My first name is that of the Vietnamese people, whose patriotic mythology says we have suffered for centuries to be independent and free. Rise against abusive power or stand with our back turned to the abuse of power. And no. So long as this crossbred system of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation remains in place, there will always be someone who will write that sign: Another American Driven Out of Business by [fill in the blank], because racism always offers the temptation to blame the weak rather than the powerful. Why wouldn’t they be? In its most diluted form, Asian-American identity is also open to anti-Black racism, the acceptance of colonization, and the fueling of America’s perpetual-motion war machine, which Americans from across the Democratic and Republican parties accept as a part of the U.S. My presence here in this country, and that of my parents, and a majority of Vietnamese and Hmong, is due to the so-called Vietnam War in Southeast Asia that the U.S. helped to wage. It is hard to say, because I had never said “I love you” to anyone, my parents included, much less a country. Some Americans like to believe that the greatness has succeeded the horror, but to me, the greatness and the horror exist simultaneously, as they have from the very beginning of our American history and perhaps to its end. I had a face, a voice, a name, a movement, a history, a consciousness, a rage. The U.S. is an example of a successful project of colonization, only we do not call colonization by that name here. For many if not all Black, brown and Indigenous people, the American Dream is a farce as much as a tragedy. I would have pointed out that he must not have finished my novel, since the last quarter indicts communism’s failures in Vietnam. Refugees from Vietnam descend a flight of stairs from an airplane in Oakland, California, April 1975. Anyone who has heard these five words knows what it means, because it almost always refers to America. But if I also felt uneasy, it was because I could not help but wonder: Which America was it? I had tried various American names on for size. Who Will Be TIME's Person of the Year for 2020? In the age of coronavirus, I am uncertain how to sew a mask and worry about shopping for groceries. Perhaps he never made it past being offended by the first quarter of the novel, which condemns America’s war in Vietnam. All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. So long excluded from American life, marked as inassimilable aliens and perpetual foreigners, asked where we come from and complimented on our English, Asian immigrants and their descendants have sought passionately to make this country our own. I have never been physically assaulted because of my appearance. Viet Thanh Nguyen Photo by Clemson New Room via Flickr Creative Commons. So I choose the freedom of America, even at a time when “love it or leave it” is no longer just rhetorical. My parents and their parents never knew anything but French colonialism. The feeling of being foreign, especially if they were, or were perceived to be, Muslim, or brown, or Middle Eastern. None of these efforts have prevented the stubborn persistence of anti-Asian racism. Perhaps it is not so far-fetched to imagine that one day someone like me, born in Vietnam, might be sent back to Vietnam, despite having made more out of myself than many native-born Americans. I cannot help but see colonialism’s legacies, visible throughout Paris if one wishes to see them: the people of African and Arab origins who are here because France was there in their countries of birth. Most of the French of Vietnamese origins I know are content, even if they are aware of their colonized history. Too much freedom of the press is unhealthy for a democracy, I declared. Naming my own son was then a challenge. This was how parents, who would never say “I love you,” told their children they loved them. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our, I Love America. Here's Why. I ask out of genuine curiosity, because I have never said this sentence myself, in reference to any country or place. Two Asian Americans were killed in the violence. The country in which I am writing these words is France, which is not my country but which colonized Vietnam, where I was born, for two-thirds of a century. Immigrants and refugees, including Asian ones, know that we usually have to start low on the ladder of American success. My parents, natural capitalists, succeeded at this life cycle until they, in turn, were driven out of business. I admit that those symbols mean little to me, because they divide as much as unify. This is not a problem of assimilation or multiculturalism. When their usefulness was over, American politicians, journalists and business leaders demonized them racially to appease white workers who felt threatened by Chinese competition. Her birth name was Nguyen Thi Bay. About 