Happy New Year and welcome back to my blog! I hope everyone had a good time over winter break and enjoyed their covid safe holidays! Over winter break, I was quarantined and had to entertain myself at home, so I took Dr. Luger’s recommendation to start reading the book we would be working with in class, The Best We Could Do.

 The book is about the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese family’s perspective, including the sacrifices, struggles and disappointments endured. The story is a case for a change for understanding the war from a first person’s point of view. Before reading this graphic memoir, I had almost no knowledge of the War and how it was impacting the civilians at the time. The book shifts through timelines from, the war as a present moment, the after war and the family living in the United States and how it impacts her relationship with her parents after she has a child, and the timeline from her mother as a teen.

The way the book describes the events from a personal perspective, it reminds me of the book we read last term, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The book which was about an Afghani man living in America, mentions his feelings and reflections of the 9/11 terrorist attack. He describes his feelings of mourning but also as almost happy that the attack happened so America could be humbled, which is very different from an American’s feelings of grief and shock. The book shows what he was doing at the time of the attack and how that impacted him and his relations with people. It shows from a first person’s perspective of a middle easter man going through airport security after the crash of the towers and how discriminated he is.

Both books show a different story that is not the common narrative about the events. News about historical events usually seems to show how it impacts the country and or the factual evidence of the events, making it non-personal for the reader. In books like these, we feel more empathy for the event and shows me a clear understanding of what happened by looking through someone else’s eyes.

Talking about different perspectives of history, it reminds me of Judith Butler’s text on memory and the different types of remembering. Butler discusses strategic remembering and cultural memory. From my understanding of her readings, she describes strategic remembering as the way we remember historical events, not by personal stories but by the way it was broadcasted on the news or how it is written in textbooks. Cultural memory seems to me to be a way of passing on stories and remembering events through how it affected your culture or community.  Books like The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Best We Could Do, show a different way of remembering events and shows different narratives from the cultural memory, giving the reader freedom to empathy and emotions.