What does it mean...?

I was inspired to write this post by a conversation I had with co-workers and community members during lunch today about the meaning of being Vietnamese - specifically in America.

While I'm pretty sure that this topic has been well discussed - probably overly discussed, by such individuals such as ethnic studies intellectuals, I think it is safe to say that I want to live in a world where everyone's opinions matter, regardless of the glitter on your degree placard.

Onwards!

The root question is: what does it mean to be Vietnamese? What makes you Vietnamese (that which separates you from other identities)? Is it language? Is it culture? Is it both? These are questions we asked - especially crucial: are you still Vietnamese if you can't speak the language?

I remember reading a quote by Monique that said something along the lines of: When asked, what does it mean to grow up Asian-American, I respond by asking, what is it like to grow up looking Asian while being raised as an American in America?

I personally think that to be Vietnamese in America is the experience. For example, when asked, what does it mean to be Vietnamese-American, I say that it is to be regarded as gook, chink, slant-eyes, yellow, oriental, etc. It is being the target of racial hatred, regardless of class status, by not only whites (neo-nazi's and KKK), but by other minorities in the USA as well. And regardless, (and this may be controversial to some), as a community, we choose to hate our own brothers and sisters in Viet Nam more than we choose to address the injustices we face in America. I don't care if you can read Truyện Kiều or can't even order a bowl of phở - I've never met a Vietnamese person in America who hasn't been called a racial slur. One can reject their identity all they want - we can pretend to be the best Americans we can be - learn the Star Spangled Banner, Pledge of Allegiance, vote Republican - but at the end of the day, that won't change the fact that the police won't think twice about shooting someone like Cau Bich Tran or beating the shit out of someone like Phuong Ho. It doesn't change the fact that while we can learn to hate ourselves, and learn not to know who we are, American society knows exactly what we are and treats us accordingly. It's never been about 'The White Man', it's the 'White Man's' System that we have to be against. White people don't have to go out of their way to call us gooks or kick our asses - they've taught everyone, including us, how to do that to ourselves.

So what does it mean to be 'Vietnamese-American'? Is it an issue of power? Or rather, the lack of power? Because we can sit around and discuss at length these issues, but if we remain powerless to change the real phenomena, that is, the way society sees us and labels us, we'll always be remain,at best, 'Asian', 'Asian-American', 'Asian-Pacific Islander', 'Vietnamese-American', or whatever fancy, 'politically correct' verbal sincerity for the word gook.

I don't have a solution, just my two-cents to spark discussion or thoughts.

Guillotine Poem

(of Confucian Sino-Vietnamese origin)

The flame [of patriotism] burns in my heart to the very end,
I am now going to shed blood beautifying the Fatherland,
Don't feel sorry that I must go and you remain,
This sacrifice is simply a test, distinguishing cowards from great men,
It is now yours, the sacred duty to liberate our beloved land,
Success or failure will be in your hands,
Your victory in the future is my hope and my dream,
I want to share it in the golden stream (place where the deceased go).




Context: French colonialists often used public executions via guillotine to dissuade villagers from joining revolutionary organizations. This was a poem often recited by people before execution. Said to have originated in Phu-Tho prison where many were held in solitary confinement until execution, which escalated throughout the 1930s.

"The people's hearts are like sunflowers
Hundreds of thousands of them all turn toward the sun
Even if everything in nature changes
They pledge to remain steadfast and loyal to the revolution"

Vietnamese folk poem

We must provide our predictions of the future with action

"There is so much that could be done, right now... But I won't talk about those things right here. I will say that it should never be easy for them to destroy us. If you start with Malcolm X and count all of the brothers who have died or been captured since, you will find that not even one of them was really prepared for a fight. No imagination or fighting style was evident in any one of the incidents. But each one that died professed to know the nature of our enemies. It should never be so easy for them. Do you understand what I'm saying? Edward V. Hanrahan, Illinois State Attorney General, sent fifteen pigs to raid the Panther headquarters and murder Hampton and Clark. Do you have any idea what would have happened to those fifteen pigs if they had run into as many Viet Cong as there were Panthers in that building. The VC are all little people with less general education than we have. The argument that they have been doing it longer has no validity at all, because they were doing it just as well when they started as they are now. It's very contradictory for a man to teach about the murder in corporate capitalism, to isolate and expose the murderers behind it, to instruct that these madmen are completely without stops, are licentious, totally depraved - and then not make adequate preparations to defend himself from the madman's attack. Either they don't really believe their own spiel or they harbor some sort of subconscious death wish." - George Jackson, Soledad Brothers

Recognizing the racist, sexist, homophobic, imperialist, capitalist nature of this system that we live in is only the first step. After we reach this realization, we must understand that the system, because of its nature, will never give us liberation and will never stop oppressing us.

