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197 By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive wars between Western imperial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Thirty years (1945–1975) of warfare destruction, coupled with another twenty years of postwar U.S. trade and aid economic embargo, cost Vietnam at least three million lives, shattered its economy and society, left the country among the poorest in the world, and scattered its people to different corners of the globe. And yet in the United States, public recollections of the Vietnam War—“the war with the difficult memory” (Sturken 1997, 122)—involve the highly organized and strategic forgetting of the Vietnamese people. As scholars, public historians, and the media have repeatedly documented, Vietnamese bodies, both during and after the war, have not been accorded the same humanity and dignity given to American bodies. The highly controversial Vietnam War Memorial, commissioned to commemorate and memorialize the U.S. soldiers who fought in Vietnam, provides a pointed example of this “forgetting.” Framed within the nationalist context of the Washington Mall, the memorial must necessarily “forget” the Vietnamese and “remember” the American veterans as the primary victims of the war (Sturken 1997). Because the memorial is a key site where U.S. cultural memory of the Vietnam War is reproduced and debated, the Vietnamese become unmentionable in this context: “They are conspicuously absent in their roles as collaborators, victims, enemies, or simply the people in whose land and over whom (supposedly) this war was fought” (Sturken 1997, 62). Without creating an opening for a Vietnamese perspective of the war, these public commemorations of the Vietnam War refuse to remember Vietnam as a historical site, Vietnamese people as genuine subjects, and the Vietnam War as having any kind of integrity of its own (Desser 1991). Negotiating Memories of War arts in vietnamese american communities Yen Le Espiritu c h a p t e r 1 0  On the other hand, as a people fleeing from the only war that the United States had lost, Vietnamese have been subject to intense scholarly interest—an “overdocumented ” population when compared to other U.S. immigrant groups. Indeed, the 1975 cohort, as state-sponsored refugees, may be the most studied arrival cohort in U.S. immigration history (Rumbaut 2000, 180). But as Ralph Ellison ([1952] 1981) reminds us, the highly visible can actually be a type of invisibility.1 Conceptualizing the arrival of Vietnamese refugees primarily as a problem to be solved, most studies have fixated on their adjustment, with successful adjustment defined as the achievement of self-sufficiency (Espiritu 2006a). Scholars have also zealously documented the refugees’ “damaged” psyche, portraying them as passive and pathetic, “incapacitated by grief and therefore in need of care” (DuBois 1993, 4–5). It is striking how the bulk of this literature locates the Vietnamese “problem” not in the violent legacy of decades of war and social upheaval, but within the bodies and minds of the Vietnamese themselves. This hyperfocus on the refugees’ needs and neediness has made “un-visible” other important facets of Vietnamese personhood: their self-identity, their dreams for themselves, their hopes for their children, and their “ground of being.” In short we know more about how scholars have constructed Vietnamese, but less about how Vietnamese have created their worlds and made meaning for themselves, including their own understanding of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Scholars of war memory have repeatedly shown that memory activities are never politically disinterested, but are always already mediated and shaped by relations of power (Fujitani, White, and Yoneyama 2001; Tai 2001). Elsewhere I have argued that the erasure of the war’s costs borne by the Vietnamese constitutes an organized and strategic forgetting of a war that “went wrong,” enabling “patriotic” Americans to push military intervention as key in America’s self-appointed role as the world’s protector of democracy, liberty, and equality (Espiritu 2006b). Casting Vietnamese as objects of rescue, immigration and refugee studies scholars have likewise refused to treat Vietnamese in the United States as genuine subjects, with their own history, culture, heritage, and political agendas (Espiritu 2006a). In this chapter, I move beyond a critique of this dominant knowledge to explore how Vietnamese American artists, through their critical memory work, have created alternative memories and epistemologies that unsettle and challenge the established public narratives of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people. I am particularly interested in the strategic role of arts, broadly defined, in making social...

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