You Didn’t Kill Us All, You Know — Part Two

*This article appeared originally on the website, diacritics.org, on April 24, 2014. http://diacritics.org/2014/04/unsettling-colonialism-object-lessons-blank-pages-features-chamviet-relations/

In the months after that man’s pronouncement that I am “vanquished” along with my people, I still wondered if a generation gap erupted that night in San Francisco, some old school motherland racial formations coming to fruition, since no one within twenty years of my age has ever said anything like it to me, even if they knew that the Chăm kingdom fell to the Vietnamese. A couple of months later, however, my young Chăm friend Ariya relayed a similar story, perhaps more disturbing. After learning at a party that Ariya is Chăm, a twenty-something-year-old Vietnamese American woman replied, “I didn’t know there were any Chăm left! I thought we killed you all!” By perceiving Ariya as extinct—an incredulous relic somehow surviving complete annihilation—this young woman reveals the Chăm person’s precarious position within the Vietnamese American community. Echoing the man at the gathering in San Francisco, this young woman addressed Ariya as “you all,” making her a stand-in for all Chăm, while representing the conquering “we” without much sensitivity to the power relations inherent in the exchange. The woman’s ancestors hadpersistently tried to wipe us out completely, not just off the political map. In her surprise that there are any Chăm “left” after 500+ years of massacres, enslavement, and assimilation by her co-ethnics, in her lack of awareness that there are still 130,000 Chăm living in southern Việt Nam (and many more in the diasporas formed since conquest), the young woman reveals how the invisibility of the conquered creates and pardons the underlying logic of genocide.

Even as Chăm in the US are generally safe from such forms of state sanctioned violence, we know that our families “back home” are not protected, which adds a sense of urgency to our transnational circuits of belonging and affiliation. The rhetoric of extinction affects us deeply. We have seen that throughout history, the easier it is for those in power to think that we are “already gone,” the easier to hasten or excuse our disappearance. This phenomenon is something that the neighboring country’s Khmer Rouge leadership demonstrated during Democratic Kampuchea, from 1975 to 1979, in the campaign to target the ethnic minority Chăm in Cambodia with far more aggression—and much higher rates of killing—than they targeted the majority Khmer population. By Khmer Rouge logic, the ethnic Khmer stood a chance at being “pure Khmer,” the agrarian utopian vision of the regime, whereas the Chăm and other ethnic minorities did not. For centuries the Khmer had peaceably allowed some Chăm refugees to settle in Kampong Cham province, after the Chăm had received permission from Khmer kings to migrate during the Vietnamese conquest of Champa. Yet the Khmer Rouge attempted to justify its intent to complete the disappearance of the Chăm—in Cambodia, anyway—by blaming the Vietnamese for having already done the job. How can you get away with killing off a diasporic population? By pretending that their populations have already been completely annihilated, in previous generations. In both cases of genocide against the Chăm, in Việt Nam and Cambodia, a previous history of conquest left the blueprinted justification for more contemporary forms of eradication. These difficult recent histories heighten war-related motivations for the Chăm who have left their homes and moved to other nations, like the US, in pursuit of a life free of the types of violence experienced in Việt Nam and Cambodia. In the US, the belief that we’re dead on arrival probably won’t result in the immolation of an innocent job seeker or the targeted assassination of Muslim Chăm Americans, even as the belief in our extinction may occasionally function as a jarring needle across the record of our social interactions with Vietnamese- and Cambodian Americans.

Some Cambodian Americans even downplay the severity of violence against the Chăm during Democratic Kampuchea, as if to recognize higher kill rates, targeted assassinations, or specific religious attacks somehow minimizes the suffering of the Khmer majority. This denial may indeed be an outcome of the unhealed wound of having one’s own people killed by one’s own people, a trauma also demonstrated when Cambodian Americans insist that Pol Pot’s regime was actually run by the Vietnamese, and that there is no way that the Khmer could have been at the helm. Similarly, downplaying Khmer violence against the Chăm may also be a result of Khmer ethnic nationalism, and the resulting pride that one’s own people could not actually express racist tendencies—even the Khmer Rouge. “Khmer ethnic nationalism is quite strong, and something that Pol Pot exploited to his benefit,” indigenous rights activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reminded me during a discussion in 2013. One possible example of Khmer ethnic nationalism in the US—a Cambodian American told me that the “numbers aren’t there” for Chăm kill rates during Pol Pot’s rule to count as genocide. During our talk, it appeared to me that the crime of “genocide” as applied to otherethnicities besides the Khmer in Cambodia might, in this person’s mind, somehow overshadow the suffering of the Khmer people during Democratic Kampuchea—long referred to as a collective “genocide.” Yet since auto-genocide (the killing of one’s own national and ethnic group) does not legally constitute “genocide,” and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal must still decide if the regime committed genocide based on evidence of crimes against ethnic minorities, how could killing a non-Khmer ethnic group—at two to three times the rate of the average population—somehow not yield convincing “numbers” to count as genocide? Whereas the killing of Khmer people does constitute genocide? Legally, the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group” besides one’s own is the very definition of genocide. The only way to convict Khmer Rouge leaders is to try them for genocide against ethnic minorities, however unfortunate that may be.

