{"id":23184,"date":"2014-04-24T00:01:28","date_gmt":"2014-04-24T07:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dvan.org\/?p=23184"},"modified":"2018-10-14T21:59:39","modified_gmt":"2018-10-15T04:59:39","slug":"diacriticize-didnt-kill-us-know-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dvan.org\/2014\/04\/diacriticize-didnt-kill-us-know-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"diaCRITICIZE \u2014 You Didn’t Kill Us All, You Know \u2014 Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this exclusive new diaCRITICIZE,\u00a0Julie Thi Underhill<\/a>\u00a0offers an in-depth introduction to the sometimes fraught relationship between Ch\u0103m<\/i>\u00a0Americans and Vietnamese Americans. She raises difficult questions, including why Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans would rather forget the conquest of the\u00a0Ch\u0103m, the continuing existence of the\u00a0Ch\u0103m people, and whether or not the\u00a0Ch\u0103m can be compared to Native Americans. She also raises questions about relations between <\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i>Ch\u0103m and Khmer people, largely impacted (for better or for worse) by the violence of the Khmer Rouge. <\/i><\/i><\/i><\/i>She concludes on a hopeful note whereby Ch\u0103m<\/i>\u00a0Americans and Vietnamese Americans can begin filling in together the \u201cblank pages\u201d of shared history and memory.<\/i><\/p>\n

Although Julie Thi Underhill has previously written for diaCRITICS about Democractic Kampuchea\u2019s Genocide of the Ch\u0103m<\/a> during the 1970s in Cambodia, this provocative diaCRITICIZE essay is the first essay published in English, since 1987, which exclusively centers the Ch\u0103m in <\/i>Vi\u1ec7t Nam and their communities and identities in the US.<\/i><\/p>\n

This essay continues from its first installment, which ran a few days ago here on diaCRITICS<\/a>.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Have you subscribed to diaCRITICS yet? Subscribe and win prizes!\u00a0Read more details<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
My 35mm documentary photographs of my Ch\u0103m family in Vi\u1ec7t Nam offer indisputable proof of the continued existence of the Ch\u0103m, in case you needed it. From my first trip to Palei Uu in 1999.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the months after that man\u2019s 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 Ch\u0103m kingdom fell to the Vietnamese. A couple of months later, however, my young Ch\u0103m friend Ariya relayed a similar story, perhaps more disturbing. After learning at a party that Ariya is Ch\u0103m, a twenty-something-year-old Vietnamese American woman replied, \u201cI didn\u2019t know there were any Ch\u0103m left! I thought we killed you all<\/i>!\u201d By perceiving Ariya as extinct\u2014an incredulous relic somehow surviving complete annihilation\u2014this young woman reveals the Ch\u0103m person\u2019s precarious position within the Vietnamese American community. Echoing the man at the gathering in San Francisco, this young woman addressed Ariya as \u201cyou all,\u201d making her a stand-in for all Ch\u0103m, while representing the conquering \u201cwe\u201d without much sensitivity to the power relations inherent in the exchange. The woman\u2019s ancestors had<\/i> persistently tried to wipe us out completely, not just off the political map. In her surprise that there are any Ch\u0103m \u201cleft\u201d after 500+ years of massacres, enslavement, and assimilation by her co-ethnics, in her lack of awareness that there are still 130,000 Ch\u0103m living in southern Vi\u1ec7t 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.<\/p>\n

