80 YEARS OF “THE ORIENT”: RE-MAPPING THE TRAJECTORY OF AMERICAN ORIENTALISM IN THE WAKE OF COVID-19 by Tyler Sehnal December, 2021 Director of Thesis: Dr. Marame Gueye, PhD Major Department: English Abstract Months after the unofficial “start” of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the spread of hashtags like #StopAsianHate and #StopAsianViolence perpetuated the ludicrous notion that a subsequent uptick in anti-Asian violence and sentimentality in the United States was wholly unprecedented or unforeseeable. However, white Americans’ fury and violent reactions to the pandemic, levied at their Asian American counterparts, merely marked another instance in the United States’ lengthy history of anti-Asian prejudice and subjugation in response to crises able to be construed as a possible threat to the white supremacy inherent in the American enterprise. To continually maintain an image of a nation deeply secured within the stranglehold of white social, economic, and political supremacy, white America has consistently moved to reaffirm its oppressive dominance. In the wake of major cultural crises like the Vietnam War, Imperial Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and now, the COVID-19 pandemic, white Americans have exercised their ability—an extension of their historical preeminence—to enforce and encourage the comprehensive ostracism of the Asian and Asian American populations supposedly responsible for manufacturing such crises for the sake of jeopardizing American white supremacy. A close reading of novels by Asian and Asian American authors like Bâo Ninh, Yoshiko Uchida, and Khaled Hosseini, however, especially in the wake of white America’s newest re-adaptation of the “Oriental” as a carrier of disease and harbinger of death, is crucial to the development of a more accurate picture of Asian and Asian American experiences. In this thesis, I will highlight the longevity of imperialist Orientalism in the United States to demonstrate that Asian and Asian American subjugation in the wake of COVID-19 is not at all unprecedented. Additionally, I will advocate for literature’s role in developing a more inclusive and accurate worldview: one that departs and often conflicts with historically white-authored Orientalist narratives meant to demonize nonwhite, Asian, and Asian American populations and preserve images of an unfettered and unchallenged American white supremacy. 80 YEARS OF “THE ORIENT”: RE-MAPPING THE TRAJECTORY OF AMERICAN ORIENTALISM IN THE WAKE OF COVID-19 A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Department of English East Carolina University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts (M.A.) in English by Tyler Sehnal December, 2021 © Tyler Sehnal, 2021 80 YEARS OF “THE ORIENT”: RE-MAPPING THE TRAJECTORY OF AMERICAN ORIENTALISM IN THE WAKE OF COVID-19 By Tyler Sehnal APPROVED BY: Director of Thesis Dr. Marame Gueye, PhD Committee Member Dr. Su-Ching Huang, PhD Committee Member Dr. Andrea Kitta, PhD Chair of the Department of English Dr. Marianne Montgomery, PhD Dean of the Graduate School Paul J. Gemperline, PhD TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1 WHAT IS ORIENTALISM? ................................................................................................................................ 4 ORIENTALISM TODAY ..................................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER TWO: PICTURE BRIDE AND ASIAN AMERICAN AS SPIES & SABOTEURS .................... 14 DISPELLING MYTHS OF ASIAN AMERICAN ESPIONAGE ...................................................................... 17 ORIENTALISM: “AT HOME” .......................................................................................................................... 20 CHAPTER THREE: THE SORROW OF WAR AND ASIAN AMERICANS AS WARMONGERS ............ 25 DISPELLING MYTHS OF THE VIETNAM WAR .......................................................................................... 28 ORIENTALISM: ABROAD ............................................................................................................................... 33 CHAPTER FOUR: THE KITE RUNNER AND ASIAN AMERICANS AS TERRORISTS ......................... 37 DISPELLING MYTHS OF THE “MIDDLE EAST” ......................................................................................... 40 ORIENTALISM: “AT HOME” AND ABROAD .............................................................................................. 44 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................... 49 DECONSTRUCTING ORIENTALISM “AT HOME” ...................................................................................... 50 DECONSTRUCTING ORIENTALISM ABROAD ........................................................................................... 53 A FUTURE MINUS “THE ORIENT” ............................................................................................................... 55 WORKS CITED ..................................................................................................................................................... 58 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Following the outbreak and subsequent politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, many Americans sought to simplify the largely unprecedented phenomenon of a global pandemic by identifying a more tangible target for their terror. When Donald Trump tweeted the phrase “Chinese virus” for the first time in early 2020, Americans were able to finally put a face to their fears: at home and abroad, Asian and Asian American populations quickly became the embodiments of infection. In the wake of (predominantly white) Americans’ collective scapegoating of Asians and Asian Americans for the outbreak and rampant spread of COVID-19, violence and prejudice directed at this more tactile threat skyrocketed. Reactions to this series of unprovoked assaults, attacks, and even a mass shooting targeting Asian American women included the emergence of hashtags like #StopAsianHate, which began trending on Twitter and Instagram in the aftermath of the outbreak and America’s subsequent uptick in Asian hate crimes. The rapid spread of hashtags like these perpetuated the premise that white Americans’ prejudice against Asian populations two decades into the 21st century was just as unprecedented as the pandemic itself. However, American anti-Asian sentiments and violence are more than just products of modern-day social media sensationalism. Rather, anti-Asian sentimentality has maintained a more than half-century long staying power in the United States, resurfacing periodically in the wake of any major crises that white Americans are able to deem a potential threat to the white supremacy inherent in the American enterprise. The United States has a long, well-established fascination with “outbreak narratives,” a fascination evident in the aftermath of the AIDS and Ebola epidemics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, respectively. In early 2020, the U.S. merely readapted its habit of generalizing entire populations as the perpetrators of a deadly pandemic in the country’s comprehensive ostracism of Asian and Asian American populations in the wake of COVID-19. While resuscitated nationalism and the emergence of Trumpism in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election undoubtedly helped foster the origination of “outbreak narratives” pinning the outbreak, spread, and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Asians and Asian Americans, the allure of perpetuating generalizing “outbreak narratives” in the United States has remained shockingly consistent. In 2019, folklorist and professor Dr. Andrea Kitta wrote that, “The attraction we see in these outbreak, superspreader, patient zero, and other narratives is that these narratives… simplify the problem and networks. We are no longer fighting an unseeable, unknowable virus; we are fighting something tangible that can be blamed and, most importantly, contained” (18). The result of this “simplification” of COVID-19 into a “more tangible threat”— one that can be more “easily contained”—is the brutality levied against Asian Americans in the wake of COVID-19, including unprovoked assaults and other unwarranted physical retaliatory behaviors encouraged by white Americans’ unfounded fury and misdirected fears. The historical predisposition of Americans to rely on “outbreak narratives” (like former president Donald Trump’s widely circulated “China virus” narrative) as a means of easing the nation’s collective consciousness in response to similar infectious disease outbreaks certainly undermines the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was wholly unprecedented. However, critics like Tessler (2020) and Lang (2021) have also noted there is something even more foundational to Americans’ reactions to the pandemic and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak; the latter of the two noting in early 2021 that, “[Asian American] brutality runs through more than two centuries of U.S. history, from the incarceration camps of World War II… to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin.” This brutality, Lang also notes, is “one that has helped to [continually] shape perception of Asian Americans as ‘perpetual foreigners’” (“Anti-Asian Violence”). Thus, 2 despite the nation’s predisposition to present itself as a haven for the “tempest-tossed” and its historical “melting pot” and “mosaic” monikers—perpetuated to promote the idea that the U.S. was and is a nation “designed to homogenize people, making them uniform in consistency” (Whitfield 53)—the United States has always fostered a disdain for the immigrant and other non- whites. The U.S. has historically—and oftentimes explicitly—strived to preserve its founding fathers’ cultural heritage and undisputable preeminence in instances of great political furor, including in the enactment of 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act, the popularization of anti- immigration sentiments in the response to the “Red Scare” of the early twentieth century, and in the perpetuated political and social discourse concerning immigration today. A product of these racist devices and acts of exclusion is the palpability of the U.S.’ disdainful attitude toward non- whites and, specifically, people of an Asian diaspora. In a manner not unlike the dynamic, systemic oppression of African Americans (by means of slavery, Jim Crow laws, implementation of Eugenics and other racist programs, highly publicized instances of white-on-Black police brutality, etc.), Asian Americans have routinely found themselves the targets of white America's evolving prejudice and fears: fears of communism, terrorism, war and now—two decades into the 21st century—of disease. These fears bolster the underlying panic of white America: that outside or foreign forces continually threaten to eliminate the “status quo”—namely, the white supremacy implicit in the American enterprise. Instances of American anti-Asian violence and prejudice today are no different; collectively, these instances of Asian exclusion, prejudice, and persecution in the United States, from nearly two centuries ago to today—as Tessler, Lang and others have alluded to—are the products of American Orientalism. More specifically, these instances are the products of a coupling of Orientalism and American 3 imperialism, the latter of which is an ideology that has been central to the American enterprise since the mid-19th century. WHAT IS ORIENTALISM? In 1978, professor Edward Said published the seminal Orientalism, establishing the titular term to describe the West’s conflation of the East as a monoculture, as a singular entity often generalized under the broad moniker of “the Orient.” Said’s writings laid the groundwork primarily for American and Western generalizations of what is typically considered the “Middle East,” meticulously outlining “how ‘Western’ writings about ‘the East’... stereotyped, traduced, scorned or even downright invented what they claimed to find there” (Howe). As such, Orientalism has since had a profound effect on how scholars and academics view and write about the “Middle East” by encouraging devout consideration be paid to subverting the abstraction, exoticism, and eroticism traditionally inherent in Western conceptualizations of “the Orient.” While Said’s work closely examines and critiques the West’s mystification and generalization of the “Middle East,” professor Robert G. Lee’s Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, originally published in 1999, specifically explores American racial myths concerning East and Southeast Asian and Asian American populations. Lee’s writing takes on a distinctively pointed tone, attacking white America’s manufactured imagery of Asian and Asian American populations as caricatures ultimately capable of upsetting the U.S.’ carefully maintained racial purity and hierarchy. From the enactment of the Chinese exclusion act in the late 1800s to the turn of the twentieth century, Lee recounts instances of Asian American alienation in response to white America’s fears that Asian and American populations could infiltrate, disrupt, and ultimately 4 overthrow the preeminence of the American nuclear family or the native white supremacy inherent in the American workforce. Examining Said and Lee’s works in tandem allows for a comprehensive overview of how Orientalism and conceptualizations of Asians and Asian Americans as “Orientals” have provided an underlying framework for widely perpetuated and generalizing Asian and Asian American prejudice in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the introduction to Orientalism, Said writes that the problematization inherent in Orientalism—historically—is that the Western world, by generalizing this region of the world as simply “the Orient,” has effectively produced the Middle East “politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (2). As Said explains, by constructing and producing these perspectives and narratives on “the Orient” and by “setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self,” Western culture has effectively and continually “othered” “the Orient,” romanticizing it in the minds of Westerners as exotic and as existing in stark contrast to the western social, economic, philosophical and political experience (20). This has thus allowed the West to