Literature, the Vietnam War, and the Politics of Reconciliation

A Rumor of Redress: Literature, the Vietnam War, and the Politics of Reconciliation By Hai-Dang Doan Phan A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2012 Date of final oral examination: 5/31/12 The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: Leslie Bow, Professor, English Lynn Keller, Professor, English Thomas Schaub, Professor, English Timothy Yu, Associate Professor, English Craig Werner, Professor, Afro-American Studies i For Jeanette ii Acknowledgments At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, my work on this project was aided substantially by an Advanced Opportunity Fellowship; research and travel grants; several years worth of teaching assistantships; and the invaluable intellectual community and support of my closest peers. A Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship allowed me to relearn Vietnamese and gave me the confidence to begin translating Vietnamese poetry into English. I am grateful to my dissertation committee of Leslie Bow, Lynn Keller, Craig Werner, Timothy Yu, and Thomas Schaub for sharing their expertise and suggesting exciting new lines of inquiry for my study. I am especially thankful to my directors, Leslie Bow and Lynn Keller, for their guidance, feedback, and patience throughout what has been a long road towards completion. My personal debts are more numerous than I can tally. I have been extremely lucky to have crossed paths with so many great intellects and good souls. For their conversation and care, I thank Leah Mirakhor, Graham Hallman, Mary Mullen, Matt Hooley, Bonnie Chang, Nan Ma, Bimbisar Irom, Cody Reis, Mariko Turk, and Mark de Silva. My sister, Kinnic, and brother-in- law, Brendan, have not only been family, but also friends. Their home next to Lake Mendota in Madison has provided much rest, sustenance, and peace. To my parents, Ai Phan and Da Doan, I owe more than I can say. Their courage, support, and love have quietly and profoundlymoulded me into who I am. In many ways, this study is for and about them. Finally, I dedicate this to Jeanette Tran, who has inspired me with her presence of mind, lightness of spirit, and gift of laughter everyday for the last seven years, and many more to come. iii Contents Dedication i Acknowledgements ii Abstract iv Introduction: A Rumor of Redress 1 1. Return to Vietnam: The Routes/Roots of Reconciliation 39 2. Facing It, Again: Revision/Reconciliation in Yusef Komunyakaa’s War Poetry 81 3. Those Born Later: The Children of Vietnam Veterans and Their Legacy Narratives 113 4. Not Coming to Terms: Diaspora, Multidirectional Memory, and the Limits of Reconciliation 154 5. Linh Dinh’s Borderless Bodies: Global Grotesques and Literature After Economic Normalization 195 Postscript 237 Works Cited 240 iv Abstract Recent years have seen the emergence of reconciliation as a primary pursuit and dominant trope in the literature surrounding the Vietnam War, marking a literary and cultural shift from the diagnosis of rupture and internal division in the literature during and immediately following the war. This dissertation examines the literature of reconciliation surrounding the Vietnam War and also the disruptive literature of irreconciliation emerging out of that same conflict. Examining the differing and often discordant views of the war and its legacy, I analyze the divergent practices, premises, and stakes of representing reconciliation in the wake of normalization of U.S.-Vietnam relations in 1995. The literature studied in this dissertation includes experiential narratives of return by U.S. veterans, poetry by northern Vietnamese veterans, legacy narratives by the second generation sons and daughters of U.S. vets, and poetry by diasporic Vietnamese writers. Drawing on literary and cultural studies on the Vietnam War, trauma and memory studies, and diaspora and transnational studies, my dissertation performs a model of critical comparativism that maps the transnational contexts of cross-cultural production and at the same time explicates the local figurative sites of reconciliation in literary texts. This dissertation challenges the idea that reconciliation in the case of Vietnam is about greater cultural and historical understanding of opposing perspectives and experiences surrounding the war. Instead, the literature of reconciliation recuperates American and Vietnamese national identities and their normalizing narratives to the exclusion of southern Vietnamese historical and cultural perspectives on the war. Consequently, my dissertation considers the resistance to reconciliation from diasporic Vietnamese writers whose work gives witness to the historical injury and loss of the southern Vietnamese past, but also gives testimony to the ambivalent results of economic liberalism and v capitalist globalization of contemporary Vietnam. These irreconciled voices further complicate, contest, and expand what reconciliation means and for whom. 1 INTRODUCTION A Rumor of Redress We entered the