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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2012
Vietnam in the American consciousness is a confluence of images of conflict; where Vietnamese appear they are backdrop to displays of US heroism. There is another story, which Vietnam veteran and filmmaker Oliver Stone calls “the reverse angle, what the war was like from the perspective of the people living in Vietnam.” If America's memory of the conflict is dominated by US perspectives, this is also in images rather than in words. Pictures of monks immolating themselves and people scrambling to board US helicopters have produced a generation who know of Vietnam only through images. One of these images is a bombing mission which dropped napalm on some villagers. AP photographer Nick Ut captured a severely burned Kim Phuc running screaming in the streets; his photo won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most infamous images of conflict ever captured; her recently published life story is the reverse angle and, with similar texts by Le Ly Hayslip, Andrew X. Pham and Duong Van Mai Elliot, represents an emergent perspective, a counternarrative of Vietnam, and a new kind of American literature of peace. My essay explores the inscription of the Vietnamese American perspective on the conflict via life writing.
1 Clendinnen, Inga, Reading the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, 174.
2 Herr, Michael, Dispatches (London: Picador, 1991), 125Google Scholar.
3 In line with accepted usage, “Vietnamese American” is defined here as it is by Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy, This is all i choose to tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, 8: “The term ‘Vietnamese American’ commonly refers to Vietnamese refugees who came to the United States after the victory of communist forces in Viet Nam in 1975. See also Monique T. D. Truong, “Vietnamese American Literature,” in King-kok Cheung, ed., An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 219–46, 219. Also see Truong's novel, The Book of Salt (New York: Vintage, 2003)Google Scholar.
4 See Andrew, Martin, Reception of War: Vietnam in American Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993)Google Scholar, especially chapter 1, for a discussion of Vietnam as America's “dirty war.” The Vietnam films I mention here are Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Heaven and Earth (1993).
5 Herzog, Tobey C., Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 169–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Chattarji, Subarno, Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, 143.
7 Jeffords, Susan, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, xiii. The mass mobilization of masculine anxiety and the cult of military masculinity in times of conflict are further explored in Phillips, Kathy J., Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and American Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)Google Scholar.
8 Jeffords, 167.
9 Williams, Paul, “‘What a Bummer for the Gooks’: Representations of White American Masculinity and the Vietnamese in the Vietnam War Film Genre, 1977–1987,” European Journal of American Culture, 22, 3 (2003), 215–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 215.
10 Ibid., 234.
11 Fictional and autobiographical output on the subject of Vietnam is vast, but examples here notably include Reed, Paul, Kontum Diary: Captured Writings Bring Peace to a Vietnam Veteran (Chicago: Summit Publishing Group, 1996)Google Scholar; Hanna, Peggy, Patriotism, Peace, and Vietnam: A Memoir (Left to Write, 2003)Google Scholar; Sue Rosenberger, Mary, Harmless as Doves: Witnessing for Peace in Vietnam (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1988)Google Scholar; O'Brien, Tim, In the Lake of the Woods (New York: Penguin, 1995)Google Scholar; and Caputo, Philip, A Rumor of War (New York: Holt, 1977)Google Scholar.
12 See Pelaud, chapter 2, 31–33.
13 See the full essay by Oliver Stone, “The Reverse Angle,” in Michael Singer, ed., The Making of Heaven and Earth (Clarendon, VT: Tuttle, 1993), np.
14 Truong, The Book of Salt, 220.
15 Pham, Andrew X., Catfish and Mandala: A Vietnamese Odyssey (London: Flamingo, 2000), 10–11Google Scholar.
16 Ibid., 98.
17 Linda Martín Alcoff and Laura Gray-Rosendal concentrate upon the survivors of sexual abuse, but also suggest that “survivor discourse” can more flexibly be adopted to refer to those who have lived though traumatic experiences. See Linda Martín Alcoff and Laura Gray-Rosendal, “Survivor Discourse,” in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 198–225.
18 Pham, 285.
19 Truong, 220.
20 Chong, Denise, The Girl in the Picture: The Remarkable Story of Vietnam's Most Famous Casualty (New York: Scribner, 2001)Google Scholar, x.
21 Quoted in ibid., ix.
22 Ibid., x.
23 Stur, Heather Marie, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Smith, Angela K., ed., Gender and Warfare in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, 4.
25 Cloonan, William, The Writing of War: French and German Fiction and World War II (Jacksonville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 71–72Google Scholar.
26 Pham, Catfish and Mandala; idem, The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars (New York: Three Rivers, 2008)Google Scholar; Hayslip, Le Ly, with Jay Wurts, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace (New York: Plume, 1990)Google Scholar; idem, with Hayslip, James, Child of War, Woman of Peace (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1993)Google Scholar; Chong, The Girl in the Picture. Although I include Andrew Pham here, and discuss his life-writing diptych briefly, I have chosen to focus more thoroughly upon works by Hayslip and Phuc (as written by Chong), since this additionally enables a thorough exploration of the gendered dimensions of writing about the Vietnam War.
27 Kim Phuc's foundation provides medical care for Vietnam's child victims, and Kim Phuc herself serves as a goodwill ambassador.
