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.

The war never ends.

If there is to be any consolation at all in the macabre proceedings of people celebrating about a mausoleum of existence it is that wars don't end.

Every conflict that the collaborationist element of the Vietnamese-American community would have cordoned off in the past such that they might aggressively pursue their bmws and mercedes have not ended, they continue with great and determined feriocity. Nothing ends. All conflicts continue. And so too will the rebellious malcontented disrespectful element of Vietnamese society endure, even in the cruel air of America. Every fight against foreigners continues, our abductees are not our kin, and colonialism and the struggle against it continues, whether here or in Vietnam.

There is no freedom that has been achieved and for all the "Mission Accomplished" that Vietnamese like to bandy about, the war is not over.

It will never be over.

And this should be a cause for celebration.

For to surrender at a crumb heaped upon a famine is to lose sight of what is important: which is to one day return home. To a Vietnam that is free in its mind and soul of the legacy of oppression. We must remember too that as the country is our flesh and our blood, so to are we the country. And we should see fit to care for the country in ways that the scourge of centuries is not a welcome presence in the land that is our heart and minds.

The battle is not over.

The war never ends.

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.

A response to the Bolsa Grande (Originally Camp Pendleton) 40th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon Event

If this is what the leadership of the youth has to offer then we'd be better off dying off.

Saturday's 40th anniversary of Black April event at Bolsa Grande - famously originally to be held at Camp Pendleton - was by all notable and measureable accounts a disaster. The organizers clearly had no sense of history or decorum or how else would they have been able to make such a wantonly offensive display to common sensibility. It is to the point where I wonder if they might not have been better off if they had just openly solicited money from the Communists to bring shame and disgrace upon the Vietnamese community. If anyone were to seek a more present example of Vietnamese-American servility, one would have been hard-pressed to find a better example than the travesty that was on show last night.

From the ill-considered, gauche, deplorable presentation of "entertainment", to the fundamental lack of understanding that Black April is a day of MOURNING, the organizers most of all demonstrated that as far as their loyalties lie, they lie firstmost with not offending their generous American benefactors, even if that means weathering open disgrace and spitting upon the suffering of their forebearers.

A fundamental lack of respect for the very essence of being Vietnamese-American was so prominently on display that the Communists probably could not have invented better slander if they tried. The constant and unending invocations of docility and servility to American leadership, the open and patently offensive dismissal of an entire swathe of Vietnamese-American religious existance. If this is the freedom that Vietnamese-Americans fought so hard to achieve - this freedom to be serving dogs - then it is fundamentally unchanged from the "freedom" offered to the Vietnamese currently living in Vietnam.

What the event on Saturday panned out to be was - in fact - a celebration of 40 years of Vietnamese-American failure. Failure to achieve anything. Failure to teach their children even the smallest bit of their history, and most of all a failure to pick their friends as anyone tuning in to such a broadcast would have observed a gauche and tasteless offense to a day marked in infamy: the prancing about of know-nothing second generations so fundamentally divorced from the death of a nation that they saw fit to bill the event as a party.

Fie and shame upon them! Decrepit dog-people that foist their capacity to bow and heel on command as credentials to savage our history. Fie and shame! They are unworthy of the legacy to which they are heirs. They are better off swearing off their heritage entirely than to bring such disgrace to the community. I come from a bloodline of militant murderers, jungle-killers and anti-western terrorists. My name and lineage is soaked in the blood of people who would invite the soiling influence of foreigners onto Vietnamese soil and yesterday I saw to the wounded spectacle of a limping, lame debaucherous circus of wanton and feckless greed.

Fie upon them! They are not all of us! There are still those for whom the promise of a free Vietnam - a truly free Vietnam, free of the pedagogy, the stench, the jack-heeled boots of a thousand marauding foreigners  - for whom that promise still lingers about their heart. That one day we will be free. Even as we wish such from captivity.

We have not all forgotten where our true loyalties lie.

