Inheriting the War Read online

  High school was the least interesting part of my education, but I did accomplish something: I learned to forget myself a little. I learned the sweetness of apathy. And through apathy, how to forget my skin and body for a minute or two, almost not caring what would happen if I walked into a room late and all heads swiveled toward me. I learned the pleasure that reveals itself in the loss, no matter how slight, of self-consciousness. These things occurred because I remained the good immigrant student, without raising my hand often or showing off what I knew. Doing work was rote, and I went along to get along. I’ve never gotten over the terror of being called on in class, or the dread in knowing that I’m expected to contribute to class discussion. But there is a slippage between being good and being unnoticed, and in that sliver of freedom I learned what it could feel like to walk in the world in plain, unself-conscious view.

  I would like to make a broad, accurate statement about immigrant children in schools. I would like to speak for them (us). I hesitate; I cannot. My own sister, for instance, was never as shy as I was. Anh disliked school from the start, choosing rebellion rather than silence. It was a good arrangement: I wrote papers for her and she paid me in money or candy; she gave me rides to school if I promised not to tell anyone about her cigarettes. Still, I think of an Indian friend of mine who told of an elementary school experience in which a blond schoolchild told the teacher, “I can’t sit by her. My mom said I can’t sit by anyone who’s brown.” And another friend, whose family immigrated around the same time mine did, whose second grade teacher used her as a vocabulary example: “Children, this is what a foreigner is.” And sometimes I fall into thinking that kids today have the advantage of so much more wisdom, that they are so much more socially and politically aware than anyone was when I was in school. But I am wrong, of course. I know not every kid is fortunate enough to have a teacher like Mrs. King, or a program like Spectrum, or even the benefit of a manual written by a group of concerned educators; I know that some kids want to disappear and disappear until they actually do. Sometimes I think I see them, in the blurry background of a magazine photo, or in a gaggle of kids following a teacher’s aide across the street. The kids with heads bent down, holding themselves in such a way that they seem to be self-conscious even of how they breathe. Small, shy, quiet kids, such good, good kids, immigrant, foreigner, their eyes watchful and waiting for whatever judgment will occur. I reassure myself that they will grow up fine, they will be okay. Maybe I cross the same street, then another, glancing back once in a while to see where they are going.

  HOA NGUYEN was born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, DC, area. She studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. Author of four full-length books of poetry, her titles include As Long As Trees Last and Red Juice, Poems 1998–2008. In the fall of 2016, Publishers Weekly selected her book Violet Energy Ingots as one of the top 10 poetry books published in the fall of 2016. Nguyen teaches at Ryerson University, for Miami University’s low residency MFA program, for Bard College the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts, and in a long-running, private poetics workshop.

  AGENT ORANGE POEM

  after Emily Dickinson

  What justice foreigns for a sovereign

  We doom in nation rooms

  Recommend & lendresembling fragrant

  Chinaberry spring

  Here we have high flowersa lilac in the nose

  “The Zeroes—taught us—Phosphorus”

  and so strippedthe leavesto none

  INDEPENDENCE DAY 2010

  Can be cracked or am thatyou didn’t

  consider me or I thought so

  recovering in a napYou took the 4th

  of July beers

  In the movie

  she was Asian and playing an Asian

  partsinging white on white in the white

  room

  I want to strum

  or mask this day

  Ask a question

  of the large “picture” window

  like why and why and also why

  to think of the napalmed girl

  in the picture

  HIEU MINH NGUYEN is the author of This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Press, 2014). Hieu has received grants and fellowships from Kundiman, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Loft Literary Center. He is a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine and an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, BuzzFeed, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. His second collection of poetry, Not Here, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2018. His work explores the intersectional identities that come with being a queer child of Vietnamese refugees.

  BUFFET ETIQUETTE

  My mother and I don’t have dinner table conversations

  out of courtesy. We don’t want to remind each other

  of our accents. Her voice, a Vietnamese lullaby

  sung to an empty bed. The taste of her hometown

  kicking on the back of her teeth.

  My voice is bleach. My voice has no history.

  My voice is the ringing of an empty picture frame.

  :::

  I am forgetting how to say the simple things

  to my mother. The words that linger in my periphery.

  The words, a rear view mirror dangling from the wires.

  I am only fluent in apologies.

  :::

  Sometimes when I watch home movies,

  I don’t even understand myself. My childhood

  is a foreign film. All of my memories

  have been dubbed in English.

  :::

  My mother’s favorite television shows are all ’90s sitcoms.

  The ones with laugh tracks. The prerecorded emotion

  that cues her when to smile.

  :::

  In the first grade I mastered my own tongue. I cleaned

  my speech, and during parent teacher conferences

  Mrs. Turner was surprised my mother was Asian.

