Most recent public comments by Hiren Bhattacharya https://nowcomment.com/users/17134 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=408606 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=408606 Bee Vang shows the weight of the lost that these survivors have to carry. Bee takes on this burden to show Americans the ravages that war had on his ancestors and just how devastating it was. Yet when he shows them these atrocities, the sadness that overcomes them feels empty, what he describes as “unapologetic insularity”. It is reminiscent of the first passage in which the meaning of Kho-siab is lost in translation. We have words that we come close to grasping its meaning but they don’t quite do it justice. And these tear don’t do this loss justice. These people will experience this sorrow for all of a few hours in this seminar and then leave to go on with their lives. Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:39:23 -0500 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=407052 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=407052 I think the author makes a great point here. War favors the victor, often regardless of their methods. While his focus is on America, it does transfer well to other conflicts in history and most likely to we’ll see in the future. But what really stood out to me here was his interpretation of America’s glorification of war. That even though we know what is being shown to us is horrible, that in the end it was better for us to be committing the act then to be the victim. However, I think that the reason we glorify these stories is not because we know that it is better to be on top, but rather because at the end we want to see that image of the soldier walking, as Thanh Nguyen puts it, “into the sunset with a young Vietnamese orphan in need of his paternal benevolence”. I believe that the audience wants to know that for all the wrong that we had done, there was something from it that we could hold up as a difference that we made for the better. Mon, 09 Nov 2015 23:34:10 -0500