historically dominate, restructure, and possess a sort of constructive authority over the Orient. Two decades into the twenty-first century, Orientalism still enables the West to impose an appropriative violence on the East. According to Said, the West’s largely unchallenged generalizations and perceptions of the Orient and belief that these ideas could and can be propagated with “very little resistance” on the Orient’s part is what allows Orientalism to have such a “durability and…strength” as well as enables perpetuation of the notion that there is a great difference between Americans (“us”) and “them” or “all ‘those’ non-Europeans” (7). Specifically, Said writes that: 5 Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”). This vision in a sense created and then served the two worlds thus conceived. Orientals lived in their world, “we” lived in ours…. A certain freedom of intercourse was always the Westerner’s privilege; because his was the stronger culture, he could penetrate, he could wrestle with, he could give shape and meaning to the great Asiatic mystery. (43-44) Essentially, it is Western hegemony which allows for the widespread and widely accepted manipulation of Western perceptions of “the Orient,” thus enacting a violence on the East via the West’s generalizations, appropriation and narrow interpretations of the cultures that exist in this part of the world, largely for the Western world’s own understanding, benefit, and consumption. Lee’s Orientals explores the reasoning behind the West and white America’s desperate desire to uphold their historical stranglehold on perceptions and conceptualizations of “the Orient.” In the introduction to his book, Lee notes that racialized and stereotypical representations come about to perform “ideological tasks” (12). “The Oriental,” a caricature inclusive of all “Oriental” populations, Lee writes, “appears in various guises throughout American culture… [and] is embedded in the discourses of race, gender, class, and sexuality in America” (12). The fluidity of the Oriental as a caricature allows dominant Western and white American culture to readapt images of the Oriental depending on the particular “cultural crises in American society that give rise to… representations of the Oriental.” These “deployments,” according to Lee, come “in the wake of economic change,” any which spurs on “profound effects on the structures, relations, and meaning of families, gender, and race” in the United States (11). Lee explores, for example, adaptation of the Oriental into an outwardly menacing figure: as a threat to the native white laborer’s 6 preeminence in the late nineteenth century. The propagation of imagery and rhetoric in the American southwest depicting industrious Asian Americans and laborers as the “harbingers of industrial wage slavery,” according to Lee, “disrupted the mythic narrative of westward expansion” (9) and Americans’ concepts of manifest destiny—ideas firmly rooted in notions of American white supremacy and imperialism. Lee also notes how, in response to the perceived threat of Chinese and Asian Americans to white American laborer’s preeminence, Chester A. Arthur signed 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act into law. Later, Lee describes popular imagery of Southeast Asian populations perpetuated in the wake of the Vietnam War. Lee writes that, “The received wisdom of the Vietnam War narrative is that America’s defeat in Southeast Asia was brought about by a faceless and invisible Asian enemy” (11). Consequently, in the war’s aftermath, in the dystopic narrative of white America’s decline, Asian Americans came to be depicted as hidden and more discreet “agents of foreign or multinational capital” and interference (11). Both of these historical adaptations of the Oriental figure and any of the numerous adaptations that have characterized other “perilous periods” in white America’s history of desperate self-preservation have all contributed to one overarching narrative: a narrative presenting white America and American industrialism and imperialism as, ultimately, victims of Asian and Asian American industriousness, sexuality, intelligence, and assimilation. Historical reactions to the Oriental figure, including those barring Asian Americans from “immigration, citizenship, and participation in American society and culture” (13), Lee explains, have ultimately culminated in a dramatic transition: in the past century, narratives of Asians and Asian Americans as threats to America’s racial and class purity have evolved from a simple series of myths into a perceptible reality for white Americans. Nearly 150 years after Chester Arthur 7 signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law, white Americans again demonstrated their ability to reduce Asian populations to a singular image embodying a newly evolved threat to their way of life. Two decades into the twenty-first century, white Americans, seeking to put a face to their fears in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, effectively readapted the Oriental (and “the Orient” itself) into embodiments of disease. As Andrea Kitta’s Kiss of Death notes, perpetuation of these images of Asians and Asian Americans as the embodiments of disease and of the COVID-19 pandemic invariably leads to narratives of the “diseased outsider” (27). For context, Kitta references the Ebola outbreak in the early 2010s, for example, which likewise had “strong associations with locations” (27). Kitta notes that, in the aftermath of the disease’s outbreak, many Americans feared for the security of their “physical, social, or political boundaries” (28) and were quick to pin blame for the epidemic’s origins and the disease’s spread on anyone white Americans felt could be categorized under the broad, indistinguishable moniker of “African.” Nearly a decade later, many Americans have taken up this same habit, broadly classifying Asian and Asian American populations as inherent threats for spreading COVID-19, even if there is no reason to suspect they have at all played a role in the disease’s outbreak or spread beyond judgments made based on these individuals’ perceived ethnic, racial, or national identities. ORIENTALISM TODAY Despite the lack of any scientific or correlational evidence linking Asian and Asian American populations to the rapid spread of COVID-19 beginning in late 2019, the U.S. has experienced a continual surge in anti-Asian hate and prejudice in response to the pandemic’s outbreak and subsequent spread. These anti-Asian sentiments have been expressed through anti-Asian rhetoric propagated by popular media and American politicians (including by former U.S. president Donald 8 Trump) and in instances of anti-Asian hate crimes, which continue to be carried out across the United States even more than a year after the initial outbreak of COVID-19. In an article published in June 2020, sociologist Hannah Tessler noted that, only a few months into the coronavirus pandemic, there had already been “a large number of physical assaults against Asian Americans and ethnically Asian individuals in the United States directly related to COVID-19” (638). Tessler also wrote that, “Beyond the narrow definition of the incidents that can be classified as punishable hate crimes, Asian Americans [had] also documented a large number of alleged bias and hate incidents” (639). Though these instances of indiscriminate and unfounded violence resulted in a large outpouring of support for Asian Americans, much of the social media activism aimed at supporting these populations has managed to perpetuate dangerous notions about the history of imperialist Orientalism in the United States. In response to this undeniable uptick in Asian and Asian American prejudice in the U.S., for example, hashtags like #StopAsianHate and #StopAsianViolence dominated the feeds of American social media users. However, authors and critics like Said, Lee, Hamamoto and Nguyen have already explored, at length, the historical inclination of white America to conceptualize Asian and Asian American populations “geographically, cartographically, culturally, and temporally,” but in a manner that “nevertheless alien[ates]” these populations (Nguyen 38). The West’s use of its cultural hegemony and preeminence to readapt perceptions of these populations to preserve the white supremacy inherent in the American enterprise and distill any notion of white America’s supposed decline is well documented, yet the emergence of hashtags like #StopAsianHate suggests that such dramatic physical and appropriative violence is just as unprecedented at the pandemic itself. The idea that such anti-Asian violence is unprecedented, however, is merely another narrative perpetuated by American Orientalism to “save face” and preserve images of an 9 unchallenged and unfettered American white supremacy and of the United States as a welcoming “melting pot” and cultural “mosaic.” As such, the perpetuation of hashtags that encourage these notions of unprecedented anti-Asian violence and “Yellow Peril” in the United States, while well- intentioned, have managed to have the effect of encouraging the erasure of a long history of anti- Asian violence and prejudice in the United States. In this thesis, I will map the trajectory of American Orientalism (specifically, instances of American imperialist Orientalism) over a period of over 80 years, identifying the appearances, causes and effects of its manifestation within instances that have defined the last century. While American Orientalism has endured a multitude of iterations in the last century, my thesis will focus specifically on instances in which American officials perpetuated Orientalist notions and adaptations of the “Oriental” for the sake of furthering distinctly imperialist aims. Specifically, following the enactment of Chester Arthur’s Chinese Exclusion Act to preserve notions of white supremacy inherent in the concept of “manifest destiny” (an inherently imperialist notion), I will explore the perpetuation of American imperialist Orientalism in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War, and the September 11th terrorist attacks. These three events best emphasize white officials’ perpetuation of Orientalist notions for the sake of justifying ultimately imperialist efforts on the American West Coast and overseas in Vietnam and across Middle Asia. Just as authors and social media stars attempt to illuminate the senses of humanity and individualism denied to Asian and Asian American populations in the wake of COVID-19, I will also closely examine three pieces of literature that take on a similar task. Specifically, in chapters two, three and four of my thesis, I will examine articles by Fuse (2003), Rollins (1984), and Aubry (2009) in order to explicate the attitudes and generalizing prejudices directed at Asian and Asian American populations in the aftermath of the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, during the Vietnam 10 War, and following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Then, in contrast, I will examine literature—narratives representative of the realities of the Asian and Asian American experience in these time periods—to illuminate the stories and lives traditionally suppressed under the weight of several historical “blanket narratives” perpetuated by American Orientalism. Specifically, my second chapter will examine Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride to explore how Japanese American individualism and autonomy was effectively erased in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks. Then, I will perform a close reading of Bâo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam in order to illuminate the contrasts between American Orientalism-inspired perceptions of the Vietnamese and unadulterated realities of the war as explicated by a former North Vietnamese soldier himself. In doing so, I will examine the trajectory of American Orientalism across a span of nearly three decades, from the implementation of Japanese internment camps in WWII to the U.S.’ invasion of Vietnam in the mid-19th century. In chapter four, I will examine Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner to unveil the realities of Afghanistan and the “Middle East” that are so often buried beneath narratives labeling the “Middle East” as merely a breeding ground for violence, death and terrorism. In the aftermath of 9/11, anyone who white Americans could broadly generalize under the moniker of “Muslim” or “Muslim American” found themselves alienated and the targets of white America’s newfound fears: fears of Muslims, Islam, or anything the American racial majority could indiscriminately label “Middle Eastern.” As a result, Muslim Americans’ white counterparts, who, in the years following the attacks on the World Trade Center also picked up the destructive habit of labeling all Muslims and Muslim-Americans “terrorists,” successfully ushered the U.S. into a modern-day epidemic of widespread Xenophobia, wherein all Muslims and Asian Americans are typically 11 classified in the American psyche as one of four things: either as warmongers, barbarians, terrorists or—now—as carriers of disease. Though the novels I examine are works of fiction, they signal important responses to white officials’ perpetuation of Orientalist ideas and adaptations of Lee’s “Oriental” figure for the sake of justifying their imperialist efforts at home and abroad in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War, and 9/11. While Uchida, Ninh, and Hosseini’s novels contain fictional elements, their stories still provide credible and realistic accounts of Asian and Asian Americans’ experiences during these historical cultural crises. These accounts, as described by Uchida, Ninh, and Hosseini, are substantially more representative of Asian and Asian Americans’ experiences than Orientalist narratives which historically generalize these populations as spies, warmongers, and as terrorists. Therefore, though these novels contain fictional elements, they still hold significant historical value because they provide valuable insight into the innocence of populations historically blamed for crises like September 11th and by contrast emphasize the hyperbole of American Orientalism inspired perceptions of Asian and Asian Americans in the wake of such crises. Finally, in the conclusion, I will synthesize my arguments concerning the Oriental’s historical preeminence, functionality, and implications to illustrate how the revitalization of American imperialist Orientalism in the wake of COVID-19 is hardly unprecedented, and merely indicates a new direction in the trajectory of American Orientalism and America’s pursuit to maintain its long- held racial hierarchy. Historically, Americans have been quick to stereotype Asian Americans as a singular population: a population capable of being collectively blamed for waging wars, spreading terrorism and for the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, this thesis explicates an explicit desire on the behalf of white Americans to uphold concepts of Asian and all nonwhite Americans as populations capable of serving as the scapegoats for the pandemics and 12 other incarnations of death that have historically plagued white America. In doing so, the United States seeks to uphold the traditions of white supremacy implicit in the American enterprise by continually reconfiguring this image of the “Oriental” and images of “the Orient” to distill any narratives suggestive of the decline of American white preeminence at home or abroad. 