Rogues In Office

So, something dubious yet again sprang from the basement of our republican/representative/participatory democracy: Last Thursday, the Vice President’s office declared to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (and, in a way, to the American people) that it does not need to comply to an executive order issued by the President. The executive order says that executive agencies need to report to the National Archives and Records Administration annually on how they classify and declassify official government documents. Vice President Cheney’s office told the oversight committee that the whole country’s got it wrong: he is exempt from the order because he is not an executive agency, thus not under the executive branch of our government.

This begs the question: has Dick Cheney ceased being the Vice President of the United States? He took the oath of office twice for his current position in the federal government in 2001 and 2005, and the most important role the Vice President plays in the executive branch is to replace the President of the United States whenever he (or she) becomes physically or mentally incapable of being the president. When considering this fact, can someone please explain to me how Vice President Cheney is not a part of the executive branch?

Cheney’s office drew criticism Thursday for claiming that it was exempt from the reporting requirements because the vice president’s office is not fully within the executive branch. It cited his legislative role as president of the Senate when needed to break a tie.

Oh, well, pardon my previous harrangue. Cheney argues that he has a dual role and that’s why he can’t be bothered with any attempts at oversight. You see, guys, he’s a Colossus who straddles the great divide between the legislative and executive branches.

The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, President Bush’s office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information.

Excuse me?! So, now President Bush and his office have decided that they do not fall under the category of an executive agency and they are no longer a part of the executive branch? Therefore, does that mean President Bush and his staff are exempt from his own office’s executive order?

“Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their government,” the executive order said.

Nice, but now a wholly empty, sentiment.

As a result, the National Archives has been unable to review how much information the president’s and vice president’s offices are classifying and declassifying. And the security oversight office cannot inspect the president and vice president’s executive offices to determine whether safeguards are in place to protect the classified information they handle and to properly declassify information when required.

It’s nice to know that the freeflow of information still exists in two sections of our government: the vice president and the president. By not agreeing to follow their own executive order, they and their staff are free to copy, save, distribute or destroy any documentation of their choosing. Apparently, this is an ongoing internal policy of for-their-eyes-only.

But, she said, Cheney’s office is exempt from the requirements because the president intended him to be.

“Intended”?! So, our government is supposed to be the President’s mind reader? And, when does any good policy come out of someone’s whimsical intent?

Blanton noted that the White House had acknowledged that a substantial number of in-house e-mails had disappeared in recent years, at a time when investigators wanted to review them for possible evidence of inappropriate leaks of classified information.

I guess they “intended” for their disappearance to happen.

If this act of defiance is not already a crime, it should damn well be.

"Vorwaerts immer; zurueckwaerts nimmer!"

Berlin hotel recreates East Germany

The Ostel, which opened on May Day — the traditional worker’s holiday under communism — represents a broader phenomenon known as Ostalgie, or fascination with life in the former East Germany. Ostalgie, like Ostel, is a play on the German word for east — ost.

“Vorwaerts immer; zurueckwaerts nimmer!”
Translation: “Always forward; never backward!”

Go to Ostel’s website (http://www.ostel.eu/), click on “Deutsch”, then move your cursor over the portrait of Erich Honecker to your left and you’ll hear the recording of the above-mentioned quote.

Ah, the sweet sound of propoganda.

Nostalgia is one of the means by which we come to terms with our own history and how we got to where we are now. What interests me about this act of looking back is that it’s a mixture of fact, fiction and fun. Nostalgia commonly serves a need to paste over the bad with what we remember to be good about certain events in the past. It’s a way of looking forward and thinking positively about the future because we believe we’ve moved past the tragedy and bitterness of yesteryear and have finally learned from our past mistakes, and we have every intention of not making them again.

I think that’s why attractions, such as the Ostel in Berlin, Germany, perpetuate themselves and still attract our curiosity. The Ostel is a hotel in eastern Berlin whose interior and spirit aim to recreate the time period when East Germany used to exist, but without all the mess of citizen spies, intellectual repression and dreariness of uninspired leadership. The hotel plays upon the notoriety of the communist dictatorship, but also the cultural kitsch that the East Germans produced and relied upon in order to have a semblance of normality behind the Iron Curtain.
A great movie to watch, in order to better understand the Ostel’s uniqueness and its humorous take on East Germany’s history, is Goodbye, Lenin!

My own interest in the hotel speaks to my graduate studies in German back in New York. I became fascinated with East Germany while pursuing my German major in college and then on to graduate school. My thesis concentrated on the younger generation of East German poets and writers who were attempting to express their contempt for the government’s censorship and outlawing of any artistic endeavor that it thought was not in the service of “the people”.

One of these days I’ll visit Berlin again and consider staying at this hotel.