As if conquest was bloodless and<\/em> totalizing, the man in San Francisco and the woman at the party and their talk about Ch\u0103m defeat and annihilation portray the tensions wrought by the post-\/colonial encounter in the diaspora. Yet for those Ch\u0103m in the US, even amidst awkward conversations about our identities, we are<\/em> actually quite fortunate to \u201cbe here\u201d or else be away from “home,” since our families in Vi\u1ec7t Nam live within continued settler colonialism, within a stridently upheld racial and social hierarchy where much worse happens than insults at social gatherings. Granted, the academic interest in\u00a0Ch\u0103m history and culture, exemplified by recent conferences held in HCMC<\/a> and Phan Thi\u1ebft, shows that we are still “on the map” for some scholars, even as we sometimes disappear within the “family” of Vi\u1ec7t Nam rubric whereby no indigenous peoples are recognized as such, by the current government<\/a>. The confluence of social death and literal death, however, occurs when even the most extreme forms of violence against the Ch\u0103m are not investigated or punished, which gives an air of impunity to such crimes. In March 2013, a young Ch\u0103m college graduate\u2014Th\u00e0nh Xu\u00e2n Th\u1ecbnh from Ph\u01b0\u01a1c Nh\u01a1n village\u2014was burned to death at a government-run employment agency in Vi\u1ec7t Nam, for simply requesting a refund of his job-placement money when no job had materialized after a wait of three months. By this and other human rights violations against the Ch\u0103m<\/a>, the 541-year campaign to eliminate the Ch\u0103m acquires newly sinister forms. I could only imagine the terror of this young man burned<\/i> to death<\/i> for having the audacity not only to seek an education, but also to seek a refund from an employment agency for services not rendered. How much was the decision to immolate Th\u00e0nh Xu\u00e2n Th\u1ecbnh symbolically and literally fueled by the refusal to \u201csee\u201d that Ch\u0103m college graduate as deserving not only of a job\u2014a standard desire for any young college graduate\u2014but also of life? How does the refusal to see him as human<\/em> reveal the mechanisms of both settler colonialism and genocide, whereby eradication of the indigenous person is nestled within the imperative to reserve life-sustaining resources only for those who are meant to survive?<\/p>\n

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Our maternal family cemetery is in the arid deserts near Phan Rang, home to the majority of Ch\u0103m in Vi\u1ec7t Nam. This photograph of my grandmother’s reburial ceremony was made in 2006.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even as Ch\u0103m in the US are generally safe from such forms of state sanctioned violence, we know that our families \u201cback home\u201d 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 \u201calready gone,\u201d 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 Ch\u0103m in Cambodia<\/a> with far more aggression\u2014and much higher rates of killing\u2014than they targeted the majority Khmer population. By Khmer Rouge logic, the ethnic Khmer stood a chance at being \u201cpure Khmer,\u201d the agrarian utopian vision of the regime, whereas the Ch\u0103m and other ethnic minorities did not<\/a>. For centuries the Khmer had peaceably allowed some Ch\u0103m refugees to settle in Kampong Cham province, after the Ch\u0103m 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<\/i> the disappearance of the Ch\u0103m\u2014in Cambodia, anyway\u2014by 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 Ch\u0103m, in Vi\u1ec7t 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 Ch\u0103m 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 Vi\u1ec7t Nam and Cambodia.\u00a0In the US, the belief that we\u2019re dead on arrival probably<\/em> won\u2019t result in the immolation of an innocent job seeker or the targeted assassination of Muslim Ch\u0103m 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.<\/p>\n

Some Cambodian Americans even downplay the severity of violence against the Ch\u0103m 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\u2019s own people killed by one\u2019s 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<\/em>\u00a0that the Khmer could have been at the helm. Similarly, downplaying Khmer violence against the Ch\u0103m may also be a result of Khmer ethnic nationalism<\/a>, and the resulting pride that one\u2019s own people could not actually express racist tendencies\u2014even<\/em> the Khmer Rouge. “Khmer ethnic nationalism is quite strong, and something that Pol Pot exploited to his benefit,” indigenous rights activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz<\/a> reminded me during a discussion in 2013. One possible example of Khmer ethnic nationalism in the US\u2014a\u00a0Cambodian American told me that the “numbers aren’t there” for Ch\u0103m kill rates during Pol Pot’s rule\u00a0to count as genocide. During our talk, it appeared to me that the crime of “genocide” as applied to other<\/em> ethnicities besides the Khmer<\/a> in Cambodia might, in this person’s mind, somehow overshadow the suffering of the Khmer people during Democratic Kampuchea\u2014long 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<\/a> must still decide if<\/i> the regime committed genocide based on evidence of crimes against ethnic minorities<\/a>, how could killing\u00a0a non-Khmer<\/em> ethnic group\u2014at two to three times the rate of the average population\u2014somehow not yield convincing “numbers” to count as genocide? Whereas the killing of Khmer people does<\/em> constitute genocide? Legally, the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group\u201d besides<\/em> one’s own is the very definition of genocide.<\/a> The only way to convict Khmer Rouge leaders is to try them for genocide against ethnic minorities, however unfortunate that may be.<\/p>\n

