The Clown Show

Every year around this time I usually flip up my calendar and note - with some wry and bitter smile - that it's about time for the clown show again. I've been going to the show ever since I was a kid - way back then I even believed in what the clowns were saying - but since i've grown up the earnestnest has given way to comedy.

Take for instance the military man decked up in his plastic medals, never bestowed upon him in Vietnam but purchased from Amazon afterwards, shipped to him from China and pinned upon his breast such that he might regale strangers with tales of his outrageous and courageous heroism in fighting the Communists. Or too, take the refugee assuming the position: docile, compliant, forever grateful to the grand paternal figure of Uncle Sam, nose so close to the ground that if you were to put a picture of a dog right before the person you'd swear it were a mirror.

These are the regular features of the show I go to see every year. A regular pangeantry draped upon the mantlepiece of a sign that reads "THIS IS ALL VIETNAMESE-AMERICAN HISTORY. NOTHING ELSE EXISTS"

Of course, those of us within the community who know better have suffered the clowns with a muted amusement. Were there something at stake, something to lose, they might yet be easily slaughtered for the fools they are. But there is no reason to fight, nothing left to return to.

Those of us in the community for whom the Americans were always invaders, the Communists always lackeys of the Chinese, the alliance with America always one predicated on the expectation of betrayal, where now do we call home? The cries of clowns and fools with their gesticulations of "We have to show our gratitude!" is met with a muted and wounded reply - unspoken - that were the scales set properly, America would owe us quite a deal more than what we have slaved for.

America owes us a country.

But for their jobs, their degrees, their fancy cars and trips to Vegas the clowns would call our story a victory. A nation exchanged for poker chips and they would call their 40-year-party a triumphant coda to losing a homeland to the ravages of foreign capital and home-grown robber barons. They would call their positions as servants to foreign machinations victories, their vast, vacant homes trumphs, their personal fortune equivalent to the success of a nation.

The clowns do not tell very good jokes.

What is present- beneath the screaming, the gesticulations, the meaningless platitudes about how American freedom to enslave the poor is somehow better than Communist freedom to enslave the poor - is something that must be acknowledged in the midst of a chorus populated by clowns: that we have lost everything.

And that every year going on 40 now we will continue to lose more, and more, and more until there is nothing left. Nothing about the screaming of people yelling at us to be grateful that we received anything at all will change the fact that in our company, we would never have given the country up for anything.

And we had to.

So what gratitude do we have to offer?

What trinket will make up for our devotion to self-determination? To freedom from foreign influences? To a Vietnam finally free of the yoke of foreigners slavering over its resources and spitting upon its people?

Nothing will replace it. Nothing will replace the lost ground over which once flew the old Vietnamese flag. If the clowns insist that I show my gratitude to the US, I will show it once they return my country, and a cookie. Because gratitude is shown towards gifts, not towards people who pay you what you're owed.

Until then you can keep your show. You can keep running up the lights. But just know that when you string up the banner, say that "We are all grateful", the we being Vietnamese - Americans writ large, you do not speak for all of us. There is just so infrequently a reason for us to speak.

Your regularly scheduled clown show will now reconvene.