グランドトリノ

前回取り上げることができませんでしたが、作家Viet Thanh Nguyenのエッセイもとても考えさせられるものでした。ジョージフロイド事件の警官Tou Thaoはモン族だという導入から入ります。

Asian Americans Are Still Caught in the Trap of the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype. And It Creates Inequality for All

Viet Thanh Nguyen  June 25, 2020 Updated: June 25, 2020 6:37 AM

The face of Tou Thao haunts me. The Hmong-American police officer stood with his back turned to Derek Chauvin, his partner, as Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds and murdered him.

In the video that I saw, Tou Thao is in the foreground and Chauvin is partly visible in the background, George Floyd’s head pressed to the ground. Bystanders beg Tou Thao to do something, because George Floyd was not moving, and as he himself said, he could not breathe.

WhiteでもBlackでもないアジア系アメリカ人の微妙な立場について考察している記事ですが、Yutaはモン族にピンとこなくてWikipediaで調べてみたら以前見た映画で登場していました。映画でのイーストウッドは朝鮮戦争で従軍しましたが、隣人がベトナム戦争によって移民せざるを得なかったモン族で、アメリカによる戦後の戦争の影が小さな街にもチラついていたんですね。今頃感じることができました。

記事内でもベトナム戦争との関係を書いてくれています。作家になったベトナム系のViet Thanh Nguyenとモン族の警官Tou Thaoはアメリカによって翻弄された人生とも言えそうです。

My presence here in this country, and that of my parents, and a majority of Vietnamese and Hmong, is due to the so-called Vietnam War in Southeast Asia that the U.S. helped to wage. The war in Laos was called “the Secret War” because the CIA conducted it and kept it secret from the American people. In Laos, the Hmong were a stateless minority without a country to call their own, and CIA advisers promised the Hmong that if they fought along with them, the U.S. would take care of the Hmong in both victory and defeat, perhaps even helping them gain their own homeland. About 58,000 Hmong who fought with the Americans lost their lives, fighting communists and rescuing downed American pilots flying secret bombing missions over Laos. When the war ended, the CIA abandoned most of its Hmong allies, taking only a small number out of the country to Thailand. The ones who remained behind suffered persecution at the hands of their communist enemies.

This is why Tou Thao’s face haunts me. Not just because we may look alike in some superficial way as Asian Americans, but because he and I are here because of this American history of war. The war was a tragedy for us, as it was for the Black Americans who were sent to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem,” as Martin Luther King Jr. argued passionately in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam.” In this radical speech, he condemns not just racism but capitalism, militarism, American imperialism and the American war machine, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In another speech, he demands that we question our “whole society,” which means “ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation and the problem of war are all tied together.”

(Wikipedia)

ラオス領内におけるアメリカの反共破壊工作は「ラオス秘密戦争」と呼ばれ、CIAが指揮を執った。ラオス領内には、北ベトナム軍が南ベトナムのベトコンに支援物資を送るための「ホーチミン・ルート」と呼ばれる補給路が存在した。ラオスは中立国だったが、米軍はこの補給路を断つため総量で200万トン以上におよぶ爆撃を行った。ラオスへの爆撃はニクソンによる北爆停止宣言後も行われるほど執拗なものだった。

この爆撃と並行して行われたのが、バン・パオ将軍率いるモン族部隊による補給路の破壊工作である。CIAは金属すら見たことのないモン族に銃の使い方から戦闘機の操縦法まで、ありとあらゆることを教え込んだ。モン族の部隊は破壊工作のほか、「サイト85」とよばれる米軍のレーダー基地の守備にもあたった。彼らはラオスの首都ヴィエンチャンから北へ約200キロほどの場所にあるロンチェンの秘密基地を本拠地とした。この基地は1960年代〜70年代当時は地図にも記載されておらず、「世界で最も秘密の場所」と呼ばれた。前述のバン・パオ将軍の家もこのロンチェンにあった。

アメリカがベトナム戦争に敗れると、モン族は見捨てられ行き場を失った。彼らの多くはベトナム軍、ラオスの共産勢力、パテート・ラーオの三者による掃討作戦で返り討ちに遭い、女、子供も含めて虐殺された。数十万のモン族が政治亡命を求めタイに逃げた。これらの難民数千人が1970年代後半から欧米諸国、主に米国、またオーストラリア、フランス、フランス領ギアナ、カナダ、および南米に移住している。その他は国連の本国送還プログラムのもと、ラオスに戻った。ベトナムとカンボジア内戦をめぐって対立したタイや、中越戦争でベトナムやラオスと敵対した中華人民共和国によって支援されたモン族による反政府活動も起きた[9][10][11]。

ラオス国内ではゲリラ化したモン族による抵抗闘争や、山賊化したモン族による犯罪が散発的につづき、この問題がいまだに解決していないことを示している。

アジア系はthe model minority: the desirable classmate, the favored neighbor, the nonthreatening kind of person of colorのように扱いを受けることがあるようですが、これはあくまで向こうの調子が良い時で何かのきっかけで風向きが変わればAsian invasionと扱われてしまう不安定な状況を指摘します。

Unlike the engineers and doctors who mostly came from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and India–the model minority in the American imagination–many Hmong refugees arrived from a rural life in Laos devastated by war. Traumatized, they were resettled into the midst of poverty and a complicated history of racial oppression of which they had little awareness. Even the Hmong who condemn Tou Thao and argue for solidarity with Black Lives Matter insist that they should not be seen through the lens of the model-minority experience, should not be subject to liberal Asian-American guilt and hand-wringing over Tou Thao as a symbol of complicity. Christian minister Ashley Gaozong Bauer, of Hmong descent, writes, “We’ve had to share in the collective shame of the model minority, but when have Asian Americans shared in the pain and suffering of the Hmong refugee narrative and threats of deportation?”

Like the Hmong, the Vietnamese like myself suffered from war, and some are threatened by deportation now. Unlike many of the Hmong, a good number of Vietnamese refugees became, deliberately or otherwise, a part of the model minority, including myself. The low-level racism I experienced happened in elite environments. By the time I entered my mostly white, exclusive, private high school, the message was clear to me and the few of us who were of Asian descent. Most of us gathered every day in a corner of the campus and called ourselves, with a laugh, or maybe a wince, “the Asian invasion.” But if that was a joke we made at our own expense, it was also a prophecy, for when I returned to campus a couple of years ago to give a lecture on race to the assembled student body, some 1,600 young men, I realized that if we had not quite taken over, there were many more of us almost 30 years later. No longer the threat of the Asian invasion, we were, instead, the model minority: the desirable classmate, the favored neighbor, the nonthreatening kind of person of color.

Or were we? A couple of Asian-American students talked to me afterward and said they still felt it. The vibe. The feeling of being foreign, especially if they were, or were perceived to be, Muslim, or brown, or Middle Eastern. The vibe. Racism is not just the physical assault. I have never been physically assaulted because of my appearance. But I had been assaulted by the racism of the airwaves, the ching-chong jokes of radio shock jocks, the villainous or comical japs and chinks and gooks of American war movies and comedies. Like many Asian Americans, I learned to feel a sense of shame over the things that supposedly made us foreign: our food, our language, our haircuts, our fashion, our smell, our parents.

アジア系はどのように振る舞えば良いのか、model minorityとしてこれまでの白人寄りでBlack Lives Matterに距離を保つのか、それとも共感を持って異議申し立てするのか、TIMEで紹介されているアジア系たちは後者を選ぶ人たちが多かったです。