Woman Warriors
As much as the North American women critiqued one another, they expressed adulation for their Indochinese sisters. The delegation to the Indochinese Women’s Conferences (IWCs) from Southeast Asia consisted of three teams of two women and one male translator each for North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and Laos.1 Vo Thi The, a fifty-year-old professor of literature at the University of Hanoi and an officer in the Vietnam Women’s Union (VWU), had visited Canada in 1969. Given her seniority and experience, she served as an overall leader of the 1971 delegation. Nguyen Thi Xiem, a forty-year-old gynecologist and obstetrician, was the vice president of the VWU. Forty-six-year-old Dinh Thi Huong, a housewife, and thirty-one-year-old Phan Minh Hien, a teacher, represented the Women’s Union for the Liberation of South Vietnam. Two additional teachers, forty-seven-year-old Khampheng Boupha and twenty-nine-year-old Khemphet Pholsena, represented the Laotian Patriotic Women’s Association.2 A fourth delegation from Cambodia planned to attend as well but was unable to do so. Due to war conditions, it was even difficult for the South Vietnamese women to travel to Canada. One of the delegates, Hien, walked with a forty-four-pound pack from her base in the South to the North so that she could take a flight out of the country. She was a slight woman, weighing just eighty-six pounds. Her journey took three months.
Figure 17. The delegates from Indochina. Left to right, front: Dinh Thi Hong and Phan Minh Hien; middle: Nguyen Thi Xiem, Khampheng Boupha, and Khemphet Pholsena; back: Vo Thi The. Originally published in Gidra (May 1971) and republished in Asian Women’s Journal. Drawing by Cynthis Fukagai. Source: Cynthia Sugawara and UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, Los Angeles.
The women from South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and Laos presented themselves to North American women in large plenaries, smaller workshops, and discussions over meals. Since the conversations occurred via translation, some North American women questioned why the Indochinese chose to send male interpreters. Other women thought little of this gendered division of labor, because the Indochinese women made such a powerful impression. They did so through presentations and responses to questions but also through their sense of humor and expressions of affection. As one Canadian conference organizer recalled:
Most remarkable about these women were their gentle dignity, self command, and deep concern for others, both individually and as nations. They laughed often with the women they met, hugged them when they felt common feelings, wept a little as they heard of each others’ sufferings, and comforted us when (as too often happened) we ran late with the program or failed with the conference arrangements. Although their competence and dedication awed us, we felt that we, too, might cope better in future, as women and as citizens, for having met them.3
The Indochinese delegates shared both the inhumane suffering that the war caused as well as their sustained efforts to fight for liberation. The newspaper coverage of the IWCs and the personal reflections of the attendees offer insight into how North American women responded to their message. Reflecting past approaches of global sisterhood, some women from the United States and Canada expressed a desire to “rescue” their Indochinese sisters from the atrocities of the war. Others articulated a radical orientalist perspective, portraying the women from Southeast Asia not as victims but as exemplars of revolutionary womanhood. These Asian female warriors offered an image of hope and humanity that contrasted with the oppressive gender roles and fractious politics in North American societies. Consequently, the Indochinese women helped female activists in the West to redefine their political aspirations.
This productive tension between a binary sense of opposition between the Orient and the Occident as well as an identification with radical Asia was particularly acute for Asian American women. Due to their marginalization within American political movements, women of Asian ancestry in the United States aspired to connect with their revolutionary Asian sisters in Southeast Asia. Their sense of sisterhood recognized the disparate subject positions of Asian and Asian American women and yet was premised upon a sense of commonality rooted in racial, gender, and political likeness. Inspired by these encounters, both groups of women formulated innovative critiques of war and colonization that foregrounded the experiences and bodies of Asian women in understanding U.S. militarization and empire.
The delegates from Southeast Asia who tended to receive the most attention in activist publications were the women who either suffered traumatic abuse or who could testify to wartime atrocities. Their testimonials conveyed how war and political persecution had gendered implications for women, their bodies, and their ability to perform responsibilities of motherhood. These dramatic accounts of atrocities invited women from the West to work in political solidarity with women from the East to end the war.
Dinh Thi Huong made a powerful impact on conference delegates. A housewife from South Vietnam, Huong had not been politically engaged in the movement for liberation before she was imprisoned. Suspected of supporting the opposition to the South Vietnamese government, she was detained and tortured in a series of the most notorious prisons in the South. The detailed account of her experiences appeared in several movement publications produced by the New Left, Third World, and women’s organizations. In her autobiographical narrative, she said, “Pins [were planted] in my fingertips, . . . electrodes . . . [were] attached to my ears and to my fingers, nipples and genitals . . . and [I was] tortured with electricity until I was unconscious.” In addition, her interrogators, she said, “forced water, lye and salt into my stomach and trampled on my stomach until I vomited blood and was unconscious.”4 These dramatic episodes illustrated the visceral and sexualized nature of torture.
