Going to Laos: Storytelling and Ideology

This is not my story. 

I've tried to write this essay at least five times.  I felt it had to begin this way:  this is not my story. 

One time, I began it this way:

There's danger in telling other people's stories. Perhaps that's why I'm loathe to tell stories that are not in some way "my own," stories that I myself have not had a hand in. I had a professor who did his dissertation on Native America, but going into the project he vowed that he "would not write another book about Indians." Too many white people have been speaking for Native Americans for too long, is the idea, taking liberties they shouldn't take, speaking about them as if they were an exotic species.

Another time I began telling the story of a woman who only had to finish her medical degree when the Pathet Lao swept into power, but instead moved to Red Deer, Alberta, where she has been a CNA her whole life, about a man who took her story and fit it into his "You came to America for freedom" narrative, looking almost right past her.  Then I realized I had already used that story on this same blog.

Then, last night, I watched a documentary on PBS entitled A Harvest of Loneliness about the Bracero Program, how through the law of the land, US companies herded poor Mexican laborers into assorted concentration camps and worked them like slaves for almost no pay; how later NAFTA increased the pressure on poor campesinos and drove them north; how currently there's still a "temporary worker" law on the table to displace people in the name of cheap labor, leaving displaced laborers already within this country doubly displaced.  Another way to begin, I thought.

This story that is not my story goes like this:  farang khi nok intervene in Indochina; out of this comes a ruling elite that in turns becomes ripe for the drama of ideological conflict; world superpowers filter money and weapons to a place their leaders can't even pronounce; the resulting horrors and specters of horrors drive people out of the place, streaming to places where life is said to be better, where mountains of gold are said to exist; churches agree to provide shelter in cast off houses and apartments around town; the mountain of gold turns out to be clefts in rocks--CNA jobs, tailor jobs, meat packing jobs. 

The first time I wrote this essay, too, in order to move the essay along, I tried this gimmick:

I'm trying to write back to my first line, to revisit the fact that "this is not my story" and then, miraculously, to show that it is, that it's an American story, that it's a migration story, that all of us here on American soil, even Native Americans through the racial memory of the land bridge, came here to establish a new life, and that my wife's story is only a relatively recent chapter--certainly not the most recent--within that American story.

But it seems fake, seems forced, seems imperialist.  I can't get there except by telling you I was trying to predetermine the ending of this essay, and then couldn't do it.  This is not my story, not America's story.  But after reading about how the US planted bombs in Laos that continue to bear deadly fruit to this very day, it seems even more impossible to get out of America's imprint, out of reframing the story in a way that will make it more flat, pre-packaged, more objective.

After the Bracero movie last night, I've come back to this "move" again, because that movie reminds me of a book I read in college, Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.  This is my story because it is a race story, because America is a race story, because America is a war story, because America is an ideology, because America is a mouth.

And this is a success story: a family comes to a secure town, the mother works hard, the children get  educated, get integrated without cultural decimation, get baptized, get married, get good jobs, get to go "back."

But this is where the tension exists in this story:  it is a success story because it is an individual story, a story of individuals who worked within a larger narrative that was almost absolutely corrupt to bring about, through the yeast of God's grace, a story that ended in a specific place with specific outcomes measurable according to typically American standards:  cultural integration, economic independence, religious freedom.

This is a story of individuals, serendipity, and other receiving individuals, acting within a narrative that had overarching violence, distrust, and selfishness as its motives. 

In other words, this is a story of God's providence, but only, it seems to me, if the story resists the pull of these other stories at every step of the way. 

But I don't know that it can. 

This is not my story.  This is not America's story.  Does announcing that make it not so?