13 CHAPTER TWO: PICTURE BRIDE AND ASIAN AMERICAN AS SPIES & SABOTEURS Given the preeminence of comprehensive blanket narratives suppressive of realities of the Asian American immigration and migrant experience, Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride is of significant historical value. Namely, Uchida’s novel is noteworthy because it counters Orientalist conceptualizations of the Japanese American experience, including the idea that Japanese Americans, in the wake of Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, harbored an innate disposition for violence and espionage. By telling the stories of members of a small Japanese American community, Uchida underlines the humanity of Japanese Americans typically discarded in dehumanizing narratives developed in the aftermath of Imperial Japan’s surprise offensive in the Pacific. Though Uchida’s novel is a work of fiction, Picture Bride serves as an important testimony to and reflection of Asian American experiences in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Further, the novel highlights the hyperbole of imperialist Orientalist narratives suggesting that Asian Americans living on the U.S.’ West Coast were inherently prone to espionage or were a threat to white Americans’ cultural and geographical preeminence at home. On May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law. Though the Chinese Exclusion Act only initially suspended Chinese immigration for ten years, its adoption into law enabled the passing of the Geary Act ten years later and the ultimate illegalization of Chinese immigration in 1902, a ruling which would stand until 1943. These discriminatory acts not only blocked immigration by Chinese immigrants into the United States, but also encouraged U.S. immigration authorities “to go to great lengths to hound Chinese immigrants” already living in the U.S., with officials often threatening Chinese Americans with deportation if they could not be “vouched for” by white community members (Christoff, 92). As such, the Chinese Exclusion Act marked a distinguishable starting point in America’s long history of anti-Asian discrimination and prejudice. The Chinese Exclusion Act was a product of Orientalism and white Americans’ subsequent conflation of the notion of “Yellow Peril.” An extension of white America’s desperate habit of self-preservation, professor and historian Robert G. Lee defines “Yellow Peril” as the perception of “Asiatic” immigrants as a threat to “nation, race, and family… an invasion of ‘yellow men’” which worsened white Americans’ “deep anxieties about racial suicide and class struggle” (10). Sixty years after perpetuation of this “Yellow Peril” narrative barred immigration by Chinese immigrants into the United States, white Americans resuscitated this narrative and reiterated the supposed dangers of Asian immigration and Asian American citizenship in the wake of Imperial Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. White Americans’ kneejerk reactions—particularly at home—to the attack on Pearl Harbor indicated a disturbing trend in the enduring history of American Orientalism: in its every iteration, white Americans’ responses to the “Oriental” typically grow more oppressive and more violent. Lee notes that white Americans’ anxiety “over a ‘Yellow Peril’ assumed the status of a nightmare after Japan’s stunning military victory over Russia” in 1905 (106). Similarly, Japan’s surprise show of force in the Pacific nearly forty years later prompted white Americans to claim that domestic internment of Japanese Americans was a “military necessity,” given that “the ‘racial characteristics’ of the members of this minority predisposed them to the commission of acts of espionage and sabotage” (Irons x). As American political activist and attorney Peter Irons notes, “Decades of exposure to the ‘Yellow Peril’ fever had infected the West Coast population. Calls for restraint by the press in the weeks after Pearl Harbor could not have cured the virulent disease of racism.” (8). As a result, within weeks of Imperial Japan’s surprise attack, Irons writes that “in 15 the press and in statements by public officials, demands for the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast replaced calls for tolerance” (7). Undoubtedly, the underlying preeminence of notions of an American “Yellow Peril” aided in accelerating the rapid and subsequent removal of Asian Americans from their West Coast homes in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, issued only two months after the Pearl Harbor attacks, resulted in the relocation of Japanese Americans uprooted from their homes on the American West Coast into internment camps. Upon its issuance, the official justification for Roosevelt’s order was “to thwart espionage and sabotage” (Yates, et. al 111). Regardless, the elderly, newborns and young children were still among those relocated into “barely inhabitable” camps filled with rows of hastily constructed tarpaper barracks and surrounded by barbed wire (Kessler 70). The widespread relocation of Japanese Americans based on their supposed “racial characteristics” emphasized that officials’ segregation of these populations in the wake of Pearl Harbor was not a matter of preserving American national security, but a matter of exercising white Americans’ racial preeminence and dominance. Across America’s lengthy Orientalist history, the internment of anyone “having 1/16th or more of Japanese parentage” (Yates, et. al 111)—ultimately totaling the imprisonment of around 110,000 Japanese Americans—is merely a single instance indicative of white America’s historically generalizing attitude toward people of Asian descent or of an Asian diaspora. The comprehensive discrimination levied against Japanese Americans living on the American West Coast and the attempted erasure and censorship of testimonies given by the interned—as noted by Kessler (1988) and Mizuno (2016)—makes Uchida’s account even more crucial to the development of a more inclusive perspective on the post-Pearl Harbor Japanese American experience. In this chapter, I will explore how Uchida’s conceptualizations of Japanese Americans 16 conflicts with post-Pearl Harbor depictions of Japanese and Japanese American populations as dangerous spies prone to acts of espionage. Moreover, I will note how Uchida’s novel emphasizes white officials’ ultimately imperialist aims in their removal of Asian Americans from lands historically “owed” to white Americans as established by the late 19th century concept of “manifest destiny.” In doing so, I will also demonstrate Orientalism’s continued preeminence and problematization sixty years after President Chester Arthur’s enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 1800s and explicate how white Americans’ internment of their Japanese counterparts marked the first of many checkpoints along America’s long and winding road of comprehensive anti-Asian oppression, opposition, and violence. DISPELLING MYTHS OF ASIAN AMERICAN ESPIONAGE Historically regarded as the “land of opportunity,” the United States was the site of a sort of “great migration” in the early 20th century. Though the nation was initially seen as a haven for immigrants looking for work, a place to live, and better lives in general at the turn of the century, only a few decades later, this notion of the United States as a “melting pot” had completely disintegrated. Though there were several social revolts and developments that occurred in the 1920s which had already been set in motion prior to the start of the 20th century, the US’ involvement in the First World War was what truly set in motion the eventual destruction of the perception that the United States was a nation in which all races, nationalities, religions, or otherwise could harmoniously coexist. The First World War was an unprecedented conflict as never before had the entire world been at arms. Though the war was fought entirely on foreign soil, World War I provoked fears that the United States’ enemies could infiltrate the American homeland, fears which would persist years 17 after the conflict had come to an end in 1918. As a result, “nativism came to full bloom” in the aftermath of the Great War, and “many who had been quite moderate and tolerant in their attitude now favored a reduction in the total volume of immigration and advocated tests to separate the undesirable from the desirable” (Wittke, 1949, p. 10). Therefore, despite popular notions that the United States has always welcomed immigrants from all walks of life into the U.S. with open arms, Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride explores the harsh realities of the U.S. immigrant experience in the early 1940s, as experienced the novel’s central character, Hana. Specifically, Uchida writes: When Hana set foot on American soil at last, it was not in the city of San Francisco as she had expected, but on Angel Island… She spent two miserable days and nights waiting, as the immigrants were questioned by officials, examined for trachoma and tuberculosis, and tested for hookworm by a woman who collected their stools on tin pie plates…. It was a bewildering, degrading beginning. (6) As such, from the beginning, Uchida’s novel illustrates that the concept of manifest destiny was a doctrine only ever meant to encourage white Americans’ imperialist aims and limit the imperialist and migratory habits of non-whites like Hana. After Hana reaches San Francisco and meets the man she’s meant to marry, Taro, things do not become any easier for Uchida’s recently immigrated Japanese picture bride. Despite perpetuation of the notion that immigration to the United States, even in the 1940s, would guarantee immigrants access to the same opportunities afforded to white, native-born Americans, Hana immediately finds herself and Taro living on a dingy street occupied primarily by other Japanese Americans. Of those she encounters, many are quick to acknowledge the status of Japanese immigrants living in the United States as “other” and warn Hana about the fragility of her acceptance by the white, native-born majority. Specifically, Kiku Toda—a “warm friendly 18 woman” who helps Hana get accustomed to her new American living space—explains to Hana that Japanese Americans like herself are “foreigners in this country,” and that, “there are many white people who resent our presence here… Don’t forget, we are aliens here. We don’t really belong” (25). Despite the U.S.’ historically welcoming “melting pot” and “mosaic” monikers, it quickly becomes clear to Hana that attaining any level semblance of the “American Dream” or financial security will be especially difficult for immigrants like herself or husband-to-be Taro. Later, after the events of Pearl Harbor, as Hana faces relocation, she wonders aloud how even young, hardworking Japanese Americans born in the United States could lose their “freedom along with their alien parents” (157). Likewise, her husband, later enclosed within the barbed wire fences of an internment camp, dismally laments that he “could understand [the U.S.’] hated for the militarists of Japan, but how much more anger and vengeance was it going to vent upon the innocent Japanese Americans who had chosen to live on its shores?” (209). Uchida’s writing and Hana and Taro’s confusion encourages important discussion about why it is so difficult for immigrants like Picture Bride’s central characters to ascend American hierarchies of wealth and social eminence and why those attempting such a climb could be so quickly dismissed as supposed threats to American national security. Uchida’s work explains that, just as Chinese immigrants and laborers in the late 19th century represented a threat to the white supremacy inherent in the American workforce, Taro, Hana, and other Japanese Americans’ presence on the American West Coast in the wake of Pearl Harbor represented to white Americans a possible threat to their geographical preeminence. Almost a century after the origination of the notion of “manifest destiny,” white Americans feared that their supposedly “God-given” geographic preeminence was under threat by populations of spies with anti-American aims. Because Taro, Hana, and others represented such a threat to 19 white American officials, they quickly became the targets of these officials’ senseless imperialist and Orientalist rhetoric and reactions. Uchida, at the end of the novel, most clearly encapsulates this senselessness of Japanese American internment when a camp guard shoots and fatally wounds Taro. The guard’s apparent mistaking of the mild-mannered Taro’s strolling along the camp’s outer fencing as an escape attempt wholly symbolizes the ridiculousness of U.S. officials’ widespread generalizations of Japanese Americans in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Specifically, Taro’s death highlights how dispensable nonwhite Americans can become to the white, native- born majority in the U.S. once white Americans fear that their best interests may be at risk. Uchida’s novel also explains that, regardless of how hard one might work in pursuit of attaining the often prophesized “American Dream” (typically available to those who simply work “hard enough”), if their success or presence seemingly interfere with the social, economic or political safety and supremacy of white Americans, nonwhite Americans and immigrants will always be swiftly relegated back to an undeniable and often deadly status as both an enemy and “other” in order to preserve the white supremacy inherent in the American enterprise and white Americans’ historical geographic preeminence. ORIENTALISM: “AT HOME” Uchida’s novel highlights the diversity of experiences of Japanese Americans like Hana, Taro and others in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks and American officials’ sweeping generalizations of Japanese Americans living on the U.S.’ West Coast as spies and saboteurs. Of course, a multitude of communities were uprooted and affected by white Americans’ kneejerk reactions to Imperial Japan’s ambush in the Pacific. Peter Irons writes that, ultimately: 20 By the end of 1942, all but a handful of the Japanese Americans on the West Coast had been herded behind the barbed wire of ten “relocation centers” scattered from California to Arkansas. Not until the middle of 1946—almost a year after the surrender of Japan… did the last residents of these dusty, barren camps return to their West Coast homes. (7) This widespread resuscitation of Orientalism and anti-Asian prejudice in the United States in the early 1940s had several effects. The uprooting and subsequent internment of innocent Japanese Americans in West Coast internment camps entailed significant stress, loss, and deprivation for the interned. Specifically, many Japanese Americans found themselves separated from their families and ousted from communities they had worked hard to establish (Yates, et. al 111). Even after their release, many internees were released from and forced to make homes in locations that were “both geographically distant and economically dissimilar to where they had been living prior to relocation” or chose not to return to their homes or original communities because of new housing shortages and increased racial hostilities (Shoag & Carollo 7). White Americans, then, succeeded in their pursuit of maintaining their geographic preeminence by ensuring housing insecurity, instability, and inequity on the American West Coast for Asian Americans for years following Pearl Harbor and the conclusion of World War Two. More than four decades after the first Japanese Americans were imprisoned in West Coast internment camps, however, the 1983 Congressional Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians determined “that not a single act of espionage or disloyalty was ever verified that could have justified internment on the grounds of national security” (Shoag & Carollo 8). Instead, “internment was recognized as the culmination of decades of racial hostility to Japanese and Asian immigrants on the West Coast” (8). This was perhaps the most resounding 21 effect of American officials’ internment of innocent Japanese Americans in the early 1940s—the act of internment and the ability of officials to exclude narratives oppositional to Orientalist conceptualizations of Japanese Americans as spies and saboteurs for more than forty years emphasized the preeminence and problematization of imperialist Orientalism and American white supremacy. Orientalism and its perpetuation of the West and the United States’ ability to selectively narrate history enables the all-but-complete erasure of oppositional perspectives like Uchida’s from universal perception. Professor and historian Takeya Mizuno examines the erasure of accounts oppositional to official narratives of Japanese American internment as a response to national security concerns or Japanese Americans’ supposed predisposition to commit acts of espionage, writing that the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in West Coast internment camps marks a “dark spot in the history of press freedom, too” (Mizuno’s emphasis, 205). Mizuno posits that while interned Japanese Americans were allowed to have their own newspapers, “these publications were subject to either ‘censorship’ or ‘supervision’,” and that “in December 1941, the Japanese American community… [had] more than two dozen of vernacular newspaper on the West Coast alone. Only 6 months later, however, none of them existed due to the Army’s mass exclusion orders” (205). Mizuno’s research and exploration of Japanese American censorship in the wake of Pearl Harbor helps to further expose the problematization inherent in Orientalism—and the way Orientalism aided white America’s desperate self-preservation—in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks. Not only had American Orientalism enabled white officials’ mass imprisonment of innocent Japanese Americans but had also permitted the erasure of accounts depicting Japanese American innocence and, inversely, white America’s wrongdoings and penchant for anti-Asian sentimentality. 22 Throughout American history, the West’s ability to construct and conceptualize “the Orient” “politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (Said 2) in any instance that white Americans and American officials perceive as a threat to American white supremacy has promoted several times over the comprehensive ostracism and often violent oppression of Asian and Asian American populations. In early 1942, the effects of Orientalism and Orientalist conceptualizations of Japanese Americans were felt at home: for Japanese Americans, perhaps the greatest impact of their internment post-Pearl Harbor was a harsh wake- up call. Despite “significant economic losses of income and property… for which they were not fully compensated” (Shoag & Carollo 8), the hardest pill for Japanese Americans to swallow in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor was the realization that, despite their citizenship or allegiance, white America’s best-interests always come first, especially when white Americans believe that their geographic preeminence or supremacy is under threat. Orientalism, coupled with the white supremacy inherent in the American enterprise, has enabled the comprehensive ostracism of Asian Americans at home in the U.S. and the widespread oppression of Southeast, East, and South-central Asian populations abroad. Twenty years after white officials adapted Japanese American populations across the West Coast into a singular caricature—that of a “saboteur”—American Orientalism would promote a new adaptation of Lee’s “Oriental” figure: the “warmongering Oriental.” Just as American officials perpetuated imagery of Japanese Americans as spies and saboteurs in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks to justify the incarceration of these populations at home, the West’s cultural domination of “the Orient” would enable the U.S. to ensure the prominence of images of “Orientals” as warmongers to justify the U.S.’ military involvement abroad two decades later. This time, however, America’s ability to rely on long-held Orientalist conceptualizations of the East and a majority population keen to 23 maintain American white supremacy would ensure an even more violent oppression and dehumanization of Southeast Asian populations—the next supposed threat to white Americans’ cultural, racial, geographic, and imperial superiority and influence. 24 CHAPTER THREE: THE SORROW OF WAR AND ASIAN AMERICANS AS WARMONGERS Just as Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride underlines the humanity and reality of Japanese and Asian Americans’ experiences in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks in the early 1940s, Bâo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam emphasizes the humanity of the North Vietnamese that is often discarded by traditionally dehumanizing Orientalist narratives and recollections of the Vietnam War. Like Uchida’s novel, then, Ninh’s novel is of great importance because it exemplifies the longevity and variability of Orientalism in the United States and yet another instance of white officials’ desperate manipulation of images of Asian and Asian American populations to justify their own ultimately imperialistic pursuits. Though Ninh’s novel is a work of historical fiction, The Sorrow of War is significant because it emphasizes the hyperbole of Orientalist notions which argue that North Vietnamese soldiers like Ninh himself were violent and mindless defenders of communism and, subsequently, inherent opponents of “democracy” (AKA American imperialism and the preservation of the U.S.’ continued influence in Southeast Asia). Two decades after the U.S.’ mass incarceration of Japanese Americans and the nation’s subsequent readaptation of the Oriental’s image into that of a spy and saboteur, the first American combat troops entered Vietnam in early 1965. Desperate to prevent the spread of North Vietnamese communism into South Vietnam and across Asia, the United States did not fully end its involvement in Vietnam until 1973, nearly two decades after beginning its supposed crusade against “hardline” communism. Despite perpetuation of the idea that the U.S.’ involvement in Vietnam was necessary for the preservation of Asian democracy, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “determination to pursue war against [Vietnam] alienated many” (Rollins 420) and sparked widespread civilian and celebrity protest of the war in America. Even decades later, the Vietnam War continually “lingers in American minds like the memory of an illness” (Smith 186), given the unpopularity of the war coupled with America’s ultimate defeat overseas. The West’s unofficial selectivity when it comes to the popularization of Vietnam War narratives is an extension of Orientalism and Western cultural hegemony. During the war—and particularly in its aftermath—popular American media rapidly readapted the Oriental’s image. While at first the U.S. perpetuated images of North Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian populations as vicious warmongers as a means of justifying America’s continued imperialist war effort, the U.S.’ defeat at the hands of the North Vietnamese ultimately inspired the cultivation of a new image: one of “a faceless and invisible Asian enemy, aided and abetted by an American counterculture… like the now-mythic Viet Cong, [one] everywhere invisible and powerful” (Lee 11). Like other historical adaptations of the “Oriental” figure, white America’s paranoid perpetuation of this image of Orientals as invisible albeit vicious warmongers is a reflection of the U.S.’ enduring habit of self-victimization. White Americans’ conceptualizations of Southeast Asian populations as a singular, “invisible” entity to perpetuate its own victimized image is indelibly tied to white Americans’ enduring pursuit of self-preservation and—by extension—preeminence. More than two decades after constructing images of Japanese and other Asian Americans as Axis double agents “predisposed… to the commission of acts of espionage and sabotage” (Irons x), white Americans and officials downplayed the U.S.’ defeat in Vietnam by perpetuating images of an overly powerful and “invisible” enemy. This was done in order to redirect attention to a supposedly more pressing narrative: that of the defeated, victimized American soldier—his innocence forcibly relieved of him in the jungles of Vietnam, his mind traumatized by images of death, gore and of war. Inevitably, this perpetuated the premise that the most tragic narrative of Vietnam was that of 26 an American soldier leaving behind a “healthy civilian environment to become immersed in a war that leaves him physically or psychically wounded,” thus idealizing “the myth of American innocence and benevolence” in Vietnam while irrefutably dehumanizing the North Vietnamese (Rollins 422). This idea perpetuated the false notions that American soldiers were the greatest victims of Vietnam and that the Vietnam War simply represented Vietnam’s rejection of American democracy and freedom, opting instead to embrace leadership by a chaotic, helpless, and violent communistic regime instead. These narratives of American victimization at the hands of a chaos-loving, unstoppable, unseeable and therefore inherently unbeatable enemy were perpetuated in the United States post- Vietnam to save face in the aftermath of a war that “set the U.S. economy on a downward spiral… left America’s foreign policy at least temporarily in disarray… [and] divided the American people as no other event since their own Civil War a century earlier” (Herring 104). Notably, even decades after the war, these narratives of American victimization have managed to maintain an unparalleled cultural supremacy. Speaking on the U.S.’ selective memory and on the longevity and continued perpetuation of these myths of the “battered American” and “warmongering Oriental,” author and professor Yen Le Espiritu wrote in 2008 that: Today, more than thirty years after the fall of Saigon… Public recollections of the Vietnam War—“the war with the difficult memory”—often involve the organized and strategic forgetting of the Vietnamese people… The controversial Vietnam War Memorial… provides a pointed example of this “forgetting.” Framed within the nationalist context of the Washington Mall, the memorial must “forget” the Vietnamese and “remember” the American veterans as the primary victims of the war. (1701-1702) 27 Such dehumanizing images of the North Vietnamese were—and continue to persist as—products of exclusion. While the West continues to inundate popular media and perception with images of the battered American soldier, viewers and readers alike are left to “fill in the gaps” by conjuring up juxtaposed images of a boastful North Vietnamese army to contrast with those of the bested and battered armed forces of the U.S. In this chapter, I will explore how Bâo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War and his conceptualizations of North Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians conflicts with traditional depictions of the North Vietnamese as vengeful, triumphant victors and thus manages to provide a voice and an autonomy to the voiceless victims of the Vietnam War: those traditionally silenced by the West’s cultural domination, suppression and generalizations of “the Orient” and its contrasting “benevolent American” and “warmongering Oriental” narratives. In doing so, I will highlight the preeminence and problematization of Orientalism in the century following President Chester Arthur’s enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 1800s. Specifically, I will look at