A review by an_library_stan
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
Not a quick read, but very informative.
There were parts where I felt like Nguyen was exploring dualities so much that I got lost, or wanted him to just take a stance already. But of course this is my discomfort with the lack of easy answers for what war is and how it implicates everyone involved.
I'm not sure what will stick with me most from this book. Certainly the critique of a lot of war films, and mainstream narratives about Vietnam (e.g. the things they carried) resonated. People pointing at gaps and biases in my education stays with me. Likewise there were some well known quotes and cultural landmarks Nguyen clarified. The books title is a Toni Morrison quote. Night of the living dead is a direct allegory for America's war in Vietnam. "Freedom is not free" comes from an MLK (essay?, speech?) condemning segregation and critiquing domestic imperialism.
The chapter On Asymmetry has some really powerful quotes. It wasn't as challenging to me as the rest of the book, because it pointed fingers at Power and the Powerful. Other parts of the book reached more for our universal humanity and inhumanity and sometimes felt like relativism. Some quotes:
There were parts where I felt like Nguyen was exploring dualities so much that I got lost, or wanted him to just take a stance already. But of course this is my discomfort with the lack of easy answers for what war is and how it implicates everyone involved.
I'm not sure what will stick with me most from this book. Certainly the critique of a lot of war films, and mainstream narratives about Vietnam (e.g. the things they carried) resonated. People pointing at gaps and biases in my education stays with me. Likewise there were some well known quotes and cultural landmarks Nguyen clarified. The books title is a Toni Morrison quote. Night of the living dead is a direct allegory for America's war in Vietnam. "Freedom is not free" comes from an MLK (essay?, speech?) condemning segregation and critiquing domestic imperialism.
The chapter On Asymmetry has some really powerful quotes. It wasn't as challenging to me as the rest of the book, because it pointed fingers at Power and the Powerful. Other parts of the book reached more for our universal humanity and inhumanity and sometimes felt like relativism. Some quotes:
Is there anything more asymmetrical than air war waged against those without an air force, or a people forced to make a living by selling the fragments of those bombs to those who bombed them? (179)
Killing is the weapon of the strong. Dying is the weapon of the week. It is not that the weak cannot kill; it is only that their greatest strength lies in their capacity to die in greater numbers than the strong... The American war machine ran aground on the bodies of its own men as well as the bodies of those it killed. With the specter of the Vietnamese body count mobilizing global opposition (156-157)
He covers so much in this book. The brutal role Koreans played in Vietnam, learning from and dependent on the US after the Korean war.
As anthropologist Heonik Kwon notes, this behavior by Korean troops was hardly surprising. Their slogans included "kill clean, burn clean, destroy clean," children also spy " and "better to make mistakes than to miss." (151)
The difficulty of telling the story of a people as a single minority artist living in the US. How so many Vietnamese writers and storytellers and artists are not peasants, who were most impacted by the war. How winners and losers in wars try to tell the most morally pure story about themselves. How even though it's now in the mainstream to critique US military involvement in Vietnam, it's more about how the US went about the occupation and less about US imperialism writ large. So we can now feel good that Vietnam is a capitalist country like the US. The ultimate ideology of capitalist democracy won out. And so the US's wars in the middle east are justified, even if, again, the US didn't _quite_ get it right, the broader white man's burden (also discussed in the book) remains Right.
Last thing I will say is I got a lot of books and movies from this book that I want to read / watch. Nguyen lists, quotes and paraphrases works of art and documentation that tell many more stories than we get in Forrest Gump, The things they carried, and apocalypse now.