Huong’s accounts also conveyed the dehumanizing day-to-day indignities of trying to survive in crowded cells with inadequate facilities and either little food or “rotten rice.” One cell that measured approximately nine feet by four and a half feet held “15 to 32 people at a time—women and men in the same cell. In this cell the prisoners eat, go to the bathroom. Prisoners could only stand. I was not allowed to bathe from November 1955 to August 1956.”5 After nearly six years, Huong was finally found not guilty and released. During that time, her weight dropped from 108 to 78 pounds.6 In addition, other family members of hers had died or were imprisoned. Following her release, Huong decided to “join my people to fight against the Americans and puppets.”7 As she surmised, “the more barbarous the army is, the stronger the struggle of the people.”8
Huong’s experiences provided a powerful example of the political persecution and lack of civil rights in South Vietnam, a condition that was supported by the United States. This message had been conveyed to women in the West prior to the conference, particularly through Ngo Ba Thanh and the Right to Live Campaign. Thanh, a lawyer who was trained at Columbia University and in Paris, led a women’s peace movement in South Vietnam. Like Thich Nhat Hanh, she and her organization represented an independent force in opposition to the war. Because petitioning for peace constituted treason in South Vietnam, Thanh was repeatedly imprisoned beginning in 1965.9 In the summer of 1970, Thanh cofounded an urban women’s movement in Saigon to protest for peace and against political persecution. Calling themselves the Movement of Women’s Actions for the Right to Live, this organization reached out to female organizations internationally.
Both new and old friends featured stories about Thanh and the Right to Live movement. Women’s liberation activists in Boston introduced the organization in a flier calling for solidarity with women in Vietnam. The poster explained, “When particularly brutal attacks on women occur in the countryside, these women immediately go out marching in the streets of Saigon. We in the US live under very different conditions and our struggle takes different forms. But our Vietnamese sisters follow our movement with great interest. Let’s find new ways of supporting them and demonstrating our solidarity with them!”10 To express their connection with this movement, women’s liberationists in the United States used variations on the slogan “Right to Live” to promote feminist understanding of women and war. Echoing Betita Martinez’s observations about Vietnamese society, a memo from the Washington, DC, Women’s Liberation Anti-Imperialist Collective argued, “We use the word ‘life force’ to symbolize a life-oriented movement, a politics based on people’s determination to live free lives and to build a new society. We see this life force, rather than a death-oriented politics, as the key to bringing the monstor [sic] to its knees.”11
Old friends also made connections to the Right to Live movement, particularly through their mutual investment in maternalist politics. WILPF, for example, reprinted an open letter from Vietnamese women in this movement written to Vice President Spiro Agnew.12 The group attempted unsuccessfully to meet with him during his 1970 visit to South Vietnam. Addressing him as a “father [who has] deep love towards [his] children,” the letter was signed by “representatives of Mothers whose children are being detained in the various prisons throughout South Vietnam, in the Tiger Cages, in the Disciplinary Cells . . . without trial or tried by unconstitutional Courts or have served their jail-terms or have been arrested during military operations (US, V.N. Allied).”13 Twenty mothers signed the letter and gave the names of their missing children. The maternalist appeal of the Right to Live movement resonated strongly with the old friends.
Presentations at the IWC also addressed the destructive impact of war on families. Dr. Nguyen Thi Xiem, a physician with the Hanoi Institute for the Preservation of Mothers and Newly Born Children, provided analysis of the widespread and long-term effects of bombing on Vietnamese people and land. North American attendees recalled:
Dr. Xiem presented an account, including pictures, of the Vietnamese wounded by pellet bombs, napalm and defoliants. Tremendous pain and mutilation, as well as death, have resulted from the use of bombs that release thousands of tiny pellets to become embedded in vital organs—napalm that burns and suffocates—defoliant sand that cause[s] blindness, genetic damage and other destruction to human beings, in addition to . . . devastating the countryside. 44% of the forests and cultivated land of South Vietnam have been affected by toxic chemicals.14
Xiem’s status as a physician, devoted to the care of women and children, gave her report an air of professional authority. She also underscored that expert forms of testimony were not always necessary. When asked about the psychological effect of bombing on young children, the doctor replied, “This bombing is not suitable for their development. It is not necessary to make an analysis. Our experiences as mothers should indicate this. Thank you for your attention to our baby children.”15
These accounts of atrocities reminded North American women of the horrific nature of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. While many antiwar activists no doubt had absorbed similar information through movement publications, the impact of hearing these stories in person was much more profound. It was difficult not to be moved by personal testimonies, recounted by women who had experienced or witnessed these atrocities and who traveled from the other side of the world in order to communicate with their “sisters” in North America.
