THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE END OF THE VIETNAM WAR: DEATH OF AN IMMIGRANT

Reminiscence upon an unpublished editorial written by a
Vietnamese reader of the Washington Post

Wendi Nicole Duong, copyright 2005

April 30, 2005 was the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. The year 1975 marked the finality of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
     The day passed quietly, with only modest  and periodic news coverage by the media around the country. No front-page headline news by any of the national media, no special stories on network television, except perhaps in locales heavily populated by
Vietnamese Americans, primarily along the West Coast.
     I am Vietnamese American and the day brought back memories, of course.  But the memories did not just come from the airlift  of Vietnamese refugees out of Saigon 30 years ago, when my parents, siblings,  and I boarded the plane.
     I remember something else, too – a local news story reported by the Washington Post in 1990, 15 years after the fall of Saigon.  I was living in Washington D.C. at the time.
***
On September 22, 1990, the Washington Post reported a hideous crime committed upon an old Vietnamese couple, residents of Northern Virginia. The old man was shot dead at around midnight on the driveway of their home.  The dead man was Mr. Le, editor
and columnist of an ethnic Vietnamese magazine, notoriously known among Vietnamese for his criticism of other Vietnamese and his politics.
    Mr. Le’s politics had nothing to do with the Republicans or the Democrats of America.  It had nothing to do with the City or County elections in the area where he lived.   It had everything to do with the home country of Vietnam, which  he had left behind when he boarded the plane for America.
    The magazine that printed Mr. Le’s work was popular among Vietnamese immigrants, but was unknown to mainstream America.  Investigation of Mr. Le’s death was underway by the local authorities in Northern Virginia, to no immediate result.  There
seemed to be an uncontested consensus among the Vietnamese community that the old man might have been killed by his own people, either for political reasons or personal vendetta that most likely was the direct result of Mr. Le's column.
   Upon reading the news in the Washington Post, Thuy, a friend of mine whose family knew the Le’s well, called me to discuss the murder.  She fed me with all kinds of  speculations and community gossip about Mr. Le and his unseen “enemies.”
    A few days later, I sat down and wrote an editorial, which was meant to provide a Vietnamese perspective on a tragic event  that might seem incomprehensible to the American mainstream -- the death of this immigrant.
     Something unexplainable caused me to pause as I was about to send the editorial o the Washington Post.  Intuitively, I became vaguely afraid,  so I contacted a friend of mine, an older Washington lawyer named Mel C., for an opinion.  Mel was among the youngest members of the team who served the Kennedy administration.   In 1990,  Mel was doing lobbying work on the Hill. So, in my mind, Mel’s opinion should reflect wisdom, experience and saaviness.
    –“I wouldn’t send it, Wendi,” Mel concluded right away. “You don’t know what’s out there or why these people got killed. If this was planned murder, why should you be involved?  Why take the risk?  Why expose yourself? Those who killed the poor man
may eye you as a person who paid too much attention.  For one thing, you are a single woman living alone.”
    –“All you have is friends like  me,” Mel smirked, “and I am too old, too tired, and too busy to follow you around and keep you safe. Don’t take any chance. Don’t be reckless. Don’t deal with something you don’t know.”
     Don’t deal with something you don’t know. Something clicked in my head at that moment.  The notion that I was viewed as vulnerable, and that my decision to get involved, even
slightly involved via the publication of an editorial, could be considered reckless.
     I never sent the editorial to the Washington Post.
***
The years passed, and I forgot about Mr. Le and the mystery of his death.
     Some 15 years later, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, I rummaged through my old files from the past, and found a copy of the editorial that was never sent out for publication.  I reread it.  The same question rings true to me in 2005 as it did when I
wrote the editorial in 1990 about the death of Mr. Le.  This was what I wrote, back then.
***
THE UNPUBLISHED EDITORIAL WRITTEN IN 1990 ABOUT DEATH OF AN IMMIGRANT
      I met Mr. Le and his wife at a small private dinner party thrown by Thuy, my friend.  That was the first, and also the only time I ever saw the old couple.  I did not talk to Mr. Le then, and up to now, as I am writing down these thoughts, I can't say that I have known the man.
     I remember him as having the look of a traditional Vietnamese man of his generation.  His hardened face and small stature somehow suggested internal sufferings, well hidden, controlled, and deeply buried under the typical Asian, low-keyed, and expressionless countenance.  It was as though an open smile was difficult for a man who was so proud, who had seen so much, and who had also been tested so much.
      His wife, however, was more relaxed and cheerful.  They were the average older Vietnamese couple, well-mannered, non-threatening, and reserved.
     At the dinner party, Mr. Le seemed quite self-conscious and a little apprehensive toward me.  I never understood the reason for this, and  now I can only speculate.  Perhaps it was because he had written about me in his column and, as in his usual way, had relentlessly criticized my literary style.  I, too, was the unwilling target of his mocking pen!  (I have not read his column, have not personally reviewed the validity of his critique, and have known about it only through hearsay.)  Mr. Le's column about me was the only real connection between me and the man -- a connection that was "thinner than a silk thread," as my Vietnamese grandmother
would have put it!
