But that is just my feeling about Lee’s writing. The same things I say of Lee could be said of me as a novelist. Who am I but one of those who may be slightly less than human in the eyes of some, the equally anxious student who cannot help but see himself through the eyes of others, my perception and taste clouded by my own desire for approval? Lee, like Yang and myself, is caught in the struggle to tell the true war story and is in the middle of a true war story: the one about how writers and critics who inherit the legacies of wars find themselves caught between being degraded and given the perfect grade, judged by an aesthetic system implicated in the war machine. This does not mean that artists who struggle to tell true war stories cannot speak or cannot strive for a perfect grade; it does mean that they should question their own identities as artists as well as the identities of the forms they choose, since both these kinds of identities are part and parcel of the triad of war, memory, and identity.
The struggle over how to tell true war stories is about both remembering wars fought elsewhere and conflicts fought here, at home. In communist countries, one usually has to go to war against the state to tell true war stories, since the state is only interested in bad war stories, the dishonest kind that justify war and glorify the state. In America’s case, culture wars divided America throughout the twentieth century, their momentum building through the rise of civil rights, workers’ struggles, feminism, gay rights, and queer empowerment, surges of restlessness that came together with the antiwar movement to gain explosive force in the 1960s. These culture wars subsided in the 1970s but returned with ferocity in the 1980s, when defenders of a homogenous America cried out against the barbarians at the gate, those colored hordes who had climbed their way up the hill of civilization to the city of shining light. Kao Kalia Yang and Chang-Rae Lee are among these barbarians, whether they want to be or not, as am I. Reluctantly or fervently, we, the barbarians, are also cultural warriors, demanding to be let in to civilization, haunted by the inhuman wars of that civilization. We, too, wish to tell true war stories, which are impossible to disentangle from the battles we fight to tell those stories.
9. On Powerful Memory
IN AN 1899 ILLUSTRATION OF Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” Uncle Sam and his British counterpart John Bull climb up a mountain “towards the light” of civilization, each carrying a basket on his back full of “your new-caught sullen peoples / Half devil and half child.” Kipling’s proimperial paean about the tragic necessity of waging “savage wars of peace” was addressed to Americans, then waging war to subdue the Filipino rebels who thought at first that the United States had come to liberate the Philippines from Spain. Kipling warns Americans of “the hate of those ye guard.” And for all the blood and treasure that Americans would expend, he cautions that they will “Watch Sloth and heathen folly / Bring all your hopes to nought.”1 This characterization of the natives certainly describes how many Americans view the people they are supposedly trying to help. A century later, his poem may as well describe my war and its aftermath in our current American wars in the Middle East. All a reader need do is replace the light of civilization with the promise of democracy and freedom, the one that Americans offered to the people of the Middle East after offering it to us. As for those people being carried ever upward, among whom I count myself, we remain half devil and half child in much of the American and Western imagination.
If Kipling proved prescient in implying the need for civilizing warfare, at least from the perspective of the civilized, so did his illustrator, Victor Gillam. What he depicts is that we do not descend toward enlightenment, civilization, or God, for that is too easy. We must carry our burden upward, toward peaks rather than valleys, closer to the eternal heavens, the ultimate high ground, which of course we can never reach in this life. I understand this impulse, as well as Kipling’s tone of self-satisfied suffering and resignation in describing the savior’s pain in saving an ungrateful people. Although I may be half devil and half child, forever ready to nip at the hand of my benefactor and to reject any piety, I have also been baptized and dressed in the clothes of civilization. I know what it means to aspire, to climb, to carry, and to speak and write in the language of my masters. This entire book is an exercise of labor to reach the moment of revelation and inspiration, and ultimately of publication, which takes place not in the depths where a text cannot be seen but in the bright heights, where God also delivered to Moses the commandments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I turn to high-minded ideas about ethics to challenge the idea that we need to burden ourselves with war, that war must always be a part of our identity.
But writing this book also involved excavation. My insights, so far as they exist, come not only from achieving some airy plain, or finding respite in a clean, well-lit, and air-conditioned archive, or thinking enlightened thoughts, but from walking and crawling through caves and tunnels where ghosts dwell, or sweating in museums with peeling walls and barred windows, or swearing at the heat and the grime and the vomit and the nauseating toilets and the rough roads and the swindlers and the cheats and the broken finger incurred in Vientiane, which led to infection and two surgeries in two countries. All of this is to say that the high ground, as desirable as it may be to some of us, including myself, is also compromised. From the high ground, we cannot see into the caves and tunnels where the ungrateful and unrepentant and uncivilized hide from our gaze, our armed force, our moral authority. They live to subvert, and to curse. I am not immune, either as the one who curses and who is cursed, or as the one who takes on the authority of calling for ethical behavior. I am among that group of “committed writers,” as the critic Trinh T. Minh-ha calls us, “the ones who write both to awaken to the consciousness of their guilt and to give their readers a guilty conscience … such a definition naturally places the committed writer on the side of Power.”2 And power, even when carried out with the elevated intention of justice, incites rebellion from those below and suppression from those above.
With this warning about the danger of power and commitment — after all, taken to the extreme, power and commitment justify the greatest of excess, regardless of ideology, from death camps to atom bombs — this final chapter is on the need for a powerful memory to fight war and find peace. As fraught as engaging with power may be, one must confront it and hope that one can manage it, and oneself, ethically. Our use of power must be done with the full awareness of our own humanity and inhumanity, our capacity for both good and bad. Even those who seek to withdraw from power, to some kind of hermetic or monastic life, must emerge if they seek to change more than themselves. One might be able to climb the mountain toward enlightenment individually, but one cannot change the world without touching on, or being touched by, power. Struggling with power, one might be tempted to see oneself as someone carrying a burden up that mountain. So it is that the story of heading upward as a sign of progress seeps into my narrative as I begin from the low ground and work my way to the high ground.
Both territories are crucial for powerful memory: the low ground forces us to confront our persistent inhumanity, the high ground reminds us of our potential for humanity. Under the cone of utopian light by which this book is written, the high ground is where we need to be, but in the dystopian shadows that surround this light, the low ground is where many of us are now. The power of the low ground was most evident to me on my first visit to the museum of Tuol Sleng, formerly the Khmer Rouge political prison S-21, in the summer of 2010. On the same day, I also made my pilgrimage to the killing fields of Choeung Ek, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, a typical foreigner’s itinerary for a day in the city (most Khmer tourists prefer to visit the beautiful Royal Palace, and who can blame them?).3 I must specify the time, for the museums and memorials of Southeast Asia transform over the years, much as memory and forgetting themselves do. Museums, memorials, and memories change because their countries change. What is suitable at one moment in time becomes a hindrance, or out of fashion, in another moment. As for me, I too changed, so that my second visit a few years later to Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek did not impact me as much. I was a little more hardened, as I was on my second and third trips to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. My eyes, now habituated, were mostly concerned with taking good photographs. Looking at the same thing twice — even an atrocity — can have that effect.