North American reception to these accounts of war was shaped by the timing of the IWC, which began just after Lieutenant William Calley had been convicted for his role in the My Lai Massacre. On 16 March 1968, Calley had commanded one of three platoons that entered a village suspected of supporting the Vietcong. Army intelligence actually had misidentified the hamlet. In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive on urban military and political outposts throughout South Vietnam, U.S. soldiers became determined to hunt down and punish communist sympathizers. Practiced in violent search-and-destroy missions, American troops executed over five hundred residents in My Lai in one day. They murdered women, the elderly, and young children, none of whom shot at the Americans. GIs also sexually abused and raped women before torturing and executing them. A soldier recalled, “I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongue, their hair, scalped them. I did it. A lot of people were doing it, and I just followed. I lost all sense of direction.”16
Among the soldiers, Calley was “responsible for killing the most Vietnamese,” allegedly slaughtering “over 100 Vietnamese civilians.”17 In addition to ordering his men to “waste” individuals who were clearly noncombatants, Calley also herded prisoners to a water ditch and began firing indiscriminately into the group. Several GIs saw him run “after a bloody but unhurt two-year-old boy who had managed to crawl out of the ditch, throw him back in, and shoot him.”18 In addition, witnesses recalled that Calley killed a Buddhist monk. When questioned repeatedly about the Vietcong, the monk denied their presence in the village and “kept putting his hands together in a praying position and bowing his head.”19 Calley initially hit him with the butt of the rifle and then “took his rifle at point blank and pulled the trigger.”20
The military superiors of the three platoons made no attempt to stop the massacre. However, army helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson observed the atrocities from above. Outraged by what he saw, he landed the plane, confronted Calley, and ordered his backup to train “his machine gun on the American troops surrounding the bunker.”21 Thompson then placed his body between U.S. troops and Vietnamese civilians to stop the killing and evacuated some of the survivors. Within the ditch, “the only person they found alive was a small child, who had been shielded from the hail of bullets by the body of a young woman, who had probably been its mother.”22
Afterward, the military attempted to cover up the massacre and described it initially as a victory over the Vietcong. News photographer Ronald Haeberle, who witnessed and documented the violence, challenged this heroic interpretation. In addition, Ronald Ridenhour, who served in a reconnaissance unit, sent letters to Washington politicians based on reports that he received about the massacre. Still, it took over a year before an investigation was initiated and nearly three years before Calley was finally found guilty of mass premeditated murder and assault with intent to commit murder.
Scholar Michal Belknap argues that Calley’s defense team lacked a coherent legal strategy. They considered the insanity plea as well as the argument that Calley was merely “following orders” and that others were engaged in similar behavior. Calley and his supporters eventually condemned the trial and its outcome for scapegoating him. A vast majority of the U.S. population agreed, as did President Nixon and the army leadership. Calley’s sentence, which could have been as severe as the death penalty, was set at lifelong imprisonment and hard labor but was reduced by the commander in chief. In the end, Calley only served “a few months in a military prison and a few years confined to his apartment.”23 All of the other defendants, including his commanding officer, were found innocent.
The mainstream press repeatedly asked the Indochinese delegation about the My Lai Massacre and Calley’s sentence. In fact, the opening plenary at the Vancouver IWC took place on 1 April 1971, two days after the trial verdict was announced. Conference attendees, after hearing the emotional testimonies of the Indochinese women, learned that Nixon had released Calley from the stockade to house arrest.24 Asked repeatedly about Calley, the Indochinese delegation used the occasion to highlight the level of violence and destruction the U.S. military committed every day in Southeast Asia. Without acquitting Calley for his role, Phan Minh Hien, the delegate who spent three months walking in order to meet North American women, stated, “While Calley is the person who gave the order, he was merely carrying out the orders of the U.S. administration.” For Hien, Calley’s crimes were America’s crimes, since “the U.S. administration sent U.S. troops into Vietnam, ‘that is why the U.S. youths commit crimes against our country . . . why the Vietnamese people have to fight . . . and why U.S. youths get killed.’ ”25 To stop this cycle of violence, the Indochinese women stressed, the United States must immediately and unilaterally withdraw from the war and end its support of the South Vietnamese government.
The Laotian representatives at the IWCs, less practiced in these international settings, did not receive as much press attention as the other delegates. However, the information that they conveyed was new for most of the North American conference attendees. The inclusion of the Laotians and the intended presence of Cambodians reflected a pan-Indochinese anticolonial strategy that was increasingly necessary as the U.S. war in Vietnam escalated in all parts of Southeast Asia. The United States had long considered these nations in relation to one another as part of an overall American Cold War strategy. Just as the United States supported Diem, it initiated political and military campaigns in Cambodia and Laos as well. As early as 1960, “the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had recruited a secret army of 30,000 Hmong tribesmen in mountainous northern Laos to fight against a Lao communist insurgency.”26 These troops would eventually go directly into battle near the Lao border, alongside the military of South Vietnam. In fact, one major campaign against the North Vietnamese occurred in February 1971, just two months before the IWC. Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization” increased the number not only of South Vietnamese troops fighting the war but also of Laotian soldiers. While the president called for a de-escalation of U.S. troops, he and his advisers increased air support for the South Vietnamese military, expanded the scope of the bombings, and mandated that Asian soldiers take leadership in the ground war. Seeking to destroy North Vietnamese base camps and supply lines into South Vietnam, Nixon ordered secret bombings of the neighboring countries. Beginning in 1969, approximately 100,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia over a period of fifteen months, killing an estimated 150,000 civilians. In Laos, almost five million tons rained down over four years.27 The U.S. directives in Cambodia came to light when Nixon ordered an invasion of the country in the spring of 1970. The American role in Laos did not receive the same level of public scrutiny.