how Orientalism and adaptations of the “Oriental” as a warmonger in the wake of the Vietnam War were used to justify the U.S’ ultimately imperialist war effort (a war waged in defense of the U.S.’ geographic influence abroad). Additionally, I will explicate how this period of prejudice and exclusion marks merely a checkpoint along white America’s long and winding road of comprehensive anti-Asian violence and ostracism. DISPELLING MYTHS OF THE VIETNAM WAR Though The Sorrow of War is fiction, Ninh’s explicit and oftentimes graphic account of North Vietnamese soldiers’ wartime experiences works to dispel several of the most common myths surrounding the Vietnam War and its combatants. While the most widely propagated images of 28 the Vietnam War are those of the “benevolent American” and “warmongering Oriental”—the latter of which supposedly emerged from the fields of battle triumphant, far “better off” than their war- weary and wounded American counterparts—Ninh’s novel deconstructs notions that the war was any less traumatic for America’s opponents or that North Vietnam’s “victory” was at all sweet. While popular American media has continued to perpetuate these myths in the half century succeeding the war’s conclusion, critics like Horner (1995), Smith (2004), and Ng (2014) have thoroughly explicated how Ninh’s novel dissolves these Orientalist conceptualizations of the North Vietnamese as unfeeling, killing machines. Further, Horner, Smith, and Ng are dismissive of the notion that North Vietnamese soldiers like Ninh were steadfastly opposed to values supposedly inherent in the American enterprise, including those of peace, democracy, and individualized freedom. Ninh’s novel revolves around Kien—the central figure whose experiences on the battlefield, as a member of North Vietnam’s MIA recovery team and as a survivor of the Vietnam War are explicitly chronicled in The Sorrow of War. Early in the novel, in the aftermath of the war and amid his suffering, Kien is able to recognize “some wonderful truth deep inside him” (76). Specifically, Kien realizes that his duty post-war has now become to “expose the realities of war and to tear aside conventional images” of post-war Vietnam (50) and to fulfill this “sacred, heavenly duty of which [his] novel would become the earthly manifestation” (57). Critics like Angela Smith have noted that Ninh primarily infuses the harsh realities of the war and Kien’s experiences into his narrative using ghosts: motifs symbolic of the trauma, memories and PTSD accompanying North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians postwar. Specifically, in her book, Gender and Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Textual Representations, Smith writes that “Vietnam was a war of ghosts” (174). Smith describes Ninh’s depictions of ghosts as both physical and emotional 29 manifestations of lingering trauma. Smith recounts Kien’s experiences as a member of North Vietnam’s MIA Recovery Team, helping to bury the dead the team encounters while scouring Vietnam’s “Jungle of Screaming Souls” postwar. Ninh writes, “Then with their final breath their souls were released, flying upwards, free…Over a long period, over many, many graves, the souls of the beloved dead silently and gloomily dragged the sorrow of war into [Kien’s] life” (25). Smith writes that physical manifestations of trauma are inescapable for Vietnamese soldiers and civilians like Kien, given that the war was fought in the very place these men and women continue to make their beds. As Smith writes, “the ghost voices that continue to haunt Kien indicate that the war will never be over in a state that has lost so much” (186). As such, Ninh’s novel begins to dismantle notions that the North Vietnamese were power-hungry and vicious victors of the Vietnam War, grateful for the chance to have savagely warded off the influence of America’s supposedly peace mongering and justified presence in Southeast Asia. These “physical” ghosts Smith mentions leave an indelible footprint on the psyche: visual reminders of the war’s perils trigger enduring emotional trauma. On page 69 of the novel, for example, Ninh writes about Kien watching leaves fall in post-war Hanoi: “as he watched [them] fall, he remembered the jungle rains… The dreams refocused until past scenes and the present became a raging reality within him… Wave after wave of agonizing memories washed over his mental shores.” Later and throughout the remainder of the novel, Kien finds himself longing to “return to those moments of the first sparks of war, the glimmering of his first adventures and the light of love shining from deep in his childhood” (227). Physical—and by extension, psychological—traumas also plague Vuong and other North Vietnamese war veterans Kien encounters in the Balcony Café—a nightspot in central Hanoi “unofficially known as the Veterans’ Club” (Ninh 151). Kien remarks, in the case of the alcoholic veteran Vuong, whose peaceful 30 postwar life is forever intertwined with triggers reminiscent of his violent memories as an armored car driver, that “It was sad, almost unbelievable, that such a tough and courageous fighter could fall so quickly in the postwar days” (152). Again, Ninh’s novel explores the idea that, while the U.S. tends to depict itself as a harbinger of peace and freedom, the U.S.’ imperialist invasion of Vietnam instead left behind memories of trauma and death for North Vietnamese soldiers like Kien, Vuong, and even Ninh himself. Despite postwar propagation of images conceptualizing the North Vietnamese as chauvinistic “winners” of the war, scenes from Ninh’s novel, like those that take place inside Hanoi’s Balcony Café, for example, illustrate that for Kien, Ninh, and other North Vietnamese war survivors, “victory is fundamentally a hollow nationalist discourse that speaks little of the experiences of ordinary Vietnamese who had to endure extreme suffering and loss, the effects of which often continue even decades later” (Ng 83). Ninh makes no secret of the trauma and suffering Kien endures in the aftermath of the war—he hardly embodies the image of a triumphant victor and he is hardly a survivor. Tellingly too, Kien laments that, after the war, there is no sense of “enlightenment,” or “hope… for a beautiful future…” (Ninh 47). Even in the war’s immediate conclusion Kien isn’t granted any sense of reprieve or relief, let alone joy. Commentary’s Charles Horner wrote in 1995: The narrator and the few survivors of his brigade were among those present in Saigon on April 30, 1975, the last day of the war. But, as he recalls the event years afterward, even at the time they did not experience that soaring and brilliant happiness they would later see depicted in films about the fall of the city. (51) Unsurprisingly, in keeping with America’s “strategic forgetting” of Vietnamese victims of the war and in addition to a number of American films and television programs that accomplished the same 31 effect, a multitude of studies were published in the aftermath of the Vietnam War emphasizing the debilitating and crippling effects of the war on the American psyche, economy, military and politics, including how the war “increase[ed] popular suspicion of [American] government, leaders and institutions” (Herring 117). However, studies emerging primarily in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would finally detail too the physical and psychological tolls endured by the U.S.’ counterpart in America’s supposed war against “hardline communism.” In 1995, researcher Dr. M.S. Shivakumar wrote that: Vietnam lost hundreds of thousands of people… [and] has about 600,000 war invalids among northern veterans and two million civilians who suffer from the ‘war trauma”. Even today any visitor to North Vietnam observes [a] lot of evidence of destruction and torment the place endured, either physically or among the people. Vietnam has spent two decades caring for the war invalids and will probably spend more time in the future too. (1836) Therefore, Ninh’s novel effectively functions as a case study exposing these “forgotten” realities of the war: The Sorrow of War sheds light on the experiences of men like Kien, Vuong and others, who, in the immediate and years-long aftermath of the war, found themselves just as empty, unemployed, bested and broken by conflict as their opponents. In explicit detail, The Sorrow of War emphasizes the reality that the North Vietnamese bled blood just as red as their American counterparts’ and experienced the same sharp and dramatic sensations of guilt, loss and sorrow as their invaders. Above all else, unequivocally, Ninh’s novel demonstrates that the men and women of North Vietnam who sacrificed their livelihood and gave their lives in the name of their nation were definitively human, too—not some unfeeling, “invisible” threat to American democracy and benevolence at home or abroad. 32 ORIENTALISM: ABROAD Orientalism and its perpetuation of the West and the United States’ ability to selectively narrate (and effectively, dictate) history has equaled the all-but-complete erasure of perspectives like Ninh’s from universal perception. Ninh’s novel, originally published in Vietnam in 1990 and translated to English in 1994, succeeded an almost three-decade long string of releases of American novels, documentaries, films, and television programs that continually advocated for the legitimacy of the “benevolent American” and “warmongering Oriental” stereotypes. Films like John Wayne’s The Green Berets and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, for example, worked to not only reaffirm these stereotypes and but also instill into public perception the notion that the war and America’s loss in Southeast Asia was not a reflection of American weakness, but merely a product of North Vietnam’s excessive savagery and predisposition for anti-American violence. The end of widespread protest of the war in America coincided with the end of the draft and the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam in 1973. Despite the lingering political and economic repercussions of the conflict, the U.S. effectively left the Vietnam War behind in the 1970s: with the war having been fought on foreign soil, there were few physical reminders of the conflict that could be found on American soil. What remained in Vietnam, however, was evidence not only of the war’s physical destruction, but the settling in of a harsh wake-up call, one the U.S. had issued to their Japanese Americans counterparts no more than twenty-five years earlier: when white America’s best interests come under (apparent) threat, anyone outside this circle of privilege and preeminence can become a target. Also obvious in the wake of World War Two and the Vietnam War was the reality that white America’s knee-jerk dismissal of Asian and Asian Americans’ autonomy and its collective generalizations of these populations coupled with the 33 West’s cultural hegemony and long-held ability to manipulate universal popular perception makes for the perfect crime. By perpetuating notions of North Vietnamese soldiers and even civilians as bloodthirsty and unfeeling communists, the United States was able to expertly disguise its true motives for sending troops overseas and invading Vietnam in the 1960s. Under the guise of—essentially—wanting to help save Vietnam from itself, the U.S. invaded Southeast Asia in hopes of preserving its international geographic influence. While in the wake of Pearl Harbor white American officials sought to preserve the geographic preeminence supposedly afforded to them by God, Vietnam presented the opportunity for the U.S. to maintain its international influence and control—an influence under threat by the spread of communism through Asia in the aftermath of the second World War. While the U.S. ultimately failed in preserving its cultural hegemony and dominance in Vietnam post-WWII, white officials’ attempts to disguise their efforts by perpetuating notions of North Vietnamese “Orientals” as bloodthirsty and unfeeling communists have continued to have lasting effects on how these populations are perceived and depicted. The problematization inherent in Orientalism in the wake of both WWII and Vietnam is clear: such appropriative violence, generalizations, and adaptations of the “Oriental” present significant dangers to Asian and Asian American populations. When reduced to either faceless notions of fear and death or to singularized caricatures of spies and warmongers, such dehumanization can be (and is) used as a tool for encouraging collective action against these apparent “threats.” Such is evident in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when white American officials imprisoned innocent Japanese Americans not unlike Picture Bride’s Hana and Taro in domestic internment camps. Twenty years later, Americans waged similar collective actions against Vietnamese soldiers, civilians, and the conflict’s survivors over the course of the Vietnam war and in its 34 aftermath. These Orientalist-inspired actions presented severe physical and historical implications for Vietnamese men, women, and children. During the war, emboldened by notions that they were fighting a collectively deserving and essentially soulless enemy, American troops routinely brutalized and sexually victimized Vietnamese women and civilians. Ninh’s novel details several instances of American soldiers’ savagery in Vietnam, including the rape of a young North Vietnamese soldier named Hoa by a troupe of American soldiers. During the war, American troops indiscriminately assaulted Vietnam and Vietnamese men, women, and children with an endless barrage of physical and sexual violence on a massive scale. Additionally, however, during and in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, popular American media was also working to deface images of men like The Sorrow of War’s Kien and Vuong to justify the U.S.’ involvement in Vietnam and American soldiers’ subsequent brutality overseas. The release of propaganda and films like The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter perpetuated images of men like Kien and Vuong as unfeeling and apathetic warmongering monsters and indirectly promoted the idea that Vietnamese women were merely necessary casualties or deserved conquests of the war. These generalizations and reactions not only encouraged anti-Asian violence overseas and presented an immediate physical danger to Asians and Asian Americans, but also entailed the near complete erasure of accounts like Uchida and Ninh’s from—ultimately—what Western powers perpetuate as the universal lexicon of knowledge concerning the planet’s eastern hemisphere. Therefore, The Sorrow of War is so critical as, without accounts like Ninh’s, narratives dismissive of Vietnamese autonomy would, historically, have been better able to dominate Western perceptions of a supposedly “deserving” population of Vietnamese men, women, and children. 