Harvard University Press Blog

Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Part II

In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’re showcasing titles that document the Asian American experience. Our second excerpt comes from Beth Lew-Williams’s prize-winning book The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, which historian Richard White describes as “a powerful argument about racial violence that could not be more timely.”

Monday night, Gong was asleep in his tent when the vigilantes returned without warning in the darkness. “So many shot fired it sounded all same [as] China New Year,” he told a coroner’s jury a few days later. As bullets blew holes through the workers’ tents, all was chaos. Gong ran for the forest, hunkered down at a safe distance, and watched as the tents burned. He returned to the camp to find the bodies of men he had labored beside only hours before. There was thirty-five-year-old Fung Wai, shot in the chest, and thirty-two-year-old Mong Goat, shot in the belly. Beside the bodies was a gravely wounded man, Yung Son. “Yung Son was shot through left arm, through both thighs and through ankle,” testified Gong. After Yung passed the next morning, the Chinese packed up their remaining possessions and took the road out of Squak Valley.

Gong stayed behind, minding the bodies of the three who died, bringing shell casings to the local sheriff as evidence, and serving as a witness in the coroner’s inquest and criminal trial. He had been defenseless against the mob, but now he could fight for retribution. In emotional testimony, Gong tried to convey the anguish of Yung’s death. He told the jury that “[Yung] was sorry to die. Got a son [at] home, too young, no one to send him money. [Yung] did not talk much, but hollered through the night.” Even in the courtroom, Gong proved powerless. He knew the men who had died, but nothing of the shooters. All he could say was, “Monday night white men come to kill Chinamen.” Who were these “white men”? Why did they kill the “Chinamen”? Gong did not know.

For the Chinese, this is how the violence began, with shock, fear, and lingering questions. Histories of violence, however, rarely start this way. It is difficult to begin the history of anti-Chinese violence with its victims because the story of racial violence is, inevitably, a narrative of action and reaction, perpetrator and prey. Searching for cause and effect, history favors stories of people who instigate events over those who suffer the aftermath. The Chinese make unnatural protagonists because they did not set these violent episodes in motion, nor did they hold the power to stop them. They also make problematic narrators because, like Gong, they often could not name their attackers or pinpoint their motivations.

Racial violence against the Chinese relied on the power of surprise. The Chinese did not know when threats would turn to violence, what form the violence would take, or when it would end. While vigilantes sometimes depended on bullets to rid their community of Chinese, they often expelled them through threats alone. To fully understand the potency of this psychological violence, we must start our exploration of racial violence with the Chinese, adopt their vulnerable state of ignorance, and attempt to understand what it means to live in terror.

Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’re showcasing titles that document the Asian American experience. This week we have an excerpt from Duncan Ryūken Williams’s Los Angeles Times bestseller, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. George Takei called it “A must-read for anyone interested in the implacable quest for civil liberties, social and racial justice, religious freedom, and American belonging.”

Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, FBI agents showed up at the Kimura family’s farmhouse to question her father. Nobuichi Kimura, Masumi’s father, was carrying a shotgun when he answered the door and, seeing the gun, the agents wrestled him to the floor. Minutes later, Masumi arrived home from school, only to find her father pinned down by one agent and another pointing a gun at her mother’s head. Her parents, who had immigrated from Wakayama Prefecture in Japan some years earlier, were trying in their broken English to explain the gun to the agents. Though terrified, Masumi’s English was better than that of her parents. She translated the agent’s questions to her father, who explained he had been preparing to shoot rabbits in the garden when they had arrived. Temporarily satisfied, the agents left. But in subsequent weeks they returned to the Kimura home to conduct further interrogations concerning Mr. Kimura’s leadership at the Buddhist association, which was seen as aligned too closely with Japan and potentially a threat to national security.

It was in this climate of growing suspicion and hostility that Masumi’s father decided to take steps to prove the family’s loyalty to America. One day shortly after that first FBI visit, Masumi was performing her daily chore of lighting the furnace next to their Japanese-style bathtub when her father entered the room. He was carrying items he had found throughout the house that had Japanese language inscriptions or “Made in Japan” written on them. Among them were Masumi’s precious Hinamatsuri dolls, which had been given to her on Girl’s Day. As tears rolled down her cheeks, she watched him throw the dolls and all the other Japanese artifacts into the fire.