     In any event, he knew of me and I knew  of him.  In the close-knit community of Vietnamese living in America, almost everybody  knows everybody else, particularly when the person is "involved."  The French call this "engagement," (pronounced "aangage-maant").  Mr. Le was undoubtedly somebody who was "involved."  It seemed to me he had chosen to be involved, by running the popular T.P. magazine, by publicly taking an uncompromising political stand, and by mercilessly mocking and criticizing every known face in the
Vietnamese community. The decision to be "involved" must have been on the borderline of recklessness.  (After his death, I found out from Thuy that he had cavalierly disregarded many anonymous death threats coming from other unknown Vietnamese, and had talked about them with disdaining calmness.  The security system at his home was more a "puff" than a real safety device, since he did not see the need to put film in the video camera!  It was as though the man had taken his life all too lightly!)
     I do not consider his critique of me a personal vendetta (since we hardly knew each other), nor a literary debate.  I think of his column, and even his magazine, as the "poignant" vestige of an era that still haunts the Vietnamese soul.  His magazine is undoubtedly the emotional nutrition for many Vietnamese immigrants who feel alienated, overwhelmed, and lost in the American media.  His  satirical, extreme, and subjective approach bore certain characteristics of pre-1975 South Vietnamese journalism, to  which I had peripherally been exposed during my teenage days in Saigon.
     It was an era where journalists ranged from the very sophisticated to the very unsophisticated.  It was a world where journalists had to learn how to fight just as much as the soldiers, with whatever means they could ensemble, whether fair or unfair, placing their lives and livelihood at stake!  That combating style was deliberately calculated to anger many people, to "get on their nerves," but to the uninformed mass public, it was healthily entertaining, lively and humorous! It was the style of journalism viewed by many as the product of Third World wartime. That  approach contradicted everything I learned in journalism school here in America.
      Sadly, in my mind, Mr. Le and his wife did not really live in America.  Their lives belonged to the ethnic world of "little Saigon," to the vestige of pre-1975 South Vietnamese society.  And it saddens me to think that perhaps this might have led Mr. Le to his violent death.
      It saddens me when I have to speculate that if Mr. Le and his wife had chosen to cut off the past, find a way to force themselves to become all-American like the couple down the street, then perhaps they could have avoided the violent crimes of which they were victims.  Surely they would have faced the daily health and safety risks of living in contemporary America -- the car accidents, the store robberies, the home burglaries, air pollution, terminal illnesses, and so on so forth...But somehow I believe that if they had managed to live like the average immigrant family divorced from the haunt of the collapsed South Vietnam, to let go completely of their ties with a very complex ethnic community and Mr. Le’s  own sense of "engagement," then perhaps he would not have had to exit from this world in a pond of blood!
     To people like me, who are labeled "the well-assimilated," after 1975, there was a rebirth, and from that rebirth, a dual cultural identity emerged to introduce us into the vast land of hopes
and opportunities called America.  But people like Mr. Le know of no rebirth, and the vast land of hopes and opportunities sank into the Pacific Ocean the day they left.  They could not shut the
door to the past because that would have meant the cessation of their existence, mind and soul and heart and everything that was meaningful and worthwhile to them.  Hence, I do not think they actually live here, in or for this vast land of hopes and opportunities.  I think they simply live and pay their dues as immigrants to carry on what they left off at the coast of Vietnam the day of their departure.  So in their world, majestic America shrinks into Little Saigon, where they shed blood, sweat, and tear, kill and die, much to the bewilderment or nonchalance of the mainstream.
      Whether all of this is due to a sense of noble "engagement" or trivial pursuit, no outsiders will fully understand. Perhaps in many ways, the mainstream does not care too much, cannot afford to care, or simply does not know how to care!
     I do not know the man, but his death has driven home so harshly a sad reality.  While I am sitting here, enjoying my  relative success as a professional who is "well-assimilated," dreaming of injecting the treasure of my cultural roots into the mainstream by way of my own life, endeavors, and professional interests, there is indeed a "dark world" out there, totally beyond my comprehension.
     It is that dark world that may shadow the positive accomplishments and contributions of Vietnamese immigrants in this country.  It is that dark world that will set us back from the progress we have made, and potentially destroy the achievements and respect our children will have gained through their own hard work, as well as through their inheritance of our struggle to survive the culture shock and the pain of losses.  Have we gone through so
much, lost so much, endured so much and survived so much, only to be destroyed and haunted by such a dark world in America, supposedly our dream land?
    I would like to think that every Vietnamese  or immigrant is equally concerned about the invisibility and, at the same time, the reality of this dark world.  Too bad if it takes the death of
one or two to raise the consciousness of a larger group. But if that's what it takes to pull the strength of the whole Vietnamese  community together to face the threat of violence and the
destructiveness of Machiavellian ethnic politics, then that is the only sense I can make out of the senselessness of the Le's tragic deaths.  Or, are we now simply accepting this as the ongoing legacy
of paranoia, assassination, violence, and brutality that characterize wartime? The issue now is whether these deaths should invoke the voice of conscience and the mainstream's awareness of a complex  ethnic community.
