{"id":3646,"date":"2017-03-22T00:01:08","date_gmt":"2017-03-22T07:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/?p=3646"},"modified":"2017-11-01T16:11:52","modified_gmt":"2017-11-01T23:11:52","slug":"diplomatic-history-reviews-nothing-ever-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/diplomatic-history-reviews-nothing-ever-dies","title":{"rendered":"Diplomatic History Reviews Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christian G. Appy reviews<\/a>\u00a0Viet Thanh Nguyen’s\u00a0Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War in Volume 41 of Diplomatic History.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Diplomatic
Diplomatic History, Volume 41 Issue 2, April 2017<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Combining cultural analysis, philosophical reflection, political manifesto, travel narrative, and autobiography,\u00a0Nothing Ever Dies<\/em>\u00a0is a rangy, original, and provocative meditation on the ethics of war memory. Though its arguments implicate war in general, the book\u2019s substance focuses on the contested legacies and memories of the wars that engulfed Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. It was written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a literary scholar and novelist who was born in Vietnam but who, as he puts it, was \u201cmade in America.\u201d He was four years old when his family fled Saigon in 1975 as Communist forces defeated their South Vietnamese enemies and put an end to an American-backed effort, beginning in 1954, to build and defend a permanent non-Communist nation below the 17th parallel.<\/p>\n

As Nguyen makes vividly clear, however, wars do not simply end. They live on in bodies, identities, politics, culture, the environment, and in a vast range of memories\u2014individual and collective, suppressed and pervasive. The point is underlined by the title,\u00a0Nothing Ever Dies<\/em>, taken from a dialogue in Toni Morrison\u2019s\u00a0Beloved<\/em>. Nguyen\u2019s study draws primarily on art\u2014novels, films, memoirs, and photographs\u2014along with memorials, cemeteries, museums, and more. His central aim is to construct an \u201cethics of remembering\u201d that does justice to the human complexity of participants on all sides in war, including those whose experiences are routinely excluded, marginalized, or distorted by powerful \u201cindustries of memory\u201d like Hollywood, television, and major publishing houses. But creating a \u201cjust memory\u201d of war depends on far more than greater scholarly inclusiveness and documentation, Nguyen cautions. \u201cMemory, like war, is often asymmetrical,\u201d so a more democratic recollection would require a major shift in control over the means of cultural production and distribution and therefore fundamental political and economic change. A lot is at stake. Nguyen hopes for nothing less than to help \u201cbeat \u2026 back to life\u201d the unfulfilled promises of Vietnam and the United States, \u201cboth revolutionary countries who have not lived up to their revolutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps now is the time to mention that Viet Nguyen\u2019s own cultural influence has recently soared. His extraordinary debut novel,\u00a0The Sympathizer<\/em>\u00a0(2015), achieved that rare combination of critical acclaim and bestsellerdom. It received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize and numerous other laurels.\u00a0Nothing Ever Dies<\/em>\u00a0is unlikely to reach so large an audience, but we can certainly hope that Nguyen\u2019s growing literary reputation will bring greater attention to his important critique of the most dominant forms of nationalist war memorialization that focus almost entirely, and much too uncritically, on those who are \u201cnear and dear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nothing Ever Dies<\/em>\u00a0promotes an alternative model of remembrance and can be read, in part, as an explication and elaboration of many of the ideas that are dramatized in\u00a0The Sympathizer<\/em>. The novel tells the story of an unnamed Communist agent who is cursed (or blessed!) with an unconquerable ability \u201cto see any issue from both sides.\u201d Although his mission is to spy on a South Vietnamese general, and even to accompany him when he flees South Vietnam for California, the double agent \u201csympathizer\u201d cannot help notice the capacity for virtue and crime in all people and positions. His ideological purity is shaky to say the least.<\/p>\n

That, in a nutshell, is the prescription offered in\u00a0Nothing Ever Dies<\/em>. Empathy with all sides is a requirement of \u201cjust memory,\u201d but only so long as it recognizes the full humanity (which includes inhumanity) of all. There must be no one-dimensional heroes or villains. To help make his case, Nguyen engages a variety of philosophers of memory such as Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and Avishai Margalit.1<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0The texts he assesses include works by writers Le Ly Hayslip, Andrew X. Pham, Monique Truong, le thi diem thuy, Bao Ninh, Duong Thu Huong, Dang Thuy Tram, Kao Kalia Yang, Hwang Suk-Yong Ahn Junghyo, Larry Heinemann, and Tim O\u2019Brien; filmmakers Rithy Panh, Francis Ford Coppola, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Clint Eastwood, and Dang Nhat Minh; and photographers Tod Papageorge and An-My L\u00ea.<\/p>\n

