PUTERBAUGH ESSAY LIVING IN THE TENSES IN SAIGONThen, magically, the little boy’s
dream came more or less true. And
he grew up and circumnavigated the
globe. What to do with the past? Let
me introduce to you my celebrated
Vietnamese American artist friend,
Dinh Q. Lê. He left Vietnam in the
late 1970s as a young teenager but
has come back and lived now in
Vietnam for over two decades. Lê
told me that “after the war ended,
there was a deliberate attempt to
erase the past in the South.” One
of his chief obsessions, then, is to
tell the narrative of loss. After all,
people who lose wars are cursed to remembrances of
traumas. The fate of exile is that it robs you of a clean,
unobstructed forward movement; the forward arc
always entails constant backward glances.
Yet there’s an almost collective distrust of the past
here in Vietnam, Lê said, especially among the young.
As he put it, “They only get the state’s version of events,
and they know it’s propaganda. But they don’t know
what the real story is, so they’d rather not trust any
s t o r y.”
Among his many Vietnam-related projects, Lê col-
lected a ton or so of black-and-white photographs that
once belonged to those who fled at the end of the war,
surely some of my family’s images among them. The
photos eventually were sold in a “pre-75” market, 1975
being the year when the war ended and the exodus
began. His work, displayed recently in the San Jose
Museum of Art in an exhibit called
True Journey Is Return, speaks of
fragmented lives, lost homes, lost
history. In one particularly poignant
and powerful piece, “Crossing the
Farther Shore,” faces from black-
and-white photos of Vietnamese—
portraits, happy moments, family
gatherings, picnics, weddings—are
strung together like a mosquito net
and stare out from a distant past.
He is a celebrated artist in the US
and in other countries. But if Lê said
he absolutely belongs in Vietnam
where much of his work is consid-
ered too political to be shown, he
meant he belongs here the way I do: he commutes back
to America every so often, and he travels the world to
show his work. He belongs only in a sense that he canleave anytime he wants. Such, alas, is
the weird space in which so many of
us who came back belong. Indeed,
we never belonged to one time zone.
Vietnam is highly mobile now.
The country is booming, both a
manufacturing hub and a hot tour-
ist destination. And as it opens its
doors wider and wider, many for-
eigners are making it their home,
and among them Viet Kieu (overseas
Vietnamese). Many have done well,
too, investing and opening business-
es, especially those who had come
back and set down roots years ear-
lier. To them I am a relative newcomer, and as such there
is much advice. Chief among them: “Try your best not
to live in the past.”
Easier said than done. Like many Viet Kieu who
remember the war, we are cursed with a superimposed
memory of this city, where the river has a tendency
to run backward, toward the bygone. And sometimes
over the city we pored: names of streets that changed,
which colonial buildings came down to be replaced
by a high-rise, which restaurants once served the best
pho during the war, which stalls the best banh mi, the
dramatic evacuation at the end of the war, the bombs,
the corpses.
The past can be a trap. Lê admits there’s a quagmire
in telling the story of loss. One can get ensnared in the
past by staring at it too long, and the burden of memo-
ries can keep him from moving forward, from seeing
and doing new things. “I’m tired
of the Vietnam story,” he told me
over dinner one evening. “Me too,”
I said. Then we continue to talk
about Vietnam.THUS THE future tense.
I carry memories of losses and
exile—my childhood in old Saigon
in wartime, my abrupt departure; I
wear them all like a scar, or a medal.
But I am quite aware that I am also
bringing the larger world back to
my birthplace. Mine is after all a
complicated sense of home: given
that the bulk of my life has been
spent in America, writing in my third language (after
Vietnamese and French), home is rooted in a sense of
plurality, in a sense of I am both this and that. And more.A recipient of the San
Francisco Creative
Works Fund, Andrew
Lam is the author
of a collection of
short stories, Birds
of Paradise Lost,
and two collections
of essays, Perfume
Dreams: Reflections
on the Vietnamese
Diaspora and East
Eats West: Writing in
Two Hemispheres. He
served on the jury of
the 2014 Neustadt
International Prize
for Literature.
Diverse, pluralistic,
and complex are what
Saigon has become. A
multiverse. And it is full
of young people, eager
to surge ahead.“I’m tired of the
Vietnam story,” he
told me over dinner
one evening. “Me
too,” I said. Then
we continue to talk
about Vietnam.50 W LT SUMMER 2019