Chloe Azurin
ASA 150E
16 February 2020
In Nayan Chanda’s Brother Enemy: The War After the War, the author talks about how the tense and somewhat undulating relationships between China, Vietnam, and Cambodia are not merely the product of “the American war” as I had previously assumed it to be. Instead, the author explains that the struggles of power goes back thousands of years. As a testament to the erasing quality of being an American trusting American history classes, this class continues to astound me with the levels of ignorance of foreign relations and the world’s struggles. As Americans, we are taught to only take interest in a country if it’s power and presence threatens our own. I knew that Vietnam had struggled with the French colonizers. I was only vaguely aware that Vietnam and Cambodia were ever I was had no idea that the country possessed ancient and similar struggles with China that would eventually lead to the Third Indochina War. Once again, the first person account of some of the events brings up the emotional ties that make it so crucial for us to view a clearer hxstory, and demonstrates that it is the emotions that cut through the barrier between a single Western-washed hxstory and the beauty of multiple truths.
My questions for this week seem simple and dumb enough at first glance, but the answer is almost impossible to discern: Who writes the American history books? Who gets to pick the authors and who dictates what they are allowed to cover, or more accurately, what they need to reinforce or conceal? Who gets to write the history that we are all taught to believe and reproduce?
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