It is absurd and otherwise foolish to even begin to think that the system would be interested in amending or stopping oppression. So why do we continue to act surprised when pigs brutalize someone in the community and get let off clean, when universities (cough, UC San Diego, cough) fail to take action against racist fraternities but threaten to expel protesters, when the nation's first black president decides to escalate warfare and armed occupation in Afghanistan and poor communities of color in America, when banks get bailed out while welfare gets cut, or when prison systems get more funding than public education? Why wouldn't the system continue want to continue its oppressive policies?

We have to question and understand each and every apparatus of the system. Let's take the legal system for example. Who makes laws? Who gets to participate in the legal process? Who does the law benefit? Who is the law? Who gets to enforce the law? Who is immune from the law?

When we begin to question the system's apparatus in this nature, we begin to see that it is all a farce. Who makes the laws? Politicians - not the people. And for who? Themselves and the corporations/capitalists they serve. Who gets to enforce the law? The racist, facist pigs. Who is immune from the law? The same people who get to make and enforce the law - the pig capitalists,politicians, and police.

The legal is system is not flawed - it operates very efficiently in the manner in which it was designed to operate - to delude the masses with the sorcery of 'justice' while legitimizing means of oppression through enlightenment rationale.

What do I mean by this? It took over a year of strenuous legal battles to legally free Angela Davis from captivity in the 1970s, but since then, California has almost tripled its prisons, sent more black men to prisons than schools, and deported countless people of color (and I ain't just talking about Mexicans - I'm talking about Vietnamese and Cambodian as well). While it's great that Angela Davis is free, we must understand that the nature of such a decadent system, is to give the people an inch, only to take back ten inches.

Understanding this and coming to terms with the absurdity of a politics of liberalism or reformism, we must, as George Jackson says, "make revolution", "we must find out exactly what the people need and organize them around these needs." We must mobilize and create a condition where a politics of rupture and revolution is possible. At the same time, we must recognize that the terrain is different now than in the 60s and 70s. While oppressive systems such as racism or sexism are still stronger than ever, they take different forms. The system is not dogmatic in its oppression of people, but rather, it is very dynamic and constantly changing and we, as revolutionaries, but recognize this and also change tactics with the times. We cannot confine ourselves to strict dogmatism. We must recognize that the people lost the war against the system - the Black Panthers, Brown Beret, Red Guard, American Indian Movement - they no longer exist, not because of peaceful disbanding, but forceful and violent repression. So while it is important to learn and adopt principles and tactics from past revolutionary groups, we must recognize that they ultimately failed and we must adapt their tactics to our situation. Take and adopt principles in order to forge material praxis.

What do I mean? Take the Việt Cộng for example. They were notorious for creating elaborate tunnel systems to fight against American, French, Japanese, Cambodian, and Chinese imperialism. It is absurd to begin to argue that such tunnel systems would be fitting in urban sprawl such as Los Angeles, but instead, principles such as learning and becoming attuned to your environment and using your understanding of the environment that against the oppressor is something that is practical and useful today and applies to any environment. Instead of imagining jungle guerrilla warfare and resistance, we must begin to imagine urban guerrilla warfare and resistance. The Việt Cộng, understanding that the people of South Việt Nam lived in poverty, went into villages and distributed food to the people at no cost - understand the needs of the people and work to meet the needs of the people.

Apply concepts and principles, not word-for-word examples.

So the question is, how do we learn from the successes and failures of the past, while imagining new revolutionary possibilities?

Colonialism

Ironically, the General who shot the man fled to America after the unification of Việt Nam and died poor and shunned by his colonial masters, a victim of American capitalism that he fought so hard to defend. Colonialism has a sick and twisted humor.

