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THE VIETNAM WAR AND ASIANS IN AMERICA
Asian Poltical Alliance Detroit
circa 1971
posted 9/19/07
For almost ten years now we have lived under the shadow of the brutal and brutalizing war in Vietnam. Every morning in the newspapers, every night on television, every day in our conscience, we have watched a people who might have been our brothers and sisters being bombed, napalmed gassed, machine - gunned, tortured, raped, herded into concentration camps, turned into prostitutes, beggars, hustlers in a ravaged Asian land - first Vietnam and now the whole of Indochina. It's a war fought by the American government which we sanction, for the American way of life which we believe in, with American weapons manufactured with our tax money, by American Soldiers, some of whom have been drafted from our communities. By the fact that we live in America, we have been involved in the prosecution of the Vietnam war. So it's of utmost importance to us that we should ask this question now: What is the meaning of Vietnam for us Asians in America.
THE END OF ILLUSION
From the time we entered school in America, we have been taught beautiful myths about America:
That America is the first nation founded on the principle of liberty and equality;
That America is bountiful, generous, and peace-loving;
That above all America is the land of golden opportunity where every industrious individual can work his way up from poverty to prosperity.
And yet as Asians growing up in America, we've also experienced many ugly facts which do not square with the myths. We've been called many times Chinks and Japs and slanty - eyed Gooks, It has always been assumed that our natural roles are to cook, to do laundry, to tend gardens. We see ourselves portrayed in a thousand movies and comic books as either treacherous villains or barbarous killers. And finally there is always the vicious reminder of Vietnam: weekly body count of Vietnamese dead as a measure of war progress; atrocities committed against the Viet namese people because Vietnamese lives are cheap The favorite words of the G.I. taken from the genocidal tradition of cowboys and Indians: "The only good Gook is a dead Gook,"