58,000 Hmong who fought with the Americans lost their lives, fighting communists and rescuing downed American pilots flying secret bombing missions over Laos. Calling for more sacrifices simply reiterates the sense that Asian Americans are not American and must constantly prove an Americanness that should not need to be proven. *Editor's note: Cho Ben Thanh, or Ben Thanh Market, is one of the main icons of Ho Chi Minh City and a big tourist attraction. [1] Somehow the person who wrote this sign saw people like my mother and my father as less than human, as an enemy. A name like Ellison compresses the beauty and the brutality of America into seven letters, a summation of despair and hope. His citizenship is natural, which is as good as the citizenship of the dentist, the doctor and the veteran. His novel, The Nguyen family, in the early 1980s in San Jose, Calif., where his parents owned the New Saigon Mini Market, Nguyen with his mother in Vietnam, before they left for the U.S, Nguyen as a child in Ban Me Thuot, circa 1974, Who Should Be TIMEâs Person of the Year for 2020? They fled communist Vietnam in 1975, after losing all of their property and most of their fortune. Who Will Be TIME's Person of the Year for 2020? The slur of the “Chinese virus” has revealed how fragile our acceptance and inclusion was. The result was white mobs lynching Chinese migrants, driving them en masse out of towns and burning down Chinatowns. Being Asian American is necessary, the name and identity giving us something to organize around, allowing us to have more than “minor feelings.” I vividly remember becoming an Asian American in my sophomore year, when I transferred to UC Berkeley, stepped foot on the campus and was immediately struck by intellectual and political lightning. But there was no manual telling them how to buy a store that was not advertised as for sale. Democracy, equality, justice, hope, peace and especially freedom, the freedom to write and to think whatever I want, even if my freedoms and the beauty of those principles have all been nurtured by the blood of genocide, slavery, conquest, colonization, imperial war, forever war. Not the America of those who say “love it or leave it,” but to my America, to an America that I would force to say my name, rather than to an America that would force a name on me. An academic and a novelist, a critic and a short story virtuoso, Nguyen has written about the experiences of Vietnamese-American people and their roots in Vietnam from seemingly every angle. “Con oi, Ba day. The memory of that visceral love, expressed in sacrifice, is in the marrow of my bones. Being immune to the flag and the anthem does not make me less American than those who love those symbols. The Immigration and Naturalization Service was created, policing Chinese immigration and identifying Chinese who had come into the U.S. as “paper sons,” who claimed a fictive relation to the Chinese who had already managed to come into the country. I grew up on intestine, tongue, tripe, liver, gizzard and heart. Korean-American merchants suffered about half of the economic damage. In short, Korean Americans suffered economic losses, as well as emotional and psychic damage, that would continue for years afterward. It is easier to blame a foreign country or a minority, or even politicians who negotiate trade agreements, than to identify the real power: corporations and economic elites who shift jobs, maximize profit at the expense of workers and care nothing for working Americans. Or we can be a model of justice and demand greater economic and social equality for us and for all Americans. Even if my Vietnamese is imperfect, which it is, I am still connected to Vietnam and to Vietnamese refugees worldwide. Or is the sentence always said with very clear menace? We were the victims. While we do experience segregation and racism and hostility, we are also more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods than Black or Indigenous people. Books. The people who write these signs are engaging in the most dangerous kind of identity politics, the nationalist American kind, which, from the origins of this country, has been white and propertied. Have you heard someone say this? Little has changed. This public event with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sympathizer,” explored how we remember war and its many dimensions. Books. Viet Thanh Nguyen: In President Trump's vision of a white America, immigrants should be grateful and servile By Viet Thanh Nguyen The Washington Post Jul 18, 2019 Many Americans consider the war to be a noble, if possibly flawed, example of American good intentions. The end of Asian Americans only happens with the end of racism and capitalism. The face of Tou Thao is like mine and not like mine, although the face of George Floyd is like mine and not like mine too. This is why I am not surprised by the rising tide of anti-Asian racism