Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam
Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu
Duke University Press: 2021
.
The traumatic effects of the Vietnam War, which every Vietnamese learns in school as the Resistance War against America, are well documented in number. How many American planes were shot down, how many American soldiers were captured, how many people on both sides lost their lives and how much wreckage remains today physically and emotionally. As a Vietnamese born after the war, I remember memorising many such statistics in our history classes, only to forget them almost instantly upon the end of a test. The war, despite being drilled for the entirety of our general education and reprised in numerous films and documentaries, was not so alive in the collective memory of my generation. The Vietnam I grew up in was—and is—rapidly changing and shedding its skin from poor and war-torn to prosperous and modern. Yet, as it turns out, the skin of war cannot be wiped clean so easily..

• Tags: Hong Kong Nguyen, Issue 24, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Vietnam