[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen
Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity. [/b]
None of us though, right?
Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.
I’m just a regular American, he thought.
I sipped my scotch. It was smoky and smooth, tasting of peat and aged oak, underscored by licorice and the intangible essence of Scottish masculinity. I liked my scotch undiluted, like I liked my truth.
Single malt truths, anyone?
And yet at Yan’an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination.
The key here is to become “one of us”.
Before I only wanted to change the world. I still want that, but it was ironic how I never wanted to change myself.
You know, whatever that means.
All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications.
What could be or not be more natural?