Likewise, most Vietnamese Americans I know have never once conveyed problematic sentiments about the Chăm—whatever their preconceived notions—perhaps due to having a shared motherland, something made more pronounced within our concentric diasporas. Having all “lost” our home(land)s due to shared wars and having relocated to the same asylum country, perhaps, is a leveling force that can provide a ground for mutual recognition and reflection, rather than upholding the racial hierarchies that justified genocide against the Chăm in both Việt Nam and Cambodia. Despite the possibility of mutuality, the completely blank stares that grace many Vietnamese American faces when I tell them “I am Chăm” reveals that the community has far to go, in the effort to understand the complexity of the motherland. Many Vietnamese Americans have no idea that their home country has fifty-three ethnic minority groups, and that the Vietnamese displaced kingdoms held by the Chăm and Khmer in order to form the entire central and southern part of the country—the region that many Vietnamese Americans come from. The effectiveness of the historical amnesia passed from generation to generation is unnerving, if not disheartening. Yet a blank stare is obviously better than a grimace at the word Chăm, showing that one possible benefit of historical amnesia is that the conversation can begin from here, rather than be freighted by negative preconceptions about the Chăm. If you don’t even know about us as a people, you certainly haven’t held a lifetime of racist and discriminatory assumptions about us, the same assumptions that fueled your ancestors’ justification that “we were never meant to survive,” in the words of Audre Lorde. In this sense, the blank stare is essentially that blank page we can fill in together, through receptivity to hearing and learning more about the Chăm, including the Chăm’s historical relationship to the Vietnamese and even our mutual hardships of living in diasporas formed by war.

We also have an expanding horizon of possibilities for more inclusive knowledge here, contrasting the education system in Việt Nam. My Chăm friend Azizah Ahmad, a gifted poet, reflects upon her experiences in the Vietnamese American college-age community as she writes to me, “For younger folks who were taught about Chăm people because they took an ethnic studies course, there’s a sense of guilt for being our colonizers and camaraderie since we share the same motherland and similar struggles in the US.” If guilt indicates sorrow about conquest rather than celebration of it, and if camaraderie shows that we have more in common than the divisions which hastened Chăm disappearance in the past, it seems that inclusive education for the 1.5 and 2nd generations within the diaspora may offer us opportunities for re-fashioning Chăm-Việt relations in important ways. With this in mind, I remember sitting down in 2007 with Thầy Bắc Trần, lecturer in Vietnamese language at UC Berkeley, at the onset of my two-year foreign language requirement for my Master’s degree. We met in office hours, where I filled out an intake form while waiting for my assessment interview. As I took a seat, he looked at the form and immediately began speaking with me in Vietnamese, my mother’s second language. I did not learn this language growing up, after my mother immigrated from Việt Nam. I felt embarrassed by that lack of knowledge as I answered, “I’m sorry, I can’t speak any Vietnamese yet.” The yet was the word of hope that this would work out somehow. Thầy Bắc looked down at the form, crinkling his brow, and blinked. “But your middle name, Thi, is Vietnamese.” I took a deep breath before replying, “Our people were assimilated by the Vietnamese so we had to take Vietnamese names. I’m actually Chăm, and I am also mixed race, if that matters.” As I spoke, I wasn’t sure what he would think—what preconceived ideas he might hold, since neither Chăm people nor mixed people are held in esteem in Vietnamese society. As an older refugee from Việt Nam, perhaps he still carried the racial and social hierarchy from back home. Once silent, I began to get nervous, wondering if I belonged in his class, or if he would somehow treat me differently once I enrolled. The class hadn’t even started yet, and I already felt like the odd one out, as with the other times where not being “really” Vietnamese challenged my inclusion in the Vietnamese community in the US.