garden by chance. We were like the rocks there, plucked from some other place to be translated by circumstance into another tongue. And in the silent crashing of stone waterfalls, and rising of inanimate objects into music, we remembered there was a time we would have killed each other. —George Evans, “A Walk in the Garden of Heaven” The Shock of Reconciliation In the summer of 1993, an unlikely friendship formed between two people who, if they had met twenty years before, would have tried to kill each other. One of them was an American writer and veteran of what his countrymen called the “Vietnam War,” and the other, a Vietnamese writer and veteran of what her comrades called the “American War.” They fought on opposite sides of the Viet Nam/American war, but, as writers, they shared the same mission: to give witness to the war and its aftermath. Both were guest writers that summer in a program sponsored by the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences that brought together American and Vietnamese writers, most of whom were also veterans, to foster greater understanding and address the impact of war on literature and society. They are Wayne Karlin and Le Minh Khue, and the story of their friendship is recounted by Karlin in his introduction to The Other Side of Heaven, the 1995 anthology of post-war fiction by Vietnamese and American writers born out of their meeting. At the center of this story is the following passage where Karlin recalls one particularly transformative moment: a moment when in a conversation over the breakfast table with Le Minh Khue she found I’d been a helicopter gunner for a time and I found that she, from the time she was fifteen to the time she was nineteen, had been in a North Vietnamese Army Brigade that worked, often under attack from our aircraft, clearing bombs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We had 2 become friends by then and at that moment I pictured myself flying above the jungle canopy, transfixed with hate and fear and searching for her in order to shoot her, while she looked up, in hatred and fear also, searching for me—and how it would have been if I had found her then. To waste someone, we called killing in the war, and the word had never seemed more apt. I looked across the table then and saw her face, as if, after twenty years, it was at last emerging from the jungle canopy. She looked across at me and saw the same. It was that look, that sudden mutual seeing of the humanness we held in common—which is of course what all good stories should do—that led to this book. (xii- xiii) The dramatic scene of recognition remembered here by Karlin represents an instance of the cross-cultural reconciliatory encounters fostered by the William Joiner Center during the late phases of American “reengagement” with Vietnam.1 The official reconciliatory mood of these times is expressed, diplomatically, by the Co-Director of the Joiner Center, poet and veteran, Kevin Bowen in a 1988 piece for the Christian Science Monitor archived online: “Fifteen years have passed since American disengagement from Vietnam. Now for many veterans it seems the time has come for reengagement, for a new campaign of hearts and minds, a campaign that involves returning to the land where they fought” (Bowen). Published in 1995, the same year President Clinton announced “normalization of relations,” The Other Side of Heaven represents a timely testament to the kinds of work—individual and collective, cultural and institutional, emotional and psychological—involved in that new campaign of hearts and minds.2 Karlin’s above-referenced anecdote is offered as a personal testimony to the effectiveness of this campaign. The communicative and collective process of reconciliation described by Karlin is 1 The word is Kevin Bowen’s, Bowen, “Seeking Reconciliation in Vietnam,” Christian Science Monitor (November 10, 1988). 2 The year after their summer of friendship, President Clinton lifts the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam on February 3, 1994; and announces “normalization of relations” on July 11, 1995, twenty years after American “disengagment” from Vietnam on April 30, 1975. As if starting a new historical timeline, the official “Chronology of U.S. - Vietnam Relations” featured on the homepage of the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi begins with the year 1991, with the following entry: “April 1991 – The George Bush Administration presents Hanoi with a ‘roadmap’ plan for phased normalization of ties. The two sides agree to open a U.S. government office in Hanoi to help settle MIA issues.” Chronology, Embassy of the United States, July 2010 < http://vietnam.usembassy.gov/chronology.html> 3 indicative of a model of therapy where trauma survivors, to facilitate recovery, are encouraged to share their stories with fellow survivors, therapists, or other sympathetic audiences, with the goal being to cathartically re-create of the traumatic experience.

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