Duong Thu Huong’s case exemplifies the troubling, threatening, and seemingly unnatural quality of remembering others. She shows how one can be denounced by one’s own while being praised by others for the same exact act of recall. Neither denunciation nor praise is innocent, because both emerge from the ideologies of one side or the other. Both sides — if there happen to be only two — prefer to see themselves as being without ideology, with the other side guilty of playing politics, as if politics was a dirty word. A laundering of these dirty politics occurs in the move from remembering others to remembering others as our own. “We” can be said once again, without remembering that those included in the “we” fought each other at one point. This is the hope expressed in a statue such as that of the three soldiers, with its portrait of benevolent solidarity, a hope already dashed by Martin Luther King Jr. in his demand that Americans recognize the brutal solidarity of these men, arrayed against those Vietnamese others who are invisible at the site of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The scholar Paul Fussell also wanted to jar his fellow Americans from the comfort of remembering only their own. As he wrote about the Great War and modern memory, a war sixty years in his past, what he saw was that
my American readers had also experienced in Vietnam their own terrible and apparently pointless war of attrition, which made body counts a household phrase.… I hoped that the effect of the book on such readers might persuade them that even Gooks had feelings, that even they hated to die, and like us called for help or God or Mother when their agony became unbearable.25
Was I not one of these others to whom Fussell gives the proper name of the Gook and yet does not name properly? If so, then I can say it is true: Gooks do have feelings.
As a Gook, in the eyes of some, I can testify that being remembered as the other is a dismembering experience, what we can call a disremembering. Disremembering is not simply the failure to remember. Disremembering is the unethical and paradoxical mode of forgetting at the same time as remembering, or, from the perspective of the other who is disremembered, of being simultaneously seen and not seen. Disremembering allows someone to see right through the other, an experience rendered so memorably by Ralph Ellison in the opening pages of Invisible Man. His narrator, the titular hero, runs into a white man who refuses to see him, and enraged, strikes back to force the white man to see him. Even beaten, however, the white man refuses to see him the way he wishes to be seen. That is because the other’s use of physical force may make the other visible, but only to turn him into a target. If the other wishes to transform ways of seeing, then the other must deploy the psychic forces of remembering, imagining, and narrating as well. Not satisfied with being disremembered, we who are others find that it is up to us to remember ourselves. Having carried ourselves over, or been brought over, from the other side — we Gooks, we goo-goos, we slopes, we dinks, we zipperheads, we slant-eyes, we yellow ones, we brown ones, we Japs, we Chinks, we ragheads, we sand niggers, we Orientals, we who cannot be distinguished between ourselves because we all look alike — we know that the condition of our being and our self-representation is that we are both ourselves and others. We are never without identity and never without ideology, whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not. Those people who believe themselves to be beyond identity and ideology will, sooner or later, charge us with identity and ideology if we dare to commit that most unnatural act of speaking up and out.
Thus, even though no one has called me, to my face, Gook or any of its equivalents, I know that that epithet exists to be aimed at me. No one had to call me that name, because American culture had already done so through the discourse of the Gook, myself as other struck by the slurs hurled from the airwaves of pop culture. My realization of my racialization, the first sting of a nervous condition untreatable by any type of medicine or surgery, except for the mnemonic kind, arrived early in my adolescence, through jarring encounters with fictions, with other people’s memories. At much too young an age, my preteen self read Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters (1977) and watched Apocalypse Now (1979). I have never forgotten the scene in Close Quarters where American soldiers gang rape a toothless Vietnamese prostitute, holding a gun to her head and giving her the choice of either blowing them all or being blown away. “After that, Claymore Face didn’t come around much, and nobody much cared.”26 Nor did I ever forget the moment in Apocalypse Now when American sailors massacre a sampan full of civilians, the coup de grace delivered by Captain Willard when he executes the sole survivor — also a woman, since the Vietnamese woman is the ultimate Gook, different from the American soldier through race, culture, language, and gender. She is the complete and threatening object of both rapacious desire and murderous fear, the embodiment of the whole mysterious, enticing, forbidding, and dangerous country of Vietnam. These accounts of rape and murder were only stories by an author and artist intent on showing, without compromise, the horror of war, but fictional stories are another set of experiences as valid as historical ones. Stories can obliterate as much as weapons can, as philosopher Jean Baudrillard shows in his estimation of Apocalypse Now. Watching the movie, Baudrillard thinks that
the war in Vietnam “in itself” perhaps in fact never happened, it is a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and of the tropics, a psychotropic dream that had the goal neither of a victory nor of a policy at stake, but, rather, the sacrificial, excessive deployment of a power already filming itself as it unfolded, perhaps waiting for nothing but consecration by a superfilm, which completes the mass-spectacle effect of this war.27
Baudrillard is not aesthetically wrong about the power of the story and the spectacle. He is just morally and ethically wrong. The war did in fact happen, and to suggest otherwise as he does only affirms the dread power of Western popular culture, its spectacles not even acknowledging the real bodies of the dead, only the dead extras on the screen.
Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememories,” from her novel Beloved, is useful here not only in clarifying the power of stories to both dismember the living and to bring the dead back to life, but to suggest that something needs to be done about such rememories. A rememory is a memory that inflicts physical and psychic blows; it is a sense that the past has not vanished but is solid as a house, present in all its trauma and malevolence. The most powerful kinds of stories, such as Close Quarters and Apocalypse Now, are rememories. Every time I thought of them, I experienced my readerly and spectatorial emotions all over again, intense feelings of disgust, horror, shame, and rage brought about by having witnessed what the scholar Sylvia Chong calls “the Oriental obscene.”28 My body trembled and my voice shook, an emotional testament to the aesthetic power of these works as well as to their participation in the discourse of the Gook, herself a rememory. It was not that I was forgotten in these stories or that I did not see my reflection; no, I saw myself, but as the other, the Gook, and that, I knew, was how others might be seeing me, not just the audiences chortling in movie theaters but even thinkers such as Baudrillard, for whom the dead are an abstraction to be dismissed in favor of the more interesting topic, the power of the war machine and its cinematic squadrons.