After hearing my short introduction, Thầy Bắc looked at me in astonishment, something I would later consider to be the crack that let the light in, in the words of Leonard Cohen. “There are Chăm left?!” Thầy Bắc asked with complete shock, as if the idea was inconceivable. After that exclamation, I could have responded in a variety of ways—mentioning basic facts about our concentrated population in the region of Phan Rang, with nationwide population counts and notes about our three religions, for example, to show that yes indeed we still exist and we even have distinct characteristics and even some variation. But I took somewhat of a risk, as I am wont to do, when I responded, “You didn’t kill us all, you know.” By addressing the Vietnamese conquerors as “you,” Thầy Bắc became a stand-in for those who’d decimated my ancestors—just as I have been a stand-in, in other moments, for those addressing my own ancestors. I also delivered the news with a smile and a tone of amused sarcasm. He looked startled but he returned my smile before we suddenly both began laughing. Loudly. The light let in. He also let me into the class, where I struggled to keep up with the “heritage learners” who already knew how to speak and understand Vietnamese, but may have lacked reading and writing abilities. As I made my own inroads into speaking, understanding, reading, and writing, I came to know and adore a large handful of my classmates, despite differences in age, ethnicity, and academic status. Before long I also learned that Thầy Bắc had held respect for the Chăm since childhood. He had felt that same guilt about conquest that Azizah recently described in the US-raised youth who learned of us through their ethnic studies courses. Thầy Bắc also believed that Chăm history is instrumental to Vietnamese Americans understanding their own history, and gave me repeated opportunities to lecture to his Vietnamese language classes about the life and culture of the Chăm people. “They need to know their own history, which is impossible without knowing what their ancestors did to the Chăm, and who the Chăm are.” The invitation to lecture remains, each semester. In this way, his own initial lack of awareness that we’re “still here” is something he has since refused to let happen to his own students.

Despite the sometimes strained relations between us, the conditions of diaspora have actually made it possible for Vietnamese Americans and Chăm Americans to re-approach our shared histories of conflict, to arrive at a place where we can begin the conversation anew, taking mutual responsibility for discussing and knowing history while also forging new alliances not freighted by the racism and social hierarchies that may well have separated us had we grown up together in Việt Nam. At times Chăm inclusion seems tenuous at best, as the outliers remind us glibly of our extermination. Yet as the 1.5 and 2ndgeneration Chăm Americans grow up in the US, not only among Vietnamese Americans and Cambodian Americans but also among all the other ethnic groups in the US, we actually have a great deal in common with those from our home countries of Việt Nam and Cambodia. The destabilizing effect of war was generally a shared push factor for our families’ emigrations as refugees. Since arriving to the US, since born in the US, we are sometimes made into culture brokers for our families and even our ethnic communities “over here” and our motherland “over there,” whether we choose it or not. Sometimes the tunnel vision of mainstream perceptions has us frozen in its crosshairs as a racial silhouette, as an object lesson about Southeast Asian refugees, as uncomfortable reminders of contentious wars in Việt Nam and Cambodia, or as confused for other Asians. Perhaps the shared sense of loss of our overlapping motherland(s) will be what binds us most tightly. I remember hearing the Vietnamese folk wisdom that French colonialism and American war in Việt Nam were karmic retributions against the Vietnamese for the brutal conquest of Champa. While I am unable to provide empirical evidence that karma played out this particular way, this folk wisdom certainly offers insight into how our histories of warfare are indeed interconnected through the sequential losses of lives and territorial autonomy, experienced between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries.

Each time it’s been necessary, I have been grateful to attest to Chăm survival, aware that the idea that we’re “already” extinct has resulted in disastrous outcomes for those living in both Việt Nam and Cambodia. The latter-day forms of settler colonialism remain destructive, so I’m grateful that it’s sometimes possible for the Chăm and Việt to stand here in the US, in our overlapping concentric motherland(s) and diaspora(s), with a shared sense of humanity on this side of the darkness. If the mere fact of Chăm existence is the crack that lets the light in, where do we go from here? If you’d thought the Chăm were extinct, how might you acknowledge the history of the conquest of Champa without reproducing the troubling refusal to “see” us that made the Chăm vulnerable to annihilation, a refusal to see that was ramped up by the massacre of 60,000 Chăm in Vijaya in 1471, and that continues in present-day Việt Nam? If apprehended as guilt, how can the sorrow of colonization be transformed productively? Certainly, the US populations of Vietnamese and Chăm have both been displaced or departed from the territory “fought over” long before the French, Japanese, or Americans arrived. In the US, how can our concentric motherland(s) and diaspora(s) establish our commonality and mutuality, now that we’ve all lost our “home” and found ourselves as ethnic minorities across the Pacific, in the US, within the communities of those who’ve emigrated from Việt Nam? How can we make room at the table for those who don’t appear, at first glance, to belong with us? What forms of collaborations extend these conversations to include not only the Chăm and Vietnamese and Khmer, but other Southeast Asians, beyond the arbitrary and permeable borders of any nation-state? When do our own exclusionary practices echo the doors once slammed in our own faces, as the violence inflicted upon us by others is taken out on those we perceive as subordinate? We must pry those doors open to let the light in, and meet together for the first time, where in the words of Yehuda Amichai—

a whisper will be heard in the place

Where the ruined

House once stood.

This piece originally appeared on the website, www.diacritics.org