Chiều Một Mình Qua Phố

What are the politics of sex?

Anarchists have quite the optimistic view. According to many schools of anarchist thought, sex is liberation. Sex is mutual aid.

Then you have the Catholic church. They're quite the opposite. Sex is temptation. Only the holiest of people devote themselves to a life of celibacy.

I don't know what I believe, in fact, I've only really begun to think about the politics of sex, not just in abstract, but in personal context only fairly recently.

Sex has historically been used by the colonizer to dominate communities. Take an example such a colonized Việt Nam. The French colonialists often raped women, not just as a way to terrorize a community, but to feminize the men as well as turn the community against each other. The children of the French colonizers obviously enjoyed far more privileges than the full-blooded Vietnamese children. This was repeated over and over again throughout history. Sex has historically been the weapon of the oppressor.

Where does sex come from? Where does this idea of rape come from? Proponents of Howard Zinn argue that it came from the white man. The colonizer. Where did the white man get the idea of rape?

What does it mean for me to be a heterosexual male and desire sex? Is it really because of some drive to procreate or is it just another system to keep me stupid and down? How many times do I think about sex a day when I could be thinking of a way to free myself?

What does it mean in regards to social division of labor? Language is so telling. Women get fucked. Men do the fucking. Sex usually stops when the man comes. Why is it that men are pimps but women are sluts?

What does it mean to get jealous? Is it some capitalist mind-set/fetish to own something that drives jealousy?

Is sex at the core of objectification?

Are humans naturally monogamous? What the fuck does it mean to be natural, anyways...

I wonder how many a great human being have died because of sex...

My Inner Whitey

I've been pondering a lot about my own internalized colonization lately, and I've decided to try and document the progression/development of my inner whitey, or just overall inner-colonization.

When I was growing up, my family really liked (and still likes) showcases of Vietnamese pop music such as Paris By Night. Consequently, one of my biggest idols when I was a wee-little kid was Đon Hồ:
But that didn't last very long. No one thought Paris By Night was cool even though I went to a school with so many Vietnamese kids the school celebrated Tết(Vietnamese New Years). Instead, my next idol (as well as every kid at my elementary school) was Red Ranger:

He was the first of many white people that I'd secretly idolize growing up. To speed things up, from elementary school to middle school, I was really interested in the military and grew fond of war movies - particularly movies about the Việt Nam War. The games I played growing up always involved killing VC's, not as a member of the ARVN, but rather, I always wanted to be Johnson, the white guy who jumped out of cool helicopters, blowing up villages and gunning down hordes of VC's with my M-16 rifle like Rambo.
Also, during this period of my life, I was first exposed to the annual April 25th protests in Westminster, where people lined the streets and set fire to Hồ Chí Minh pictures and Vietnamese flags (not that pro-colonizer yellow with red strips flag, I'm talking about the yellow star flag). I find it interesting that the only internationally reknown or historically recognized Vietnamese person I was ever taught about while growing up was someone who my community considered a fuck-up and traitor. No one ever made an effort to actually teach me about a Vietnamese figure I could be proud of and look up to, instead, they talked about how America was so great for letting us flee and take refuge in our Little Saigon.

Onwards to high school. It was in high school that I started developing my own musical tastes that branched out from what my parents exposed me to. My parents provided the foundation of my musical appreciation with bands such as The Beatles, Carlos Santana, and the Eagles. It was my friend named Cody Pettrow who really had an impact on the music I listened to as well as my decision to pick up playing guitar. He really got me hooked on Weezer, and we shared a deep love of Rivers Cuomo (bordering creepy fan-boy status):
Rivers Cuomo basically taught me that it was okay to be a loser - if you're white.

Next, I got into the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and for a while my idols were Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante (who is still arguably one of my biggest musical influences as well as idols):











I don't think I cannot emphasize enough how much I really liked John Frusciante (picture on the right). It was a sort of affinity that lasted throughout high school and through much of college. I still have a folder with pictures of him on my laptop and I used to go on youtube just to watch live performances of him. I wanted tattoos because of him. I thought smoking was cool because of him. Yeah, kind of sad, I know. I had a small Frusciante hiatus when I really got into the Beatles and Nirvana and started looking up to John Lennon and Kurt Cobain.

