Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (33 page)

The memoir is the documentary evidence of these Hmong refugees being transformed into ambivalent Westerners, of entering into a system that assesses both the weary, terrified refugee who supposedly has no voice and the writer who gives voice to the refugee in a language understood by the West.

Being a writer is one way the refugee sheds her inhumanity—the degraded “toll”—and becomes human, the higher-graded “stuff of life.” But this refugee who becomes a writer, who wishes to take the true war story away from those who insist that it belongs to men and soldiers, leaves one fraught territory to enter another one nearly as perilous. In the first instance, as a refugee, what Yang encounters in Ban Vinai is this: “the dominant feature of the camp was the stench of feces. There were toilets, but they were all flooded.”
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Seven years later, the Yang family is finally sent to the Phanat Nikhom Transition Camp to the United States. “The building we were assigned smelled like the toilets that I had dreaded back in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp,” Yang recalls. “In fact, it had been used as a bathroom. There was always human waste between the buildings and amid the cement blocks and large rocks throughout the camp.”
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Filth, especially the untreated waste of human excrement, haunts other Hmong accounts of life in the camps, and many stories of other Southeast Asians in other camps.
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This is no surprise, since refugees are what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” or “naked life,” just alive enough to know they are human, close enough to death to know they are less than human. Confronting one’s own waste and the waste of others, living among it, smelling it, stepping in it, confirms for these refugees their inadequate humanity under bureaucratic eyes. Living in shit is a true war story and a traumatizing one. O’Brien conveys some sense of this when he writes about how the soldiers of
The Things They Carried
are ambushed in a “shit field,” used by villagers as a toilet. The Indian named Kiowa is killed, or, in GI slang, wasted.
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Kiowa sinks beneath the shit, waste beneath waste. But awful as it is, the field is a temporary stop for American soldiers who can go home after a year, if they live. For Yang’s refugees, the pervasive presence of shit is a part of everyday life that can go on for many years, even decades. That is one crucial difference between a soldier’s war story of his terminal tour of duty and a refugee’s war story of a possible life sentence.

One difficulty in writing a true war story is the aesthetic challenge of dealing with shit and waste, the unpleasant facts of death, neglect and inhumanity for both soldiers and civilians. One must write about the shit even as one wipes it off one’s shoes or feet, making the story aesthetically decent enough to be brought into someone’s house. Writing, or spilling one’s guts, is thus the second dangerous territory encountered by the refugee who wants to tell a true war story. Writers have to deal with shit if they spill their guts, which includes the figurative shit thrown their way by readers and critics such as myself. By learning to write at all, by learning to write in English, by earning degrees, by publishing, Yang and other Hmong American writers are judged by both the minority community they come from and by their national audience. Ha Jin, a Chinese writer living in America, describes this dilemma as the tension between “the spokesman and the tribe.”
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As Mai Neng Moua, editor of the first Hmong American literary collection, says of the Hmong in the United States, “this is a community that is very private … and may very well be threatened by the writings of its young people.”
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To tell a true war story is thus a risky enterprise, not least of all because it is inevitably a story not only about war and memory but also about identity. This is as true for soldiers as it is for refugees.

A true war story ultimately challenges identity because war radically challenges identity, from the soldier who must confront himself as well as the enemy on the battlefield to the civilian who discovers she is less than human when she becomes a refugee. Blown up, dismembered, wasted bodies on the battlefield also fundamentally disturb human identity for those who killed them, witnessed their demise, or buried them. Those bodies also unsettle national identity when a country divides itself over a controversial war, or when the body politic persuades soldiers to kill others even if in so doing they bring their own humanity into question. The false war story ignores this challenge to humanity by owing its allegiance to war and national identity. The false war story affirms in sentimental, selective, and dishonest ways the idea that “we”—its protagonists and its audience—are human, even though we might be more like chickens clucking our heads over the oh-so-sad loss of life we have just witnessed. A good or great true war story forcefully articulates war’s challenge to identity and humanity in content and form, balancing the tension between war’s degrading nature and the need to make the grade as a war story.