Her father did not burn everything, however. He could not bring himself to destroy the bound edition of Buddhist sutras that had been handed down through generations of the family. Instead, he asked his wife to find boxes and some Japanese kimono cloth while he went outside and dug a hole behind their garage with a backhoe. After wrapping the Buddhist scriptures and the minutes of board meetings from the Madera Buddhist Association in the kimono cloth, he placed them in tin rice-cracker boxes, carefully lowered them into the hole, and covered them with dirt. By burying them next to the garage, he hoped to be able to find and recover them at some later date.

Shortly thereafter, in April 1942, the Kimuras were ordered to report to the Fresno Assembly Center, which had been set up at the local county fairgrounds. They ended up having to sell their farm to their neighbors for less than one-twentieth of its market value, and, after depositing a single suitcase of their most valued remaining possessions at the Fresno Buddhist Temple for safekeeping, they arrived at the center, where they were quartered in a horse stable designated Barrack E-17-2. They were however more fortunate than the majority of Japanese Americans. Instead of being transferred to one of the more permanent WRA incarceration camps, the Kimuras were among the handful of families approved to join work programs east of the military zone, so they ended up in Utah, where they worked as cheap farm labor for the duration of the war.

After the war ended, the Kimura family returned to Madera in the hopes that they would be able to buy their farm back and recover their home. But the new owners demanded a sum ten times greater than what the Kimuras had accepted for the farm three years earlier. They had also torn down the garage, making it impossible for the Kimuras to find the precious belongings they had buried near it. Their single suitcase of valuables, which had been stored away for safekeeping, had been lost as well when vandals ransacked the Fresno Buddhist Temple during the war. Unable to raise the money to buy back the farm, the Kimuras went to live with relatives in Los Angeles.

This story, told to me in the gardens of my advisor’s widow, has stayed with me over the years. Though just one among tens of thousands of stories of Japanese American Buddhist families during World War II, it encapsulates both the loss and the hope that made possible the birth of an American form of Buddhism. Though the Kimuras were willing to let go of their Japanese national identity by burning objects symbolically linked to Japan, the one thing they refused to erase was their Buddhist faith. Indeed, they ended up quite literally placing Buddhism into the soil of America for safekeeping. Like Senzaki and many others, their actions demonstrated their firm conviction that their adopted homeland would one day be a place where their faith could grow and flourish.

Q&A with Sarah Kovner, author of Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps

For the 75^th anniversary of V-J Day, we spoke with Sarah Kovner about her new book, Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps, which goes beyond the horrific accounts of captivity to actually explain why inmates were neglected and abused, and contributes to ongoing debates over POW treatment across myriad war zones, even to the present day.

Where were the Japanese POW camps and who were the POWs?

There were hundreds of POW camps, from Burma to Japan, from Manchuria to the South Pacific. Allied POWs came from what are now more than a dozen different countries, including Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, the U.S., and New Zealand. They included Indians, Filipinos, Chinese, and more rarely, Asian-Americans. And then there were Asian laborers, the treatment of which was appalling. 

If there was no “official” imperial government policy for running the camps, under what rules were the camps run?

Japan was a signatory to what we today think of as the first two Geneva Conventions, and they agreed to follow them mutatis mutandis, meaning depending on circumstances. Officially, two agencies were given responsibilities for Allied POWs: the Prisoner of War Information Bureau would gather and transmit information to the International Committee of the Red Cross, such as lists of POWs, and the Prisoner of War Management Office would run logistics and issue guidance to camp commanders. The same bureaucrat was put in charge of both. He was not in the chain of command, and he had few staff to carry out these responsibilities. He could merely advise the War Ministry and set guidelines. Most camps were under the control of field commanders, and run day-to-day by camp commandants. Many of these commandants were near or past retirement age, and the guards were chosen from those also deemed unfit for frontline duty.

Where and why did the Imperial Army use non-Japanese prison guards? Were any outsiders ever allowed in the camps to gauge prisoner treatment (e.g., the Red Cross)?

In 1941, what is now North and South Korea and Taiwan were part of the Japanese Empire. The Japanese Imperial Army used Korean and Taiwanese auxiliary employees to guard POWs. ICRC delegates were allowed into many POW camps in Japan, Korea, and China for inspection visits—visits closely supervised by members of the Japanese Imperial Army. But they were denied access to newly conquered territories, like the Philippines and Malaya.

 What would most surprise readers in this story of the POW camps?

First, some historians like to attribute Japan's treatment of POWs to Japanese culture, sometimes called “the way of the samurai.” In fact, the military's treatment of POWs had changed dramatically by the 1930s. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, Japan had been world-famous for its generous treatment of prisoners—they taught illiterate peasants how to read, and provided Russian officers with access to hot springs and even servants. 