The Laotian delegation of the IWC sought to expose these “secret wars.” Khampheng Boupha, the more senior member of the Laotian team, shared the difficulties of living and teaching in time of war: “Since the U.S. bombardment began, about 2,000 schools have been destroyed. . . . The classes must be divided. We teach in small groups, sometimes in the jungle, under the shade of the trees. . . . The children have learned to leave their studies, to be ready to aid their family in rebuilding their home or help the peasants with their crops.”28 Despite these challenges, she expressed pride in her responsibilities: “That is my small contribution to my people—educating the children.” Khemphet Pholsena, the youngest of the six delegates, was also a teacher as well as a mother of a ten-month-old baby. She shared that her father, who served as a minister of foreign affairs in 1963, followed a policy of neutrality, similar to what Cambodia attempted. She believed that CIA agents killed her father because of his political beliefs and also severely wounded her mother in April 1963. Following these attacks, her injured mother and their remaining family joined the socialist-controlled Liberated Zone in Laos.
These personal accounts of war-related atrocities and political persecutions highlighted the gendered impact of American policies throughout Southeast Asia. Chandra Mohanty has critiqued the construction of a monolithic, victimized “Third World woman” in Western feminist discourse.29 Strikingly, the Indochinese women who came to North America used individual experiences to convey an analysis of the similarities of U.S. policies throughout North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and Laos. They provided personal examples so that they might illuminate patterns of gendered violence. In other words, the Indochinese representatives were invested in constructing a categorical understanding of Southeast Asian women. They offered models of resistance, however, and not just evidence of victimization. In addition, the Indochinese women emphasized that the war harmed those in the West, including those in the American military who enacted atrocities.
These cumulative testimonials of violence made a profound impact upon North American female audiences. Their reactions reflected two main tendencies. Some maternalist peace activities expressed a sense of moral obligation that resembled a politics of rescue. As women from the West, they wanted to save the women from the East. Other activists, including maternalists, women’s liberationists, and Third World women, placed the Indochinese women on an idealized political pedestal for their ability to endure and struggle. Asian American women, in particular, became inspired by the experiences and political leadership of Asian women to develop a transnational and intersectional analysis of American militarism.
Following the conference, the newsletter of WSP, Memo, published a series of letters from its readers. One statement, authored by Voice of Women president Muriel Duckworth, appeared under the headline “They Must Be Saved.”30 The phrase positioned North American women as the potential saviors of Asian women. Reinforcing this message was an image widely circulated among peace activists that appeared on the cover of Memo in December 1966. Featuring a Vietnamese mother holding a young child in her arms, the image portrayed the mother as utterly hopeless and forlorn. As she gazes down and away, three white angels descend toward her to offer solace, evoking the role to be played by women of the West. Published during the Christmas season, the Vietnamese Madonna image underscored a maternalist message, calling for the salvation of a fellow mother and, perhaps more important, her child, whose gaze connects directly with the viewer (see figure 4).
The mother and child photograph published by Memo replicated the image that circulated as a Fellowship of Reconciliation antiwar Christmas card in 1966, featuring a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh. In fact, the same image had been prominently displayed onstage at a public antiwar meeting held during that summer which featured Hanh and Bob Browne. Not coincidentally, the old friends, the maternal peace activists, tended to be political allies of Browne in his early efforts to foster awareness of U.S. policies in Southeast Asia. Chapters of WSP and WILPF frequently invited him to give talks about Vietnam. Given their investment in maternalist politics, they expressed particular interest in Bob’s marriage to Huoi and his claim that familial responsibilities gave him added authority to speak about U.S. foreign policies. The sense of “paternalistic” materialism conveyed by the Vietnamese Madonna image and by Duckworth’s letter resonated with the political and cultural orientation of older peace activists.