Basically, I spent most of my life looking to the white heterosexual man for someone to look up to and idolize next, resulting in me spending a lot of time lamenting that I wasn't white and that my daydreams never actually involved the real me because no asian boy fits the mold of cool lead singer of a rock band or village-bombing figher pilot.

It wasn't until high school that I started having non-white idols again. I hung out with the group of asian kids who adored Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese (specifically, Taiwanese since the girl who had a thing for me was Taiwanese and she made an effort to distinguish the difference between Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese dramas). The girl who had a crush on me sort of projected her idols onto me such as Jun Matsumoto (left) and Van Ness Wu (right):


Basically, you couldn't be asian and cool unless you strove to be either Japanese, Korean, or from the Taiwanese boy band, F4. I remember Vietnamese friends trying to learn Japanese, Korean, or Chinese, but never once bothered to learn Vietnamese despite being unable to speak their parents' language. It wasn't cool to be Vietnamese, but I had the advantage of having long hair and not too many 'Vietnamese' features and could somewhat pass as an ambiguous asian, but seriously, despite going to a school with lots of Vietnamese kids, I associated with a predominantly Taiwanese and Japanese crowd. Hell, even I tried to learn how to speak Japanese at one point. Learning Vietnamese was called fobby while learning Japanese, Korean, or Chinese made you cool. Whenever we went out to eat, we'd drive far distances to eat Japanese or Korean food, but despite being only minutes from Westminster, I never once ate Vietnamese food with my friends in high school. The only time I remembered having Vietnamese pride as a kid was in middle school, not because I was proud of who I was, but because we had to stick together to fight back against violence from the Latino and white kids (which makes me question, where the hell did all the Taiwanese kids that I knew in high school go to middle school?!)

As an asian male in high school, I quickly learned what Yellow Fever meant before Wongfu made it cool and popularized. The girls I knew outside of the Japanese-worshipping clique, liked white boys. As a Vietnamese kid, I wasn't white enough for those asian girls and not Japanese enough for the other asian-asian girls. Fuck. It sucked hanging out with girls and have to listen to them talk about how hot white guys were and how lame asian boys were because we're so timid and lanky. I remember me and a bunch of guy-friends had huge bouts of 'fuck girls, they're stupid' phases.

I also remember that high school was when I first learned how to masturbate and first watched porn. This was significant because before this I was always teased about my penis size for being asian, but actually seeing another man's penis - and not just any type of man, but a white man - really fucked with me. When I realized that I actually wasn't as big as the guys in the porn I saw, it made me realize that all the things the white kids were saying to me in middle school could actually be right.

Anyways, I'll save college for later because I have to get back to studying, but yeah, I still carry a lot of this colonization with me today. I'm still insecure as fuck about my penis size. I get pissed, but also really sad, when I see an asian girl dating a white guy. I still can't imagine an asian guy as front person of a band. My concept of what it means to be a man is still all sorts of white. Regardless, the first step to fighting back against a colonized mindset is to know what the fuck went wrong.

On Self-Defense

'An eye for an eye makes the world blind'...

There are a lot of problems I have with non-violence and any movement that confines itself to just non-violent tactics.

Just by studying history, it is very clear that in any situation where there is a disparity between power, where one group is oppressing another, the people in power will do anything to defend their power - by any means necessary.

In fact, it is absurd to believe that the oppressor will not consider completely annihilating a population to keep power. We have seen evidence of that in situations such as Nazi Germany with the holocaust, or even in Việt Nam where Kennedy believed that the only way to win the war was to send the Vietnamese back to barbarism.

I believe that Malcolm X said it best when he stated that the language of the oppressor is violence and that unless we speak to the oppressor in the same language, the oppressor will not be able to understand our demands.

Unless people rise up to defend themselves they will be wiped out, either by force or by mental and social colonization.

What about the glorified heroes of non-violence?

Let's start with Jesus.



The son of God's most famous contribution to non-violence was the whole turn the other cheek deal, however, I think it is obvious to anyone that not all of us have the luxury of being resurrected after we die. While people may praise Jesus for being a champion of non-violence, I see him as the greatest deterrent. The lesson I learn from Jesus is as follows: turn the other cheek, and get crucified (I'm being real, I don't mean to be offensive). I don't know about everyone else, but being crucified isn't my idea of liberation.

