Just Memory: War and the Ethics of Remembrance

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” This sentence begins one of my articles and will likely begin my book, “Just Memory: War and the Ethics of Remembrance.” Its major concern is the often irre-solvable conflict over remembering particularly troubling events, with the war in question being what Americans call the Vietnam War, what Vietnamese call the American War, and what historians sometimes call the Second Indochina War (1960–1975).¹ Ranging across literary and visual cultures from the 1960s until the present, I examine how this war remains important by weaving American and Vietnamese memories together within multicultural and international contexts. While earlier works on the war have narrower cultural, national, or disciplinary concerns, I consider how both Vietnam and the US fashion war memories through art, literature, cinema, photography, memorials, and museums. What ultimately concerns me is the question of ethical memory, which I define as memory work that recalls both one’s own as well as others. Considering memory (and forgetting) in this dual fashion, the book also challenges the borders and assumptions of American studies, Asian American studies, and Asian studies.

The war had always been an important concern for me, given how it had determined my life. Let me then begin with the affective and the autobiographical, as this is one case where the personal is unavoidable. Rather than myself seeking out the past, the past has sought me out, something I have felt ever since I came to the US as a refugee from Vietnam. Although I was too young to remember anything of the country or the war, it nevertheless imprinted itself on me with what W. G. Sebald calls “secondhand memories” (88) and what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory” (13). In Sebald’s lyrical model, those who actually experience an event pass on secondhand memories to those too young to have seen them. For all that they are secondhand, these memories can be powerful enough to affect a life. This was evident in Sebald’s career as an essayist and fiction writer, devoted almost entirely to World War II and the Holocaust, events that ended when Sebald was still in the crib. From a more theoretical point of view, Hirsch makes essentially the same claim of a generational inheritance of traumatic memory. Simply because events are unwitnessed directly does not mean that they are unknown most intimately.

Thus, long before encountering these writers, it already seemed to me that the traumatic experiences underwent by my father and mother were passed on to me in some measure through their repetitive retelling of certain terrible things. These had happened during the years of colonization and war stretching from the 1930s to the 1970s, and included famine, war, violent crime, the decades-long separation of siblings, children, and parents, the loss of social and economic status, being refugees (twice), and perhaps other things they did not tell me. While hearing these stories and witnessing their struggles as aliens in America, I was also subject to the cultural osmosis required for secondhand remembering, growing up in an ethnic enclave of Vietnamese refugees who were equally marked as my father and mother by numerous and even more severe scars. What I considered terrible was, in effect, normal for them. To not have experienced something terrible, to not have heard about terrible things—now that would have been unusual.

Two other types of experience marked my youth and leave their stamp on this book. First was my inarticulate awareness that my understanding of war and the American understanding of war were rather different. Americans generally think of war as something being fought by soldiers “over there,” at least in the twentieth century, with the bloodily contradictory Revolutionary and Civil Wars being distant memories now rehearsed and sanitized by re-enactors. These soldiers were also men, and war in terms of combat, death, and killing was a masculine experience. War rarely touched the American homeland, except for Pearl Harbor (9/11 was yet to come, but even so, war remains a distant experience for many...