For some Cambodian Americans, it appears, to legitimize the suffering of the\u00a0Ch\u0103m in Cambodia somehow diminishes the “numbers” of Khmer killed by the Khmer Rouge. For these individuals, outright denial of Ch\u0103m genocide in Cambodia is preferable to a sense of shared victimization between the Ch\u0103m and Khmer. This denial insists that the Khmer people couldn’t have possibly<\/em> been racially discriminatory when selecting targets of annihilation, even as the Khmer Rouge sought only the “pure Khmer” in the ideologies and practices of their regime. Yet according to the Documentation Center of Cambodia<\/a>, the\u00a0Ch\u0103m\u2014who were forcibly displaced from their communities and dispersed and targeted as a people\u2014died at a higher rate than any other ethnic or religious group<\/a>, with many atrocities against their Muslim practices. Some Cambodian Americans refuse to believe the Khmer Rouge attacks against Islam, however. One such respondent to a paper I presented at a conference actually insisted that \u201cthere are no pigs in Cambodia\u201d to explain that it was “impossible” that the Khmer Rouge forced the Ch\u0103m to eat pork to violate their Islamic beliefs, despite widespread oral testimonies to the contrary. A fellow panelist\u2014a Khmer researcher from Phnom Penh\u2014and I had both mentioned the forced consumption of pigs and the conversion of mosques into pigsties during the KR era, so we just looked at each other quizzically and shook our heads, before I explained why I believe the overwhelming evidence that pigs not only exist in Cambodia<\/a>, but that pigs were also used by the Khmer Rouge to force the Ch\u0103m to violate their prohibitions within Islam<\/a>. Thankfully, such strident disbelief represents an outlier perspective, far distant from the empathetic sense of collective suffering<\/a> usually expressed by those who survived Pol Pot or who fled in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge\u2019s initial defeat by Vietnamese armies in 1979. Many Cambodians I’ve met do<\/em> feel that sense of shared hardship with the Ch\u0103m, including every Khmer person I interviewed in Cambodia in 2010, many who volunteered that the\u00a0Ch\u0103m “had it the worst” without once conveying the sense that\u00a0Ch\u0103m suffering overshadowed their own.<\/p>\n

\"Ch\u0103m
Ch\u0103m woman in Svay Khleang in Cambodia, during conversation about the village’s history, photographed during my visit in 2010.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Likewise, most Vietnamese Americans I know have never\u00a0once<\/i>\u00a0conveyed problematic sentiments about the Ch\u0103m\u2014whatever their preconceived notions\u2014perhaps due to having a shared motherland, something made more pronounced within our concentric diasporas. Having all \u201clost\u201d 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 Ch\u0103m in both Vi\u1ec7t Nam and Cambodia.\u00a0Despite the possibility of mutuality, the completely blank stares that grace many Vietnamese American faces when I tell them “I am Ch\u0103m” 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 Ch\u0103m and Khmer in order to form the entire central and southern part of the country\u2014the 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 Ch\u0103m<\/em>, 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 Ch\u0103m. If you don\u2019t even know<\/i> about us as a people, you certainly haven\u2019t 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<\/a>,” 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 Ch\u0103m, including the Ch\u0103m’s\u00a0historical relationship to the Vietnamese and even our mutual hardships of living in diasporas formed by war.<\/p>\n

