No more happy endings.

I don't have the heart to tell them. I'm at the 40th anniversary memorial of the fall of saigon organized by the coalition representing boat people, seated before a statue in a cemetary depicting boat people: clothes ragged, arms outstretched and I don't have the heart to tell them.

To a certain extent, don't the Vietnamese deserve a happy ending? After all that has passed, the betrayal, the manipulation, don't they deserve a happy ending? In which everything is good and they don't have to fight anymore? Sure. I understand it. But to speak on that happy ending one has to ignore certain disquieting details: the begging, the restrictions on freedom, the whole suffering of their children - small things? Perhaps not, but at the present moment I don't have the heart to tell them.

The happy ending is a cudgel that grants clemency to Vietnamese-Americans to cease their fight for a nation that no longer exists. It frees them of the hopeless responsibility of holding onto their culture fiercely against a hostile society that seeks only to erase them. It grants them - at the end of cruel and arduous journeys of escape - something to look forward to. But in so doing it also obviates the present realities that contradict such happy endings. But the happy endings too must exist, for if not then such losses would be complete, absolute, too vast to bear. I can understand that.

And at the present moment, in the company of people who lost their loved ones upon the sea to death, starvation, disease, or worse I don't have the heart to tell them, won't tell them what they must know in their heart of hearts: that there are no more happy endings.

But today, a negotiated revolution will do. Against a swarming tide of white supremacy, that renders all non-white lives irrelevant and unworthy, there is a place in Westminster that pays homage to the grace, beauty, vice, and all things in between of everyone who lost their lives at sea and linger on in the hearts of those they left behind.

For them, for today, the battle is over.

And this is a happy ending.