american requiem
the first and probably last of a non-exhaustive list of things i "journaled" about a long time ago and recently revisited and am now deciding to post
In 10th grade English, my English teacher had us watch a bunch of videos about the people who died, survived, saved each other – or tried to – on 9/11. I cried a lot when I watched those videos, and so did some of the other girls in class. I think that even the 15-year-old Huntington Beach boys cried too but were just better at hiding it; otherwise, I watched them ball their fists and clench the edges of their RVCA cargo shorts (lol).
I listened, also, to the thick silence that fell over our classroom that persisted even after our teacher turned the lights back on. How do you begin to actually teach kids about 9/11? Ms. Lammers had such an important responsibility. How far back before 9/11 should we go, and why didn’t we go any further back than that day, on that day, at all?
For a long time in school, all I knew about 9/11 was that normal people died and other normal people gave their lives to save other ones. That – and the whole pledge of allegiance thing, as well as Vietnamese American Catholicism, probably – was enough to instill in me a deep-seated pride in being American. Like, to a kid-version of myself, this terrible, apparently apolitically evil thing happened to the people from this place called America where I was born, and nevertheless these people persisted in taking care of each other and living. This story of America that our teachers, parents, and community members fed me was simple and moving.
It still moves me, but I so wish that I had access to adults and mentors when I was a teenager who could’ve helped me connect the dots so much earlier about American empire and its ugly tentacles. I would’ve woven threads between stories about my family and others like mine, and I would’ve told those stories so differently. I would’ve turned both shoulders towards history and appreciated every detail so much more, savoring in the lessons — in Assata Shakur, George Jackson, Fidel Castro — like they were the rounds of a gun. I would’ve been angrier so much younger; I would’ve loved so much harder; I sometimes wish I had more years of anger, and love, in me.
Still, I am heartbroken when Jim Giaccone’s voice breaks. In 2014, Jim Giaccone tells a Moth Radio Hour audience about the moment he realized he was never bringing his brother home from Ground Zero.
Like Jim Giaccone, everyone, even my immigrant parents, somehow has a story of what they were doing on 9/11. Of course there’s a vast spectrum of grief and humor in these stories, but a unifying variable across the board is that everyone tells them excellently, as if they were pulled straight from an award-winning short story anthology: I hung onto the words of adults in my life who recounted pouring cereal for their kids or writing the date on an elementary school whiteboard just before a plane crashed in NYC and the whole country shut down. There was a mythology, almost a mysticism to 9/11 and the place it occupied in our national consciousness. My youthful pride in being American grew from that national consciousness, planted in me from childhood. Call it patriotism, if you must!
Every year onwards from the years that we’d call “childhood,” though, I grew up and did things like read Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again” and be a Sociology Major (jokes). This “patriotism” didn’t go away so much as it… turned into something else.
I still remember the bike ride from January last year where I thought about what life would be like if I just stayed in Vietnam forever. On my way back from getting groceries at the supermarket on Nguyen Dinh Chieu street, I wondered how I might feel if I never came back. It was an impossible idea – especially because I loved my family, my friends, and the open-ended prospect of ever seeing Ravyn Lenae live – but one that I casually played with.
Though, I could never seriously consider living anywhere but the U.S. precisely because I did things like grow up and read Langston Hughes and be a stupid sociology major at UC Berkeley, which is to say that the things I did, the life I had, and the political consciousness I came to could have only ever unfolded inside the belly of the beast, the imperial core, Turtle Island, the United States of America. I had less of a connection – or at least, a different kind – to Vietnam, my family’s homeland, than I had to the U.S. When that sentence comes out of my mouth, the idea seems obvious, but I still marvel at the reality of it since my parents and so many Vietnamese Americans would’ve never thought that they’d end up 9000 miles away from their homeland just one generation ago.
Coming to and living in Vietnam sharpened so much of my perspective on what it means to live in the United States. This place called America and the people who lived here – killed here, displaced here, survived here – are inseparable from making a meaningful life: stepping up to the responsibility that comes with being born in the belly of the beast.
Assata Shakur says it’s our duty to fight for our freedom. I didn’t really understand fully what this meant until I lived in Vietnam and started seriously organizing in the U.S. where I grew up.
I’ve learned from Assata and so many of my comrades that if we can acknowledge that mass death and violence at the expense of the Global South takes place for the benefit of people here, then we know that we have a revolutionary duty in our hands. If we know for certain that the country that exploits us is exploiting people everywhere too – has violently exploited people everywhere, including dispersed peoples like Vietnamese people, a lot of whom ended up here, from there, in the imperial core — then we have to organize. I’m here, from there too; still, I’m here.
This is what I mean when I say my “patriotism” didn’t go away as much as it became something else. I don’t love living here – who does? – but I love organizing here, loving people here, learning here. That’s why I don’t get it when anti-Trump, liberal but essentially apolitical Americans say that they’ll just move to Europe when America is “going to shit.” Like, enjoy your fascism and crudités over there?
If I got the chance, I don’t know how I’d talk about all this to my 15-year-old self, or any 15-year-old. I don’t know how you’d teach 15-year-olds that 9/11 happened because we come from a violent and exploitative country, but it really shouldn’t have happened because the people who paid in full for this violence were workers and families here, then workers and families abroad.
I don’t know how to tell my old self that I can’t ever be anywhere else but here, but not for the reasons I used to think I did (directionless, liberal hatred, lmfao). I’m curious to know what 15-year-olds are thinking about these days when their teachers make them watch 9/11 videos on 9/11.
The last funny thing about this whole spiel is that I thought of all this because I listened to Beyonce’s “American Requiem” in the car on the way to Orange County a few months ago. I won’t give Beyonce credit for any of this though because she is a patriotic-in-the-bad-way, greedy capitalist, but ugh that song is kinda good.
Minor comment, but my family still lived in brasil when 9/11 happened and my mom has a story of where she was
WOW your mind.....this resonates so much i gotta sit with it for a sec