Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (40 page)

Evident in this model of giving and forgiving, of letting go and surrendering, is the gratifying picture of two enemies making peace, acting out the binary of giver and receiver. The model is laudable but vulnerable because it can encourage us to overlook what does not fit this dualistic scheme. So, when it comes to my war, its complicated history is often reduced to a conflict between Vietnam and America. What happens to Laos and Cambodia, the South Vietnamese, the diversity within all of these countries? For many, it is easier to overlook these and other differences in favor of the image of (victorious) Vietnamese and (defeated) Americans reconciling. The model of two enemies making peace is also vulnerable because the reciprocity of gift giving still implies indebtedness, the expectation of getting something in return for a gift, even if it is love and friendship. Thus, the reconciliation of Vietnam and America has not actually led to peace, unless one defines peace as the lack of war. Reconciliation has led to the return of business as usual, two countries negotiating for power and profit in the former Indochina and the South China Sea region. Those invested in capitalism and militarism steer this corrupted reconciliation, which masks the self-interested exchange between the two countries. In this exchange, gifts turn into commodities and peace turns into alliances for present profit and potential war. If we wish for true peace, pure forgiveness, and just forgetting, we must remember the labor that makes commodities, we must remember the history of war that lurks behind the façade of peace.

Giving without hope of reciprocity, including the gift of art, is one model for pure forgiveness and just forgetting. Rather than think of giving as involving only two people or entities, imagine giving as part of a chain in which the gift circulates among many. The one who receives a gift need not return it but can instead give a gift to another, with the giving itself a gift. In this manner, the giver eliminates the problem of reciprocity and expectation. Critic Lewis Hyde proposes this when he discusses the work of art as a gift that the artist sends out into the world, to be passed along to others. For Hyde,

art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective.… So long as the artist speaks the truth, he will, whenever the government is lying or has betrayed the people, become a political force whether he intends to or not.
²⁷

Giving in its pure form is a way of forgiving the world, the one that accepts the inevitability of warfare and capitalism, blood and debt. Is not such a world unforgivable to those who wish only to give? Giving without expectation of return is a way of working toward a time when just forgetting and actual justice exist in all ways of life, including in memory. The work of art crafted in the spirit of truth is a sign of justice and points toward justice, even if it cannot completely escape the material and unjust world that can turn the gift into a thing to be bought and sold. Still, the artist who gives her gift to others remembers the gift of art given to her by other artists. She gives and forgets about any debt owed to her. This true artist hopes for an era when all people can be artists if they wish, to give if they wish, to live in a time when the just forgetting of the unjust past has happened.

To all those who demand that we must forget even without justice if we wish to move on—forgetting at all costs will one day cost you or your descendants. The violence and injustice you wish to leave in the past will return, perhaps in the old guise or perhaps in a new and deceptive one that will only be another face of perpetual war. Yes, you can forget, but you will not move on. Just forgetting only happens as a consequence of just memory. Remembering in this manner remains a task that seems impossible, given the irony that many of us prefer to carry the burden of injustice instead of putting it down, a reluctance that makes us bound to our past and present. Until that impossible moment of just memory occurs for everyone, some can undertake the task of just forgetting by giving and forgiving, working alone or, preferably, in solidarity with others.

Meanwhile, the future of memory remains unknown. On my last trip to Southeast Asia, I visit the far reaches of Cambodia to catch a glimpse of that future, to the border town of Anlong Veng, thirteen kilometers from Thailand and in a district that was the Khmer Rouge’s last bastion. It takes two hours by private car from Siem Reap, and we drive up mountain roads past an old monument to the Khmer Rouge, carved from a boulder. Someone has beheaded the statues of the Khmer Rouge soldiers who once proudly stood there. Driving past the monument and Anlong Veng, we continue to the border crossing with Thailand, where we have no difficulty finding what I am looking for. On the side of the road, a blue sign that says “Pol Pot Creamation” points to the grave. It is twenty meters away amid a camp of shacks and tarps where people live in poverty, with the ones doing well selling things like gasoline in old Johnny Walker bottles. What remains of Pol Pot lies in a small and barren dirt lot. A rope keeps out visitors, but the guard lowers it for a dollar. The dusty and neglected tomb is a knee-high, rusty tin roof over a low, rectangular mound of earth, fenced off and decorated with a few sad flowers. Here rests someone who embodied the human and the inhuman in the extreme, an idealist who learned his ideas about taking Cambodia to Year Zero in Paris, City of Light.
²⁸
The antimemorial he has at present suits him perfectly, its form as ugly as his legacy, but I can only hope that it stays that way. After all, his tomb exists almost literally in the shadow of a casino under construction a hundred meters away, across the highway. By the time I write these words, the casino should be finished, and its proximity to Pol Pot’s tomb can only lead to more tourism for both. There will be no giving here, much less forgiving.