Second, officials in Washington were initially unaware of the harsh treatment meted out to Allied POWs, but when they learned what was happening, they knew it was partly in retaliation for how the U.S. was treating Japanese American internees. Tokyo was very concerned about their fate, but cared little about Japanese POWs held by the Allies. Since negotiations were based on the principle of reciprocity, efforts to exchange internees broke down and the two sides instead exchanged recriminations and threats.

Third, more than half of all POW deaths came about because of friendly fire. The Allies bombed and torpedoed Japanese ships, despite knowing POWs were abroad.

Finally, many POWs endured violent treatment, but this was never a matter of policy. In fact, the Japanese Imperial Army carried out court-martials (gunpō kaigi) of some eighty guards who were accused of mistreating Allied captives. For many guards, on the other hand, using corporal punishment—such as slapping the face of a POW—seemed more charitable than a formal sanction, which could result in severe consequences.

Unlike the Germans, the Japanese have been accused of not fully coming to terms with the war. How do the Japanese today see the history of the POW camps?

That’s one reason why I got interested in this story—precisely because it is so seldom mentioned in Japan even while it looms large in Australian, British, and American memories of the war. While there have been some academic studies by Japanese scholars, the history of Allied POW camps is not a major focus of discussion. In a way it’s not surprising that national memories of the war experience center on their dead—especially civilians who were firebombed. When you do encounter the stories of guards, they are primarily in local histories. But if you interview them, as I have, you find that some of these guards feel that they too were victims. Korean and Taiwanese civilian employees say they had little choice but to serve. That’s why I titled my book Prisoners of the Empire, because I wanted to capture all sides of this epic history. 

Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy

Harvard’s Michael Sandel is an unusually prominent thinker in North America and Europe, but in China he’s a verifiable celebrity, inspiring what New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos describes as “near religious devotion.” On one recent trip, the border guard checking passports told Sandel that he was one of his heroes. Scalpers around the country make huge profits selling tickets to his talks. He is a regular on state television, and China Newsweek selected him as 2011’s “most influential foreign figure.”

Part of Sandel’s fame in China is surely due to the engaging style of his lectures, which rely heavily on interactions with the audience. Other factors include the rarity of public discussions of morality in China, where market reforms and exponential economic growth have left a “moral vacuum” in their wake, along with a thirst for alternatives to communist and market-based systems of thought. It’s also helpful that Sandel’s ideas, with their communitarian inflections, echo traditional Chinese teachings about private and public ethics.

Those echoes and connections are the focus of a new volume of essays on the ways in which the ideas that Sandel offers intersect with, resemble, and differ from Confucian and Daoist thought. Encountering China: Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy collects nearly a dozen original pieces from leading scholars who tease out how the affinities between Sandel’s work and the major Chinese traditions help audiences to confront questions of utmost significance in Chinese public life: What is the role of the individual to the family, and of the family to the community? What is the relationship between the virtue of a social institution and the virtue of those who lead it? What is the significance of individual liberty if the common good is based in shared values? How does one celebrate human diversity while cultivating a strong sense of community?

“China is now in search of a public philosophy beyond GDP,” Sandel writes in his reply to the volume’s contributors. “As in so much else, China’s success or failure in this quest will matter greatly for its own future and for the rest of the world.” Abiding by the pluralist conception of the common good which Sandel has always defended, the contributors to this collection provide access to and encourage participation in the spiritual and moral debates that have begun to permeate life in the world’s newest superpower.

This Friday, February 2nd, Sandel will mark the publication of Encountering China by joining Joseph C. W. Chan, Chaibong Hahm, Tatsuo Inoue, and Hongmei Qu for a roundtable discussion chaired by Elizabeth Perry, Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Organized by the Harvard-Yenching Institute and co-sponsored with the Asia Center, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Korea Institute, the event is open to the public and takes place at 3pm in the Tsai Auditorium at Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies.

“Genius Grants” for Sunil Amrith and Viet Thanh Nguyen

Among the twenty-four members of the 2017 class of MacArthur Fellows—recipients of the so-called “Genius Grant”—are two recent HUP authors: Sunil Amrith, whose Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants we published in 2013, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of 2016’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.

