A trip down memory lane with Dad — to Vietnam
March 24, 2007
Monday, March 19, 2007
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sfgate_get_fprefs(); The Father of All Things
A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam
By Tom Bissell
PANTHEON BOOKS; 407 PAGES; $25
Tom Bissell’s wandering journey through Vietnam, “The Father of All Things,” within the context of the Vietnam War and his unresolved relationship with his father, does not lead to an epiphany, nor a holy grail. Instead, Bissell’s account, in tandem with his father’s recollections, offers a fresh and comprehensive look at the Vietnam era.In 1967, after being wounded in Vietnam, Capt. John Bissell resigned his Marine commission and moved his young bride to his hometown of Escanaba, Mich. The younger Bissell imagines his father’s thoughts as he watches televised accounts of Saigon’s fall. At the same time, the marriage between a traumatized John and his wife, Muff, the author’s mother, is unraveling. John is incapable of sharing his deepest feelings with her and finds solace in alcohol:
“Of course you know that if you keep behaving this way you are going to lose Muff forever … You honestly don’t know what you would do, or where you would be, without her. … Yet running contiguous to this certainty are rivers of far inkier thought. They flow through the black, treeless landscape of your mind and feed into your heart, changing its electricity, coarsening it … And your mouth is so dry. You need a drink. You pacify yourself by thinking of that drink, the way the scotch-soaked slivers of ice will melt against your teeth.” It is in passages like this the author finds his most expressive voice.
In other places Bissell defines the reasons we continually retrace our most difficult moments:
“Why do disasters demand such constant revisitation? Perhaps the first human being to delineate yesterday from today was not acting upon any natural observation but was instead seeking to commemorate some previously unthinkable event. Where were you when? Do you remember? We employ so many signifiers to hallow our larger, shared disasters that memory itself collapses beneath the weight. I was there. I remember. But all one truly remembers of most disasters is having forgotten what existence was like before they occurred. …
“On April 29th, 1975, my father was losing something of himself. He was losing what was at that time possibly the largest part of himself. This was his certainty that what he had suffered in Vietnam was necessary. In other words, he was losing his past and future all at once. He would lose much more. We all would. We would lose so much we would forget, perhaps, what it was we had lost.”
In the book’s second part, as father and son traverse Vietnam, the author continuously prods John Bissell to talk about his memories. This veteran is not a particularly revealing person. Pulling stories out of him is hard work, and it shows. At the same time, the son occasionally mines some gems, as in this exchange with a former South Vietnamese soldier.
” ‘The bad memories,’ my father said, ‘like this.’ He then pantomimed taking his brain out of his head, slipped the imaginary brain into his shirt pocket, and slyly patted it.”
Bissell’s extensive description of the grisly My Lai massacre and its aftermath, the harrowing attempted evacuation of Saigon and Da Nang, and the atrocities committed by both sides during the course of the war, offer proof of his astonishing skill. The reader desperately wishes to look away from the heartbreaking narrative of death and destruction, but Bissell’s powerful writing forces one to open one’s eyes and take in the enormity of the moral abyss.
Similarities to the war in Iraq can be found on every page, but Bissell does not spell them out. Simply put, technological advances do not assure victory, and leaders do not always tell the truth, no matter which side they are on. The line between combatants and civilians is consistently blurred.
After a visit to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, Bissell describes a display that honors all the journalists killed in wartime, especially relevant at this moment in time. He also generously pays tribute to fellow writers on Vietnam: Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, Neil Sheehan and Tobias Wolff, among others.
Bissell reads so much about the Vietnam War that he seems to know more about it than his father.
” ‘I read somewhere,’ I told my father, ‘that the National Liberation Front was so effective using booby traps because they knew which trails you’d take. They knew American soldiers would always take the easiest, driest-looking path.’
” ‘I’m sorry to say,’ my father admitted, ‘that what you read is probably true.’ ”
In his author’s notes, he asks, “More than thirty thousand books on Vietnam are currently in print. Why another?” The answer is not difficult. Bissell looks at the war through the lens of a generation not yet born when America pulled out of Vietnam. He scrutinizes the oft-repeated historical facts and holds them up to the light, illuminating them in the process. The complexities inherent in the Vietnam War are difficult to understand. And, although Bissell obviously loves his father, their relationship is fraught with sadness and uncertainty. “The Father of All Things” displays the kind of hard-won comprehension and insight that develops only over time and with much thought. In a nation’s history, and a family’s saga, this understanding is both painful and necessary.
Patricia Conover is a writer and editor who lives in Paris.
