So, Grandpa and Grandpa used to make a good living as upright and enterprising citizens selling toilet seats to the U.S. Army at $1500 a pop from the family base in Shanghai. Life was good but your political leader Chiang Kai-shek had 20 years to fix China and instead he blew his chance-- politics, dirty stuff you know.
Then tyrant Mao came to power and your grandparents high-tailed it for Taiwan with the accumulated wealth of decades of toilet seat contracts, but your parents made so much money supplying the U.S. Army squatting in Korea that you ended up going to college in the United $tates while living in a paid-off condo in DC. Now you write articles for Asian Fortune and you've even seen Donald Rumsfeld at a dinner-party.
You heard about some campaign against the Black Book of Communism errors, so you said Mao's killing 20 million in the Great Leap is not a "typo." Well golly be, then saying Mao died in 1977 in the same story(p. 26) is probably not a typo either.
Ahem, Mommy and Daddy made good money arranging visits of U.$. soldiers to enterprising young wimmin in Saigon. You had started attending good Catholic schools and everything was swell. Rice, vegetables and meat were in good supply when Ho Chi Minh's followers took over.
It took a good chunk of the family savings, but you got on one of the last helicopters out of Vietnam. You reckon that lots of people move as kids without even remembering much of their first home, but it must be hard on your parents to leave after so many years in the country they loved-- Orange County California--I mean Vietnam of course. So now you live in Northern Virginia where no Vietnamese communists are allowed. ("Orange County CA Considering 'No-Communist Zones'", p. 27) Naturally, you write for Asian Fortune with the special mission of showing the Amerikans that not all East Asians are communists, which is why they fully deserve another million green cards a year.
Daddy was a teacher with a bit of farm land and uncle was an officer in the Vietnamese army, well at least for 7 weeks.
Sister says Kerry is her man, having proven himself by running off the swift boat to kill a teenage Viet Cong member. Even though, you are not so sure about Kerry, you're happy that your sister sports a Kerry button, because secretly you're afraid that respectable people will realize that your fellow "Asian-Americans" do not vote much. You work for Asian Fortune to raise political consciousness among your fellow "Asian-Americans." Lucky for you the 1960 and 2000 presidential elections were so close, you definitely have a point: even the "Asian-Americans" could choose the next Amerikan president. ("Janelle Hu: Harnessing the APIA Voter Power," p. 2)
You married an Amerikan Vietnam veteran and edit his stories for Asian Fortune. ("Uncle Ho--Enron Accountant?" p. 15) You notice he sleeps better at night after staying up all day writing articles for you. When will he ever learn to just forget all the people calling him a war criminal and monster when he got back from Vietnam? You even resent a little bit that your good love has not completely steered him straight yet. Why does he care about the protesters more than you?
Your sister says Kerry was wrong to oppose the war when he came back to the united $tates, but he did more to fight communism than Bush did. You argue back that if Kerry and others had kept their mouths shut, they wouldn't have needed an army or navy of people like him in Vietnam: bombing millions of communists to death from 30,000 feet up in B-52s would have done just fine. Whatever, you're modern now, not like your parents' generation and that was a long time ago, but if your husband does succeed in justifying another bombing campaign in Vietnam, the Congress will probably hand out some more green cards to prove how great Amerika is compared with bomb craters run by communists. That's what you like about Amerikans, so generous with their freedoms.
Mommy and Daddy had a clothing shop next to a discotheque in the shopping district closest to U.$. soldiers in Seoul. If those tens of thousands of troops had not landed to fight off the evil communists, there's no telling if that shopping district ever would have gotten anywhere.
Now it's so bad in North Korea that people run into burning houses to save their pictures of "Dear Leader" Kim Il Sung only to die in the effort.(p. 12) It's so much better in a Christian capitalist country where after Sylvia Ewing killed her 8-year-old and 4-year-old children with a baseball bat and left a note saying "Jesus is coming . . . Jesus loves the kids" and after Christian Texan Andrea Yates drowned her five children aged 2 to 7 to save them from demon possession, we can still turn on the TV in freedom and call a 1-800 number to donate to Jesus.
Well, Yee-haw Asian Fortune, may you fully vanquish your competitor, the Twinkie Herald. And don't worry, we'll back you up on immigration and your hero General Taguba and his exposure of Abu Ghraib anyway.