Here’s the MacArthur Foundation’s clip on Amrith, who was recognized for “illustrating the role of centuries of transnational migration in the present-day social and cultural dynamics of South and Southeast Asia”:

And their spot on Nguyen, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, and honored by MacArthur for “challenging popular depictions of the Vietnam War and exploring the myriad ways that war lives on for those it has displaced”:

Crossing the Bay of Bengal and Nothing Ever Dies are emblematic of concerns that’ve become central to our publishing program—migration, displacement, transnationalism, environmental history, climate change, and cultural memory, to name but a few aspects of these capacious works—and we’re thrilled to see this continued recognition for their authors. Congratulations to Amrith, Nguyen, and the rest of the 2017 class.

Liu Xiaobo and the Responsibility of Being Alive

The Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo died today, a few short weeks after the Chinese government revealed that he was suffering from cancer that had progressed beyond treatment during his political imprisonment. The course of his life was forever altered by the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, and, as Perry Link notes at NYR Daily, Liu felt haunted by the “lost souls” of Tiananmen, “the aggrieved ghosts of students and workers alike whose ages would forever be the same as on the night they died.” His widow Liu Xia reports that he dedicated his Nobel Prize to them in 2010, as he’d done in 2003 after receiving an award from the Chinese Democracy Education Foundation. In the following passage from his statement of thanks for that award, excerpted from No Enemies, No Hatred, a volume of Liu’s essays and poems edited by Link, Liu Xia, and Tienchi Martin-Liao, Liu Xiaobo declares his acceptance of the honor “in the names of the souls of the dead,” and speaks of the responsibility of the living.

-----

I receive this award today, May 31, 2003, only four days before the anniversary of that bloody morning in June fourteen years ago. I do not know whether my work has been worthy of the people who died and cannot claim to deserve this award. I can understand the honor only as a tribute to those who continue to speak the truth inside a system built on lies and as an offering to the souls of the dead, delivered through me, of memory that refuses to be erased.

I feel that those who perished that day are looking down on me from above. They look down on a person privileged still to be alive. They have been looking down for fourteen years now. I was a participant in the 1989 movement and observed how, in that dark night and early dawn, it was sliced by bayonets, pierced by bullets, and crushed by tanks. The glinting tips of the bayonets still stab in the recesses of my memory. As one of the survivors, I see before my eyes two things—the souls of those who died for a free China and the violence, the lies, and the bribery of the killers—and I am haunted by the grave responsibility of being still alive. I do my best to make every word from my pen a cry from the heart for the souls of the dead. I use my memory of their graves to combat the Chinese government’s pressure to erase memory; my searing desire to atone for having survived helps me resist the temptations to join the world of lies.

We may feel contempt for a regime that kills people and disgust when it lies to explain its killing, but we can feel only despair if a nation makes allowances for such a regime and forgets the people who were killed. How much more is this the case when the killings were on open display to the world and when the physical deaths of the victims have so well proven the moral deaths of the killers?

The crimes of the Communist dictatorship are many, and the victims whom we do not know about are far, far too numerous—both the souls of the dead from killings and the prisoners of conscience who remain behind bars. One way to compensate for their suffering is to be sure that we reflect upon it scrupulously in memory, and one of the moral preconditions of honest memory is that we utterly refuse the regime’s indoctrination and refuse as individuals to repeat its lies. We fortunate survivors, and anyone who lives outside the regime’s metal bars, must, each of us as an independent person, hold fast to memory of the victims and refuse to sell out to the material comforts that participation in the official lies can bring. To do anything less is to surrender the meaning of life, to sell one’s personal dignity, and to lose sight of what it means to be a human being. Nothing can substitute for individual responsibility.

Japan’s Popular Song Era

Since the 1980s, popular culture has been one of Japan’s most important and most visible exports, from video games and film to fashion and J-pop. But where did Japanese cool come from? What did it mean for Japan to have a “popular” culture? What was “Japanese culture” before the pop? And did popular just mean “Westernized?”

In Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents, historian Hiromu Nagahara faces all of these questions by tracing the rise of Japan’s pop music industry. As can often be the case with stories of mass culture, Nagahara’s exploration of how and why popular songs came to occupy a central position within twentieth-century Japanese cultural politics centers on concerns for hierarchy and democracy in the production, consumption, and critique of art, media, and culture. Indeed, the book demonstrates how the emergence of a highly capitalized culture industry threatened to upend existing hierarchies of culture and taste, provoking vigorous backlash from the political, cultural, and educational elites of Japan. In doing so, Tokyo Boogie-Woogie offers a new understanding of twentieth-century Japan by connecting the cultural history of mass entertainment with the social and political history of the transformation of the nation into a mass middle class society.