Nguyen does not enter conventional historical debates about causality, military strategy, policymaking, or diplomacy. Nor does he hazard an attempt at precise categorization or periodization of postwar memory. Diplomatic historians should nonetheless engage this book. Among other virtues, it advances the growing movement toward an international and transnational history of the Vietnam-American War by embracing groups and memories that most American historians of the war have ignored or sidelined. For example, Nguyen gives substantial attention to South Korea\u2019s experience of the Vietnam War (in which hundreds of thousands of South Korean troops fought, paid by the United States). He also includes Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong. And, of course, much attention is given to the group most obviously missing from most American accounts of the war\u2014Vietnamese Americans. Civilians, moreover, are accorded as much significance as combatants.<\/p>\n

Nothing Ever Dies<\/em>\u00a0also brims with original insights, many of them amplified by Nguyen\u2019s wry, sometimes wicked, gift for irony and humor. For example, he describes Little Saigon in Orange County, California, the largest community of overseas Vietnamese, as a \u201ctriumph of capitalism and a rebuke against communism\u201d and thus a \u201cmuch belated strategic hamlet so desired by the southern government and its American advisors\u201d (40). In one deft stroke, Nguyen skewers all warring parties and one of the war\u2019s great disasters\u2014the forced relocation of South Vietnamese villagers into fortified hamlets in a failed effort to isolate them from Communists and pique their appetite for Western ideas and values.<\/p>\n

Yet Nguyen\u2019s alertness to evil, betrayal, and duplicity is accompanied by a powerful idealism. Not everyone will share his faith that art is so redemptive: \u201cthe best manifestation of immortality.\u201d Despite bell ringing injunctions to break the power of the \u201cwar machine\u201d and the \u201cindustries of memory,\u201d\u00a0Nothing Ever Dies<\/em>\u00a0does not, for me, make a completely persuasive case that art can advance these political goals, nor, more importantly, does it clarify what else might be required.<\/p>\n

There is also a concerning vagueness and ambiguity in Nguyen\u2019s powerful insistence that we recognize the universality of humanity and inhumanity (as does Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh through his interviews with notorious torturers of S-21, the Khmer Rouge prison and death camp). While the\u00a0capacity<\/em>\u00a0for evil may be universal, does not ethical memory require us to assess the relative guilt and responsibility for\u00a0acts<\/em>\u00a0of evil? Nguyen might agree, but he seems to embrace Derrida\u2019s call for \u201cpure forgiveness,\u201d an unconditional forgiving of the unforgivable (286\u201387). Only that, Nguyen argues, can lead to a \u201cjust forgetting\u201d that would free us from continually refighting the \u201cunjust past.\u201d I have doubts about this, but Nguyen\u2019s work should make us reconsider a famous line from Graham Greene\u2019s\u00a0The Quiet American<\/em>: \u201cSooner or later \u2026 one has to take sides if one is to remain human.\u201d At least when it comes to remembering war, he suggests, just the opposite may be necessary.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

1. Paul Ricoeur,\u00a0Memory, History, Forgetting<\/em>\u00a0(Chicago, IL, 2004); Emmanuel Levinas,\u00a0Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority<\/em>\u00a0(Pittsburgh, PA, 1969); Avishai Margalit,\u00a0The Ethics of Memory<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge, MA, 2002).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christian G. Appy reviews\u00a0Viet Thanh Nguyen’s\u00a0Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War in Volume 41 of Diplomatic History. Combining cultural analysis, philosophical reflection, political manifesto, travel narrative, and autobiography,\u00a0Nothing Ever Dies\u00a0is a rangy, original, and provocative meditation on the ethics of war memory. Though its arguments implicate war in general, the book\u2019s substance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3649,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[208],"tags":[654,655,145,244,131,10],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDiplomatic History Reviews Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War - Viet Thanh Nguyen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Christian G. 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