in this country. What they carried with them–including some gold and money sewn into the hems of their clothes–they used to buy a house next to the freeway in San Jose and to open the second Vietnamese grocery store there, in 1978. The symphony was never heard. I did not understand the contradiction that was our America during my youth in San Jose, Calif., in the 1970s and 1980s. In Vietnam, the police were not to be trusted. [4 ½ min read] By Susan Bell - November 15, 2018. Hardcover $15.05 $ 15. A classroom composed of Chinese children in New York, 1900, Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images. Like many Asian Americans, I learned to feel a sense of shame over the things that supposedly made us foreign: our food, our language, our haircuts, our fashion, our smell, our parents. Unlike many of the Hmong, a good number of Vietnamese refugees became, deliberately or otherwise, a part of the model minority, including myself. I want to create a family where I will never say “love it or leave it” to my son, just as I want a country that will never say the same to anyone. Eventually the city sold the property for many millions of dollars, and now a tower of expensive condominiums is being built on the site of my parents’ struggle for the American Dream. And is there anything more American than joining the police? Faced with this problem, Asian Americans can be a model of apology, trying to prove an Americanness that cannot be proved. A musician and a girl in Topaz Internment Camp in Utah, July 1945, Updated: June 26, 2020 6:55 PM EDT | Originally published: June 25, 2020 6:37 AM EDT, Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. Survivors of war, my parents fought to live again as aliens in a strange land, learning to read mortgage documents in another language, enrolling my brother and me in school, taking driver’s-license examinations. Viet Thanh Nguyen. Or were we? So it is that Tou Thao and I are “Asian Americans,” because we are both “Asian,” which is better than being an “Oriental” or a “gook.” If being an Oriental gets us mocked and being a gook can get us killed, being an Asian American might save us. We owned property. At last, my father had claimed America. But from the perspective of many Black, brown and Indigenous people, this country was built on their enslavement, their dispossession, their erasure, their forced migration, their imprisonment, their segregation, their abuse, their exploited labor and their colonization. I hardly ever got to see them. Mao also inspired radical African Americans, and the late 1960s in the U.S. was a moment when radical activists of all backgrounds saw themselves as part of a Third World movement that linked the uprisings of racial minorities with a global rebellion against capitalism, racism, colonialism and war. The principles. Perhaps he never made it to the middle of the novel, by which point I was also satirizing the failures of the government under which I was born, the Republic of Vietnam, the south. The murder of Vincent Chin, killed in 1982 by white Detroit autoworkers who mistook him for Japanese, remains a rallying cry. As a result, we often have divergent political viewpoints. What made these sentiments worse, Hong argues, was that we told ourselves these were “minor feelings.” How could we have anything valid to feel or say about race when we, as a model minority, were supposedly accepted by American society? Author Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016 with his debut novel, "The Sympathizer." Two immigration officers interrogate Chinese immigrants suspected of being Communists or deserting seamen at Ellis Island. I made such criticisms not because I hated all the countries that I have known but because I love them. A long series of wars is a pattern. Aware of my colonization, I do not love France the way many Americans love France, the ones who dream of the Eiffel Tower, of sipping coffee at Les Deux Magots, of eating a fine meal in Provence. If we are dissatisfied with our country’s failures and limitations, revealed to us in stark clarity during the time of coronavirus, then now is our time to change our country for the better. Most of the more than 12,000 people who were arrested were also Black or brown. Cataloging these incidents, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong wrote, “We don’t have coronavirus. But when he spoke to his child in Vietnamese, his voice was very tender. I should have. This is the life cycle of capitalism, one in which an (Asian) American Dream that is multicultural, transpacific and corporate fits perfectly well. Vote Now, Here's Who Won TIME's 2020 Person of the Year Reader Poll. His debut novel, a darkly comic spy novel set amidst the Vietnam War, garnered him a Pulitzer Prize. November 15, 2018 6:10 AM EST Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. 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