In contrast, the Indochinese women, although extremely modest in their claims and presentation styles, nevertheless highlighted their own political agency in resisting the war. They also emphasized that the U.S. war victimized Americans and damaged U.S. society as well. From their perspective, it was not a matter of the West rescuing the East. Rather, the Asian women were seeking to encourage those in the West to recognize that they had a role to play in stopping such a destructive war. Third World women, women’s liberation activists, and maternalist peace advocates all noticed the contrast between their own engagement in the politics of “blame,” their divisiveness and factionalism, compared to the Indochinese, who, they said,
never let us feel guilty of the crimes they described. Furthermore, they expressed sincere compassion for the suffering the war has brought to Americans. These women, whose families were scattered by our armies, whose villages were leveled, whose loved ones were murdered, these women recognized that “young Americans are scapegoats” forced to fight the war. Over and over the Indochinese women reiterated their confidence that if the American people only knew what was going on in Indochina, Americans would demand an end to atrocities and the war.31
The Indochinese ability to forgive and to distinguish between the American people and their government led many conference attendees to regard them as model revolutionary figures. North American women tended to “place them on a pedestal because of their revolutionary courage, spirit and warmth.”32 For Third World women in particular, the opportunity to interact with and learn from nonwhite female leaders was especially empowering. Chicana activists Maria Ramirez and Nina Genera recalled that it marked their first opportunity to witness and interact with Third World women in the vanguard of an ongoing revolution.33
Asian American women expressed a special affinity for the women from Southeast Asia. In fact, the conference played a significant role in the political development of an entire generation of Asian American female activists. According to a Japanese American delegate, 120 Asian Americans and Asian Canadians attended the Vancouver IWC.34 If this number is accurate, Asian North Americans constituted a significant and perhaps even majority constituency of the approximately 200 to 250 Third World women at the West Coast conference. Because Asian Americans resided predominantly in the U.S. West, they likely attended in smaller numbers in Toronto, which was intended for residents of the East Coast and the Midwest. Those who could not travel to Canada could read extensive coverage of the IWC in Asian Women’s Journal, a pioneering and widely circulated publication devoted to Asian American women’s issues. Originally issued in 1971, the same year as the conference, the journal was eventually reprinted three times. It included biographies of the Southeast Asian women who participated in the IWCs as well as personal testimonies, poetry, and artwork by attendees. Significantly, the publication also featured an interview with Pat Sumi, described as a movement “superstar.”35
The IWCs attracted the interest of Asian American women because female revolutionaries from Southeast Asia crystallized three main tenets of Asian American women’s emerging political identity—their racial, international, and gender consciousness. Donna Kotake, a Japanese American who attended the Vancouver conference, recalled the political inspiration that the Indochinese women offered. Raised in a farming community in San Francisco’s South Bay and attending San Jose State University in 1971, she was undergoing a political awakening. Growing up in the United States, Kotake explained,
your whole identity was not Asian. Your identity was just, like, you wanted to be a white person. . . . So, to us at that point, . . . identifying ourselves as Asian Americans, wanting to learn more about our own histories, and, you know, being proud of the histories . . . and I think really hooking up with other nonwhites was a really big deal. . . . So, you know, there’s the identity going on as being Asian and there’s a Third World coming, coalitions coming together, and there’s this international thing with Vietnam, and at the same time people talking about China and seeing what a shining example of, you know, what it could be like to be free, people who care about . . . people and a country that provides . . . for everyone.36
Kotake and other activists of her generation were discovering their racial identity as Asian Americans.37 Instead of desiring whiteness, she recognized herself as a member of a resistant panethnic group that had a distinct history and culture connected to Third World struggles in the United States and around the world.
With her political consciousness raised through the Asian American movement press and conversations with individuals like Pat Sumi, Kotake experienced a profound connection with the Indochinese women in Vancouver. They shared her racial and gender status and her anti-imperialist politics. When asked how the IWC influenced her, Kotake responded, “Just feeling the strength of the women and realizing how much women can do and it really made me feel incredibly proud about being a woman.”38 Another Asian American woman who attended the conference emphasized that the presence of Asian female bodies enhanced the political message of the Indochinese delegates: “Their physical presence had tremendous impact on the hundreds of Third World and white women. Here were six Asian women—physically small, sincere, friendly often appearing extremely tired. Yet, whenever one spoke, it was with such clarity and with a background of personal involvement that the meaning of a people’s revolution became a reality.”39
At the time of the conference, Asian American women were developing a gendered and racialized analysis of the war that emphasized the transnational connections between Asians in Vietnam and in the United States. Activist Evelyn Yoshimura articulated this perspective in an essay titled “GI’s and Racism,” which first appeared in the Asian American movement newspaper Gidra and then was reprinted in the Asian Women’s Journal. Yoshimura argued that the U.S. military relied upon and reproduced racial hatred for Asians to motivate American soldiers to fight in Asia. By promoting the “view of Asian people as sub-human beings . . . the U.S. military . . . can instill the values and mentality that is necessary to become effective killers.”40 U.S. soldiers carried and reproduced these racial attitudes, which were cultivated during basic training on the U.S. mainland and then on military tours in Southeast Asia, back and forth across the Pacific.