Perhaps one reason why
The Latehomecomer
might get a good but not great grade is that it does not fully recognize the challenge to identity that it poses. This challenge is found in the transformation from being degraded—of living in shit—to being able to earn a grade, to foreground “the stuff of life.” Yang exhibits faith in the power of her story to represent herself and her people, but she does not see the pitfalls of victimization and voice. The refugee who speaks in a language that her adopted national audience can hear faces a dilemma: she is no longer a refugee even as she speaks for the refugee, and no longer a victim even as she speaks of victimization. Her ability to tell the story to an audience not made of refugees has changed the author’s identity. This is why the refugee community may turn against its writers, because it knows its identity is no longer the same as that of the writers. In the West, the refugee writer is an auteur, whereas the community he or she supposedly speaks for is a collective, their condition enforced on them by a general public that cannot hear them even when they do speak.

Since Yang has chosen the form of the written memoir, her identity has been alchemically altered. In leaving the inhuman, degraded world of the refugee camp and its fields of waste behind her, she enters a hallowed world of higher grades where no one says shit, where waste is flushed away behind closed doors, where the aesthetic achieves a certain level of odorless, porcelain refinement. Likewise, a Southeast Asian academic colleague of mine who facetiously (I think) proclaims of having gone from “refugee to bourgeoisie” laughed when I said that I, too, was a refugee. “You don’t look like a refugee,” my colleague said, no longer joking. And my colleague is right. I no longer have refugee hair or refugee clothing; I no longer have a refugee accent or refugee grammar, if I ever did; I no longer smell like a refugee; and I know better than to do refugee things like talk about money, except in private. I am a Westernized critic, as Yang is Westernized writer, both of us subject to Western standards while also being subject to the standards of our original communities. Like every such writer, she may be unhappy about judgments rendered on her, but the only solution offered from within a world that privileges authorship and the auteur, the accomplishment of the individual in a capitalist society, is to achieve the perfect grade, the A. If one stays within this world, how does one achieve this? What are the standards? Or, as many students have asked their professors: What are you looking for? As a professor, I give the student a rubric by which he or she will be graded. But critics do not provide checklists of aesthetic criteria by which an artwork is to be assessed, like a car at a tune-up. The critic supposedly knows what is (good and bad) art, just like the judge knows what an obscenity is—when he (or she) sees it. So I refrain from providing criteria for how an artwork gets a perfect grade, since any such criteria are as subjective and mutable as identity itself.

What concerns me is how the experience of an artist who works on a true war story, and who aspires to the perfect grade, itself constitutes another kind of true war story. As O’Brien understands very well in
The Things They Carried
, a true war story is not only about the story itself but is also about how the story is told, heard, and passed on. This is why he creates a character in his book called Tim O’Brien, who shares his name and his occupation as the writer of the book’s stories, but who is not the same as the Tim O’Brien in the world. The struggles of the character Tim O’Brien express in a perhaps filtered way the struggles of his creator in both war and storytelling. Self-reflexivity is partly what gives this true war story its kick, its recoil. In a parallel fashion, Kao Kalia Yang’s encounter with being graded like a student is as much a true war story as the story in her book. As the soldier faces two rites as ancient as those depicted in
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
, war and then the journey home, the refugee also goes through those rites, except in an inverted manner. If war makes the surviving soldier a man, a privileged member of his society, it makes some civilians into refugees, the trash of nation-states and war. If the soldier struggles to go home both literally and figuratively, battling external and internal demons, the refugee struggles to find a new home. The soldier typically achieves validation in the epic form of the novel, the memoir, the movie blockbuster, the grandiloquent speeches of kings and presidents. The refugee rarely merits such validation. Hence the burden on Yang’s memoir, the grade she has to make, where good is not enough. Good enough is how men or the majority often grudgingly assess women and minorities, or how the colonizer judges the colonized to be “almost the same but not quite,” “almost the same but not white,” as the theorist Homi Bhabha says.
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Not all soldiers who write make the grade, but soldiers who write can make the grade, as O’Brien does, because the war story belongs to them. The difficult transformation from soldier to writer is not a change in her or his already granted humanity. But for a refugee to become a writer is for the refugee to go from being inhuman to human. While the refugee who becomes a writer is given the license to tell a refugee story, he or she is not seen as writing an actual war story, at least not one that is given the same weight as a soldier’s. To get a good or great grade in either respect, as a storyteller of the refugee experience or the true war story, is considerably more difficult for the refugee turned writer. This difficulty is inseparable from the war that created the refugee in the first place and hence created the conditions for grading the refugee turned writer.

