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Notes Preface 1. To this end, I am founder of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), an organization dedicated to the promotion of Vietnamese artists in the diaspora (http://dvanonline.org). Introduction 1. Related ideas have been discussed in depth by David Palumbo-Liu in “Civilization and Dissent,” 151–152. See also Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 86. 2. Catfish and Mandala may be the Vietnamese American text most taught in Asian American studies classes. Andrew Pham’s book received the Kiriyama Award for nonfiction, the Quality Paperback Book Club Nonfiction Prize, the Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It earned its author a Whiting Fellowship. Catfish and Mandala was also a finalist for the Guardian Prize for First Book. It was translated into French and German. 3. Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge was the first Vietnamese American text to be reviewed in the New York Times (as an immigrant text and not as a foreign one). 4. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 221. 1 / History 1. Bush also said: “In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more 140 / notes fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.” From “President Bush Attends Veterans and Foreign Wars National Convention, Discusses War on Terror.” Kansas City Convention and Entertainment Center, Kansas City, Missouri, Office of the Press Secretary, August 22, 2007. 2. Thom Shanker, “Historians Question Bush’s Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq,” New York Times, August 23, 2007. For my reasons for referring to Viet Nam instead of Vietnam, see chapter 2, note 26 below. 3. Note that President Bush’s sudden recall of a segment of overlooked history defines Vietnamese Americans as refugees only. 4. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 8: “classical nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European imperialism still casts a considerable shadow over our own times. Hardly any North American, African, European, Latin American, Indian, Caribbean, Australian individual—the list is very long—who is alive today has not been touched by the empires of the past. Britain and France between them controlled immense territories: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean, large swatches of Africa, the Middle East, the Far East (Britain will hold Hong Kong as a colony until 1997), and the Indian subcontinent in its entirety—all these fell under the sway of and in time were liberated from British and French rule; in addition, the United States, Russia, and several lesser European countries, to say nothing of Japan and Turkey, were also imperial powers for some or all of the nineteenth century. This pattern of dominions or possessions laid the groundwork for what is in effect now a fully global world. . . . .Consider that in 1800 Western powers claimed 55 percent but actually held approximately 35 percent of the earth’s surface, and that by 1878 the proportion was 67 percent, a rate of increase of 83,000 square miles per year. By 1914, the annual rate had risen to an astonishing 240,000 square miles, and Europe held a grand total of roughly 85 percent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths.” Countries and regions experiencing American intervention after 1945 include China (1945–1949), the Philippines (1945–1953), South Korea (1945–1953), Indonesia (1957–58; 1965), Vietnam (1950–1975), Cambodia (1955–1975), Italy (1947–1948), Greece (1947–1949; 1964–1974), Albania (1949–1953), Germany (1950s), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1953–1990s), the Middle East (1956–1958), British Guiana/Guyana (1953–1964), Congo/Zaire (1960–1965), Brazil (1961–1964), the Dominican Republic (1963–1966), Cuba (1959 on), Chile (1964–1973), East Timor (1975–), Nicaragua (1978–1989), Grenada (1979–1984), Libya (1981–1989), Panama (1989), Iraq (1990s, 2000s), Afghanistan (1979–1992), El Salvador (1980–1992), Haiti (1987–1994), and Yugoslavia (1999). http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/US_Interventions_WBlumZ .html. 5. The United States has risen to preeminence as a superpower over the past century. To maintain its status, it searched for new markets and engaged [34.230.68.214] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:04 GMT) notes / 141 in direct competition with other superpowers such as Britain and France, which were investing heavily in Asia. In 1898, the United States achieved a firm economic hold in the Southwest Pacific with the acquisition of Hawaii and the...