But don’t forget about the songs themselves. Here, courtesy of Nagahara, a playlist of tracks considered in Tokyo Boogie-Woogie:

And here’s a bit from the book:

Between the late 1920s and 1960s, an impressive array of musicians, intellectuals, government officials and other members of Japan’s cultural elite not only debated the merits, or lack thereof, of popular songs, but also made attempts at managing and countering the broader set of societal problems that were associated with the songs. This was true from the very outset of the genre’s emergence in the late 1920s. Produced by record companies that were largely funded by Western capital and disseminated through channels such as cinema, radio, and cafés, popular songs quickly came to be recognized as the audible symbols of what contemporaries called modan (modern)—a term that gained currency in the late 1920s as an adjective to denote all that was seen to be part of Japan’s mass-oriented, speed-driven urban modernity. As such, the popular song genre was immediately associated with contemporary trends such as the perceived Americanization and eroticization of Japanese culture—trends that found critics across the political spectrum and were captured by another, more sensational, contemporary phrase, ero guro nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense). In this way, numerous songs came to be identified, with varying degrees of plausibility, with countless contemporary cultural, social, and political phenomena, be it mass consumption, war time nationalism, occupation-era poverty, or—as is perhaps true even today—the allegedly ever-degenerating juvenile mores.

 

In Search of Bengali Harlem

Last week the Whiting Foundation announced the second class of recipients of the Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship, which celebrates and supports faculty in the humanities who embrace public engagement as part of the scholarly vocation. Among the 2017-2018 cohort is Vivek Bald, a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker who will use the time and funding granted by Whiting to continue his recovery of the stories of South Asian immigrants who quietly became part of some of the most iconic neighborhoods of color in the United States. He tells some of those stories in Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, which we published a few years back, and he’s working now to complete a documentary titled In Search of Bengali Harlem, a collaboration with the playwright Alaudin Ullah and musician/composer Vijay Iyer.

Here’s the description of the project from the Whiting Foundation’s site, where you can also see a preview of the film:

One of the earliest groups of Muslims to settle in the United States risked their lives to come to the country amid the harsh restrictions on entry of the Asian Exclusion Era (1890-1940). South Asian men working under indenture-like conditions on British steamers jumped ship in northeastern ports and linked up with clandestine networks of their fellows to start new lives working in restaurants and factories across the country. Many made their way to Harlem, where they integrated through marriage into African-American and Puerto Rican communities, in effect “disappearing” into the neighborhood.

Vivek Bald will use the Fellowship to help complete a documentary film recovering the lost history of these men, their families, and their contributions to American urban life. The story unfolds from the perspective of Bald’s collaborator, Bangladeshi-American playwright Alaudin Ullah, who is in search of answers about his parents’ own path to Harlem. As the search ripples outward, the film illuminates a larger twentieth-century history of Bengali Muslim settlement, inter-marriage, and cross-racial community-making in U.S. cities. As part of the Fellowship project, Bald will also implement a digital crowd-sourcing project to collect and share more stories of the descendants of these immigrants.

Bald, who became a documentary filmmaker before pursuing his PhD, met Ullah in the 1990s. That encounter inspired the extensive archival research that culminated in Bald’s book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. The new documentary and website build upon this scholarly work, closing the circle to bring to life the family narrative that introduced Bald to this powerfully multicultural American moment.

The Whiting Foundation believes that “scholarship in the humanities is crucial in pushing forward the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding of the world,” and that “engagement with the humanities provides a blueprint for full, informed participation in civic life in a pluralist democracy; teaches the habit of thinking deeply and broadly, ensuring that we ask questions about history and context when making important decisions; and develops skills that allow us to contribute more to a productive economy, including analytical thinking, facility with complex ideas, clear and persuasive communication, and evidence-based decision-making.” We most certainly agree.

Continuing Agony in Tibet: The Destruction of Larung Gar

Tibet in Agony: Lhasa 1959, written by Jianglin Li and translated by Susan Wilf, draws extensively on newly available Chinese civil and military sources to provide the most comprehensive assessment to date of the pivotal moment in modern Tibetan history: the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile and the Chinese takeover of Tibet in 1959. The book stands as a critical counter to the official Chinese narrative on Tibet, which is still being shaped today. The Chinese government’s efforts in recent months to destroy Larung Gar, the world’s largest Buddhist institute, have offered further evidence of its fear of any movement, religious or social, that it can’t fully control. Below, in Wilf’s translation, Jianglin Li places the assault on Larung Gar in the context of China’s history of crackdowns on Tibetans.