The refugee shares this plight of being graded with many of those classified as other: women, minorities, and the colonized. These others may believe in the grading system so much that they grade themselves and find themselves wanting. The specter of the slightly less than perfect grade is particularly haunting and daunting for them. A failing grade might signal rebellion and an alternate world of possibility, of badness, of rejecting the terms forced on a student by the authorities. But a slightly less than perfect grade is the true failure for those who have genuinely tried, for it affirms that they are slightly less than human, slightly less than those doing the grading. So it is that at the beginning of Chang-Rae Lee’s first novel
Native Speaker
, a well-known work of (Asian) American literature that foregrounds in its title the role of speech and belonging, the protagonist Henry Park receives a letter from his alienated white wife that calls him a “B+ student of life.” This grade is meant to sting. While Henry Park, the son of Korean immigrants, struggles with this grade, I can’t help but feel that Lee the novelist also worries about being given the same grade. In a career marked by deep concerns about war, memory, and identity, Lee has tried mightily to be the perfect student and has garnered his fair share of great grades, including being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for
The Surrendered
, his novel of the Korean War. And yet, as beautifully written as his novels are, there is something of the anxious student in them, the longing for belonging, the evident desire never to write a bad sentence, and indeed always to write the perfect sentence, which sometimes leads to overwritten sentences and lyrical conclusions that may not be earned, as the creative writers say.

But that is just my feeling about Lee’s writing. The same things I say of Lee could be said of me as a novelist. Who am I but one of those who may be slightly less than human in the eyes of some, the equally anxious student who cannot help but see himself through the eyes of others, my perception and taste clouded by my own desire for approval? Lee, like Yang and myself, is caught in the struggle to tell the true war story and is in the middle of a true war story: the one about how writers and critics who inherit the legacies of wars find themselves caught between being degraded and given the perfect grade, judged by an aesthetic system implicated in the war machine. This does not mean that artists who struggle to tell true war stories cannot speak or cannot strive for a perfect grade; it does mean that they should question their own identities as artists as well as the identities of the forms they choose, since both these kinds of identities are part and parcel of the triad of war, memory, and identity.

The struggle over how to tell true war stories is about both remembering wars fought elsewhere and conflicts fought here, at home. In communist countries, one usually has to go to war against the state to tell true war stories, since the state is only interested in bad war stories, the dishonest kind that justify war and glorify the state. In America’s case, culture wars divided America throughout the twentieth century, their momentum building through the rise of civil rights, workers’ struggles, feminism, gay rights, and queer empowerment, surges of restlessness that came together with the antiwar movement to gain explosive force in the 1960s. These culture wars subsided in the 1970s but returned with ferocity in the 1980s, when defenders of a homogenous America cried out against the barbarians at the gate, those colored hordes who had climbed their way up the hill of civilization to the city of shining light. Kao Kalia Yang and Chang-Rae Lee are among these barbarians, whether they want to be or not, as am I. Reluctantly or fervently, we, the barbarians, are also cultural warriors, demanding to be let in to civilization, haunted by the inhuman wars of that civilization. We, too, wish to tell true war stories, which are impossible to disentangle from the battles we fight to tell those stories.