Let's take another example: Thích Quảng Đức.



Many know him as the burning monk on the cover of the Rage Against the Machine CD cover. He immolated himself to protest the unjust Diệm regime. Many people champion Thích Quảng Đức as a shining example of aggressive non-violence and that he and other self-immolating monks contributed to the downfall of Diệm.

I disagree. Diệm was recording saying that he enjoyed watching the Buddhists monks kill themselves and compared it to a human barbecue. It is clear that Diệm had no intent on changing his oppressive policies towards the Buddhists just because they took their own lives in noble ways, and if anything, they made Diệm's job easier, since he was already out to kill the Buddhists anyways. It is important to note that Diệm was overthrown by a bloody coup that resulted Diệm's death. It is arguable that had it not been for the coup, Diệm would never have been overthrown, especially since he had American backing.

These are two very specific examples, however, the history of non-violent movements have proven to be ineffective. To me, the non-violent movements in the Civil Rights Era were failures and only resulted in excessive physical violence towards blacks and did nothing but get ineffectual legislation passed. As Malcolm X said, "Nothing has changed". Police brutality of blacks hasn't stopped. Rodney King was far after the Civil Rights movement. Professor Gates and the incident with the racist pigs was just a few months ago. Having a half-black president doesn't mean shit.

Especially in contemporary left-wing organizations, the non-violence movement is dominated by people with privilege. It is easy to advocate non-violence when you have the luxury of being able to wait for liberation and especially for whites because they are less likely to be brutalized by the oppressor than people of color. It is easy to advocate for non-violence when your community is not being physically attacked. It is absurd to advocate non-violence when the only thing the oppressor has ever been is violent.

I believe that movements based on self-defense are the only ones who have actually achieved the overthrow of an oppressive regime. History tells us that this is the most effective tactic. From the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Vietnamese Revolution - these are all examples of an oppressed mass organizing to defend themselves against an oppressive regime and ultimately overthrowing the regime. Even failed attempts such as the Black Panther Party have shown us the effectiveness of self-defense in empowering a community to control their own destiny and not ask for hand outs from the powers that be. Self defense is key in self-realization that people can stand on their own two feet and liberate themselves without being reliant on the oppressor.

It is important to understand that the oppressor's attacks on the community are not always physical, but are largely psychological. When society teaches you to hate yourself and have a distorted standard of beauty, that is an attack on the community, and is far more effective at destroying unity than any bomb ever can.

Once we understand that we're under attack in our every day lives, we can begin to understand that the problem is deep rooted in the system itself and that revolution is the only way to liberation. We must uproot evil, not just chop it off at the stem.

The goal of self-defense isn't to make the world blind, but rather, the goal is that if the oppressor threatens to smack your cheek, you chop of the hand so that it can no longer threaten not just your welfare, but the welfare of the entire community.

I am NOT an American

I despise the label 'Asian-American'.

To me, it denotes ownership, more specifically, a nationalist ownership of generalized Asians by Americans. Just the very notion of adding a hyphenated term to my so-called ethnic identification signals being thrust into limbo - I am obviously not American otherwise they would just call me American but there's a need for the colonialist to have a sense of ownership over me, otherwise I'd be called asian.

Asian is what the colonist labels me. I had no say in my identity. The term Asian doesn't take into account my own personal narrative - a son of Vietnamese refugees. It doesn't take into account where I come from, where my parents come from, what language I speak, what food I eat, but rather, the label is a way for the colonialist to signify that I am not white - that I am different and therefore don't belong.

I sure as hell don't identify with the title 'American'. To be American, you must be a citizen of America. Being a citizen, to me, signifies a certain attachment to the country of America - a certain loyalty, but more importantly, it signifies someone who shares in the fruits of the country and shares a common language, culture, and practice. I don't share in the fruits of a country that was made for whites and is still run for whites. My community, the Vietnamese peoples obviously didn't share in the fruits of this country when it dropped more than 6.7 million tons of explosives and sprayed more than 40 million gallons of Agent Orange on our homeland, displacing millions of people. Don't let those numbers escape you. A 1-ton bomb is more than capable of killing 130 people and the amount of Agent Orange sprayed on Việt Nam has destroyed 1/4 of the arable land that was available before the war.

