Long T. Bui’s book, Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory, jogged thought processes and questions critical for directing my personal interests. Unlike other academic texts I have read in mandated Sociology and introductory Gender Studies courses, I found analytical gems in every one of Bui’s chapters that lit up different aspects of colonialism. Returns of War guided me by clearly demonstrating systems of powers as perpetual and present processes that are still tied to the past and pushes us relentlessly towards the future.
Before I discuss the philosophical research questions Bui’s book prompted for me, I’d like to first analyze an intense emotional reaction I had during the reading of this book. To preempt common critiques I overhear in academic circles, I would like to explicitly lay out the teleological framework I utilize not only here, but in all my work.
As a sociologist, I do not consider the excavation of the personal reaction which I detail below, nor any other presentation of emotional and psychological responses to works of art, to be an intellectually masturbatory act with the critical caveat that such journeying must be done with the trueness and fullness of one’s heart. I also strongly believe that it is a very good thing that there remains no formula or intellectual yardstick with which to measure ‘trueness’, ‘fullness’ or even the very existence of a heart, that it remains a matter of woo-woo-ness, a gut instinct, a sixth sense finely honed over life-cycles and life-courses.
(And no, I do not care if that is a selfish belief –
it’s far too comforting for me to ever give up)
Rather than an abstracted exercise designed to benefit only other intellectuals who have the same access to such heights of cultural and actual capital, I hold the true value of existing in this material world can only be discovered in the constant, honest, and unflinching (as distinguished from non-reactionary) mining of one’s personal experiences, consequent self-reflection, and the memory of engaging in this process.
So, can we finally begin?
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The second chapter of Long T. Bui’s book, Returns of War, fleshes out a conceptualization of ‘reeducation’ using a critical reading of Aimee Phan’s novel, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, drawing on the Phan’s use of non-linear chronology and multiple perspectives. Bui’s analysis deftly develops a layered understanding, not only of Aimee Phan’s novel, but of the trauma underlies the neocolonial experience.
His ideas knocked on a door that I’d forgotten somewhere in my heart.
I have to put this book down, I thought, a quick break, a cup of tea, a walk around the block just to clear my head. So, I did just that. I put the book down, I put the kettle on, poured hot water over a packet of Vanilla Chai tea in a thermos, then zipped downstairs for a walk up the street and back. As I walked, I pulled my scarf tighter around my neck in an effort to ignore the dull throbbing emanating from somewhere under the left half of my ribcage.
Considering the subject matter, I don’t know why I was so surprised I curled into my bed and started crying uncontrollably the second I stepped foot back into my apartment. Yet, I was. I was still somehow shocked.
After I reached the other side of crying, that blissful moment when you wipe your cheeks and they finally stay dry, I blindly groped in my mind until I found a thread that, when I tugged at it, seemed to hold the promise of some, if not an, answers. I followed it and this is what I found at its origin.
As the first female child of Indian immigrants borne here by the tech boom of the ‘90s, the phantasms that float along the outlines of my life are substantively different from the particularities of the phantasms that float along the outlines of Vietnam refugees’ lives. Or so I thought.
I was wrong.
Bui’s book – particularly his discussions of gendered embodiments of life, love, and loss through the prism of Aimee Phan’s novel, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong in Chapter 2 – dusted off ghosts I thought I’d shelved a very long time ago. In this way, Bui’s notions of war as reverberating endlessly through time, of its twin concepts of memory and trauma, are extremely effective in cutting across systems that exist outside of time and space.
Shall I name these ghosts and draw these linkages for you? Yes, but it is important I stress this is only because it is first useful for me to know this for my life.
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The first ghost: the gendered body as nation
Bui introduces the first ghost by twisting the concept of ‘reeducation’, redefined as “the connection between the filial duty of daughters to their conjugal families and the debt owed by refugees to the host countries, where gendered familial dynamics are a synecdoche for the neocolonial relationship between the refugee and the nation” (58). I would argue this concept is not limited to the neocolonial relationship between the refugee and the nation but can be expanded to include neocolonial relationships between survivors of colonial regimes writ large, particularly those rising out of Asian cultures. Bui’s concept of reeducation certainly rung a chord with me, an individual who is not considered a refugee by the hegemonic state, who certainly exists on a plane with extreme privilege but is nevertheless shaped by a similar yet different expression of these power relations, a distinct mutation that nonetheless finds its fountainhead at the intersection of dehumanization, capitalism, whiteness, anti-blackness, colonialism, and exploitation.
In Chapter 3, using the concept of ‘dis/rememberment’, Bui connects the corporal to the imaginary of nation further, “Following feminist scholars… [we can consider] the nationalist discourses that occur in the diaspora [as] containing gendered sexist hues because they prop up the human/familial body as a metaphor of the nation” (101). Bui goes on to expound how gendered bodies come to represent and validate patriarchal meanings tied to culture, as well as how these symbols come to justify violence and punishment to the body in the name of securing that very body/nation. Reading this line of analysis, I arrived at understandings of my body that explained aspects of the dire politics that surrounded my inhabitation of a first-generation female immigrant body within a family structure that moved from a formally decolonized nation to a metropole.
This is the first haunting.
