No Vietnamese names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But two miles away from the long black wall, you can go to a hip restaurant with pink neon signage and spend $14 on a corrupted vegan bánh mì with “edamame paté.”
In his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.”[2]
One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese immigrants in California battled severe anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s. In 1871, eighteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched in Los Angeles.[3] In 1877, an “anti-Coolie” mob burned and ransacked San Francisco’s Chinatown, and murdered four Chinese men.[4] The neighborhood was dealt its final blow during the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco fire departments dedicated their resources to wealthier areas and dynamited Chinatown in order to stop the fire’s spread. When it came time to rebuild, a local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired T. Paterson Ross, a Scottish architect who had never been to China, to rebuild the neighborhood. Ross drew inspiration from centuries-old photographs of China and ancient religious motifs. Fancy restaurants were filled with elaborate teak furniture and ivory carvings, and completed with burlesque shows with beautiful Asian women who were later depicted in the musical Flower Drum Song. The idea was to create an exoticized “Oriental Disneyland”[5] that would draw in tourists, elevating the image of Chinese people in America. It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan, and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs.[6] People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners.
We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the only image of China I had growing up. I was surprised to learn, in my early twenties, that roofs in China were not, in fact, covered with thick green tiles and dragons. I felt betrayed—as if I had been tricked into forgetting myself.
Which is why Professor Do asks his students to collect family histories from their parents, in an effort to remember. His methodology is a clever one. “I encourage them and say, look, if you tell your parents that this is an academic project, you have to do it or you’re going to fail my class—then they’re more likely to cooperate. But simultaneously, also know that there are certain things they won’t talk about. But nevertheless, you can fill in the gaps.” He’ll even teach his students to ask distanced questions such as “How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma, but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.
* * *
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I suppose I am a privileged American and so are the current students at Piedmont Hills. But I don’t see these teenagers as spoiled by their privilege. I still see them as vulnerable. And in some ways, I see their American entitlement doing them good.
Before I left Piedmont Hills that day in San Jose, I dropped by the newsroom that saved my life, just to see it. It looked exactly the same, just with newer Macs. “Hey, guys—it’s an ex-student, who’s a real journalist in New York!” the new journalism adviser proclaimed. They didn’t care at all. Just kept their eyes glued to InDesign. Good kids. I walked around and looked over students’ shoulders as they laid out the paper. One headline caught my eye: A Different State of Mind: Derealization and Depersonalization.
The article was all about recognizing that being emotionally closed off—as if you’re looking at the world through a pane of glass—is a potentially dangerous way of coping with stress and a possible symptom of depression and anxiety.
“Who wrote this?” I asked, and the students pointed at a girl with a giant hoodie and unwashed hair in the corner. “This is incredible. Where did you learn this stuff?”
“Ms. Gunter taught it to me,” she said shyly and smiled. Yvonne. I turned back to the screen.
The last paragraph read, “If you are experiencing depersonalization and derealization. Breathe and slow down your thoughts. You are in control. If these symptoms remain, contact a mental health professional. Many people have experienced these feelings, so do not be afraid to reach out for help. You are not alone.”
CHAPTER 31
Despite recent departures from tradition, I am convinced that my ancient Chinese ancestors left a trail of breadcrumbs for me in the Way. They believed that the Way allows us to pass knowledge and information down from generation to generation…that dead ancestors who came before us can return and guide us with their wisdom. They believed that the dead could live through us, their descendants, encouraging us to make the choices they might have made.
They didn’t know about periodic tables or cells or quantum theory. I’m certain my grandparents didn’t even know about chromosomes. They didn’t know how any of this was true. They just knew it was. And wouldn’t you know it—they were right.
* * *
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At the Emory University School of Medicine in 2013, researchers conducted an experiment with male mice.[1] They exposed the mice to the smell of cherry blossoms, then gave them an electric shock. The mice came to associate the smell of cherry blossoms with danger. Eventually, the mice were able to identify the smell at trace concentrations. The smell receptors in their brain enlarged—they changed to identify the scent. Researchers even identified changes in the mice’s sperm.
Then, after the mice had offspring, the researchers exposed this next generation of mice to the cherry blossom scent. Despite the fact that these mice had never smelled cherry blossoms before and had never been shocked, they still shuddered and jumped when it wafted into their cages. This generation of mice had inherited their parents’ trauma.