We also have an expanding horizon of possibilities for more inclusive knowledge here, contrasting the education system in Vi\u1ec7t Nam. My Ch\u0103m friend Azizah Ahmad, a gifted poet, reflects upon her experiences in the Vietnamese American college-age community as she writes to me, \u201cFor younger folks who were taught about Ch\u0103m people because they took an ethnic studies course, there\u2019s a sense of guilt for being our colonizers and camaraderie since we share the same motherland and similar struggles in the US.\u201d\u00a0If 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 Ch\u0103m disappearance in the past, it seems that inclusive education for the 1.5 and\u00a02nd<\/sup> generations within the diaspora may offer us opportunities for re-fashioning Ch\u0103m-Vi\u1ec7t relations in important ways. With this in mind, I remember sitting down in 2007 with Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc Tr\u1ea7n<\/a>, lecturer in Vietnamese language at UC Berkeley, at the onset of my two-year foreign language requirement for my Master\u2019s 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 Vi\u1ec7t Nam. I felt embarrassed by that lack of knowledge as I answered, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, I can\u2019t speak any Vietnamese yet.\u201d The yet was the word of hope that this would work out somehow. Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc looked down at the form, crinkling his brow, and blinked. \u201cBut your middle name, Thi, is Vietnamese.\u201d I took a deep breath before replying, \u201cOur people were assimilated by the Vietnamese so we had to take Vietnamese names. I\u2019m actually Ch\u0103m, and I am also mixed race, if that matters.\u201d As I spoke, I wasn\u2019t sure what he would think\u2014what preconceived ideas he might hold, since neither Ch\u0103m people nor mixed people are held in esteem in Vietnamese society. As an older refugee from Vi\u1ec7t 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\u2019t even started yet, and I already felt like the odd one out, as with the other times where not being \u201creally\u201d Vietnamese challenged my inclusion in the Vietnamese community in the US<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After hearing my short introduction, Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc 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. \u201cThere are Ch\u0103m left?!\u201d Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc asked with complete shock, as if the idea was inconceivable. After that exclamation, I could have responded in a variety of ways\u2014mentioning 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, \u201cYou didn\u2019t kill us all<\/i>, you know.\u201d By addressing the Vietnamese conquerors as \u201cyou,\u201d Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc became a stand-in for those who\u2019d decimated my ancestors\u2014just 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 \u201cheritage learners\u201d 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 Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc had held respect for the Ch\u0103m 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. Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc\u00a0also believed that Ch\u0103m 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 Ch\u0103m people. \u201cThey need to know their own history, which is impossible without knowing what their ancestors did to the Ch\u0103m, and who the Ch\u0103m are.” The invitation to lecture remains, each semester. In this way, his own initial lack of awareness that we\u2019re \u201cstill here\u201d is something he has since refused to let happen to his own students.<\/p>\n

In my last semester studying under Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc, I attended office hours one day alongside other students, including my friend and classmate Michelle. Her parents had just arrived to meet Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc before attending the Vietnamese Student Association\u2019s culture show that night at Zellerbach Hall. Their daughter\u2014a beautiful, intelligent, kind, and talented senior\u2014would star in the show. \u201cOh, Michelle,\u201d I said, before departing office hours, \u201cI\u2019m coming to your show tonight. I am actually thinking of wearing my \u00e1o d\u00e0i<\/i>,\u201d referring to the traditional attire worn by Southern women in Vi\u1ec7t Nam, a gracefully fitted tunic with slit sides, over long loose pants. \u201cBut I sometimes get nervous wearing traditional Vietnamese clothing,\u201d I confessed, \u201cbecause I am afraid Vi\u1ec7t people will think I have no right to wear their clothes.\u201d Her parents were standing near as Michelle and I had a short discussion about my struggling to belong despite my fears of \u201cinauthenticity,\u201d the same ones that had troubled me when Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc had asked about my middle name, eighteen months before in that same office. \u201cSo I\u2019ve decided that if anyone challenges me, I will just let them know that the Vietnamese stole most of the design from the \u00e1o d\u00e0i<\/i> from the Ch\u0103m anyway, so I can wear an \u00e1o d\u00e0i <\/i>if I want.\u201d My tone was amiable, perfected from years of truthtelling through humor. She smiled with a knowing look. \u201cThe Vietnamese stole everything else<\/em> from the Ch\u0103m,\u201d she observed. \u201cSo why not your clothing, too?\u201d We both laughed at our dark jokes about conquest, to the amazement of her parents standing with us, who\u2019d probably never<\/i> heard such a conversation between descendants of Vietnamese colonizers and Ch\u0103m “conquered.” And if it hadn\u2019t been for Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc\u2019s interventionist invitation for me to lecture about Ch\u0103m history and culture to his Vietnamese language classes, Michelle would have not understood the conquest well enough to be able to banter with me about it, as my friend who’s made a place for me, at the table, many times.<\/p>\n

