content warnings: imperialism, colonialism, war, suicide, violence, white supremacy
@America — Megan Duong
Be grateful you live in America, my parents tell me. They left a country that was once whole Fertile with coconut trees and rice fields Until the Frenchman mapped out our country like a boardgame Except in this chess game, the white piece had the power to control all the brown pieces Even had the power to call the brown pieces “burdens” “Burdens” that worked rubber plantations for your Michelin tires My parents dreamed of coming here since 1975, the Fall of Saigon After years of war - of bombs and Agent Orange, of watching monks set themselves on fire in protest Years of food rations and watching their friends leave the country one by one They had the American Dream To leave war-torn Vietnam for a land said to be brimming with opportunity This dream was hollow, its skeleton sustained by the myth of meritocracy The maintenance of the model minority that would manifest In ways meant to divide and conquer people of color They left for a land that backed the very war they were escaping A land that elected a president with complexion resembling the orange pesticides that rained over my parents’ motherland Embodying violence as lethal as the chemicals that maimed my people A land that forced us to assimilate into an America we dreamed would be better than our war-torn home And made my parents believe that we should be grateful for this sliver of American pie A land that This land was not made for you and me
Megan Duong (she) is a Bay Area-based youth artist/organizer who is exploring mediums of watercolor and poetry as a tool to disrupt oppressive narratives and create visions of healing and liberation, all with the intention of navigating what ancestry, resilience, trauma, and being a product of the Vietnamese diaspora mean to her.
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