In Hollywood, whites have churned out dystopian fantasies by imagining themselves as slaves and refugees in the future. In Blade Runner 2049, the sequel, neon billboards flicker interchangeably in Japanese and Korean, villains wear deconstructed kimonos, but with the exception of a manicurist, there is no Asian soul in sight. We have finally vanished. The slaves, like Ryan Gosling, are all beautiful white replicants. The orphanage is full of young white boys who dismantle junked circuit boards, a scene taken straight out of present-day Delhi, where Indian child laborers break down mountains of electronic waste while being poisoned by mercury toxins. Blade Runner 2049 is an example of science fiction as magical thinking: whites fear that all the sins they committed against black and brown people will come back to them tenfold, so they fantasize their own fall as a preventative measure to ensure that the white race will never fall.

* * *

—

    In Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s eighteen-hour documentary The Vietnam War, they interviewed a Japanese American veteran, Vincent H. Okamoto, who served as a platoon leader. Like Kochiyama, Okamoto was imprisoned at a Japanese internment camp, in his case in his early youth. Since all six of his brothers served in the military, two during World War II and one during the Korean War, he followed his family’s footsteps by enlisting to go to Vietnam.

Okamoto’s first assignment was searching for Viet Cong soldiers supposedly hiding out in the countryside fourteen miles outside of Saigon. After hours of fruitless searching, he gave orders for his men to take a break for lunch at a nearby village. He found a hut where he smelled the familiar scent of steaming rice. He suddenly felt homesick for his mother’s cooking. He hadn’t had rice for months. Okamoto told his interpreter to ask the elderly woman who was cooking if he could have a bowl of rice in exchange for cigarettes and Crations of canned turkey. She made a meal for him of rice and fish and vegetables. He wolfed it down. He asked for seconds.

    “Ain’t they poor enough without you eating all their food?” a soldier chided him.

“They’ve got enough rice to feed a dozen men,” Okamoto responded.

Then he stopped himself. Why was there all this rice for one elderly woman and her grandchildren? He asked the woman, “Who’s all this rice for?” “I don’t know,” she kept repeating through the interpreter. He ordered his group to conduct a search around her home. Under a thatch of straw, they found a secret tunnel. Okamoto threw a phosphorescent grenade into the tunnel. After the explosion, they dragged out seven or eight dead bodies that were so charred they couldn’t be identified. “Atta boy,” the company commander said to him. The woman who fed him the rice crumpled to the ground and started wailing.

* * *

—

Traitor, I thought.

That word kept ringing in my mind. I was disgusted with him, especially by his flat neutral affectlessness as he told the story. But I was wrong. He wasn’t a traitor. He was fighting for the United States. He was doing his job. In fact, he was probably showing his remorse by telling that story for a documentary series that he knew would be seen by millions of viewers.

Ultimately, I was left dissatisfied with the documentary. The directors claimed that their series was going to show both sides of the war, but it still centralized the trauma of American veterans. No stories of loss by Vietnamese civilians. None by the Viet Cong female soldiers whom I was dying to know about. I had read that feminist Asian American activists in the sixties and seventies looked up to these female soldiers as models of resistance. The series also didn’t have much of anything on the foreign allies who helped the United States, not that I expected it would. I’m thinking specifically of South Korea, who deployed more than three hundred thousand soldiers to Vietnam during the nine years of the war. At the time, South Korea was one of the poorest nations in the world and they wanted aid money to boost their economy. They were also indebted to America for rescuing them from their Communist enemy during the Korean War. At the time, the dictator Park Chung-Hee said, “We are making a moral repayment of our historical debt to the Free World.”

* * *

—

    I could begin writing about buying flowers from the corner deli, but give me enough pages—two, twenty, or one hundred—and no matter what, violence will saturate my imagination. I have tried to write poems and prose that remain in the quotidian, turning an uneventful day over and over, like a polished pebble that glints in the light into a silvery metaphysical inquiry about time. It is late spring. I pick up my daughter from preschool and on our walk home, we admire the perfect purple orbs of onion flowers in bloom. My husband makes dinner that we sometimes take upstairs to our roof with the view of the train and the sun that melts its blood orange into the clouds.

I write down my daily routine that is so routine it allows me the freedom to ruminate. At what cost do I have this life? At what toll have I been granted this safety? The Japanese occupation; the Korean War; the dictators who tortured dissidents with tactics learned from the Japanese and the war. I didn’t live through any of it, but I’m still a descendant of those who had no time to recover; who had no time, nor permission, to reflect. Barely recovered from the Korean War, young South Korean soldiers arrived in Vietnam to pay back their debt to America. They were ground troops assigned “to pacify the countryside” and they raped and murdered civilians indiscriminately. Their zeal for retribution was monomaniacal, where if one of the soldiers died from an unknown sniper’s fire from a village, they went back and burned that village down. In Hà My village, South Korean troops killed 135 civilians, including babies and the elderly. In Bình Hòa, there were 430 deaths. In Binh An, more than 1,000 civilian deaths. There were 8,000 civilian deaths at the hands of South Koreans but that number, like all civilian casualties during war, is inexact.