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A Ch\u0103m man at Po Klong Garai temple in 1999 during my first trip to Vi\u1ec7t Nam.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Despite the sometimes strained relations between us, the conditions of diaspora have actually made it possible for Vietnamese Americans and Ch\u0103m 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 Vi\u1ec7t Nam. At times Ch\u0103m inclusion seems tenuous at best, as the outliers remind us glibly of our extermination. Yet as the 1.5 and 2nd<\/sup> generation Ch\u0103m 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 Vi\u1ec7t Nam and Cambodia. The destabilizing effect of war was generally a shared push factor for our families\u2019 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 \u201cover here\u201d and our motherland \u201cover there,\u201d 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 Vi\u1ec7t 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 Vi\u1ec7t 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.<\/p>\n

This folk wisdom connecting the wars of conquest and aggression also expresses the underlying guilt some Vietnamese feel for the conquest of Champa, which I have heard confessed by kindhearted Vietnamese people in the US and Vi\u1ec7t Nam. This guilt need not be a submissive gesture whereby one loses face, but one full of mutual recognition\u2014the ability to see the other as human<\/em>, the desire to fill the blank page about Ch\u0103m\/Vi\u1ec7t relations in such a way that the light is let in. I\u2019m trying to do this here, from a Ch\u0103m perspective. From a Vi\u1ec7t point of view, who else besides Th\u1ea7y B\u1eafc<\/a>, the Cultural Quest Foundation<\/a>, and Bao Nguyen<\/a> will try to fill the blank pages in our shared histories? Granted, acknowledging the sins of the forefathers is not an easy task, even for the sympathetic. History is generally told through the stories of survivors and victors, who prefer to sanitize ancestral sins, glorify the spoils of conquest, or romanticize the erasure of those \u201cmysteriously\u201d disappeared from re<\/i>occupied regions. Yet in diaspora we can improve Ch\u0103m\/Vi\u1ec7t relations amidst continuing repressions against the Ch\u0103m in Vi\u1ec7t Nam, which have happened at individual, village, national, and cultural levels. Recently controversies<\/a> have also erupted over the Vietnamese government\u2019s disregard of Po Klong Garai as a sacred ritual site for the Ch\u0103m, as the authorities have confiscated and used our 13th century temple for ethnic tourism even when that tourism prohibits Ch\u0103m B\u00e0-la-m\u00f4n<\/span><\/a> clergy from completing longstanding annual ceremonies. And let\u2019s not forget the plans to build Vi\u1ec7t Nam\u2019s first nuclear power plant<\/a> 1.2 miles from Palei Uu, my maternal village, the same village evacuated by Minh M\u1ea1ng in the 1830s. Many Ch\u0103m near Phan Rang perceive the planned nuclear power plant\u2019s location in Ninh Thu\u1eadn province\u2014right next to the country\u2019s largest population of Ch\u0103m\u2014as an attempt to hasten our extinction by allowing the Ch\u0103m to be the first ones hit by nuclear contamination or “downwinding<\/a>,” and the first canaries-in-the-goldmine in line for possibly catastrophic accidents like the one at Chernobyl<\/a> in April 1986 and, more recently, at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant<\/a> in Japan.<\/p>\n