      I am curious to know how many murders of first-generation immigrants have remained unresolved in FBI files, or not prosecuted in local District Attorneys’ offices.  Many of these crimes have not received the same attention from law enforcement agencies as other types of murders, especially when the cases seem to involve violence allegedly committed by members of an ethnic community upon one another. Lack of witnesses, lack of cultural understanding and linguistic facilities, all contributed to the lack of resolution, attention, or commitment to identify suspects by the  authorities.  It will take a systematic and detailed empirical study to validate my hunch. Who is to start such a study except for the sons and daughters of the first generation immigrants themselves? But will it take the whole rebirth of the ethnic community -- the substitution of one generation with another – before the issue can come into focus?
      Somehow I regret not taking the time to talk to Mr. Le  at the ethnic  party where I met him briefly. I could have got to know him to gain some insight into his inner world.  My friend Thuy told me that behind the image of a sarcastic columnist was a very loyal and caring man.  Perhaps with a little bit of the innocence of youth and my own non-threatening, feminine curiosity expressed in the traditional Vietnamese way, I could have bypassed his sense of self-preservation in order to discover the real reasons behind the recklessness, the nervy sarcasm, the brass humor, the relentless and quite often unproven, uncalled for, literary attack and mockery.
Perhaps all of that was just a way for the war child and the lost immigrant in him to dress his wound, to cover up the despair, to seek a way homeward.
      Perhaps among the many Vietnamese who have been "targeted" in Mr. Le's column, nobody was philosophical enough to look past the personal anger he provoked.  Nobody was caring or sensitive enough to detect the wound and the pain behind his sense of "reckless engagement."
     Or perhaps all of this is purely my imagination, due to my own romantic and nostalgic concept of the immigrants' world.  After  all, Mr. Le is no longer here  for us to ask  the disturbing question.  But if there is any truth at all to my speculation, then wherever he is, Mr. Le and those who are like him,  I hope the war children, the lost immigrants in them have finally found their home, and their peace.
***
AND THE REALITY TODAY...
     On the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon – the date that marks three decades of Vietnamese American resettlement into this  country, I reread the editorial that was never sent to the Washington Post, this time with a renewed sense of reality.  Vietnam was long over, but after 9/11, the United States has embarked upon two more wars:  the war in Afghanistan and then the war in  Iraq, all marking perhaps a new American mission in Islamic Central Asia and the  Middle East.  Our media has continued to report tales of violence in these faraway places where we as a country have decided to go in order to fulfill, allegedly, our vision of the American ideals.  The Afghan- and Iraqi-American immigrant communities here must have undoubtedly felt the pain, and even the divided sense of loyalty and turmoil, in seeing their adoptive country go to war on the soil of their former home. Myths and mysteries must have arisen in those pockets of immigrant communities, which might have just escaped the full comprehension of the host country.
     It would be an exhausting and complex task to compare, distinguish, or contrast these newer wars against the old wound of  Vietnam.  I don’t wish to even begin the task and that is not my purpose. But I know this much based on the lesson of Vietnam, having relived the fall of Saigon 30 years later.  Once the U.S. expands its superpower to other parts of the world, as it has always done, in the process, it has also created, changed, and/or caused turmoil  to immigrants and ethnic communities within  its own melting pot.
      Once there was the Vietnam War, and then the place for Vietnamese Americans in America was created.  Now there are Afghanistan and Iraq, and from there comes the focus of attention on the Islamic and Arab American communities in the United States, as well as our welcome for the newcomers from these cultures. But does the focus of attention means true understanding and sensitivity?
     The question is asked, and the issue should be raised, whether the mainstream truly comprehends these pockets of immigrant communities for the right reason – all that myth, mystery, and the web of cultural behaviors that typically escape outsiders’ attention, sympathy, or appreciation.  For policy-making and implementation, America may need to understand the Islamic and Arab worlds, so the immigrant communities are called upon to provide such a bridge to facilitate the goals of U.S. policymakers.  But short of these strategic and political goals, do we as a society care or even attempt to peep into the dark worlds of the immigrants, their pain, displacement, hopes and dreams, because we recognize them as part of us?
    In the story told by the Washington Post in 1990, the death of the Vietnamese immigrant signified the myth of ethnicity and the cultural isolation of those people who are not like us.  Naturally their stories and concerns escape our attention.   After all, it was just the death of someone we did not know, living in a world that really did not belong to the American mainstream.  We leave such a death and myth to the police, who may equally share our sense of nonchalance and ignorance.  Or we leave it all to those novelists who wish to tell the fascinating immigrants’ stories, to be read and told in academic classes of literature and cultural studies.  But as a society, in our daily lives and consciousness, we comfortably ignore such a death.
     And yet, it has always been those immigrants that built the country, as the sociological theory of the melting pot and the 200 years of American history have confirmed.  We just conveniently forger them.
     And that, to me, is the great lesson I learned and relearned in reliving painful memories of the fall of Saigon -- the birth of my ethnic community here in the heart of America.
     September, 1990
     May, 2005
     Wendy  Nicole  Duong