The Quiet American does not endorse the surgical malpractice of killing innocents, but neither does the Quiet American do much to oppose it. The Quiet American is not necessarily white. The Quiet American might even be an immigrant. A person of color. A woman. Queer. Trans. Or a mixed-race Black president of the United States who professes, even if ironically, to be
really good at killing people.
Or the Quiet American could be you.
A major American foundation features you in the pages of a major American newspaper as a Great Immigrant. This pushes your rather large button of vanity.
Then an uneasy feeling. You
search quickly and confirm:
Henry Kissinger is also
a Great Immigrant.
Goddamn it.
Immigrant America is better than Great America, but Great Immigrants are also alibis enabling AMERICA™ to execute what Kissinger endorses. Overthrowing the democratically elected Allende in Chile. Carpet-bombing Cambodia and Laos. Supporting the Suharto regime of Indonesia in its campaign to exterminate communists or Chinese. Who can tell the difference? Hundreds of thousands are murdered.
A war criminal
is still a war criminal
even if never convicted,
even if he’s a Great Immigrant,
even if he will never be deported,
even if he wins the Nobel Peace Prize,
because Bombing Makes AMERICA™ Great,
but Drone Strikes Make AMERICA™ Even Greater.•
Excerpted from A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial. Copyright © 2023 by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Inc. All rights reserved.
This excerpt appears in Issue 27 of Alta Journal.
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A MAN OF TWO FACES: A MEMOIR, A HISTORY, A MEMORIAL, BY VIET THANH NGUYEN
Viet Thanh Nguyen is an author, essayist, and professor at the University of Southern California. His novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016.