The figure of Asian women played a central role in the racial education of U.S. military personnel. As Yoshimura put it, U.S. soldiers learned to regard “Asian women as a symbolic sexual object.”41 Through the systematic creation of red light districts in Asian countries where U.S. troops were stationed, the U.S. military institutionalized the practice of American GIs frequenting Asian prostitutes.42 Not limited to individual excursions, these practices became integral to military culture and discourse through the ritualized retellings of these experiences. An Asian American Marine recalled of his boot camp experience:
We had these classes we had to go to taught by the drill instructors, and every instructor would tell a joke before he began class. It would always be a dirty joke usually having to do with prostitutes they had seen in Japan or in other parts of Asia while they were stationed overseas. The attitude of the Asian women being a doll a useful toy or something to play with usually came out in these jokes and how they were not quite as human as white women . . . how Asian women’s vaginas weren’t like a white woman’s, but rather they were slanted, like their eyes.43
Such racialized and sexualized depictions of Asian women, used to foster male bonding among U.S. soldiers, guided American military policies and practices in Southeast Asia—in the brothels and in the general prosecution of war.44
In addition, Vietnam veterans brought these beliefs and practices back to the United States. Evelyn Yoshimura reminded readers of her article, “GI’s and Racism,” “We, as Asian American women, cannot separate ourselves from our Asian counterparts. Racism against them is too often racism against us. . . . The mentality that keeps Suzy [sic] Wong, Madame Butterfly and gookism alive turns human beings into racist murdering soldiers and also keeps Asian American from being able to live and feel like human beings.”45 This analysis of how racialized sexualization travels across borders emphasizes the mutually destructive impact of the war on Asians and Asian Americans. Suzie Wong and Madame Butterfly are both fictive representations of Asian women who engage in sexual and romantic relationships with Western men. Suzie Wong, created by novelist Richard Mason and immortalized on screen by actress Nancy Kwan, is a prostitute with a heart of gold who caters to British and American sailors in Hong Kong during the Cold War. Madame Butterfly, the title of Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera, is a Japanese woman named Cio-Cio-San who marries an American naval officer and has a child with him. When he abandons her for a white American woman, San not only gives up her child to the father and surrogate mother but also commits suicide. Yoshimura connects both of these representations of Asian women, which emphasize their sexual availability and vulnerability to Western military men, to gookism. The term “gook,” which initially referred to a low-class prostitute, has historically been utilized by the American military as a racial epithet to refer to Asian enemies. It was used during the U.S.-Philippine War, fought by Americans to prevent Philippine independence; the term surfaced again during the Korean War, in which the United States attempted to prevent the reunification of Korea under socialist leadership; finally during the U.S. war in Vietnam, “gook” became widely used to refer to Vietnamese enemies, both real and imagined.46 By linking Suzie Wong, Madame Butterfly, and gookism, Yoshimura emphasizes the connections between sexual and racial dehumanization of Asian people by the U.S. military. She also stresses that these perceptions have implications for Asian people globally, both for those in Asia and for people of Asian ancestry in the United States. As the appellation “Third World women” suggests, racialized women in the United States recognized how colonization and gender oppression operated in tandem both abroad and at home.
The IWC provided a counterexample of how ideas and practices could critique and transcend national boundaries. The political leadership of Indochinese women inspired an array of American sisters to combat American militarism and imperialism. Women of Asian ancestry in the United States were particularly attracted to Southeast Asian women as political role models. The alleged model minority status of Asian American women was compounded by projections of hypersexuality and submissiveness, rendering them invisible among movement circles and in fact the antithesis of political activists.47 In contrast, Indochinese women were hypervisible revolutionary leaders.
The idealization of Southeast Asian women, which was expressed broadly among the North American attendees and not just among Asian Americans, reflects a radical orientalist sensibility. The revolutionary social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s tended to endow the most oppressed with the greatest political capital. The Indochinese women, as targets of Western militarism, imperialism, racism, and sexism, represented the ultimate underdogs. Yet they fought against nearly impossible odds with a sense of strength, clarity, and unity. As warm, dedicated, revolutionary heroines, the Southeast Asian representatives reminded North American women what was possible to achieve both individually and collectively. After all, women of color, lesbians, and Canadians all utilized the colonial analogy to conceptualize and resist oppression. Following in an orientalist tradition, the imagined East helped to redefine the imagined West.
In response to the tendencies to perceive Indochinese women as either victims or heroines, the women from Southeast Asia encouraged their audience to view everyone as equally capable of political struggle and achievement. The North American women were eager to learn from the Indochinese representatives and asked questions not only about the war in Vietnam but also how women in the West might engage more effectively in activism. The Indochinese women responded by emphasizing the importance of forging political unity.
In contrast to the identity-based politics that created such negative dynamics at the conference, the Southeast Asian women stressed the need for self-sacrifice and developing alliances. Lacking the resources to fight a conventional war, the Vietnamese who resisted the Americans and the South Vietnamese government turned to guerrilla warfare, a tactic that necessitated cultivating political support among the “people.” As one representative explained, “Cadres must make the masses love them,” a representative explained at the IWC. “This is a question of principle. If the masses love the cadres, they will listen to what they say and give them protection.” That love, she continued, flowed from shared sacrifice. “That is why you must be exemplary. You must be exemplary in sacrifices. You must be the first to give your life, and the last to get rewards.”48
For the Indochinese delegates, their strategy of building a political base was applicable to struggles beyond armed conflict. In response to a question as to whether the antiwar movement should pursue violent forms of protest, the women from Southeast Asia explained, “Revolutionary force is in two parts: (1) political force and (2) armed force. When we say political force we refer to the consciousness of people. . . . You need this political force. . . . The force must be large and strong, of people determined and courageous, who can take repression. When one is killed or jailed, another takes the place.”49 Instead of recommending armed resistance for the U.S. peace movement, the Indochinese women explained that they had no choice but to fight militarily. “We need military force to drive out the aggressors and take the power. In different stages of struggle, sometimes political force is to the forefront, sometimes military force. But always military force must be combined with political force.” The military ought to be inseparable from the people, they argued, since “isolation in the fight is very dangerous.”50
The Indochinese emphasis on developing broad-based political awareness and support contrasted with the approaches of American war supporters as well as the extreme elements of the antiwar opposition. Some apologists for the Vietnam War blame the loss of the conflict on U.S. political leaders, the antiwar movement, and/or the liberal media for their meddling in military affairs. In their eyes, the military should have had a freer reign in executing the war. In contrast, the Indochinese women prioritized the importance of political understanding in the waging of armed conflict. For them, there should not be a strict separation between military strategy, diplomacy, and public opinion mobilization. Rather, the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese strategized to win the “total war,” which took place not only through armed conflict but also in the hearts and minds of local peasants as well as in world public opinion.
