New York Methodist Hospital. November 28, 2005. I’m in labor. The pain comes in twenty-foot waves and Má has disappeared.
The very first narrative panel—as opposed to a couple of preceding panels which situate historical context—is from the point of view of a woman looking downward. The roundness of her stomach confirms that the image is supposed to be the woman narrating. Since the perspective is from the woman, only her body the upper chest on down is seen. The narrative text seems more like a screenplay than a novel: the terse language describing the setting and the use of present tense verbs to describe the action. While not much technically essentially information is conveyed in this opening panel, it is fraught with the information of technique as it foreshadows the significance of using both “illustrated” and “memoir” in the book’s subtitle.
`Saigon Execution’ is credited with turning popular opinion in America against the war. I think a lot of Americans forget that for the Vietnamese…the war continued.
“Saigon Execution” is the name given to one of the most famous photographs ever taken. It was snapped by a photographer covering the war in Vietnam as a general points a pistol just inches from the head of a captured prisoner. The photographer has written that he assumed the act was solely for the purpose of intimidation, but a video news camera also present on the scene captures the sickening moment that came after the still camera was snapped.
The grisly, seemingly unprovoked cold-blooded murder which took place would likely have been forgotten were it not for one single essential detail of the event: the general pulling the trigger was not a fighting on the side of the America’s enemy, North Vietnam, but was a general for the “good guys” on our side that we there fighting for. That singular detail—and that detail alone—entirely changed the public’s reaction. The photograph would go on to win multiple honors, but it would be decades before the full context of the act would be revealed, lessening the horror and now making that same photo an iconic one all over again, this time as an example of just how inextricable facts and propaganda are intertwined in even the most well-known of documentary evidence.
My father explained to me that there was a word for our kind— NGỤY It meant “false, lying, deceitful”—but it could be applied to anyone in the South. It meant constant monitoring, distrust, and the ever-present feeling that our family could, at any moment, be separated, our safety jeopardized.
The war did continue for the Vietnamese after American troops. The hot war did not last long as South Vietnam fell to the forces from the North very quickly. But the war continued even after battle engagements ceased. Vietnam in the years after the fighting became the site of a war of terror conducted against anyone who suspected of being disloyal to the new regime or having dangerous connections to the crushed South Vietnamese leadership. The recognition of being identified as “NGUY” is the stimulation for the family to begin making the move away from trying to assimilate as best as possible into the new Vietnam and toward escaping the country. The consequence is that the family would become members of that community of Vietnam natives known collectively to Americans as “boat people.”