  She just assumed I was adopted. She assumed

  that this voice was the same one I started with.

  :::

  As she holds a pair of chopsticks, a friend asks me

  why I am using a fork. I tell her it’s much easier.

  Her voice, the same octave as my grandmother’s,

  she says but this is so much cooler.

  :::

  I am just the clip-art. The poster boy of whitewash. My skin

  has been burning easier these days. My voice box is shrinking.

  I have rinsed it out too many times.

  :::

  My house is a silent film.

  My house is infested with subtitles.

  :::

  That’s all. That’s all.

  I have nothing else to say.

  COCKFIGHT

  I met my brother once

  in a small village in Vietnam

  who, upon meeting me

  grabbed my small arm

  & dragged me into the woods

  behind his house

  where a group of men

  all wearing our father’s face

  stood in a circle, cheering

  while the two roosters

  whose beaks had barbed hooks

  taped to them, pecked

  & clawed each other open

  until the mess of bloodied feathers

  were replaced by two clean birds

  one, my brother’s. The other

  a man’s, who I am told is deaf

  but vicious. He told me

  our father calls him long distance

  from America, every week.

  I can’t help but wonder how

  they tell the roosters apart

  since the blood has turned their feathers

  the same shade of burgundy.

  I told him how our father, who lives

  only three miles away from me

  avoids making eye-contact at supermarkets.

  I can tel
l this made him happy.

  Though, he didn’t cheer

  when the crowd cheered, when one rooster

  fell to the dirt with a gash in its neck.

  I knew he was the winner

  when he lowered his head to hide

  his smile, how he looked at me

  then snatched his earnings

  from the vicious man’s hands.

  I learned what it was like to be a brother

  by watching the roosters

  & how, at first, the air was calm

  until they were introduced

  & then they knew:

  there could only be one.

  TATER TOT HOT-DISH

  The year my family discovered finger food

  recipes, they replaced the roast duck with a turkey,

  the rice became a platter of cheese and crackers,

  none of us complained. We all hated the way the fish

  sauce made our breath smell. When the women

  started lightening their hair, we blamed it on the sun.

  When Emily showed up with blonde highlights

  and an ivory boyfriend, we all started talking

  about mixed babies. Overjoyed with the possibility

  of blue eyes in the family photo. That year

  I started misspelling my last name, started reshaping

  myself to have a more phonetic face. Vietnam

  became a place our family pitied, a thirsty rat

  with hair too dark and a scowl too thick.

  We stopped going to temple and found ourselves

  a church. That year my mother closed her eyes

  and bowed her head to prayers she couldn’t understand.

  PHONG NGUYEN is the author of the novel The Adventures of Joe Harper and two short fiction collections. He is also the son of Hien Nguyen, whose mother and brother were killed in a French air raid during occupation, and whose father was interrogated by the communists during the war. He grew up in a household that appreciated how Vietnam is so much more than its history of conflict, but a household that was also deeply affected by that history.

  THE WHEEL OF HISTORY

  The wheel of history will run you over.

  —Khmer Rouge slogan

  MAP

  History begins at 2:10 p.m. The chairs are attached to their desks, arranged in jagged rows from a full day’s use. The walls are blocks of peach stucco, and a lone poster in the corner half-heartedly asks its viewers to “Make a Difference.”

  It is the third month of eighth grade, and I want to step outside of my metal-cage seat and crouch on the floor. When you sit on one of these bone-hard chairs of indeterminate material, it presses back with such force that it leaves marks on the flesh. I am used to wearing down my knees picking beans and the dull ache of a stooping back. But eight hours of sitting leaves my elbows and ass cheeks red and sore. Eventually, I will become used to it, and sitting will be as natural as walking.

  When my friend Jason stands up to use the bathroom, the legs of his desk-chair jerk back, making a scraping sound against the tile floor. Jason and I hold spitting contests, and he challenges me to a race nearly every day. Even his loud standing is like throwing a stone. He seems to be saying, Now it’s your turn.

  Hanging out at his place after school, we have been known to wrestle until the first nosebleed, to out-lie each other with stories of our imagined sexual exploits, and to enter into spontaneous chip-eating contests. We’ve grown fat on each other’s company.

  During the revolution, I was just a chubby kid on the side of the road as the army passed. I was strangely unfrightened by their blood-red headbands. Their loose black clothes. Their bayoneted rifles.

  “Do you speak French?” they said, their eyes like spear-points.

  “No,” I said. At five, I barely even spoke Khmer.

  “That’s good, that’s good. Everything we’ve ever had was stolen from us by the French, then sold back to us. The colonials are responsible for all our troubles, Comrade. Don’t you agree?”

  I agreed. I must have agreed, because I lived.