-----

Recent bulldozing at the enormous Larung Gar Buddhist Academy complex in Sichuan is emblematic of the Chinese Communists’ refusal to tolerate Buddhism—or any religion—as a rival source of authority. The forcible eviction of thousands of the academy’s resident monks and nuns is an incalculable loss for the entire Tibetan community. In addition to tending to people’s spiritual needs, the modern Tibetan Buddhist clergy also spearheads a public drive for responsible, ethical behavior. Thus, the Communists’ blind intolerance goes beyond religious persecution: it places them paradoxically on the wrong side of many other pressing issues, from animal cruelty to AIDS prevention.

For example, when the Dalai Lama called upon Tibetans in 2006 to help save endangered species by giving up their tradition of wearing exotic furs, they responded by tossing their animal pelts into bonfires. The Chinese Communist reaction to this demonstration of faith in the Dalai Lama has been to force Tibetans to wear furs to prove their loyalty to the Communist Party instead, and many Tibetan objectors have been beaten or jailed.

In recent years, the monks and nuns of Larung Gar and other Tibetan Buddhist centers have promulgated a set of modern vows for lay Tibetans—persuading people to renounce common vices such as gambling, fighting with weapons over pastureland, alcohol abuse, smoking, unsafe sex, and needless animal slaughter. With the expulsion of the clergy, however, these initiatives may be doomed.

The Chinese Communist repression of Tibetan Buddhism dates to the 1950s, when most monasteries were systematically dismantled in the name of “religious reform.” All religious leaders who were unwilling to be co-opted by the Communists either fled into exile or went to jail. As the Tibetan ethical system deteriorated along with the loss of leadership, the Communists attempted to instill “socialist values” in a series of campaigns, reaching a climax in the Cultural Revolution, which destroyed the few remaining monasteries and left an ethical vacuum in its wake.

When religion was allowed a limited revival in the 1980s, Larung Gar Buddhist Academy was founded. Through its welcome of a highly diverse student body, it soon became the largest Buddhist academy not only in the Tibetan regions, but in the world, with somewhere between ten and twenty thousand students. Han Chinese students came too, and took their message back home, spreading the influence of Tibetan Buddhism in Chinese society. Increasing numbers of people turned to the religion, partly filling the ethical void.

The religious comeback put the Chinese Communists into a double bind: they could not close the monasteries again, nor could they allow religion to mushroom beyond Communist control. In 1993, then Party Secretary Jiang Zemin formulated a “religious policy for the new era,” requiring religious believers to love the Motherland and the Party above all else, and to “adapt religion to socialism.” But who would decide which religious tenets should be “adapted?” The Communist Party, of course. It has conducted large-scale evictions at Larung Gar before, in 2001. And when Kirti Rinpoche, head abbot (in exile) of Kirti Monastery in Sichuan, issued a popular set of thirty-two basic ethical precepts for contemporary Tibetans, the Communists banned it.

The signals from the Chinese Communists to the Buddhist community are clear. Despite their lip service to social stability and harmony, what the Chinese Communists want most of all is to show everyone who’s boss.

Of Ethical Memory

When it comes to war, ethical memory illuminates how war neither emerges from alien territory nor is fought by monsters. War grows on intimate soil, nurtured by friends and neighbors, fought by sons, daughters, wives, and fathers. Our ambivalence about war’s identity simply expresses ambivalence about our own identities, which are collectively inseparable from the wars our nations have fought. These are the wars for which we have paid, from which we have benefitted, by which we are traumatized. Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us.

When it comes to war, the basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is thus not only about remembering and forgetting certain events or people. The basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is instead more fundamentally about remembering our humanity and forgetting our inhumanity, while conversely remembering the inhumanity of others and forgetting their humanity. A just memory demands instead a final step in the dialectics of ethical memory—not just the movement between an ethics of remembering one’s own and remembering others, but also a shift toward an ethics of recognition, of seeing and remembering how the inhuman inhabits the human. Any project of the humanities should thus also be a project of the inhumanities, of how civilizations are built on forgotten barbarism toward others, of how the heart of darkness beats within. No wonder, then, that for Jorge Luis Borges, remembering is a ghostly verb. Memory is haunted, not just by ghostly others but by the horrors we have done, seen, and condoned, or by the unspeakable things from which we have profited. The troubling weight of the past is especially evident when we speak of war and our limited ability to recall it. Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.

—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies