The incident itself was startling and horrifying, but barely made the news outside of Salt Lake City. On a sunny afternoon in late April, 2012, a homeless man born in Vietnam bought a knife and began attacking white men in a shopping mall, screaming, “You killed my people! Why did you kill my people?”
Kiet Thanh Ly was indeed born in Vietnam – but three years after the war ended, and came here as a baby. As mass attacks go, his was relatively minor; he stabbed and critically injured two men before he was subdued by a man with a concealed weapons permit. Today he is serving two long prison terms for attempted murder, and has been all but forgotten.
But poet Paisley Rekdal, a former Michigan student, was haunted by the incident – and has used it as a basis for a profound meditation now only on the continuing legacy of Vietnam, as the subtitle says, but on a wide variety of issues in many forms, from the immigrant’s place in the world to the profound nature of trauma to the shabby treatment the United States too often provides the mentally ill.
“What if trauma and violence are not psychic breaks with history, but violent attempts to re-engage with it?” she asks. Rekdal, a professor of English at the University of Utah, is also an award-winning poet, who uses a poet’s disciplined economy of language to convey more in barely 160 pages of text than another book might at twice the length. The author knows something about living in two worlds; she herself is half Chinese.
But, as she quickly notes, she was not an immigrant and never felt torn between two nations, though she was always aware she was different; as she notes here, “understanding your identity is not … .as simple as looking to other groups to choose your race and gender roles.”
Indeed not – especially when it comes to Vietnam. Virtually all of those who came from Vietnam, or whose parents were part of the flotsam of that war are torn, often in multiple ways, scarred as this nation itself remains scarred by what was our longest, most unsuccessful, and most traumatic conflict.
There are many facets to this deceptively simple-appearing book, including some stunning evidence that it may be possible to inherit the effects of trauma and PTSD. In the end, while Paisley Rekdal’s quest to understand the riddle of Kiet Thahn Ly and our continuing relationship with the Vietnam War raises more questions than answers, any reader is bound to come away richer for having experienced her meditation on these events.
“How when war turns into war into war, am I to find its final resting place?” she asks. That may not be an answer we’ll find in our lifetimes.
