being akin to educational success—with the artist as a good student—is shown explicitly in the
Entertainment Weekly
review, as well as in the story
The Latehomecomer
tells. In both cases, making the grade covers up the opposite, the haunting possibility or even past reality of being degraded.

While
The Latehomecomer
is a history of Yang’s family and the Hmong people who sided with the United States, it is also a story of how a refugee became a writer. Yang, born in the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand, begins by tracing the history of her family and their struggle to reach a refugee camp across the border of Laos into Thailand. The exodus, by foot, takes four years. Once in the refugee camp, the Yangs are assigned numbers by the United Nations, which requires them to have birthdays. Since these are unknown for some, the Yangs make up dates. “For many of the Hmong,” Yang writes, “their lives on paper began on the day the UN registered them as refugees of war.”
²⁴
Yang alludes here to how the Hmong did not even have a written language until the 1950s. They were indeed undocumented, and paperless, until they entered Western bureaucracy. For Yang to write the first book in English by a Hmong author continues the transformation of Hmong people’s lives on paper. Her memoir signals that the Hmong have a representative who can speak for them, in all the complicated ways we have already seen:

For many years, the Hmong inside the little girl fell into silence … all the words had been stored inside her.… In the books on the American shelves, the young woman noticed how Hmong was not a footnote in the history of the world.… The young woman slowly unleashed the flood of Hmong into language, seeking refuge not for a name or a gender, but a people.
²⁵