Pot Calling The Kettle Black

Viet leader: No need to fix human rights

Bush said he pressed Triet during their meeting on the importance of having a strong commitment to human rights and democracy. U.S. lawmakers, in a meeting Thursday, urged Triet to make stronger efforts to stop what they describe as widespread abuse of Vietnam’s citizens.

The very sad irony contained within the advice given by President Bush to President Nguyen Minh Triet of Vietnam in the above article is not his own contempt for human rights and further prosecution of wars against two sovereign states that did not attack the U.S., but that many Americans do not recognize this irony because of their myopic belief that our country and our government can do no wrong.

The reason why Triet can unequivocally disregard the U.S.’s concern about the dehumanization of people whom the Vietnamese government categorizes as criminals is because our government has sunk to that base level. Simple as that.

How can one person admonish another for kicking someone in the stomach while at the same time that person is punching another in the face?

Entitled

De Profundis

In the photo lies an infant
toothpick limbs at his side,
motionless, mouth agape.

Yellowing paper ages his skin and leaves him
transparent underneath the afterglow
of a photographer’s flashbulb.

The sisters named him.

Up from the depths,
he called from the back of a bus
with no arms curled under him.
The nurses thought he’d never live past a week.
But when his sores healed and the clouds in his eyes parted,
he posed for the camera on the floor of the orphanage,
plump cheeks laughing.

One more child flown out of the carcass of civil war.
A life saved to memorialize those who perished
in the wind above the coast.

This is the first real poem I wrote concerning adoption. Its origins can be found in a book called Turn My Eyes Away, a book given to my parents, I believe, when they adopted my younger sister. Rosemary Taylor, a prominent figure in establishing orphanages in South Vietnam, compiled the photos and text and dedicated it to the orphans and their caretakers who perished on the first Operation Babylift flight.

When I was little, I used to look through the book without comprehending its subject matter and without being told the background story as to the reason it was stuffed alongside all the other books my parents had on their bookshelf. I was oblivious to its intent and the history it was imparting to anyone who would listen. In my little brain, I thought I was just looking at some strange kids who didn’t resemble me at all.

But, during my own personal reclamation project back in 1999, when I was quickly distancing myself from the environment I had grown up in, I took the book down from the bookshelf and put it on the night table by my bed. For a couple days, I hesitated to open the front cover, but then one night I sat on the bed, took a deep breath and just started reading and peering at the photos for a long time.

The most dramatic photo was the one that took up two pages, showing an emaciated boy lying in a crib with dark boils all over his skin, sporting white bandages wrapped around his hands and around the top part of his head. His eyes betrayed confusion, loneliness and fear of facing a nonexistent future. Turning the page, I came face to face with the photo of a healthy, plump infant with a dark tuft of hair sticking straight up, and he was sitting up on the floor laughing. Amazingly, according to the text, this was the same boy in the previous photo a couple months later, after he was properly fed and cared for. His caretakers, appropriately, gave him the nickname of ‘De Profundis’, which is Latin for “up from the depths”.

I guess I can now say that his life and mine are uniquely intertwined in the paradox of human cruelty and compassion.

They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To

Found this article about the last public letter writer in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) at Spiegel Online.

A Day with Saigon’s Last Public Letter Writer

Ngo never receives e-mails. He hates computers and mobile phones, too. “Words that come from a machine have no soul,” he says, adding that people who use such machines have lost all politeness and sense of proper style.

The world’s culture is at a juncture where print, radio, cable and wireless technology coexist and which almost everyone uses in one form or another every day.

The key thing for me, anyway, is communication, no matter what form it comes in.

Twisting While Kissing

Around The Lake We Go

take a walk around the lake like we did
the houses you planned to sell
the cities I planned to move to
kissed while twisting
laid my hand on your stomach
for love, I wondered
to go back to how it could’ve been
when in a second life
without hesitation
I’d’ve asked for your hand
instead of your hide

Several months into my move to Seattle I started dating this young woman who emigrated from Vietnam around 1995. Perfect, I thought, this relationship will bring about a lot of healing inside myself, and what better way to close the loop than to be attracted to and be loved by a woman who came from my birth country. Naively, I expected her to teach me Vietnamese and some of the country’s customs/traditions and I would help her integrate more into American society and culture. But, it soon became apparent that my coincidental birth to a Vietnamese mother in Vietnam, along with the deadly assumption that people of the same ethnicity automatically share similar values and opinions, would not carry me very far in her eyes, and especially under the watchful gaze of her parents.

