Indians were the original terrorists in the American imagination. As such, this war was just one manifestation of a centuries-long expansion of the American empire that began from its own colonial birth and ran through the frontier, the American West, Mexico, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and now the Middle East. And while there is some truth to that, it was also simply a continuation of French colonization, a war that was racist and imperialist at its roots and in its practices. Many Americans consider the war to be a noble, if possibly flawed, example of American good intentions. I was made in America but born in Vietnam, and my origins are inseparable from three wars: the one the Vietnamese fought against the French the one the Vietnamese fought against each other and the one the U.S. #THE WEATHERING MAGAZINE VIETNAM.PDF SKIN#Why wouldn’t they be? A Moroccan friend in Paris points to the skin I share with these French of Vietnamese ancestry and says, “You are white here.” But I am not white in America, or not yet. Most of the French of Vietnamese origins I know are content, even if they are aware of their colonized history. The fantasy is tempting, especially because of my Vietnamese history. Romanticizing their existence, oftentimes at the margins of French society, would be difficult, which is why Americans rarely talk about them as part of the fantasy of Paris. I cannot help but see colonialism’s legacies, visible throughout Paris if one wishes to see them: the people of African and Arab origins who are here because France was there in their countries of birth. This is a romantic love, set to accordion music or Édith Piaf, which I feel only fleetingly. Perhaps because of this history, part of me loves France, a love that is due, in some measure, to having been mentally colonized by France.Īware of my colonization, I do not love France the way many Americans love France, the ones who dream of the Eiffel Tower, of sipping coffee at Les Deux Magots, of eating a fine meal in Provence. My parents and their parents never knew anything but French colonialism. French rule ended only 17 years before my birth. The country in which I am writing these words is France, which is not my country but which colonized Vietnam, where I was born, for two-thirds of a century. I have never said “love it or leave it” to my son, and I hope I never will, because that is not the kind of love I want to feel, for him or for my country, whichever country that might be. I ask out of genuine curiosity, because I have never said this sentence myself, in reference to any country or place.
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