35 Almost thirty years after American troops withdrew from Vietnam’s jungles, leaving behind a myriad of destruction—a mark ultimately symbolic of white America’s racial apathy and endless imperialist quest to maintain its own preeminence—American Orientalism would again reconfigure itself and result in the manifestation of yet another new adaptation of Lee’s “Oriental” figure. Decades after Vietnam, the U.S.’ next adaptation of the “Oriental” would need to be outlandish and encompassing enough to justify white officials’ imperialist assaults on the freedoms of Asian and Asian American populations at home and abroad. Therefore, while adaptations of the Oriental in the early 1940s and mid-to-late 1960s—perpetuated to justify the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans and as grounds for American interventionism in Vietnam—were already ludicrously grand, white America’s next readaptation of the Oriental figure in the early twenty- first century would prove to be white America’s most dramatic assault on Asian individualism— and, subsequently, its deadliest call to arms—yet. 36 CHAPTER FOUR: THE KITE RUNNER AND ASIAN AMERICANS AS TERRORISTS In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, white American officials perpetuated imagery of the Oriental as a saboteur to justify reinforcement of white America’s geographical preeminence on the American West Coast. Twenty years later, white American officials attempted desperately to preserve their geographic preeminence abroad by conceptualizing the Oriental as a vicious warmonger to justify the U.S.’ ultimately imperialist war effort overseas. Three decades later, the September 11th terrorist attacks presented an even greater challenge for white American officials. Specifically, 9/11 represented the emergence of a perceptible threat to white American preeminence at home and abroad: on American soil and in Middle Asia. The Kite Runner, though a work of fiction, is critical because it dismantles notions perpetuated about Middle Asian populations living in the U.S. and abroad in the wake of 9/11 as the U.S. desperately scrambled to preserve its influence at home and abroad. Because Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel is reflective of the experiences of Middle Asian American immigrants, the novel is of great value as it highlights the vast contrasts between true Middle Asian and Asian American experiences and the discriminatory images of these populations perpetuated by American officials post-9/11. On September 20, 2001, almost three decades after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam in 1973, President George W. Bush announced “the War on Terror.” Bush was addressing Americans nine days after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center: attacks perpetuated by 19 hijackers acting on behalf of the multinational terrorist organization, Al-Qaeda. Though the hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Lebanon, Afghanistan was seen as America’s most pressing target in the aftermath of 9/11 for two reasons. Because Al-Qaeda developed out of network of Islamist fighters originally formed to oppose Soviet forces invading Afghanistan in the 1980s (BBC News) and because its leader, Osama bin Laden, was thought to possibly be living in Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, American forces invaded Afghanistan in late 2001. The U.S.’ invasion of Afghanistan kicked off a decades-long bout of continued American political and military involvement and intervention in the “Middle East.” With the intention of toppling Al-Qaeda and Taliban regimes across Middle Asia, the United States would also invade Iraq two years later in 2003. The 9/11 attacks and the U.S.’ subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq also coincided with the readaptation of the “Oriental’s” image. No longer depicted as an invisible albeit vicious warmonger, the Oriental suddenly had become the embodiment of white America’s newest nightmare: terrorism. While America waged war against an increasingly indistinguishable target abroad, accompanying imagery of Orientals as “terrorists” was white America’s perpetuation of xenophobic and anti-Muslim sentiments and violence at home. As was in the case in the aftermath of Imperial Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942 and America’s invasion of Vietnam in the mid-1960s, this sudden outpouring of racial, religious, and ethnic prejudice levied against anyone able to be classified under the broad monikers of “Muslim” or “Middle Eastern” was a product of Orientalism, and, by extension, white America’s enduring pursuit of racial purity and ascendancy. Though for white officials the 9/11 attacks provided justification for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and the “Middle East” (and for white noncombatants, for their heightened mistrust of their nonwhite counterparts), Edward Said’s Orientalism explains how Orientalism laid the groundwork for such widespread and rampant generalization of Asian, Asian American, and Muslim American populations as “terrorists” in the aftermath of September 11th. Said, writing of the “Middle East,” notes the “history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West” (26), explaining that “Orientals or Arabs are [traditionally] shown to be… inveterate liars… and in everything oppose the clarity, directness, and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon 38 race” (39). Said also wrote, even almost three decades before the September 11th attacks, the “War on Terror” and white America’s subsequent classification of Orientals as terrorists at home and abroad, that: because the Middle East is now so identified with… the simple-minded dichotomy of freedom-loving, democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian, and terroristic Arabs… the life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed… (27) The September 11th attacks and readaptation of the Oriental’s image into that of a terrorist undoubtedly bolstered the preeminence of this “web” of racism, stereotypes and dehumanizing ideologies that Said describes. Building off a long history of suppressing images of “Middle Eastern” and Muslim American populations as anything but “lethargic,” “suspicious” and terroristic (39), Western cultural hegemony and its newfound habit of perpetuating images of these populations as the perpetrators of 9/11 and as the embodiments of terror in the early 2000s permitted the West’s continued appropriation and manipulation of “the Orient” and other worldly conceptualizations of the East. Just as Bâo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War emphasizes the humanity of the North Vietnamese that is traditionally excluded in Western Orientalist conceptualizations and recollections of the Vietnam War, however, Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel The Kite Runner underlines the humanity of South-central Asian and Muslim American populations often buried beneath a bevy of generalizing narratives perpetuated in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks. In this 39 chapter, I will explore how Hosseini’s conceptualizations of Afghan and other “Middle Eastern” populations conflicts with traditional depictions of the Middle Eastern Asian populations as nothing more than violent, dangerous, and terroristic threats to white Americans’ otherwise “tranquil” way of life. Specifically, I will look at how Orientalism and adaptations of the “Oriental” as a terrorist in the wake of 9/11 were used to justify the U.S’ ultimately imperialist war effort (a war waged in defense of the U.S.’ geographic influence at home and abroad). In doing so, I will highlight Orientalism’s continued preeminence and especially violent problematization nearly thirty years after the events of Ninh’s The Sorrow of War and explicate how this period of prejudice and exclusion marked, once again, another checkpoint along white America’s lengthy history of comprehensive anti-Asian violence and ostracism. DISPELLING MYTHS OF THE “MIDDLE EAST” In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, the U.S.’ “Neo-Orientalist discourse”—now targeting anyone white America could indistinguishably generalize under the broad monikers of “Middle Eastern,” “Muslim” or “Arab”—was heavily “bolstered by Hollywood” (Alrasheed 303). Popular American films like Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (both produced post-9/11) promoted “hyperbolic stories and aggrandized violence emphasizing the evil of Muslims and Arabs… reinforc[ing] the idea that the main purpose of [the “War on Terror” was] self-defense” (303). Films like Berg and Eastwood’s perpetuated remarkably generalizing stereotypes not unlike those popularized in the wake of the Vietnam War by films like The Green Berets or The Deer Hunter: those of the “benevolent American” and the “warmongering, terroristic Oriental.” Ultimately, films like Survivor, Sniper, and other popular American films produced in the aftermath of 9/11 concerning the U.S.’ supposed “War on Terror” 40 seemed to make the case that “every member of the Iraqi society [was] a potential threat from men to women to kids” (311). The production of films and perpetuation of this imagery by mainstream American media again demonstrated white officials’ resorting to desperate fearmongering to justify a suppressive effort at home and overseas that was, ultimately, imperialist and in pursuit of protecting white America’s geographic preeminence. In addition to films, several novels examining the war, its impact on the lives of American civilians and soldiers and, ultimately, the savagery of America’s counterpart in the U.S.’ “War on Terror” likewise perpetuated these ideas of the “benevolent American”—fighting a war in his own and in his country’s defense—and of the “terroristic Oriental”—fighting simply for the sake of spilling American blood. While the films noted above bolstered the popularity of these contrasting stereotypes, and, subsequently, notions of Iraq and the “Middle East” as dangerous breeding grounds for terrorism and violence, novels like Jay McInerney’s The Good Life and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man perpetuated notions of American victimization and, ultimately, the borderline erasure of non-American perspectives concerning the 9/11 attacks and the “War on Terror.” Effectively, novels like these dehumanized the U.S.’ “ominous” and “evil” (Alrasheed 312) counterparts, reducing them to nothing more than “invisible” threats to American tranquility, peace and democracy. Specifically, professor and historian Jae Eun Yoo writes that these novels: were often criticized for escaping into a private world instead of exploring the historical and cultural context of the terror. This domesticating tendency was considered problematic because it could be seen as corresponding to and reiterating the jingoism and xenophobia that marked the American public response to 9/11… [their] exclusive focus on trauma leads easily… to a monolithic view of American culture and to the idealization of American history and America's role in history. (216) 41 Originally published in May 2003, two years after the September 11th attacks and only a few months after the U.S.’ invasion of Iraq, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner works to dispel many of white America’s generalizing and misleading conceptualizations of Iraqi and other Middle Eastern populations. Set in Kabul, Afghanistan, the novel tells the story of Amir, a young Pashtun boy whose friendship with his Hazaran half-brother Hassan crumbles because of Amir’s jealousy and his inability to prevent and later address Hassan’s sexual assault. The novel is namely centered around narratives of family and friendship, with Hosseini dedicating particular attention to Amir and Hassan’s partnership as well as to Amir and his father’s often strained relationship. In addition to basing the novel on themes of family, love, companionship, loss and separation, Hosseini conveys Afghan humanity simply by relaying to American and other international readers a realistic narrative reflective of men like Amir and Hassan’s experiences in the wake of 9/11, the U.S.’ “War on Terror” and Taliban occupation of Afghanistan. Most notably, perhaps, Hosseini’s novel diversifies traditionally generalized conceptualizations of the Middle East simply by variegating Western readers’ traditional abstraction of Muslims and Middle Eastern populations as a monoculture. By highlighting distinct differences between different ethnic classes and religions (i.e., Pashtuns and Hazaras; Sunni and Shi’a Muslims), Hosseini helps dismantle commonly held Western perceptions that anyone in these regions of the world could be collectively classified under the broad monikers of “Arab” or “Middle Eastern.” Hosseini’s incorporation of ethnic diversity and inclusion of themes of family, love, and loss, ultimately lend themselves to his ultimate goal of illustrating the similarities between the Afghan people and Americans. Moreover, in Hosseini’s incorporation of these literary elements and “humanizing” themes, Hosseini “offers a revealing look at a completely unfamiliar culture and… nevertheless tells an essentially human story, to which any reader can relate” (Aubry 32). Overall, 42 what most unites white, disenfranchised American readers and the populations represented in Hosseini’s novel in the aftermath of 9/11 and white American officials’ divisive rhetoric and defense of the U.S.’ subsequent “War on Terror” is another central conflict depicted in the novel: one between native Afghanis like Amir and Hassan and the invasive and destructive Taliban forces. As the two travel together by taxi, native Afghan Wahid pleads with Amir—a novelist— suggesting that “maybe [Amir] should write about Afghanistan… tell the rest of the world what the Taliban are doing to our country” (Hosseini 236). In his continued elaboration on this overarching narrative of Afghanistan’s decline—as facilitated by the Taliban—Hosseini pursues another commonality capable of defamiliarizing the Middle East and cueing Western readers into the shared humanity between themselves and this traditionally foreign “other”: the desire for freedom. These prominent narratives of victimization and pursued liberation from Taliban forces aligns with white Americans’ own senses of exploitation and their pursuit of retribution in the aftermath of September 11th: two notions U.S. officials continually perpetuated following 9/11 to justify the U.S.’ invasion of Iraq and its costly “War on Terror.” According to author and associate professor Timothy Aubry, such a relatable narrative has, historically, been able to “render the people of Islamic nations amenable to the United States’ democratizing mission” (35). “By depicting a country central to the United States’ war on terrorism,” Aubry continues, the novel “seems only to activate the desire to overcome or elude partisan, ethnic, religious, and national divisions—a desire, it turns out, capable of allying, unpredictably, with a diversity of antagonistic political orientations” (26). The Kite Runner, Aubry notes, has succeeded in encouraging some Western readers to identify these populations as not some indistinguishable, faceless “other,” but rather—at least in some way—as human: not unlike white Americans in their shared pursuits of liberation, tranquility and freedom. Like Uchida’s 43 Picture Bride or Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, then, Hosseini’s novel uncovers the humanity of populations whose autonomy is often diminished or erased in Western-centric and American- authored recollections and accounts of 9/11 and the U.S.’ subsequent “War on Terror.” By emphasizing accounts from the perspectives of those often generalized under the broad monikers of “Muslims,” “Arabs” and, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11, as “terrorists,” Hosseini effectively highlights how the universality of love, loss, regret, guilt, and redemption—how the universality of the human experience—extends beyond simply the West’s borders. Ultimately, Aubry celebrates the novel’s ability to elicit a sense of fellowship and empathy between Americans and South-central Asian populations, writing that: If not in the tragic narrative itself, then in their own compassionate reaction to it, many readers find a self-validating basis for hope—one that posits their participation in a purportedly universal and unifying affective response as a nonpolitical solution to the ethnic hierarchies and antagonisms that the novel, to elicit this response, presents as painfully intractable. (37) Hosseini’s novel, in its humanitarian narrative, emphasizes the humanity of Middle Asian and Asian American populations in the wake of 9/11 and the U.S.’ physically and rhetorically destructive “War on Terror.” In doing so, The Kite Runner also illuminates the U.S.’ continued perpetuation of disdainful imagery of Asian and Asian American populations to justify its own imperialist pursuits, as I will explain below. ORIENTALISM: “AT HOME” AND ABROAD Just as films, novels, and other productions distributed in the wake of the Vietnam War promoted images of bloodthirsty and violent Asian populations to contrast with those of the 44 victimized and battered American, apposite films and novels produced post-9/11 perpetuated similarly misleading imagery. Researcher Khalid Alrasheed writes that, in the aftermath of 9/11, novels like Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and films like American Sniper advanced “the rhetoric and representations of American neo-Orientalism” (7). Unsurprisingly, popular American media concerning the “Middle East” produced in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the midst of America’s supposed “War on Terror”—like DeLillo’s novel and Eastwood’s Sniper—encouraged expressions of imperialist, anti-Muslim and anti-Middle Eastern sentiments abroad and at home. By putting great emphasis on the supposed savagery of Middle Eastern populations abroad and on the hurt America suffered at home (thus continuing America’s long history of desperate self- victimization), American officials were able to continually justify the massively destructive war the U.S. was waging overseas in addition to the Xenophobic prejudice and hate crimes occurring within America’s borders. Specifically, abroad, 9/11, the U.S.’ “War on Terror,” and America’s subsequent readaptation of the Oriental into that of a suspicious, ever-present terrorist threat culminated not only in the deadly and destructive invasion of Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations by American troops, but also the worsening of tensions between religious minorities all over the Middle East. Zahid Ahmed and Musharaf Zahoor write that, “violence against religious minorities became an international phenomenon after 9/11, shaping President George W. Bush’s rhetoric of the War on Terror.” Bush’s “War on Terror,” Ahmed and Zahoor explain, “disproportionately affected the lives of religious minorities through, for example, murder, abduction and looting… In Pakistan… a major wave of violence against religious minorities emerged following 9/11” (87). All over the world, popular Western media’s frightened perpetuation of images of the Middle East as a breeding ground for terrorists coupled with the West’s unchallenged cultural hegemony identified minority 45 Muslim populations as—essentially—universal threats to all nations’ national security. In using its influence to encourage political instability and social unrest across the Middle East, the U.S.’ managed to exercise its international, geographic preeminence. White American officials’ perpetuation of the notion of Middle Eastern Americans as national security threats has distinctly imperialist motives. Researcher and professor Fethi Mansouri writes that this enhanced “visibility of the Muslim Other…circulate[s] fear and anxiety in… culturally diverse societies that have a dominant white majority culture” (166). Unsurprisingly, coinciding with the West’s perpetuation of “public discourse that views Muslims as ‘alien’, ‘foreign’ or ‘threatening’ and their religion ‘incompatible with Western liberal values’” (165) was the emergence of “Muslim Diasporas… as [particular] objects of anxiety in Western societies” (Johns, et al., 171). Since 9/11, this anxiety and Islamophobia in America has manifested itself in various ways, ranging from an increased use of “racial slurs, vigilante killings or assaults, [and] hate crimes [to the] vandalism of mosques” (Mohammad 46). As such, the encouragement of such violence and rejection of Middle Eastern American populations has enabled white Americans to reaffirm their geographic preeminence at home through the physical destruction of Muslim diasporic property like mosques and homes and the shunning of these populations from traditionally white- settled areas across the United States. As many critics have noted, however, the dehumanization that traditionally accompanies Neo- Orientalist conceptualizations of racial and ethnic groups as “faceless,” indistinguishable monocultures is “often more common and visible in politics” (Ahmed, 86). As Khan, et al. notes, global politics often work in tandem with global media to perpetuate “negative perceptions and stereotyping of Islam and Muslims” (2). Khan, et. al specifically notes 2016 American presidential candidates Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal, and Donald Trump’s uses of “anti-Muslim” and “anti- 46 Islam” rhetoric during their respective presidential campaigns (4). Naturally, use of such rhetoric and perpetuation of such ideology by high-ranking American officials like Jindal and Trump only exacerbated Xenophobic sentiments and fears among white Americans, even more than a decade after 9/11. Thus, just as in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks and the Vietnam War nearly sixty and forty years beforehand, respectively, America’s powers-that-be again demonstrated their continued willingness to exercise their preeminence to encourage persecution of entire populations generalized under a singular moniker—in this case, that of the “Middle Easterner.” Post-9/11, at home in the U.S. and abroad, Muslim, and Middle Eastern populations became the embodiments of white America’s greatest newfound fear: a fear of terrorism and the subsequent disruption of white America’s apparent “tranquil” way of life. In George Bush’s declaration of war on a broad, indistinguishable target—that of “terror”—and America’s subsequent targeting and “othering” of all Middle Eastern populations, it is evident that in the aftermath of 9/11, the autonomy and individualization of select Asian populations was suddenly diminished. Just as it had years earlier, the moment white America believed that its best interests and geographic preeminence and influence were at risk, these populations underwent an immediate dehumanization by Western powers, politics, and media. The problematization inherent in Orientalism in the wake of 9/11 is obvious. While accounts like Hosseini’s exist to illuminate the humanity smothered beneath popular, Orientalist conceptualizations of the “Middle East,” these notions of Middle Asia as a breeding ground for terrorism continue to persist as the products of Western cultural hegemony’s monopoly on perceptions of “the Orient.” Even two decades after the events of September 11th, anti-Muslim and Islamophobic sentiments remain deeply embedded in the American enterprise and vernacular. From one generation to the next, the U.S.’ Orientalist conceptualizations of whatever it perceives 47 as the most prominent and relevant threat to white American preeminence becomes engrained in the psyche of white America. Forty years after adaptation of the Oriental into a “hidden” and “vicious” warmongering figure, imagery of the Oriental as a bloodthirsty terrorist has developed an unbridled staying power in the American worldview. Products of this staying power, as noted, include continued discrimination against Muslims and Middle Eastern populations abroad and at home, including medical, economic, social, and oftentimes violent discrimination levied against these populations in response to Americans’ anxieties concerning domestic Muslim and Middle Eastern diasporas. Nearly two decades after the September 11th attacks, while these sentiments remained deeply engrained in the psyche of white America, a new threat to white America’s way of life would manifest itself, and, accompanying this new assault on white American supremacy and freedom was, naturally, a new adaptation of the Oriental figure. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War and 9/11, white America expertly played up its apparent victimization and, in contrast, the evil and savagery of its victimizers to preserve the white supremacy inherent in the American enterprise, preserve white America’s “benevolent” image and, all the while, further its ultimately imperialist pursuits. However, despite America’s long history of self-victimization and desperate self-preservation, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 and the U.S.’ subsequent manipulation of “outbreak narratives” concerning the virus still managed to play out in a remarkably dramatic fashion: both in the absurd perpetuation of white Americans’ supposed blamelessness and in the violent retribution vigilante Americans paid to those who they claimed were “actually” responsible for the deadly disease outbreak. 48 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION By early 2020, a new strain of human coronavirus, nicknamed COVID-19, had spread to nearly every corner of the globe. As such, March 2020 is often considered to be the unofficial “start” of the COVID-19 pandemic, a global catastrophe that, less than two years later, had infected more that 240 million people and caused the deaths of more than 4.5 million others (Troeger, 2021). Only a few short months after the pandemic began, white America, desperate to put a more tangible “face” to this newest threat to their traditionally tranquil and unfettered way of life, developed a new adaptation of Robert G. Lee’s “Oriental” figure, reconfiguring the Oriental into a malicious carrier of disease and harbinger of death. Because the first cases of COVID-19 were documented in China, Chinese populations—and subsequently, other Asian and Asian American populations—were scapegoated as the originators and initial broadcasters of the virus. To help perpetuate images of these populations as malicious carriers of disease, mainstream media immediately set about flooding American minds with Xenophobic and scare-mongering images of “filthy” Asian food markets and videos of Chinese civilians “eating live mice” (Human Rights Watch) to perpetuate notions of Asian populations as inherently disease-ridden and unhygienic. U.S. politicians’ labeling of the pandemic as the “China Virus” and “Wuhan Virus” also helped to foster fanatical claims concerning the virus’ origins. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s persistent labeling of COVID-19 as the “China Virus,” for example, continually encouraged characterization of “China and even American-born Chinese as unsanitary and practicing dangerous lifestyles” and added credence to unsubstantiated conspiracies suggesting that COVID-19 was “created in a Chinese laboratory as a possible bioweapon” (Bolsen, et. al 567). The West’s cultural hegemony and ability to assign preeminence to Orientalist narratives dismissive of Asians and Asian Americans as spies, saboteurs, warmongers, terrorists, and—most recently—as carriers of disease, undoubtedly bolstered and aided in the persistence of these conspiracy theories concerning China’s role in the origins of COVID-19. Shortly after the beginning of the pandemic and the subsequent spread of rhetoric painting Asian Americans as the primary perpetrators of the virus’ outbreak and spread, several series of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents were documented across the United States. To counter the rapid uptick in anti-Asian crimes and sentimentality in the United States, many social media users took to popularizing hashtags like #StopAsianHate. However, while well-intentioned, popularization of hashtags like #StopAsianHate and #StopAsianViolence perpetuated the notion that America’s recent uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes and violence was just as unprecedented as the pandemic itself. In reality, the U.S. has a long, well-documented history of anti-Asian prejudice, exclusion, and ostracism, particularly in the wake of crises like Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War, and 9/11. Ultimately, unfortunately, the spread of hashtags like #StopAsianHate then helped merely originate and perpetuate another narrative suppressive of Asian populations abroad and Asian American populations at home: that white America has always treated these populations benevolently and never as threats to white American geographical supremacy at home or abroad. DECONSTRUCTING ORIENTALISM “AT HOME” In the aftermath of the unofficial start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020, Asian Americans continually found themselves the targets of white America’s newly adapted fears and Xenophobia in response to the pandemic, a rising death toll in the United States, and white officials’ perpetuation of notions of unhygienic and disease-ridden Asian populations. In the months and years that followed the beginning of the pandemic, amid a still ever-present 50 perpetuation of images of the United States as a continual haven for immigrants and the “tempest- tossed,” white Americans subjected Asian Americans to several series of unprovoked assaults, verbal attacks, and even mass shootings. As oppressive narratives concerning the U.S.’ historically unshakable “mosaic” and “melting pot” monikers again continued to suppress those of unsubstantiated anti-Asian violence and hate, Uchida and Hosseini’s novels have developed an even greater importance, as they help to illustrate the absurd longevity of anti-Asian sentimentality in the United States. Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride explores one of the first of many instances of imperialist Orientalism inspired subjugations of Asian and Asian American populations in the U.S.’ history. Further, the novel illustrates the realities of the Asian American experience in the mid-20th century United States. Rather than a haven or “land of opportunity” for Japanese immigrants like Taro and Hana, Uchida’s main characters are always acutely aware of their statuses as eternal “foreigners in this country,” maintaining a presence that “many white people…resent” (25). Uchida also illustrates that in the aftermath of Imperial Japan’s surprise assault on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, there was no sense of triumph among the U.S.’ supposedly clandestine population of like-minded Japanese American “saboteurs.” Instead, Uchida writes, the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and white officials’ kneejerk internment of innocent Japanese American civilians invoked “significant economic losses of income and property” for which Japanese Americans were never fully compensated” (Shoag & Carollo 8). Uchida’s novel, then, is of great value because it serves as brutally honest account of white America’s unfounded and unjust oppression of innocent Japanese Americans in the wake of Imperial Japan’s surprise assault in the Pacific, exposing the insecurities and racial inequality Japanese Americans experienced at home in the United States. 51 Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel, The Kite Runner, is similarly dismissive of the notion that Asian Americans (particularly those from Middle Asian countries like Hosseini’s home country of Afghanistan) have ever been freely allowed access to the same opportunities and quality of life afforded to native-born white Americans. Hosseini’s novel explores the racial, political, and economic subjugation that main character Amir and his father Baba experience as they move to the United States to escape the Taliban. In the U.S., Amir, and his father, though members of the Pashtun majority in Afghanistan, are relegated to an undeniable “other” status, placing Amir on the opposite side of an oppressive power dynamic not unlike the one shared between Pashtuns like himself and Hazaran families living in Middle Asia. Like Uchida’s novel, The Kite Runner exhibits the oppressive and Xenophobic sentiments perpetuated by the white American majority even before the events of September 11th. Uchida and Hosseini’s novels (and novels like theirs) illustrate that perpetuation of inflammatory anti-Asian rhetoric in the wake of COVID-19 is not unprecedented. Instead, Uchida and Hosseini’s novels illustrate that white officials’ oppression of Asian Americans in the United States is routine, systemic, and a calculated effort. These novels demonstrate that white Americans’ verbal and physical assaults on Asian Americans in the United States in the wake of COVID-19 represent merely a checkpoint amid a lengthy history of anti-Asian prejudice at home: prejudices perpetuated to justify the defense of white Americans’ geographic preeminence at home. In doing so, Uchida and Hosseini’s novels, though works of fiction, emphasize the innocence of populations historically blamed for crises like Pearl Harbor and September 11th and by contrast emphasize the hyperbole of American Orientalism inspired perceptions of Asian Americans in the wake of such crises. 52 DECONSTRUCTING ORIENTALISM ABROAD White Americans, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrated not only their disdain for Asian Americans, but for Asian and prospective Asian American immigrants living beyond the U.S.’ borders. While white officials and civilians subjected Asian American populations to violent attacks, verbal assaults, and mass shootings at home, American mainstream media worked to incite violence and prejudice abroad by promoting images of, for example, “filthy” Asian food markets to downplay the possibility of COVID-19 having zoonotic origins. Instead, American media perpetuated images of “unsanitary” and inherently disgusting living conditions in Asian countries like China to support narratives suggesting that China maliciously created COVID-19 in a laboratory or intentionally allowed the disease to spread worldwide as a part of a larger, undisclosed scheme (Bolsen, et. al 563). Such notions encourage the generalization of all Chinese and other Asian populations as malicious carriers of disease, just as was the case in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and 9/11, when white Americans massively generalized Southeast Asian and Middle Asian populations as warmongers and as terrorists, respectively. Like Uchida’s Picture Bride, Vietnam War veteran Bâo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, initially banned in Ninh’s home country for its harrowingly truthful narrative and refusal to glorify North Vietnam’s victory over South Vietnam and supporting U.S. forces, works to dismantle prominent, white-authored narratives of a collective “yellow peril” and illustrate that American perpetuation of Orientalist ideas abroad is nothing new. Years after the war’s conclusion and the production of several films in the United States emphasizing Americans’ suffering and the savagery and sadism of their overseas opponents, Ninh’s novel offers a more inclusive and accurate account of the war. The Sorrow of War explains that rather than “experience that soaring and brilliant happiness they would later see depicted in films about the fall of the city” (Horner 51), North Vietnam’s soldiers 53 were left just as broken and battered by the war as their American counterparts. Ninh’s novel asks its readers from within Vietnam’s borders and beyond to consider how North Vietnamese civilians and soldiers like Ninh could be as bloodthirsty or jubilant as films like The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter make them out to be: how is such a thing possible when these men and women have endured—and continue to endure the aftereffects of—such violence and destruction on their home soil? Ninh’s novel, in providing such an honest, unflattering account of the Vietnam War from the perspective of white America’s “foes,” works to deconstruct narratives of white American victimization and the demonization of their supposedly bloodthirsty assailants abroad. The Kite Runner also works to humanize those living beyond the U.S.’ borders. Specifically, in the wake of 9/11, popular and mainstream American media, including films like American Sniper, perpetuated the notion that Middle Asian populations were inherently prone to violence and acts of terrorism. Not only did such rhetoric help white officials justify the U.S.’ invasion of Iraq and its costly “War on Terror,” it also promoted a heightened prejudice among white Americans toward people of Middle Asian descent and of Middle Asian diasporas. Hosseini’s Kite Runner, however, like Ninh’s Sorrow of War, manages to “underscore commonalities between Afghans and Americans” (Aubry 35). Moreover, Hosseini’s novel, in providing insight into the systemic oppressions and lives of the Afghan people, “tells an essentially human story, to which any reader can relate” (32). As such, Hosseini’s novel helps illustrate the insincerity of claims made against Asian populations abroad—claims just as derogatory and diminishing as that would be made in the aftermath of COVID-19 only two decades later. Further, Hosseini’s and Ninh’s novels demonstrate the historical tendency of white Americans to misconstrue reality to justify imperialist efforts ultimately meant to benefit the white American majority. 54 A FUTURE MINUS “THE ORIENT” In the wake of COVID-19, white Americans continue to readapt Orientalism and images of the “Oriental” to suit their adapting needs as they struggle to preserve the white supremacy that has defined political, social, and economic life in the United States since the country’s founding in the late 1700s. As such, accounts like Uchida’s, Ninh’s, and Hosseini’s continue to become more relevant and critical to preserving the truth about the role of Asians and Asian Americans in supposedly victimizing white Americans in the Pearl Harbor attacks, the Vietnam War, 9/11, and in the wake of COVID-19. While the prominence of historically white-authored, Orientalist narratives of Asian and Asian Americans’ roles in these historical crises has allowed the Western world to continually produce the East “politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (Said 2), these novels provide testimony to the victimization of innocent Asian and Asian American populations in the wake of white America’s fears and insecurities. Further, these accounts are critical because they defy narratives that paint Asian and Asian American cultures and identities as existing in stark contrast to the western social, economic, philosophical, and political experience: notions that have historically allowed the West to dominate, restructure, and possess a sort of constructive authority over “the Orient.” Despite white America’s best efforts to promote an image of an unfettered and unshakable American white supremacy, white officials’ desperate scrambling to manufacture images of the “Oriental” as a spy, warmonger, terrorist, and a carrier of disease has only worked to underline the fragility of white America’s supposedly untouchable preeminence. With each passing iteration of the “Oriental,” white America’s desperation and absurdity becomes more obvious. Thus, white America and the West’s “constructive authority” over “the Orient” becomes lessened. Like Uchida, Ninh, and Hosseini’s writings, novels and other works produced by Asian and Asian 55 American writers during the COVID-19 pandemic will serve as testimony to the innocence and unfair subjugation of Asians and Asian Americans during the pandemic. Rather than allow white- authored and Western narratives of Asian and Asian Americans’ supposed guilt in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, 9/11, and COVID-19 to dominate global perception, literature has and will continue to play a critical role in giving voices to the suppressed. Eventually, with the growing popularization of literature and writings by authors beyond the Western and American white male majority and as the desperation of white America in their pursuit of preserving their majority becomes ever more obvious, there will come a change. Ideally, in addition to a heightened exposure of narratives representative of Asians and Asian Americans’ experiences during the pandemic, Western readers may begin advancing toward the ultimate dissolution of notions of “the Orient” and of “the Occident,” the latter of which Edward Said describes as the powers (British, French, and American) that have typically “dominated” “the Orient” (5). To do so, the continual promotion, preservation, and perpetuation of narratives representative of Asian and Asian American experiences in the wake of crises like Pearl Harbor and COVID-19 is critical to the development of “a better understanding of the way cultural domination has operated” (28). By understanding the networks and methods by which the West’s cultural hegemony and domination of “the Orient” operate, it is possible to dissolve the lines of division sown between the planet’s hemispheres. With the rapid growth of social media and more ways to share voices than ever before, the promotion, preservation, and perpetuation of narratives representative of Asian and Asian American experiences continues to become less challenging and harder to restrict, manage, and “dominate.” The continual allowance of Asian and Asian American voices to speak, rather than be spoken for, will also allow readers and those who perpetuate notions of “the Orient” and “the 56 Occident” to discover commonalities that will inevitably disintegrate falsified notions of the supposedly inherent differences between those living in either the “West” or the “East” or between “us” and “them.” Instead, readers and those who idealize notions of “the Orient” and “Occident,” finding more homogenizing characteristics between the two, will instead recognize the shared humanity and inherent likenesses among all human beings. 57 WORKS CITED Ahmed, Zahid Shahab, and Musharaf Zahoor. “Impacts of the ‘War on Terror’ on the (De- )Humanization of Christians in Pakistan: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Media Reporting.” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 31, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp. 85– 103. 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