The importance of cultivating broad political support also challenged the actions of some antiwar activists who engaged in violence or utilized strategies that alienated the American public. As the Laotian delegates explained, “the policy of the United Front . . . is to win more supporters and isolate the administration. It is a tactical policy, a policy of increasing our friends and decreasing the enemy.”51 The Vietnamese delegates also shared that they had
followed anti-war activities in Canada and the U.S.A. We have taken note of the demonstrations, petitions, and many other actions. They all help in our struggle against U.S. aggression. The most important thing is to mobilize larger forces to undertake these actions. If we are larger and more united, we can achieve greater success. We need unity and solidarity between the many groups. . . . As Ho Chi Minh said, “Unity, unity, larger unity; success, success, bigger success.” The greater the difficulties, the broader must be the force in order to defeat the enemy. The more we consolidate, the more we weaken and divide the enemy.52
The IWC provided a venue to articulate and pursue a common, transpacific struggle against U.S. imperialism.
In response to the frustration expressed by antiwar activists that their organizing efforts achieved little result, the Indochinese encouraged patience and persistence. The Vietnamese and Laotian delegates, regardless of their ages, proposed a broader historical consciousness that recognized and built upon previous generations’ struggles. The Indochinese encouraged their American counterparts to do the same, addressing a tendency among some young American activists to search constantly for new political ideologies, strategies, and identities. They explained, “We must also be prepared for all the struggles to take a long time. Actions must go on, but the results may not be seen for a long time. . . . We say to you: Be patient. Be flexible. Be vigilant. And wage a persistent struggle.”53
Ironically, these words of advice led North American women to regard the Indochinese women with awe and to view themselves even more critically for their failure to create unity and commonality of purpose. As an Asian American delegate pondered in a poem about the conference:
-How can your people maintain such discipline, understanding and humanity?
-One million soldiers have been killed or wounded
three million civilians have been killed or wounded
one hundred fifty thousand children are orphaned
fifty thousand people are imprisoned
thirty nine thousand women over the age of twelve are prostitutes
six thousand American bombers have been shot down.54
In the poem, the Asian American author expresses a sense of separation between the Southeast Asian women and herself and presumably other North American attendees of the IWC by asking how “your people” could endure and resist such violence and upheaval. Despite a sense of racial and gender affinity, she recognizes her subject position as a person of Asian ancestry in the West. She is geographically distanced from the direct site of colonial and military conflict. In addition, she ascribes a romanticized identity to the Vietnamese, depicting them as a collective people heroically suffering under and resisting American oppression.
The same poem, however, suggests that the Indochinese emphasized a nationalist and internationalist collective identity that transcended radical orientalist binaries. The voice of an Indochinese woman responds to the question addressed to “your people” by stating:
For twenty five years we have been defending our land. What our fathers began we continue. What we do not finish our children will continue and even their children’s children until the enemy is driven out.
Until the People win. Until there is peace.55
The evocation of “we” is a collective call, an open-ended coalition that included multiple generations of Vietnamese people as well as a broader global community of “the people” struggling for peace. Another Asian American delegate recalled that through their words and actions, the Southeast Asian women reminded their North American audience that the Indochinese “were not too different from ourselves as women. We need not have false feelings of inadequacy.”56 By working together, women around the world might achieve liberation and peace.
The North American activists who traveled to Vancouver and Toronto aspired to create an international community of women. The racial, sexual, and national differences among American and Canadian women were particularly intense, perhaps because they lived and worked in closer proximity to one another. In contrast, they encountered briefly a very select group of female political leaders from Indochina who could fulfill and exceed their romantic visions of victimhood and heroism. As much as the North American delegates brought home stories of conflict with one another, they also carried with them hopes for political change. While some became disillusioned by the tensions among North American women, others became even more dedicated to exposing and ending the horrors of the war in Southeast Asia. At both the Vancouver and Toronto conferences, Southeast Asian and North American women issued joint declarations, affirming their mutual desires to end the U.S. war in Indochina. Individuals also signed the People’s Peace Treaty, an initiative to assert the voices of ordinary citizens into top-down diplomatic and military decisions.
