Collateral Damage: ‘Asian Americans On War & Peace’

By Terry Hong
Special to AsianWeek

The Aug.13 issue of USA Today reports that more than 150 books that deal with Sept. 11 have already been or are about to be published, making the event “the most documented and photographed event in war or peace.” Of the myriad of titles, Asian Americans On War & Peace will stand out. If you read just one of the post-Sept. 11 titles, read this. Edited by Russell C. Leong and Don T. Nakanishi, and published by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, Asian Americans On War & Peace is the first — and perhaps the only — book to look at Sept. 11 from Asian Pacific American perspectives. It is a thoughtful, questioning collection of essays by 24 scholars, writers and activists. It contains photos of people that look like us, which also means that some of the faces mistakenly resemble the so-called enemy. It is a book of mourning, of outrage and ultimately, of hope.

For APAs, especially those of South Asian descent, life after Sept. 11 has seen a sudden spike in anti-Asian violence. A report released in March by the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, aptly titled “Backlash: When America Turned on Its Own,” tracked 243 incidents of racially-motivated violence in the three months following the attacks, in contrast to a more typical number of approximately 400 over a full 12-month period. In the wake of the terrorist bombings, anyone who looks foreign is a possible target.

The post-Sept. 11 “you’re either us or against us” rhetoric set forth by President Bush and his generals leaves little room for more than blind patriotism. To question is a potential act of national betrayal. But to question is an absolute must, as exemplified by the essays contained in this important volume.

Lin Meijuon, Chen Xian and Lin An Le (left to right, carrying flags) march alongside NAPS (National Association for Prevention of Starvation) in New York City’s Chinatown on Sept. 15, 2001.

Vijay Prashad’s “War against the Planet” is a clear admonition against Bush’s “War on Terrorism”: “History shows us that the U.S. was not innocent on 9/11, even as thousands of innocent people died. We should not confuse those two things ...” Wise words indeed.

In “Nothing to Write Home About,” Amitava Kumar is uncomprehending of the first post-Sept. 11 U.S. and British attacks on Afghanistan: 50 tomahawk cruise missiles were followed by 37,500 food packages and leaflets “telling people that the war is not against them but against bin Laden.” The irony is staggering.

In Part II, “Civil Liberties & Internment,” Jerry Kang in “Thinking through Internment: 12/7 and 9/11” draws parallels between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11 bombings, both events that heightened unjust racial profiling in the United States. Eric K. Yamamoto and Susan Kiyomi Serrano in “The Loaded Weapon” ask where do the victims of such profiling — the detained, harassed and discriminated against — turn to for legal protection in a time when racial profiling is authorized “more definitively than ever” in the name of national security.

In “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?” Moustafa Bayoumi questions the validity — the laughable irony — of the post Sept. 11 government “racially profiling a people [Arabs] whom they don’t even recognize as a race.” Indeed, Arabs are officially classified as “white,” while they are considered a now-unwanted minority. In “What Does Danger Look Like?”, Stephen Lee, while waiting for signs of new internment camps, pleads “to remember the past so we [won’t] keep telling the same stories over and over again.”

Part III, “Geopolitics,” is a look at events before and after Sept. 11 from multiple perspectives. Arif Kirlik in “Colonialism, Globalization and Culture” insists on looking at history before Sept. 11 — how Sept. 11 was not a random aberration, but events prior in world and U.S. history led to this tragic event. In “Terrorism as a Way of Life,” Vinay Lal questions the “American way of life,” which assumes “that one lives without fear … while being perfectly free to inflict, through one’s representatives in government, fear and terror upon others.” That ‘American way of life’ is epitomized by the U.S. preoccupation with SUVs, which accounts for almost 50 percent of new car sales. It’s the ultimate sign of the “profligate consumer,” of the 4 percent of the world’s population gorging on almost a third of the world’s oil and other resources.

In the final section, “Peace,” James N. Yamazaki in “Why Does a Pediatrician Worry about Nuclear Weapons?” recalls his experiences as an army pediatrician working at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) to study the devastating effects of the nuclear bomb on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The implication is clear: The United States is hardly innocent. Ironically, Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the World Trade Center (a detail rarely pointed out in Sept. 11 reports as Helen Zia notes in her opening essay, to seemingly avoid reference to anything un-American since Yamasaki is of Japanese descent), was Yamazaki’s best man and is his brother-in-law.

Both Angela Oh in “A Merciful End” and Michael Yamamoto in “Stop the Bombing, Stop the War” beg for an end to violence and the installation of peace. And Mari Matsuda in “Asian American and the Peace Imperative” chooses peace: “Not the idealized peace of the Summer of Love. No lilacs in my hand this time. This is a cold, calculating peace activist. Someone out there wants to kill me, and I have to figure out how to save my own life out of the history I know and the tools I have.”

That history, especially the most recent history, is suspect as Stephen Lee chronicles in “A Chronology of the ‘War on Terror’ and Domestic Hate Crimes.” Bush’s ‘war’ has created zealous patriotism in the media — while that same media is quick to give Bush full coverage when it comes to his calls for racial tolerance, the public knows little about the innocent pulled off of airlines because a mistaken resemblance to the enemy makes the crew uncomfortable, the racially motivated murders, the nearly 2,000 people detained by Ashcroft since Sept. 11, the rash of unexplained deportations. Lee’s chronology bears witness.

The events of Sept. 11 are different through the eyes of a minority, the eyes of those unwillingly marked as “foreigner.” While none of the contributors to this text would argue that the events were horrifyingly tragic, and that the actions of a few were heinous against the many innocent, eyes made foreign are perhaps more open, certainly more questioning. As if to add to the tragedy, “collateral damage” in the name of this ‘war on terrorism’ creates endless victims not only abroad, but at home, as well.