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The second ghost: colonialism as contemporaneous
This particular ghost is interwoven throughout Bui’s work, but fully reveals itself through Bui’s conceptualization of ‘militarized freedoms’ and ‘empire’s residuals’ as laid out in Chapters 4 and 5.
In Chapter 4, where Bui fleshes out his concept of ‘militarized freedoms’, the author echoes Dylan Rodriguez (2010) in defining it as “the incorporation of [postcolonial] subjects into U.S. empire transact[ing] a form of permanent debt to former colonial masters, one that prompts thankfulness for receiving freedom from outside protectors” (130). I find this concept of militarized freedoms helpful when theorizing about traumas tied to brown and black subjects’ histories, especially those that fall within the ‘model minority’ strata of the racial/color hierarchy. The concept pokes at the source of anti-black and fear-driven discourses in model minority families who move to metropoles – white-blindered narratives of indebtedness and freedoms that can only be accessed through violence and the oppression of others.
In Chapter 5, Bui approaches the same specter of neocolonialism through his conceptualization of ‘empire’s residuals’ to great effect. Building off of Hardt and Negri (2000) concept of ‘Empire’, Bui writes, “we now line in ‘Empire’ in a broader global sense with corporations, rich global elites, and First World nations like the United States holding power over the earth’s poor in a phase of global development” (172). He describes the nation-state of South Vietnam as “liv[ing] on in a strange fashion, as a distant shadow of the receding past, but also an unmovable specter of war haunting the country’s speculative future, where the past refuses to desist or sit in abeyance to the utopian impulses and historical amnesia of globalization” (173).
Between these two conceptualizations of the global and local – for Bui, this is South Vietnam; for me, it is Kerala – I find gestures towards realities for Keralans living in the United States. Growing up, I saw, heard, felt, finally embodying the sadness and longing for homeland that my parents carry every day, particularly my father. I have always struggled to find its source or an explanation for this grief. I can now think of it in terms of lost choice, lost homes, lost futures, losses that ultimately rest at the feet of Empire. Thinking of Empire as contemporaneous and presently and perpetually imprinting itself on my life as well as on the lives of those I love and the lives of those in my community just helps. It lightens. It lifts. It invites hope.
This is the second haunting.
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The third ghost: longing
Throughout his work, Bui utilizes language and concepts that simultaneously gesture backwards to a longing borne from loss, exists in the present as a wistful desire to be considered ‘human’, and forwards to a future that is truly self-determinable for non-white individuals, societies, and cultures. Given the emotional power of such academic writing, I contend that works like Bui’s should be considered a firm, intentional step towards the erasure of arbitrary distinctions between the ‘academic’ and the ‘personal’, rather than a simple ‘addition to the literature’.
In his first chapter, Bui addresses the present longings of neocolonial subjects by exploring current-day evaluations of who is ‘human’ through the prism of the archive. When Bui visits the Vietnam War Center and Archive – one of the world’s major sites dedicated to the preservation of the memory of the Vietnam War which is incidentally (or not? Bui does not provide a definitive answer… perhaps because definitiveness in such matters cannot exist) located in the remote town of Lubbock, Texas – he learns that he cannot access South Vietnamese bodies and histories without himself moving through the dehumanizing perspectives that Empire demands. Tellingly, Bui discovers this particular cost of pursuing truth when a librarian tells him that using keywords like “South Vietnam”, “Vietnam”, “Vietnamese people” or “Vietnamese refugees” will not return the results he desires. Rather, Bui will need to type the word “gook” to encounter bodies that look like his, that are of him. The librarian shares this information with chagrin generated through the white encounter of a Vietnamese body that cannot be so easily dismissed as non-human. In a particularly poignant question, Bui asks “what does it mean to have those who think Vietnamese people are subhuman entities legitimize the archive?” (35).
As I will most likely work in archives both in Kerala and in the United States, reading about Bui’s experiences and interpretations thereof is not only ‘helpful’, it is straight-up like putting on armor before going into battle. For that, among many other reasons, I am eternally grateful for having read this book.
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Beyond the personal reaction I had to Bui’s work, I found his use and orientation of concepts like Vietnamization, reeducation, dis/rememberment, and the Vietnam/American Syndrome powerful in their nuance and clarity. Bui’s interrogation of the constitution of archive and the politics that shape it was also particularly helpful.
I do have a significant critique that I need to bring up before I conclude – Bui misses out on a really great opportunity to critically examine South Vietnam’s positionality in terms of its politics to the land it occupies and its relationship with indigenous populations as well as with its relationship with North Vietnam. Perhaps this was well outside Bui’s scope, but he could have provided a critical discourse and point to other research done on these topics in the Introduction. As someone who does not have as much visibility into the politics of the Vietnam peninsula, I would have really appreciated it if Bui had fleshed out his own positionality / privileges / disprivileges as a South Vietnamese refugee in the United States who also participated in the US military and Vietnamese activism in the US, in explicit and unavoidable terms, right up-front.
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What did I learn from this exercise? What is the actionable conclusion that I reached? Most vitally that, of course, ghosts can never be truly shelved and to even think they can be is the definition of hubristic, a human characteristic that unfortunately colors much of my life.