Yes, she did teach me many useful phrases in Vietnamese (which I have since forgotten) and introduced me to some exquisite cuisine from the homeland. She was attentive, thoughtful, sweet and, more importantly (at least to me), funny. However, there was always an aura of melancholy about her as she would reminisce about her childhood near Ho Chi Minh City and quite often express her desire to return to what was most familiar. She lamented her parents’ decision to leave Vietnam many times to me. In the end, it seemed more and more that she wished she were dating someone with my personality, creativity and intelligence, but who was fluent in everything Vietnamese: the language, the food, the history, the livelihood, the inner conflicts and the pure joys. In short, to be someone whom I could never be.

This young woman was the only daughter of four siblings, all boys. Pressure was mounting on her to succeed in all phases of life because not only was she a university student, but she also was designated the family mouthpiece because her parents barely knew English, both spoken and written. She had to be the go-between for her family when it came to communicating with bill collectors, a landlord, telemarketers, bankers and public officials. She was also expected to always be the dutiful daughter who would attract the right man for marriage and hopefully increase her caché in this new land.

So, at the end of our last phone conversation, she made it clear that even though we had had a lot fun together and she had fallen in love with me, I was not “Vietnamese”.

Yet again, that same dastardly question rose to the top of my mind: “Who am I?”

Cruel Love

cruel
was when I told you I loved you and you nodded
as if I would just evaporate into thin air – leave you
to blend back into your mother’s thigh – drown
cups of rice until tender, the back of your hand
the white of your teeth, the afternoon we kissed
was the home I had left – thought I’d never go back
without you by my side – on the couch I sat
watching you and your brother sing to vietnamese karaoke –
the voice my mother must have taken to her grave

Buffalo Boy – the movie

Yesterday, I watched Buffalo Boy written and directed by Minh Nguyen-Vo. I don’t know if it’s unconscious bias or shameless cheerleading, but I’m always impressed by films made by Vietnamese. All the films I’ve watched so far (Three Seasons, Scent of a Green Papaya, etc.) have a wonderful storybook quality to them. They are films that you have to pay attention to, which is none too hard because the images created and recorded are spectacularly rich. And, I don’t know if it’s the Vietnamese way, but the acting seems so fluid and heavily infused with meaning and raw feeling. Go see Buffalo Boy if you haven’t already!

War Merchandise

Two weeks ago I got word that my long (prosey) poem, “Failure To Thrive”, was accepted into an upcoming anthology called Not Forgotten: Asian Americans Remember US Wars in Asia. Much gratitude goes to my fellow TRA blogger, Sume, for giving me a head’s up on the call for submissions by the editors of this anthology.

In fact, once again, she gave me something to think about in regard to the reason why we casually refer to ourselves as “products of war” when we examine our origins as adoptees from Vietnam. To be literal about it, one could trace our beginnings to a war that made us orphans and, thus, made us available for adoption. Figuratively, our flesh and bones were poured into the indomitable cast of mortal combat, taken out and set aside to cool and harden, then placed on the store shelf for foreign customers to ogle over and pick the right one for their respective homesteads. To be crass about it, our lives seem to have been produced for mass Western consumption.

When I reluctantly tell people that I was orphaned and then adopted during one of America’s most conflicted military adventures, I usually become the vessel into which they feel they can dump their misplaced sympathies, old-guard political ideologies or real pain that still aches with much bitterness and wait for their long-awaited gratitude for how good my life turned out to bloom from my mouth. To them, I’m an object with which to re-write their legacies in order to impress their descendents. It’s not surprising, then, that they become dismayed when I attempt to correct their assumptions about my life by telling them the facts of my life, the many struggles I’ve had to face and how undecided I still am about the benefits of actually being in the world now. I can see in their eyes that they wished I were just one of those disembodied plastic fortune teller heads in a glass box that, for a quarter, would tell them exactly what they wanted to hear.

So, if I were to think (too hard) about it, to many people I would be a ‘product of war’ in the sense my adoptive country extricated my body from a bad (and worsening) situation and set me down in a field of calm to live and represent the American Dream. In exchange for this gesture, my role is to hand them my self-esteem, my self-identity and my subconscious for them to alter in the name of national posterity.

However, my birth cannot be extricated from the actual events, circumstances and aftermath of a civil war in which the U.S. intervened. For better or worse, the context in which I’ve collected all my memories and developed my complex national/cultural/racial identity will forever betray the deep, and highly visible, scar of war.

1973

Sometimes I wonder what signficant events were occurring on, or near, the day of my birth, December 5, 1973. Since I don’t have any record of the hospital I was born at, at what time I was delivered into the world, how much I weighed or any other pertinent details, I’ve taken to collecting interesting bits of info that give me a window into that period of time. Take a look for yourself:

• Paul McCartney releases his record “Band On The Run” on 12/05/73 (but according to a Wikipedia entry, the release date is stated as 12/07/73).

• Serpico, starring Al Pacino, was released on 12/05/73.

