Helen Little

Agent Smith: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings

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Vuong comments on the lingering effects of trauma: “to destroy a people . . . is to set them back in time”

Postmemory is tellingly woven into the novel as Little Dog’s life is filled with fragmented and traumatic memories of events that, though predating him, continue to define him. Marianne Hirsch defines postmemory as a recollection that is inherited from someone else and transmitted “so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in... See more

Little Dog exists only because American soldiers were in Vietnam; he must grapple with the fact that he is the direct product of war:

Little Dog begins assembling his life story through his remaining connections to Vietnam: Rose and Lan. The stories that they pass down to him are not the linear, homogenized, or patriotic version of history taught in American schools because their memories are “broken by war, occupation, and displacement. Asian American culture ‘re-members’ the... See more

Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real” (Vuong 62). To generations before him whose stories were buried and untold, Little Dog says, “Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are”

To promote historical amnesia, the United States demands conformity as a prerequisite for integration

Over time, a skewed portrayal of historical narratives began to affect the psyche of Americans and Vietnamese alike through what is commonly known as intellectual imperialism . Syed Hussein Alatas states that imperialism can come not only in the form of political and economic policies, but also as an intellectual position that dominates a group of... See more