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January 10, 2002, 1:36 p.m.

Dude, I'm totally sick. My throat hurts and I can't stop sneezing. (Morton just sympathy sneezed, awww.) I think I'm going to take a dissertation break and fire up the Rapidograph pens Mark bought me and do some doodling, maybe new images for this site--?

12:26 a.m.

I've been having trouble sleeping lately because I can't stop making lists. Arbitrary lists, like my favorite five films from 2001, or my favorite five live shows ever, or maddening tallies of the most outrageous lies and abuses of the Bush administration of the last week. I keep hoping that the lists will have the same effect as sheep-counting --though I've never tried sheep-counting to bore myself into unconsciousness-- but instead I find I'm hashing out the details of why and why not, making checks of the pros and cons, and debating the evaluative nature of lists.

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"WOMAN SELLS HOME TO BUY PARADE FLOAT
Associated Press, December 28, 2001   

LOS ANGELES--A Vietnamese immigrant who sold her home to help pay for a float in the famed Tournament of Roses Parade on New Year's Day says she did it to thank America for taking care of her as a refugee 24 years ago.

'This has been my dream since 1977,' Madalenna Lai said. 'The first time I saw the Rose Parade I thought it was so beautiful that I told myself, one day I will do a float to say, 'Thank you, America.''

The theme of the float, which Lai said is the first Rose Parade entry from Southern California's large Vietnamese community, is 'Thank You America and the World.' She sold her home and used $40,000 of the proceeds toward building the float and paying entry fees. She lived at her beauty parlor for six months while the float was built and until her daughter helped her buy another house."

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My parents watched the parade and called me to the television when the Vietnamese Cultural House float appeared, a boat cresting a wave. My mother shook her head. "She sold her house for this?" Unidentified smiling Vietnamese individuals in ao dais waved to the crowds from the deck. The parade commentator read the signboard out loud and intoned solemnly, "You're welcome."

It's too good to be true, isn't it? The "good" refugee for whom America looms so large as a signifier of freedom, she sacrifices the fruits of her hard labor to erect a display of her gratitude and love. Framed as such, it seems to be a story about a prepolitical innocence, radiating from that vague space of "the heart."

But what kinds of "truths" is this "refugee memory," this "refugee gratitude," meant to produce? Its deployment certainly validates a hegemonic narrative of migration to the West  --and particularly America-- as a trajectory from oppression to liberation, barbarism to modernity. Of course, as Gayatri Spivak suggests archly, "To create the new American out of the pipe dream of 'We, the People,' or out of the bogus concept of the world's policeman, or to give democratic ideals a kind of moral luck is to forget the violence at the origin ."

French writer Pierre Nora wrote that memory only accomodates those facts which suit it. The question then becomes, whose memory (and which memory) is enshrined on the float, and why?

There is so much going on here, but at the least I have to believe this appeal to the American Dream is a strategic one. The story (and the float itself) mobilizes an emotional discourse which also serves the anticommunist cause, which is far from prepolitical, and which is actively engaged in a contest of meaning and power; to "give thanks" to the United States is to validate the military intervention and its political agenda against the "Red Tide," and to "naturalize" current Vietnamese anticommunist activism. The sentimental, gendered conventions for interpreting the story, the float, and its message --the female refugee who finds the floats of flowers beautiful, who sacrifices her home for love, et cetera-- are self-effacing, helping to disguise a (potential) political motive.

I've been reading so many books researching my dissertation which suggest that the refugee is a figure of resilience, of resistance to the nation-state (in fact and in theory). In these books (some of them scholarly) the refugee often appears as a wise woman, uttering truths about the so-called "human experience" in plain, prepolitical language, demonstrating "new possibilities for living" in a transnational era and exercising their agency to define themselves.

But it seems obvious to me that the quality of refugee agency is not always one of resistance to the nation-state form (which is a reductive binary, in any case), and neither is it always one of prepolitical innocence, and to hope that the figure of the refugee might represent the "authentic" critique of the nation-state is to make her the site of myth-making, to problematically imagine her as an escape from the impure nature of political realities. We clearly need to historicize the conditions that produce refugees as a specific population or social category, but also do the same for the figure of the refugee as a subject of discourses both sentimental and regulatory, and how she functions politically and ideologically.

I'm really, really tired, but I hope that made some sense. (Thanks to Phil for the copy from the AP story.)