• Gerald R. Ford becomes vice president on 12/06/73 after Vice President Spirow Agnew resigned on 10/10/73 due to criminal charges he was facing in regard to allegations of bribery in prior office.

• Monica Seles is born on 12/02/73; Tyra Banks is born on 12/04/73; Terrell Owens is born on 12/07/73; Thuy Trang is born on 12/14/73 (died on 09/03/01).

• This woman has posted her diaries on the Web from 1973-1979. On the date of my birth, she watched a “neat” episode of Sonny & Cher and cleaned out her fish tank.

Garbage Plates & Snow Flakes

At the age of six, grandma took me to the zoo
for the day, and when it came time to leave
I didn’t want to get back in the car because
the lions reminded me of the cage back home,
except the one back home opened up
once in awhile to let me see the new neighbors
moving into new houses in what used to be
our new backyard.
- K. Minh -

My fondest memory of my hometown was when I got into my packed Chevy Cavalier, drove down to the end of my parents’ driveway, waived goodbye and headed toward the highway, pointed due west. Even though my car was loaded with boxes and bags full of clothes, CDs, books, etc., I was leaving a lot of baggage behind. Shit I didn’t want to deal with. People I couldn’t tolerate anymore. A place that would have slowly digested my spirit and spit my bones out if I hadn’t left when I did.

“Home” is a contentious word with me because it’s a word that connotes ownership and belonging, two things I have yet to apply to places I’ve lived in. Ideally, “home” would be a community I feel intimately involved with, a place where I could set down my roots and let them become intertwined with the history, the knowledge and the personalities that comprise it; it would be a place whose name I would feel proud uttering in mixed company; it would be a place in which no matter where I ended up I would feel welcome to take my time and look around for a while.

Growing up, growing out. I was made to feel that the suburb I was raised in is all there was: where I grew up is where I’ll die, as so many of my “relatives” did, so I better get used to that cruel fact. My hometown’s slogan was (and still is) “Where life is worth living”. It became a sarcastic joke to us teenagers back in the day: “Where life is worth ___”, fill in the blank with the expletive of your choice. My home life was monotonous and I rarely colored outside the lines because my brain kept weighing the risks against the benefits and always came to the same conclusion: “Just do what you’re told, collect your rewards and soon enough you’ll be out of their hair and they’ll be out of your life.”

I daydream a lot, and my wandering thoughts can compose some really elaborate sets and scenery of lands far away in which I can do whatever I choose. So, whenever I felt trapped, persecuted in my own house, I would take my mind to a new location and idealize it and fantasize about the amount of freedom I would have to realize myself, to be true to myself. Back in reality, whenever my melancholy got the best of me and I was on the verge of hurriedly packing a bag and leaving town for good, I had no idea where I wanted to go or where I wanted to live; I just knew that no matter where I ended up I was smart enough, savvy enough and skilled enough to hold down any 9-to-5 and be satisfied just living for myself and doing what I wanted to do. No more arbitrary, irrational rules to abide by; no more pointless head-butting with people whose sole reason for existence seemed to be to control other people.

The straw that broke my back was when I found myself outside once again snow blowing my parents’ driveway after the sky dumped a couple feet of snow. I was bundled up, but I could feel my fingertips and toes turning blue. The wind was picking up, casting tiny icicles into my face. I was struggling with the dirty dunes of snow at the end of the driveway where they had been lobbed by passing snowplow shovels, slipping and continually trying to dig in with my boots in order to push forward and cast the snow back into the street. Finally, I just stopped the snow blower and stood still like one of those stripped, dead trees in a field of white. The wind had also taken a rest. It was one of those splendid winter evenings when the ceiling of the sky is an impenetrable dark gray, and the sun is barely audible with its rouges, oranges and yellows as it slinks down to sleep. I wasn’t feeling at one with anything; I wasn’t in communion with any supernatural entity, either. I simply felt detached from my surroundings. I was remembering what it was like when I was a little kid who couldn’t wait for the snow to fall so I could break out the sled and go whizzing down the hills in the public park nearby. That’s when I made my decision to leave that place, the place I don’t call home anymore.

POSTSCRIPT:

You’re probably wondering what the hell are “garbage plates” (?!). To explain: It’s a local delicacy. In the heart of Rochester, there’s a hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Nick Tahou’s where they invented a heart attack on a plate. It’s a concoction of macaroni salad, hash browns, baked beans, two cheeseburgers, and to top it all off, chopped onions and a special hot sauce. A big heaping, steaming plate of this food is all a man needs when staggering home drunk on a winter evening with freezing temperatures outside. There’s another restaurant in the town I grew up in called Empire Hots that serves the “Trash Plate”. This is a similar version of the garbage plate, but since I didn’t find myself too often roaming around downtown Rochester, I would frequent Empire Hots almost every Friday or Saturday night and scarf up a trash plate.