Real Life Connections

"Let's have a toast for the douchebags, Let's have a toast for the assholes, Let's have a toast for the scumbags, Every one of them that I know, Let's have a toast to the jerkoffs, That'll never take work off, Baby, I got a plan, Run away fast as you can." Kanye West.
LETS START WITH ANTHROPOLOGY
Everyone who knows me, knows that I believe I have been given an incredible amount of privilege for no reason at all. But they also know that my complicated ethnic and racial identity has been the source of most pain and the driving force of most inspiration. Yes, I've always been a private person, but something about existing in the realm of Vietnamese identity that doesn't acknowledge the ambiguous, and the people in between, who aren't really this, and aren't really that, is uncomfortable. It makes me feel complicit, because my driving force, unannounced to the Vietnamese community, IS that racial, ethnic, personal, space in between; the in-between-ness that made me feel so nauseatingly foreign in the place I was born yet drives me back there to help me understand the people who don't fit into its homogeneity; who belong to both the United States and Viet Nam but, more realistically, to neither.

Prof. Winifred Tate opened a vault filled with stories from Viet Nam vets, anthropologists, authors, and their experiences and understandings of the War. They are insightful stories and interpretations yet I tend to find myself frustrated and feeling silenced by the text even when it is meant to be evocative.

I did a presentation on my hypothetical memorial exhibits dedicated to the ARVN and black American servicemen. Simply because I'm a bit of a radical who does believe that those allowed to represented in text (thus history and thus memory) remains political, hierarchical, and hegemonic. The narrative of the white-middle class soldier coming back to Viet Nam to build schools, gain closure, and purge is a positional narrative, which is not wrong. The problem exists when there are no alternative narratives. ARVNs, ARVN POWs, Amerasians, and South Vietnamese in general. Why did they have to ship hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese to the U.S. after a humiliating war effort and why was that never discussed?

I believe too forceful a narrative of collaboration, commonality, and healing, enables people to forget that (social, political, textual) marginalization exists within Viet Nam just as it does with minorities within the United States. All this is to say is that the VC has his memoir so we could now be more sympathetic to his struggles as a person (brother, husband, son, friend to some in South Viet Nam) and not just a communist. The (White) American has his memoir but there are others affected by Agent Orange, skin color, and regions.
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EDUCATION, GENDER STUDIES

I have less to say about masculinity but to simply state that I see that it exists starting at a very young age. Good or bad, I can't say but the performance of it is real so much so sometimes that the performance engulfs the person and there isn't much left.
I feel as though people are always performing for me, a performance of indifference, a performance toughness, a performance of being okay, a performance of disinterest. But then if people have been socialized by this, I wonder if it just comes naturally, with no second thought. But I am guessing it does not come completely naturally to everyone; because a vulnerability which people don't always admit to in words, sometimes comes out in actions, as I am learning.