And What Becomes of the Memory of “Vietnam”?

Yesterday, America paused its usual biddings for a moment to honor and celebrate the memory of those who’ve passed away in service to the country.

Today, continuing the mood for memory, VTP asks, what of the memory of Vietnam?

At a reading for the California Historical Society last week, Vietnamese American author Andrew Lam (whose writings we’ve occassionally re-posted here) read an excerpt from New California Writing, an anthology of California writers published by Heyday Books.  His piece “Afghanistan Can’t Wash Away Vietnam” asks us to think critically of the memory of Vietnam and how that memory has been shaped (see the video below).  As Andrew articulates:

Often times, indeed, when we mention the word Vietnam in the United States, we don’t mean Vietnam as a country. Vietnam is unfortunately not like Thailand or Malaysia or Singapore to America’s collective imagination. Its relationship to us is special: It is a vault filled with tragic metaphors for every pundit to use.

That tragic vault of metaphors that is Vietnam, as Andrew also points out, becomes the driving force for headlines like  “Afghanistan haunted by ghost of Vietnam” and “Will Obama’s War Become his Vietnam?”; or “Vietnam myths haunt Afghanistan.” To this day, Vietnam “continues to stoke America’s foreign policy fears. The entire country still stands for America’s loss of innocence, its legacy of defeat and failure.”  And yet the country itself, the country that became “America’s boogeyman,” is a youthful one. Vietnam “is a country full of young people, with no direct memory of the Vietnam War.”

Who writes the memory of “Vietnam” then? Will there ever be a day wherein “Vietnam” is no longer a synonym for failed foreign policy?  How have these articulations of Vietnam directed or mislead your relationships to the country (and other countries)?  Most importantly, what is Vietnam to you?

Image from here