View Thanh Nguyen
02/2018
Oh, fish sauce! How we missed it, dear Aunt, how nothing tasted right without it, how we longed for the grand cru of Phu Quoc Island and its vats brimming with the finest vintage of pressed anchovies! This punchent liquid condiment of the darkest sepia hue was much denigrated by foreigners for its supposedly horrendous reek, lending new meaning to the phrase 'there's something fishy around here,' for we were the fishy ones. We used fish sauce the way Transylvanian villages wore cloves of garlic to ward off vampires, in our case to establish a perimiter with those westerners who coiuld never understand that what was truly fishy was the nauseating stench of cheese. What was fermented fish compared to curdled milk? (70)
He said, Oh, you nisei, as if knowing that one word means he knows something about me. You've fogotten your culture, Ms. Mori, even though you're only second generation. Your issei parents, they hung onto their culture. Don't you want to learn Japanese? Don't you want to visit Nippon? For a long time I felt bad. I wondered why I didn't want to learn Japanese, why I didn't already speak Japanese, why I would rather go to Paris or Istanbul or Barcelona rather than Tokyo. But then I thought, Who cares? did anyone ask John F. Kennedy if he spoke Gaelic and visited Dublin or if he ate potatoes every night or if he collected paintings of leprechauns? So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn't my culture right here since I was born here? (75)
This sight scandelized our French overlords, who saw this childhood nudity as evidence of our barbarism, which then justified their raping, pillaging, and looting, all sanctioned in the holy name of getting our children to wear some clothes so they would not be so tempting to decent Christians whose spirit and flesh were in question. But I digress! (78)
Have you noticed that when we Asians speak English, it better be nearly perfect or someone's going to make fun of our accent? It doesn't matter how long you've been here, Ms. Mori said. White people will always think we're foreigners (120)
One must be grateful for one's education, no matter how it arrives (141)
His district office was a modest outpost in a Huntington Beach strip mall, a two-story arrangement of shops on a major intersection. Drenched in cafe au lait stucco, the mall was bordered by an example of America's most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot (143)
But what did I know? I had only lived there, and people who live in a given place may have difficulty seeing its charm as well as its faults, both of which are easily available to the tourist's freshly peeled eyes. One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both. (148)
When your grandchildren ask you what you did during the war, you can say, I made this movie. I made a great work of art. How do you know you've made a great work of art? A great work of art is something as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real. Long after this war is forgotten, when its existence is a paragraph in a schoolbook students won't even bother to read, and everyone who survived it is dead, their bodies dust, their memories atoms, their emotions no longer in motion, this work of art will still shine so brightly it will not just be about the war but the war itself (178)
Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory's laminated floor? Still smarting from my wounds even now, I cannot help but wonder, writing this confession, whether I own my own representation, or whether you, my confessor, do (194)
All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many thins when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The chinese might have invented gunpowed and the noodle, but the west had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications (241)
Americans on average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity. Not only did Dr. Hedd have a measure of both, but he also possessed an English accent, which affected Americans the way a dog whisle stimulated canines. I was immune to the accent, not having been colonized by the English, and I was determined to hold my own in this impormptu seminar (255)
For someone to be happy, he must measure his happiness against someone else's unhappiness, a process which most certainly works in reverse. If I said I was happy, someone else must be unhappy, most likely one of you. But if I said I was unhappy, that might make some of you happier, but it would also make you uneasy, as no one is supposed to be unhappy in America. I believe our clever young man has intuited that while only the pursuit of happiness is promised to all Americans, unhappiness is guaranteed for many (255)
I cannot be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved. But what would happen if one took off the mask and the other saw one not with love but with horror, disgust, and anger? What if the self that one exposes is unpleasing to others as the mask, or even worse? (275)
To be anti-American only makes you a reactionary. In our case, having defeated the Americans, we no longer define ourselves as anti-American. We are simply one hundred percent Vietnamese (319)
We are the ones most able to know ourselves, and yet, the most unable to know ourselves. It's as if our noses are pressed up against pages of a book, the words right in front of us but we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can (342)
We can argue about the causes for these wars and the apportioning of blame, but the fact is that war begins, and ends, over here, with the support of citizens for the war machine, with the arrival of frightened refugees fleeing wars we have instigated. Telling these kinds of stories, or learning to read, see and hear family stories as war stories, is an important way to treat the disorder of our military-industrial complex. For rather than being disturbed by the idea that war is hell, this complex thrives on it