A few kilometers away down a badly cratered red earth road stands the tourist future, “Ta Mok’s House Historical Attractive Site,” marking the residence of Pol Pot’s last ally and possible murderer, nicknamed the Butcher. Hidden behind a screen of weeds and saplings is the decrepit shell of the home, its walls marked with insults against Ta Mok. In a clearing nearby, restaurants and bungalows invite people to eat, drink, and relax. A young couple cuddles in one of the bungalows as they gaze at the view of the plains beneath the mountains. Perhaps one day Pol Pot’s grave will be ringed with bars. Why not, if money is to be made from people like myself. In the small town of Anlong Veng itself there is another Ta Mok tourist attraction, a compound where he once lived. A few vanloads of Khmer tourists wander around the barren houses of the compound, devoid of furniture but still decorated with wall paintings of Angkor Wat. Children lounge on the balcony of an open-air room facing fields where the homes of other Khmer Rouge senior leaders—Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary—once stood. The homes have disappeared. A demolished truck that was Pol Pot’s mobile radio station crouches in the front yard. Under the shade of a pavilion, on cement, stand two gigantic wire chicken coops that once caged prisoners. In Ta Mok’s day, he kept the cages and the prisoners under the sun. A woman fingers a cage door and smiles, half-laughing. I doubt she finds this place funny, but as the journalist Nic Dunlop has written in regard to the genocide, “Confronted with the enormity of what had happened, how was one to react?”
²⁹
I take her picture.

Perhaps tears and sorrow are not enough. Perhaps one should smile and laugh when confronting these places, not because they are humorous but because they are strange, these rememories where despair mixes with hope. In these places, we cannot separate the absurd from the tragic. Here are two men who died for a revolution that sought to murder a country in order to save it, a lesson learned from the French and Americans. Now, as ghosts, they inhabit a poor, traumatized country where the forces of unjust memory and unjust forgetting outnumber the forces for just memory. An unpredictable future waits to be built on the literal bones of the past. Will these bones serve only as a lesson against madness, if even that? Will they also speak against the deprivations that led to that madness, the myriad injustices of the past that survive to this day? Will the past be just forgotten, or will there be a just forgetting of the past?

Epilogue

IN WRITING THIS BOOK,
I returned again and again to what people call my homeland, where my parents were born, as was I. But for the Vietnamese, the homeland is not simply the country of origin. It is the village where one’s father was born and where one’s father was buried. My father’s father died where he was supposed to, as my father will not and as I will not, in the province of his birth, his mausoleum thirty minutes from Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace. The region is famous for producing hardcore revolutionaries and hardcore Catholics. My parents were among the latter. The geographical proximity of revolutionaries to the religious often makes me wonder what a different direction my life might have taken, what a different war I might have inherited.

I went to my father’s homeland to pay my respects, only to discover that my father’s father was not buried in his mausoleum. Soil and the smoke of incense smudged the mausoleum, which stood near the compound built by my father’s father, where my uncles and most of my cousins still lived. The date of my father’s father’s death was inscribed at the mausoleum’s peak, and beneath it lay two tombs. My paternal aunt and the wives of my uncles pulled weeds, swept away the dust, and lit incense. Above the tomb of my father’s mother was a black-and-white photograph of a sad face that had also peered at me from the mantel of my childhood home. But next to her the tomb of my father’s father was empty, no stone slab to seal it, no name above it, no body inside. What remained of my father’s father was buried kilometers away, in a muddy field near the railroad tracks, far from the living, laid to rest ten years ago.

I lit incense at his tomb. Later my uncles did the same in their father’s compound, in front of his photograph. I knew this man only by his title, my father’s father. I would never be expected to call him by his name even if I had known him. Only when I was home in California did it strike me that I did not know the name of my father’s father. But I remembered his face vividly from the photograph on my parents’ mantel. Some years after my visit, this image, his image, was placed next to that of his wife, above his tomb.

That picture will become the kind of memory that the filmmaker Chris Marker talked about, the kind that fascinate me the most, “those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories.”
¹
I have inherited many of these memories, from the refugees among whom I grew up, from the Americans whose manners and customs I took as my own, and from my mother and father. They rarely discussed the war that had shaped them indelibly, but their lives exuded the force of memories of which they rarely spoke.

I remember what happened a few times after my mother came home from a twelve-hour workday, with even more work yet to do at home. They labored like this every day of the year except for Christmas, Easter, and New Year. Having lost almost everything, they nearly killed themselves to earn it back. She asked me if I wanted to go for a drive with her, without my father. Perhaps I was eleven or twelve, maybe younger. We drove silently in the night, the windows rolled down for the cool breeze. The radio was off. My parents never listened to the radio in the car. She would not speak to me, or perhaps she did and I did not listen or do not recall. Even if she did speak to me, I do not know what I would have said. We drove into the hills in silence and then we returned home. Perhaps this was her way of reaching out to me, the boy who had lost his mother tongue, or who had cut it off in favor of his adopted tongue. Perhaps she simply needed a few minutes away from work and my father, whom she saw every minute of the day. What did she think of, what did she remember. Now I cannot ask. Her memories are vanishing and her body is slow to obey her. She will not be counted as one of war’s casualties, but what else do you call someone who lost her country, her wealth, her family, her parents, her daughter, and her peace of mind because of the war.

I recall what Marker also said about “the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.”
²
Yes, remembering and forgetting entwine together, a double helix making us who we are, one never without the other. I want to remember, but so much has been forgotten or silenced. My own personal memory is faulty. Through my youth, I had a memory of soldiers firing from our boat onto another boat as we floated on the South China Sea. I was four. My brother, seven years older, says the shooting never happened. As an adult, I remembered my mother being hospitalized when I was a child. A few years ago, when I discovered a memoir that I had written in college, I read in my own words that she was in the hospital at that time, not years before. Her illness and that strange ward with its mumbling patients had made me feel like I was a frightened child. That feeling was what I remembered.