UC Irvine

This chapter delves into the enduring legacy of the Vietnam-American War (1955-1975) for East Asian countries by focusing on the geo/politics of memory. Although the main focus is on South Korea, I also take aim at the failure of Japan, Taiwan and China to acknowledge their complicity in the messy conflagration and its impact on Vietnamese people. Deflecting attention away from the violence of the war and towards postwar economic integration demonstrates the ignorance and historical amnesia of these states. These powerful Asian countries have whitewashed their role in the brutal atrocities that took place during the war-actions that demand answers and prompt communal rage from Vietnamese and other Asian survivors. A trans-Pacific conception of the Vietnam War and its haunting afterlives challenges the spatialized notion of the Vietnam War as something that is localized (e.g., a civil war) and uproots the neoliberal demand to forget the temporal past for the sake of economic security and future prosperity. It does so by revealing the ways 'development' and ' progress' throughout the Asia-Pacific region are undergirded by historical violence and memory gate-keeping.