28 Many Vietnamese-language novels deal with this issue, but few are translated. An exception is Duong Thu Huong's 1988 novel The Paradise of the Blind, translated in 1991 by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. In their Afterword, at 270, the translators write that she “is in the position of having been both a participant and a witness to Vietnam's tragedy … [she] questions the human cost of Vietnam's long war with the United States.”
29 Isabelle Thuy Pelaud notes that most of the first generation of published works by Vietnamese refugees were written in Vietnamese and published in Vietnamese-language literary journals. See Pelaud, This is all i choose to tell, 22–23.
30 Chan, Sucheng, ed., The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation: Stories of War, Revolution, Flight, and New Beginnings (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
31 Le, Vui, The Forgotten Generation: From South Vietnamese to Vietnamese-American (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009)Google Scholar.
32 Dinh, Truong-Nhu and Nga, Tran Thi Truong, The Last Boat Out: Memoirs of a Triumphant Vietnamese-American Family (Leander, TX: Gaslight Publishing, 2006)Google Scholar.
33 Van Mai Elliot, Duong, The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
34 Nguyen, Thi Thu-Lam, with Kreisler, Edith and Christenson, Sandra, Fallen Leaves: Memoirs of a Vietnamese Woman from 1940–1975 (New Haven: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1989)Google Scholar.
35 Thi Tuyet Mai Nguyen, The Rubber Tree: Memoir of a Vietnamese Woman Who Was an Anti-French Guerilla, a Publisher, and a Peace Activist, ed. Monique Senderowicz (Jefferson, NC.: McFarland, 1994).
36 This is an observation which has also been made by Oliver Stone.
37 Pelaud, 23.
38 According to Nathalie Hunyh Chau Nguyen, who interviewed Krall in 2000. See Chau Nguyen, Nathalie Huynh, Memory is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009)Google Scholar, 163, 189. Also see Krall, Yung, A Thousand Tears Falling: A True Story of a Vietnamese Family Torn Apart by War, Communism, and the CIA (Atlanta, GA: Longstreet Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
39 This is Leslie Bow's phrase. See her article “Le Ly Hayslip's Bad (Girl) Karma: Sexuality, National Allegory, and the Politics of Neutrality,” Prose Studies, 17, 1 (1994), 141–60, 143. Also see idem, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.
40 It should also be noted that Le Ly Hayslip was subject to intense condemnation of her work within the Vietnamese American community, as many people felt she had misrepresented the Vietnamese experience of the conflict too.
41 Truong, The Book of Salt, 237. Also see Leslie Bow, “Third World Testimony in the Era of Globalization: Vietnam, Sexual Trauma and Le Ly Hayslip's Art of Neutrality,” in W. S. Hesford and W. Kozol, eds., Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the Real (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 178–79.
42 Bow, “Le Ly Hayslip’s Bad (Girl) Karma,” 141, 156, 153. Bow is actually referring to the work of John Carlos Rowe here; however she expresses misgivings about Stone's film elsewhere in her article, especially at 156–57.
43 Pelaud further warns that “Vietnamese refugees’ tears, losses, and blood” have been used by the United States to appropriate “human rights violations to allow America to shed itself of national responsibility and guilt,” and she calls for an end to “representationalism.” Pelaud, This is all i choose to tell, 2, 7, 35.
44 Alcoff and Gray-Rosendale, “Survivor Discourse,” 213.
45 For an expanded discussion of the interface of life writing and photography see Adams, Timothy Dow, Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
46 The editors at the AP office also decided to use the photograph of Kim Phuc in preference to the photograph of her grandmother Tao carrying an injured baby Danh, which was taken first.
47 Chong, The Girl in the Picture, 73–74.
48 Ibid., 370.
49 Ibid., xi.
50 Ibid., xi.
51 Ibid., 364–65.
52 Kinney, Katherine, Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 160.
53 Chong, 205, 3, 190.
54 Ibid., 254.
55 Ibid., 255.
56 Ibid., 255–56.
57 Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, Memory is Another Country, 9, 101. This use of the concept of a “traumascape” is a reformulation of a term originally coined by Maria Tumarkin to describe a kind of memory of place as marked by tragedy. See Tumarkin, Maria, Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
58 Clendinnen, Inga, Reading the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, 172.
59 In Reading the Holocaust, 14, Clendinnen compares the picture of Kim Phuc with Holocaust victim photographs: “When we think of innocence afflicted, we see those unforgettable children of the Holocaust staring wide-eyed into the cameras of their killers, but we also see the image of the little Vietnamese girl, naked, screaming, running down a dusty road, her back aflame with American napalm.” Also see idem, “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?”, Quarterly Essay, 23 (2003), 1–72Google Scholar.
60 See Liss, Andrea, Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)Google Scholar, chapter 1. A similar formulation, called “postmemory,” can be found in Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, a means whereby private recall is connected to collective, public history. Both Liss and Hirsch concentrate upon the afterlife of the photograph in cultural memory, in a manner akin to the afterlife of Ut's image.
61 Kolko, Gabriel, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace (New York: Routledge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1. Also see idem, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1985)Google Scholar.
62 Pelaud, This is all i choose to tell, 137.
63 Chan, The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation, xi.