In addition, the conference inspired North American women to increase their efforts for feminist empowerment. Some individuals arrived at the IWCs with a political awareness of female oppression and the necessity of challenging these gender hierarchies. Others left with this sensibility. Nina Genera, who crossed the U.S.-Canadian border for the first time to attend the IWC, had been inspired to engage in antidraft activism because her brother was drafted and her husband nearly so. When busloads of young men arrived at the Oakland induction center, she and other Chicano/a activists would “be out there at 4:30, 5:00 in the morning . . . chanting our mantra that they shouldn’t, you know, go fight a war that they didn’t know why it was being fought and for what. And we’d literally pulled [Mexican American] guys aside—you know, there would be enough people to where they would at least want to listen to us and we’d talk to them about, you know, the possibility of being able to get out on legitimate deferments and then . . . we’d work with them long term.”57
Maria Ramirez, Genera’s co-organizer, was known for her antiwar theatrical performances. She and others in her group performed in community and public settings, including the culture night at the Vancouver IWC.58 Ramirez recalled that she and Genera were “strong women,” but they viewed their activism not as a separate women’s cause but rather as part of “our people’s struggle.”59 Genera described female activists like herself and Ramirez as “the workhorses . . . of the organizations. I think the men took the credit at being, you know, in the forefront carrying the signs that we had made. . . . But in the end . . . it was the women who still did the bulk of the organizing.” Genera in particular was extremely shy and preferred not to speak publicly in meetings. She recalled, “I was raised very, very traditionally.” When she returned from the IWC, she learned that a “handful of Latino guys” in her husband’s law school made fun of him because “he let his wife go on a trip like this, by herself with, you know, a bunch of women, a bunch of lesbos, a bunch of dykes, a bunch of . . . crazy women. . . . I remember . . . walking into the law school, like, the following week after I’d gotten back and one of the guys was making fun of my husband in front of me and I just walked right up to him, and I knew him, and I knew his wife, and I just walked up to him and I slapped him in the face in front of all the other men.”60 For Genera, it was a “line of demarcation,” transforming her into a more empowered and vocal woman. Following the IWC and the confrontation, she and other Chicana activists decided to meet regularly to discuss their concerns as Mexican American women.61 The feminist awakening for Genera occurred at a time when Chicanas around the country were discovering their need for a collective political voice and vision. A month after the IWCs, approximately six hundred women met in Houston, Texas, for the first national conference devoted to women of La Raza, a Chicano/a phrase meaning “the people.”62
A similar transformation occurred for women’s liberation activists in the Vancouver, BC, area. Various local newspapers covered the IWC. One of them was Georgia Straight, an underground publication primarily authored by male countercultural and New Left activists. Shortly after the conference, the headline “Indochinese Women—Their Personal Stories” appeared on the front page of Georgia Straight. The cover also featured a large drawing of a headless nude female torso with a Jesus Christ figure crucified between her legs.63 Women’s liberation activists in Vancouver were outraged by the image for its sexual objectification and denigration of women. They were further incensed by the drawing’s association with the Indochinese conference. The women from Vietnam and Laos had such dignity and had suffered for so long from the sexualized brutality of the war. Their testimonials, however, were retold in a publication that purported to oppose the war but in actuality supported the underlying logic of misogynistic contempt. In retaliation, women’s liberation activists took over the press. After a long and tense meeting, the Georgia Straight staff agreed to four demands:
1) The creation of a newspaper for the people, which will present news to help us deal better with the problems of society and our lives rather than alienate us from them. . . .
2) Staff salaries and money received from our issue to be given to us for the formation of a women’s defense fund. . . .
3) One issue per month [to] be produced by the women’s collective on which two regular male staff members will be allowed to assist so that they can learn about women’s lib.
4) Equal editorial control by women to veto all exploitation of women and men.64
The IWCs served as both the culmination and the catalyst for women’s activism for peace and liberation. Women of different racial, sexual, and national backgrounds embraced diverse strategies for ending the war and held varying understandings of what constituted freedom. Nevertheless, they discovered some common ground for unity, particularly at the local and global levels.
One final indication of the importance of female internationalism can be gleaned by a celebration in Hanoi that marked the official end of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. On 19 January 1973, the Washington, DC, branch of WILPF received an urgent cable from the VWU. The message, written in French and translated into English, invited a small delegation from WILPF to visit the capital of North Vietnam for a week, beginning on 27 January.65 Even though the American travelers had only eight days to prepare for their journey and were not provided with a reason for their visit, WILPF accepted the invitation. Upon their arrival, the American delegates, headed by U.S. section president Marii Hasekawa, discovered that they were joined by “five women representing the Women’s International Democratic Federation, one each from Argentina, Russia, India, France, and the Republic of Congo. To our knowledge, we were the only two visiting Americans in Hanoi for the signing of the Peace Accord.”66 The staging of this international female celebration to mark the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam conveys the significance of women’s peace activism. The invitation from the Vietnamese indicates how much they valued and consciously nurtured global female networks as part of their broader campaign to obtain national liberation and reunification. The acceptance of the invitation by WILPF representatives, given the limited information provided to them and the enormous resources necessary to travel across the world with such short notice, reveals how much American women believed in the profound possibilities of global sisterhood.