\"Po\"
Po Klong Garai visited by Ch\u0103m in Vi\u1ec7t Nam during the annual Kate festival.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Each time it\u2019s been necessary, I have been grateful to attest to Ch\u0103m survival, aware that the idea that we\u2019re \u201calready\u201d extinct has resulted in disastrous outcomes for those living in both Vi\u1ec7t Nam and Cambodia. The latter-day forms of settler colonialism remain destructive, so I’m grateful that it\u2019s sometimes possible for the Ch\u0103m and Vi\u1ec7t to stand here in the US, in our overlapping concentric motherland(s) and diaspora(s), with a shared sense of humanity on this<\/i> side of the darkness. If the mere fact of Ch\u0103m existence is the crack that lets the light in, where do we go from here? If you\u2019d thought the Ch\u0103m\u00a0were extinct, how might you acknowledge the history of the conquest of Champa without reproducing the troubling refusal to \u201csee\u201d us that made the Ch\u0103m vulnerable to annihilation, a refusal to see that was ramped up by the massacre of 60,000 Ch\u0103m in\u00a0Vijaya in 1471, and that continues in present-day Vi\u1ec7t Nam? If apprehended as guilt, how can the sorrow of colonization be transformed productively? Certainly, the US populations of Vietnamese and Ch\u0103m\u00a0have both been displaced or departed from the territory \u201cfought over\u201d long before the French, Japanese, or Americans arrived.\u00a0In the US, how can our concentric motherland(s) and diaspora(s) establish our commonality and mutuality, now that we\u2019ve all lost our \u201chome\u201d and found ourselves as ethnic minorities across the Pacific, in the US, within the communities of those who’ve emigrated from Vi\u1ec7t Nam? How can we make room at the table for those who don\u2019t appear, at first glance, to belong with us? What forms of collaborations<\/a> extend these conversations to include not only the Ch\u0103m 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\u2014<\/a><\/p>\n

a whisper will be heard in the place<\/p>\n

Where the ruined<\/p>\n

House once stood.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n
\"Julie
Julie Thi Underhill<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Julie Thi Underhill<\/a> has previously written for diaCRITICS about the lived memories of Democractic Kampuchea\u2019s genocide of the Ch\u0103m<\/a> during and after the 1970s in Cambodia. Since 2010, her historical, cultural, and photographic essay has remained one of the most visited posts<\/a> on diaCRITICS, generating dozens of comments by those interested in Ch\u0103m history and culture. She thanks diaCRITICS editor Viet Thanh Nguyen and the many commenters on her 2010 article for encouraging her to write more for diaCRITICS about the Ch\u0103m, and for entering into difficult conversations about the past. Her bio continues below.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/del><\/p>\n

Do you enjoy reading diaCRITICS? Then please consider\u00a0subscribing<\/a>!<\/em><\/p>\n

Please take the time to share this post. Sharing (on email, Facebook, etc.) helps spread the word about diaCRITICS.\u00a0Join the conversation and leave a comment! How do we combat the challenge of the \u201chistorical amnesia\u201d that settler colonialism perpetuates? How can we protect the cultural memory of\u00a0the Ch\u0103m, Native Americans, and other indigenous people from being \u201cvanquished\u201d?<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026Granted, the academic interest in\u00a0Ch\u0103m history and culture, exemplified by recent conferences held in HCMC and Phan Thi\u1ebft, shows that we are still “on the map” for some scholars, even as we sometimes disappear within the “family” of Vi\u1ec7t Nam rubric whereby no indigenous peoples are recognized as such, by the current government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":32352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[]},"categories":[25,92],"tags":[1576,1578,233,1361,933,410,1299,1360,1359,1363,1362,1364,1365],"yoast_head":"\ndiaCRITICIZE \u2014 You Didn't Kill Us All, You Know \u2014 Part Two - DVAN<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Julie Thi Underhill writes about anti-Ch\u0103m racism, and the sometimes fraught relationship between Ch\u0103m Americans and Vietnamese Americans.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dvan.org\/2014\/04\/diacriticize-didnt-kill-us-know-part-two\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"diaCRITICIZE \u2014 You Didn't Kill Us All, You Know \u2014 Part Two - 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