VLVL 4: War, politics and love

[pynchonoid]

Good post, Mark. 

We had two big waves of immigrants from Vietnam into
California. One came prior to the US abandonment of
the country (soon to be seen again, just as
shamefully, in Iraq), and included some high-ranking
collaborators who got out with money and connections
intact.

The second wave came after the US crayfished out, poor
people mostly, many of them afraid that their past
work for the S. Vietnamese government and the US put
them at risk as the new government took over, the
people marginalized as so-called "boat people" (I
agree, it's a dreadful term), and, sure enough the
many of the people who didn't make out of Vietnam
suffered for their past association with the US
colonialist regime.

Many people from both groups settled in California,
primarly around San Jose, south of San Francisco, and
in Orange County in Lower California.

Richmond, CA, not very many blocks away from my house
here in El Cerrito, has a sizeable Laotian refugee
population, with lots more in Stockton, in the San
Joaquin Valley.

Nearly thirty years later, the children of those
immigrants are now beginning to have their own
children.  As we see in S. Korea, many of these young
people no longer believe US propaganda about the death
and devastation they spread throughout Vietnam (and
Korea).  Which is not to ignore the excesses and evils
of the N. Vietnamese regime (or the N. Korean regime),
but merely to put it in a broader context.

Plenty of tragedy to go around, and a lot of that due
to the US's misguided, war-profits-driven foreign
policy.





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