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Letter from a Vietnamese to an Iraqi refugee
By Andrew Lam |
January 10, 2013, Thursday
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MORE than three decades ago, I left Vietnam as a refugee and found asylum in America.
A few days ago on the Internet, I chanced upon an image of you: a teenage refugee from Iraq newly arrived to America. Your shy smile reminds me of myself a long time ago.
Many have stepped onto the American shore since my arrival but few share such parallel tracks as you and I do.
You and your family fled Iraq; my family and I were once refugees from Vietnam. We found asylum in a country that had a direct hand in the chaos and bloodshed in our own respective homelands. Iraq, it seems, is about to trump Vietnam in the American psyche as the reigning metaphor for tragedy.
A year has passed since American troops pulled out, but the peace in your homeland remains, alas, elusive. I could, like baseball cards, trade the Gulf of Tonkin Incident for weapons of mass destruction, the My Lai Massacre for Haditha, boat people for Iraqi refugees, and "Vietnamization" for "Iraqization." The similarities continued to pile up as the war went on.
Though I know little of your past, I have an idea of what you're going through. Life in a new country is difficult and bewildering, but for those forced into exile, it torments to the core. You will grieve for what was robbed from you and your family.
A new reality is upon you and you must rise to meet it. This entails a drastic change in your nature, in your thinking, and, possibly, in your very constitution. You will learn soon enough that in the land of plenty there's plenty of irony. The champion of human rights one day can easily turn into the worst violator of those rights the next. The country that boasts, "Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free," turns its back on those whose misfortunes are the direct result of its own actions.
Here, where freedom of expression is written into law, there's very little space to accommodate your biography, your story, and your distress. What is a central concern in one country is often a footnote in another.
You will find that the American experience in Iraq will, in time, be reconstructed - through books, movies and songs - into a mythic reality around which the nation self-flagellates and reexamines, what seems now, since Vietnam, to be its routine loss of innocence. But Iraqis themselves will be relegated to an asterisk. The complicated narrative of a civil war with so many sides and so many people caught in the middle will be dismissed until the American experience takes center stage. Everyone else becomes his enemy.
But don't give in to the self-indulgence of despair. Despair fuels hatred, warping you into the image held by those who think the worst of you.
You have survived, after all, and you must turn your new life into a constructive expression, not just for yourself but for all those you love and care for.
How you do this you must find on your own. I can, from experience, tell you this: you cannot run away from the past, feign amnesia, and embrace the new. I tried this, and it did no good. I learned to combat the rancor in my heart by embracing my losses, accepting the tragedies of my life - my lost homeland, my dead friends and relatives, my traumatized family, my broken heart - as a kind of inheritance. Over time, I learned to give it aesthetic expression, and this gives me solace, a center, and ultimately a sense of direction.
This is my final piece of advice: Tell your story. Commit everything - each unmarked grave, each burnt-out house, each broken body - to memory. And when you can, sing. It's your responsibility, your spiritual burden to speak up, to bear witness to the new tragedy for this generation.
New America Media editor, Andrew Lam is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which recently won a Pen American Beyond the Margins award and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres." His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in 2013. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
A few days ago on the Internet, I chanced upon an image of you: a teenage refugee from Iraq newly arrived to America. Your shy smile reminds me of myself a long time ago.
Many have stepped onto the American shore since my arrival but few share such parallel tracks as you and I do.
You and your family fled Iraq; my family and I were once refugees from Vietnam. We found asylum in a country that had a direct hand in the chaos and bloodshed in our own respective homelands. Iraq, it seems, is about to trump Vietnam in the American psyche as the reigning metaphor for tragedy.
A year has passed since American troops pulled out, but the peace in your homeland remains, alas, elusive. I could, like baseball cards, trade the Gulf of Tonkin Incident for weapons of mass destruction, the My Lai Massacre for Haditha, boat people for Iraqi refugees, and "Vietnamization" for "Iraqization." The similarities continued to pile up as the war went on.
Though I know little of your past, I have an idea of what you're going through. Life in a new country is difficult and bewildering, but for those forced into exile, it torments to the core. You will grieve for what was robbed from you and your family.
A new reality is upon you and you must rise to meet it. This entails a drastic change in your nature, in your thinking, and, possibly, in your very constitution. You will learn soon enough that in the land of plenty there's plenty of irony. The champion of human rights one day can easily turn into the worst violator of those rights the next. The country that boasts, "Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free," turns its back on those whose misfortunes are the direct result of its own actions.
Here, where freedom of expression is written into law, there's very little space to accommodate your biography, your story, and your distress. What is a central concern in one country is often a footnote in another.
You will find that the American experience in Iraq will, in time, be reconstructed - through books, movies and songs - into a mythic reality around which the nation self-flagellates and reexamines, what seems now, since Vietnam, to be its routine loss of innocence. But Iraqis themselves will be relegated to an asterisk. The complicated narrative of a civil war with so many sides and so many people caught in the middle will be dismissed until the American experience takes center stage. Everyone else becomes his enemy.
But don't give in to the self-indulgence of despair. Despair fuels hatred, warping you into the image held by those who think the worst of you.
You have survived, after all, and you must turn your new life into a constructive expression, not just for yourself but for all those you love and care for.
How you do this you must find on your own. I can, from experience, tell you this: you cannot run away from the past, feign amnesia, and embrace the new. I tried this, and it did no good. I learned to combat the rancor in my heart by embracing my losses, accepting the tragedies of my life - my lost homeland, my dead friends and relatives, my traumatized family, my broken heart - as a kind of inheritance. Over time, I learned to give it aesthetic expression, and this gives me solace, a center, and ultimately a sense of direction.
This is my final piece of advice: Tell your story. Commit everything - each unmarked grave, each burnt-out house, each broken body - to memory. And when you can, sing. It's your responsibility, your spiritual burden to speak up, to bear witness to the new tragedy for this generation.
New America Media editor, Andrew Lam is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which recently won a Pen American Beyond the Margins award and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres." His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in 2013. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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