This article appeared on page E – 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Scene Change for Asian TV
March 24, 2007
By The Associated Press
HOTLINKS
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(Multichannel News) _ It would be easy to read too little ‘ or too much ‘ into last month’s announcement that the MTV World channels MTV Chi, MTV Desi and MTV K were going dark. Read too little, and the news can be dismissed as problems specific to MTV Networks. Read too much, and it could signify that the bottom is falling out of the Asian-American TV market.
“I was disappointed,” said Bill Georges, senior vice president of marketing and sales for Asian network AZN. “It is sad, and it doesn’t send a message we would like to have out there.”
For ImaginAsian TV president Mike Hong, what happened to MTV World had to do with making a go of it in a premium space. “When you are trying to target the Gen Y Asian-American market with a premium service, it just doesn’t work,” Hong said. “And I think [MTV’s] was a premium service that had very little appeal to advertisers.”
During an interview last July on the launch of MTV K, MTV World senior vice president and general manager Nusrat Durrani claimed several advertisers were interested, but he refused to name them. Later that month, MTV president Christina Norman said, “We really feel these young audiences deserve their own MTVs.”
Maybe so, but not for long. MTV Desi, aimed at South Asian-Americans, launched in 2005. MTV Chi, for Chinese-Americans, and Korean-American-targeted MTV K launched in 2006.
ImaginAsian and Comcast-owned AZN report increasing advertising sales on a quarterly basis. That said, “the Asian market is grossly underspent,” according to Georges, with the amount of advertising targeting Asian-Americans in no way reflecting their buying power.
“There has been a lot of buzz and e-
‘);” onmouseout=”hideAd();” class=”Hotlink”>mail circulating within the Asian space because it is Viacom and MTV,” said Hong. “And some of the agencies have been active in trying to support [MTV World’s] continued existence.”
By contrast, the demise of the satellite network American Desi drew little attention when it filed for bankruptcy last August.
Founder and former CEO Vimal Verma now regrets having granted exclusivity to EchoStar Communications when American Desi launched in December 2004. That approach, he said, is fine for a network from Asia looking to secure incremental revenue in the United States, but “today, for a local U.S. channel to establish itself on EchoStar would be difficult.”
Hong goes one step further. “I think the idea of creating a linear channel that is ad-supported today if you were just getting out of the gates is probably insane.”
That did not stop Filipino Click for the lowest price on dmnobieblanktelevision‘);” onmouseout=”hideAd();” class=”Hotlink”>television giant ABS-CBN from launching a “music/lifestyle” outlet called MYX, inspired by a music network of the same name in the Philippines. MYX debuted Feb. 28 on DirecTV.
“There really is a big market out there, specifically the Asian-American youth market who we know are really, really hungry for music videos,” ABS-CBN Global product manager Pia Palpal-latoc said. “They are not getting enough of that right now.”
ABS-CBN has run a premium network, The Filipino Channel, in the U.S. for more than a decade. In that time, according to Palpal-latoc, it has realized the children of Filipino immigrants felt there was nothing on the network that spoke directly to them as Asian-Americans.
In light of this generational shift, “The next question is, ‘What is the future of our company?’ Obviously we need to start talking to the younger people, the kids of the immigrants and they are looking for something else beyond our original programming on TFC. We feel the way to go after them is music and lifestyle,” Palpal-latoc said.
Despite its Filipino origins, MYX’s focus is on the whole Asian-American youth market. The network does not intend to provide separate Chinese, Korean and South Asian feeds.
ABS-CBN International product manager Jun Del Rosario said, “We are taking a risk but a risk that needs to be taken now.”
Other companies are taking that risk to the Internet and pursuing the Asian-American audience online.
KyLin TV, for instance, is an Internet Protocol-TV service that provides 31 broadcast Chinese channels and some 20,000 hours of “on-demand” broadband programming. The service has 15,000 subscribers, and is bringing in $25 per customer per month, according to Chris Wagner executive vice president of NeuLion, which distributes KyLin TV via broadband.
“Very attractive” is how Wagner described the multicultural broadband market. “You have an expatriate group that wants programming from home. There is a very strong desire for that.”
Broadband, according to Wagner, enables KyLinTV to reach a potential market of 20 million Chinese-Americans without going to the trouble of having to negotiate dozens of cable and satellite carriage agreements.
AZN’s Georges said his network’s online Click for the lowest price on dmnobieblankstreaming‘);” onmouseout=”hideAd();” class=”Hotlink”>streaming video player offers programming in several languages at the same time, “which you could never do on a linear platform and, with the number of Asian languages, you can’t do it on VOD either.”
Even when news of MTV World’s demise broke, the company said, “We remain steadfast in super-serving multicultural youth, and we are continuing to investigate ways to integrate the MTV Desi, Chi and K brands online and on our other screens.”
As ABS-CBN’s Del Rosario put it, “With the Asian market, everything is a work in progress.”
Copyright The Associated Press 2006. All Rights Reserved
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