It is obvious that I am not a citizen because other citizens don't recognize me as such. Laws are all talk about equality but when I am still called gook and chink by white racists and when the pigs on the block condescendingly ask me if I speak english before threatening to arrest me, it is made painfully clear to me that nothing has actively been done to achieve any sense of equality.

Unfortunately, however, I'm certainly not Asian, or more accurately, Vietnamese, because America's social colonialism has made it so that I don't know how to fluently speak the tongue of my parents. I no longer know my parent's culture as my own, but rather, the culture I am faced with is a sad compromise in which, unless something is done to resist colonization, the culture of my parents will eventually be lost throughout generations as was done with blacks or more assimilated peoples such as the Japanese in America.

So fuck Asian-American, call it what it is: I am a colonized person. Every day American society tries to rid me of my culture and the culture from of my parents. Every day the generation gap widens between the colonized youth and the colonized adults and elders. We of the colonized youth hardly speak our language (in fact, we're told that our parents speak funny english!), know our customs, or can eat our own food. We look to the white person for a standard of beauty (or specifically for Vietnamese, we sometimes look to more 'higher' asians such as Japanese and Koreans). We've been taught not only to hate ourselves, but to hate our community.

So it's time to fight back against this continual colonialist take-over of our every day lives. Every time someone speaks Vietnamese, tries to cook Vietnamese food, questions where and why Vietnamese people practice certain customs - these are all forms of active resistance to dominant colonialism. We must be proud of who we are (and I'm talking about all colonized people - not just Vietnamese) because if we are not, this racist society will be quick to brainwash us into hating ourselves.

Montagnards/Degar Peoples and Racism Beyond Whiteness

When I went to visit Việt Nam last winter, I was taken to visit a Montagnard village by the Catholic Bishop with whom I was staying with in Đà Lạt. It was the first time I've ever heard of the Montagnard peoples and it wasn't ever made clear to me that the Montagnard people were not Vietnamese, but rather, a separate indigenous population (I would later find out that Vietnamese is not even their native tongue). .

It is important to note that the Montagnard are not Vietnamese, but rather, are a recognized indigenous peoples. In fact, they never had contact with foreigners (Vietnamese included) until the 1800s when the French missionaries came to Việt Nam (which wasn't Việt Nam back then). The Montagnard's first contact with Vietnamese people came later when the French brought their Vietnamese servants with them to the highlands where the Montagnards lived. Also, the term Montagnard didn't exist before the French. The population refers to themselves as the Degar people. Montagnard means 'mountain people' in French and it was the term used by the French to identify the Degar people.

This complicates the narrative of Vietnamese independence and Vietnamese refugees because while Degar people are lumped into the category of Vietnamese in America, they are considered an ethnic minority in Việt Nam. In fact, Degar people do not speak Vietnamese and don't share cultural practices with the Vietnamese people. The Degar people have been trying to liberate themselves and establish a self-autonomous state recognizing Degar peoples as independent from the Vietnamese people (BAJARAKA and FULRO movements).

This brings up an important point to illustrate: Minority-Majority narratives always involve a disparity and unequal balance of power. This highlights the need to move away from glorified democracy to an actual working consensus model that takes into account all narratives and eliminates the rule of majority over minority. For example, in Việt Nam, we currently see a movement to modernize Vietnamese culture, however, this is in reference strictly to Vietnamese culture, which is the majority culture while leaving out and threatening minority narratives such as that of the Degar people. Also, the idea of Vietnamese as the national language once again leaves out Degar people who are indigenous to the Central Highlands of Việt Nam and who don't speak Vietnamese. As we can see, the minority-majority narrative extends itself beyond whiteness, just as racism extends itself beyond whiteness as well. Racism often involves the minority-majority narrative because it is often those who are the majority who have the most institutional and systematic power to oppress minorities. It is the majority that are also able to achieve hegemonic power as well. The key thing to note, however, that the majority-minority narrative that I was referring to, especially in regards to racism, applies strictly to nation-states. In the global scene, racism is still predominantly a white supremacist structure because we now live in a system of globalized capitalism where imperialism no longer limits itself to physical colonization, but also to colonization of the mind. We see examples of this through a spread of the Western standard of beauty to almost every corner of the world.