  They gave me a wet cigarette, and promised to be back someday to make me a soldier.

  After they passed, looking back at the place they were leaving, I saw what appeared to be a bonfire. The wooden stakes our neighbors used to hold up the sheets when they bathed were now skewers for the dead.

  In History class, when we finish watching a documentary on the Vietnam War, Mrs. Lee starts directing her questions at me. I know hardly anything about the American Presidents, and nothing at all about the anti-war movement. “Why do you think Johnson escalated the war, even though there was no clear path to success? . . . Map?”

  “I think, maybe, Johnson was a hard-working man. He was like a coffin-maker,” I say.

  “A coffin-maker?” says Mrs. Lee, skeptically.

  When put under a spotlight, I tend to ramble. “He cannot think too hard about what he’s making, or else he will stop. But if he stops, it does not keep the armies from making more dead.”

  “OK . . . ” Mrs. Lee says. “Anyone else?”

  I used to say “I don’t understand,” if I didn’t want to speak up in class. But Jason knows my English is good, and he would call me out on it. That’s the way we are: best friends who tell on each other.

  “Yeah, my dad fought in ’Nam and he says we could have won if we just kept on fighting,” Jason says. “It was the Americans at home who wussed out.”

  “OK . . . ” Mrs. Lee says. “And what would winning mean, in that case?”

  “Defeating the enemy,” Jason says, with enviable simplicity. “Beating them.”

  The old man said, “Go away!” It was just something the old man said. He had said it to kids around the neighborhood a hundred thousand times. If they buzzed around him like flies, he tolerated them like flies. If they skimmed too close to his ear, he waved his arms and shouted again in impotent rage: “Go away!”

  But when they heard the old man shout, “go away,” these Khmer Rouge kids in their war-costumes stung like wasps. They seized him by the arms and dragged him into the market, where among the bitter melon and durian, he was clubbed with rifle butts and kicked by twelve little feet, shod in sandals cut from old tire.

  So the children beat the man. I cannot express what a strange feeling it provoked in me. I had seen a man beating a child before. But never had I seen a child beating a man. With every strike, the earth seemed to wobble on its axis until the tilt of the earth was changed. The horizon was horribly askew; the vegetable carts seemed to roll themselves.

  While the thrashing continued, one tall boy with a cracked voice stood facing the gathering crowd with his hands held behind his back, his shoulders straight and his chin raised at attention. “This man is an enemy of Khmer and has been involved with numerous Western plots against Angkar. Do not feel sympathy for him. Do not defend him. He is a prisoner.” The word he used, neok theos, meant both “prisoner” and “guilty person.”

  “What is his name?” asked one woman, full with child, sweating in the heat, a basket on her hip.

  For a moment, the soldier looked almost friendly, then quickly resumed the mask-like expression of his office. “Don’t concern yourself with who he is. Go home and take care of your children. They are the future of Khmer, and they are Angkar’s children too.”

  And the crowd immediately fell to crumbs like stale bread, going their separate ways as though scattered by the wind. I kept on staring at the old man on the floor; I could not help it. One soldier pointed his automatic rifle at the prisoner.

  “No! Foolish!” the tall boy said. “Use the bayonet. Ammunition is precious.”

  During break, Mrs. Lee says, “Is there anything you miss about Cambodia?”

  The only thing I can think of is the early-morning-time, when we all sat under the window and talked about our dreams. But that ritual had ended with the revolution.

  “Why did you and your family stop talking about your dreams?” she as
ks.

  How to explain? “The chhlop would listen outside the window, and with dreams, you cannot control them. Talking about them, you could say the wrong things.”

  “What are the wrong things?” she says, genuinely curious.

  Teacher, how can I explain? Saying “What are the wrong things?” could mean the end of you.

  But I am not the only one who has stopped talking about dreams. Dreams in America are like secrets that are kept; it is as though they never happened at all. The only time I even hear the word is when, in history class, they play a video of Dr. Martin Luther King standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

  Other times, the word “dream” means something that will never come to pass. “You think that Lindsay Bradner even knows who you are? You’re dreaming,” Jason says after break, while Mrs. Lee writes a series of dates on the board.

  “I know she knows who I am,” I say. “She’s my tutor.”

  Jason’s eyes light up like flares. “You lucky fuck.” He looks genuinely impressed, as though I had done something of my own merit. “If I forget how to speak English, do you think I could get a hot girl to tutor me?”

  “It’s not . . . we’re not going out. I’m just saying, she has a good spirit. I am happy when I am with her. That’s all,” I say, warmed by the thought of her.

  Jason smiles with half of his face. “Sure, I get you,” he says, nodding. “You want to make babies with her.” He pauses, struck by inspiration. “Lindsay. Bradner. . . . You want to bet to see who gets there first?”