-Lê Duy Việt

Tell me my history (white boy)

Tell me again about my history white boy.

Tell me again how there were only two sides. How - despite having lived it - I know less about it than you do. Tell me again your story in which my part in my history is less important than what all your white boys did - selectively omitting how they fucked everything up.

Tell me about my history again white boy.

I wanna hear you tell how your government murdered our first and only effective president as a warning to all following presidents not to override military command. How american military command fundamentally refused to listen to any of the generals who'd actually fought and won in their own country. Tell me about how against the fundamental failure of American troops to do their jobs, your government decided to double down on its leadership and torch my country to the ground.

Tell me about my history again.

Tell me about how every single racist aspect of your nation - because it was richer, it must know better - took from my hands a millenia-long dream of a foreign-free Vietnam and presented it to me as a reliquary, souvenir, and token. Tell me how every thing your country fucked up about my country, every instant you insist that we were just lapdogs of your country, as though there was no pushback, as though we were happy you were there, as though I do not have to sit through the agonizing indignity of having to tear you a new one in english as opposed to happily living in a country free of your wanton stupidity,

Tell me again, what my history is white boy

We Blame You

We blame you.

In few uncertain terms we blame you. Your fecklessness, your idiocy, the failure of the whole of your society: every single member from liberal to conservative. You came into our country and imposed your brand of idiocy upon us, hamstrung us, told us how to fight a war we've been fighting for decades, insisted that God would show you the way as you refused to listen to your betters then abandoned us when your inability to listen to us cost us everything. 

We blame you. 

Our conspicuous absence from a national dialogue that revolves around slandering us as lackeys of US imperialism or ardent vanguards of the Southeast Asian bulwark against communists taking away baseball. Your flagrant and wanton lack of concern or consideration of the humanity of the people whose lives you unmake. 

We blame you. 

For the roots of your society are diseased and rotted. A nation unfit to travel outside its borders even as it insists that its knowledge encompasses all human experience.

We blame you!

That my tongue curls and bristles in english words, colonial and bitter. That my heart shivers daily for a nation that could have been and may never be again. That our lives are a slow and torturous march towards the inevitable extinguishment you so aspire us to achieve. 

We blame you 

For having lost everything, for all that is yet to lose, for ignoring us, ignoring our humanity, ignoring our agency from right to left, for insisting above all else that you always knew better even as we always knew better than you. For foisting upon our country a racial hierarchy that lost us the war. For maintaining a racial hierarchy that insists we have to beg for scraps of a nation that was already owed to us! For the sins you have committed upon the black bodies, brown bodies, asians bodies, and the collective non-white masses you fetid, wretched, racist society.

We. Blame. You. 

I remember

I can see you begging

I've watched us begging for 40 years

Though you will not call it as such

You will tell yourself that the Americans are our friends

That they love us and respect us

But unfortunately I remember. 

I remember far longer than you do, apparently

I remember how they came in and murdered our president

I remember how their soldiers insisted they knew how to fight better than us

Even though we'd been fighting there for a millenia

I remember the failure of their spirit that cost us our war

So yes, I can see you begging

But I do not fault you for it

But I hear you say me seeing you begging

Makes me the enemy

For what else is there to do?

But Beg

You beg well, learned you are as a dog

But I have not learned to bark

I remember

And I do not forgive

And every day I live here tears at my being and pulls against the feeling of where I am supposed to be, where we are supposed to be

Which is home

Away from here.

Away from what our home now looks like

Away from every murder, duplicity, bowing, scrimping, begging, lying indignity that we have suffered

for 40 years

I remember.

I remember and it is all I can do to keep from screaming out when you say how grateful you are to the americans. 

Who gutted us.

Hamstrung us.

Betrayed us.

I remember.

And the fog of my desperation does not cloud my memory, nor does the grip of my greed twist my tongue to tell pretty platitudes of how great americans were to us. 

You killed us. 

This whole society killed us.

And I survive on only to utter this:

I remember.