![\"Beyond](\"https:\/\/objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/racefiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Beyond-Vietnam.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nLike many others, my Asian American story begins in war. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, my father was a young man studying in Seoul, and my mother a 13-year-old girl. They both largely insist that they experienced no suffering. Yet a different truth emerges from my mother\u2019s references to using helmets of dead soldiers that littered the ground as cooking vessels, or my father\u2019s stories of being arrested numerous times for his leftist political activity.<\/p>\n
It was only in my 30s, when I began interviewing my parents, that I was able to begin<\/i> piecing together their stories, and reconciling them with other information. I owe an immeasurable debt to people like Grace Cho, author of Haunting the Korean Diaspora<\/span>, and to projects like Still Present Pasts<\/a>. They\u00a0have helped to illuminate the brutality of the war, and to put words to the ghostlike power of intergenerational trauma.<\/p>\n Most people don\u2019t realize that the United States dropped 600,000 tons of napalm on Korea. There were 37 documented civilian massacres, with an estimated 70 percent of the war\u2019s death toll composed of civilians. As Cho writes:<\/p>\n While the Vietnam War is well known for brutal tactics directed at unarmed civilians, the same tactics were used against civilians in the Korean War, and more intensely, resulting in a larger death count in a much shorter time span\u2026 One of the most salient aspects\u2026 in the accounts of both historians and survivors is the relentless bombing led by the United States\u2026 everyone and everything that moved was subjected to constant bombing and strafing\u2026.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This was only once hinted at by my mother\u2019s memory of her father running around the room screaming, with a pillow on his head. She recalled the moment, laughing. But some of her other stories went beyond the absurdity of war, recounted slowly, soaked in the flood of our tears, my hands gripping hers in a futile attempt to absorb and erase the pain.<\/p>\n Perhaps this is why every MLK Day I listen to Dr. King\u2019s Beyond Vietnam<\/a> speech. It\u2019s my attempt to ground my critique of U.S. nationalism and white supremacy in my own life story. It\u2019s my attempt to remain mindful of what Nikhil Singh calls \u201ca mythic nationalist discourse that\u2026 obscures [Dr. King\u2019s] significantly more complex, worldly, and radical politics.\u201d In his book, Black Is A Country<\/span>, Singh points out the political utility of this national fable about King: \u201cthe mythic King allowed Americans not only to celebrate their progress into a more inclusive and tolerant people, but also to tell themselves that this is who they always were.\u201d It\u2019s a nice story that celebrates the nation’s benevolence, not the movement’s accomplishments<\/a>, and that pretends that racial justice has been achieved. Period.<\/p>\n King was assassinated one year after giving his Beyond Vietnam speech. As I listened to the speech tonight, I heard not a specific call to a detailed agenda, but the promise of a fuller understanding of white supremacy \u2013 one that links U.S. foreign policy to domestic racism and poverty. Sadly that promise was cut short. I pondered its relevance today. Could King have envisioned the kind of police expansion that we\u2019re experiencing in a post-9\/11 world? Could he have imagined the damage of record-breaking deportations to families and communities? Could he have imagined continued rightwing attacks on anti-poverty programs, and the growing racial wealth gap, despite higher black educational achievement and household income?<\/p>\n