Most recent public comments by Allison Yelgin https://nowcomment.com/users/16924 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=408560 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=408560 I was thoroughly mystified by this piece and feel as though I would need at least a week of intensive rereading and note taking to address even half of the complex and numerous concepts and emotions discussed in the piece. Consequently, I will focus on a few particular lines that caught my attention. One line was, “Maybe becoming specters through a collective social death forces us to come to terms with having survived, and all that entails.” What struck me about this line was the way that Bee Vang writes about survivor’s guilt. He presents it in a way that acknowledges not just the feelings that survivors experience, but also the feelings that children and other relatives of survivors have. In this sense, he recognizes the ways in which war and trauma transcend individual experience. Such immense suffering and damage affects lives intergenerationally. This whole section, “Surviving, to Remap,” actually discusses the emotions, trauma, and responsibilities that survivors have simply as a result of surviving or being the “genetic product” of survival. For example, when Vang writes, “It is I who must labor to evoke a war that I inherit as its legatee, its progeny; it is my body bound to all the generations of the dead,” he speaks on the sometimes burdensome task of having the responsibility to represent and know about those who did not survive. Such is the nature of survival; you are expected to be knowledgeable of what was almost responsible for your demise. You are the lone voice to speak on your family because no one will care more than someone who so nearly died. Or, in the case of being a relative of a survivor, no one will care more than someone who so nearly never existed. In these ways, Vang talks about the complexities that arise from survival, and points out that the emotions that come out of survival make trauma and its effects a continual and ever pervading event in people’s lives. Wed, 11 Nov 2015 23:35:59 -0500 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=403382 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=403382 My junior year of high school, I, like many other high schoolers, discovered Tim O’Brien’s transformative and multi-faceted novel, The Things They Carried. I had never read a “war story” that even remotely resembled its structure, narrative, or evocative emotions. I had never read any novel that so completely intertwined philosophy and emotion. I thought it was brilliant. So, when I saw that this essay referenced it, I was thrilled. However, as I read, I began to see new perspectives and dilemmas in O’Brien’s book—perspectives that hadn’t occurred to me before. Throughout Nguyen’s essay, I found myself wondering: have I been glorifying O’Brien’s story for four years now? More importantly, if I have, what are the implications of this unwarranted glorification? Who have I, and presumably many others, left out of our views on war stories? One reason I was particularly concerned with my oversight is that I have spent a lot of time considering the nature of war stories for World War II refugees, but this recognition of their stories somehow never carried over to my thoughts on refugees from other wars. In other words, the concept that refugee stories are war stories has been in my mind for years. Yet I still never questioned O’Brien’s version of a war story, or his declaration of how a war story can be defined. My oversight speaks not only to the forgotten nature of many refugees, but also to the complacency and “passive consent” (143) that Americans give regarding war. As Nguyen says, there is a naturalness to war. I didn’t notice my oversight until it was essentially pointed out to me—the view I held seemed natural and that naturalness seemed right. So, I’m left to ask: what would make something so horrific (i.e. war) seem natural? Long-term exposure and widespread adjustment to horrors would do that. Therefore, Nguyen’s assertion that war affects every part of Americans’ lives makes sense. The only way for war and its consequences to seem natural, the only way Americans can appear so nonchalant about war is for it to be a permeating aspect of our culture and lives. Sat, 07 Nov 2015 16:27:34 -0500