Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 418

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial," by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

 

Like many other immigrants and refugees before them, Ba Má become human sacrifices, throwing themselves onto barbed wire so I can walk across their backs into this strange new world. They work relentlessly, almost every waking hour, almost every day of the year except for Easter, Tết, and Christmas. Every day their own station of the cross.

The writer’s dilemma: be scarred enough to be a good writer, but not so scarred as to be truly fucked up. You have achieved the magic balance! Congratulations!!!

You laugh at yourselves because you have been laughed at so many times already. At Saint Patrick, one classmate asks, Did you carry an AK-47 during the war? Another classmate says, Ah-so, asshole! while bowing and clasping his hands. You remember their names and faces to this day.

Many of the Hmong resettle in poor Black communities, where neither is prepared for the Other. When poor people are forced together, they sometimes clash. But after [Minneapolis Police Department officer Jason] Andersen kills Fong Lee, Black activists rally. Lee’s sister Shoua says, "They were the loudest voices for us. They didn’t ask to show up. They just showed up."

Start with an easy question for the students. How many of you are refugees? Two, three hands go up. How many of you are immigrants? 

Everybody raises their hands. 

These students have already absorbed the message: AMERICATM is a nation of immigrants. Not a country of refugees.

You tell yourself: 

Don’t be a voice for the voiceless. Abolish the conditions of voicelessness.

You are thrilled to get as far away as you can from San José, even if it is only 330 miles to your Inland Empire. Only many years later do you feel a degree of shame. Ba Má sacrificed so much for you. And you repay them by fleeing.

You marry Lan. Although the most important thing about her to Ba Má is that she is a Vietnamese Catholic from a good family, the most important thing about Lan to you is that she is a poet, as well as beautiful. Your delighted parents pay for the very loud wedding, held in a Chinese banquet hall with the same elaborate ten-course Chinese meal served at every Vietnamese wedding, a bottle of Hennessy cognac on every table for the four hundred guests, most of whom you do not know. No one expects you to enjoy your own wedding. What a Western idea!