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Posted on 4/18/2025 11:40:53 AM
By Donald Fox
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I remember being outside a Vietnamese restaurant three weeks before Christmas years ago. A covered white pick-up was parked outside. On one side window someone had air-brushed a death’s head hovering above a surf board. A tall, lanky man in a baseball cap asked me if the food at the restaurant was any good. Had I actually eaten there before? He was painting imaginary oriental Christmas scenes on the restaurant windows. He had already painted a Chinese foot bridge over a green flowing river. Red linear mountains and small huts lingered in the distance. He told me he planned to put Mt. Fuji on one window like he remembered from school. I looked without commenting at his drawn face from which a cigarette bobbed as he spoke. Let’s see – Christmas, Vietnamese restaurant, Chinese footbridge, Mount Fuji – oriental polyglot, mixed cultural metaphors including a Middle-eastern birthday become a Western European tradition.
There are many possible directions in life, and so often we remain narrowly focused on what’s at hand. When I was a kid, my neighborhood was filled with promise and pleasure. Already though, the outside world encroached in ways I could not fathom at the time. At noon a siren signaled the hour, but this was also part of an alarm system for emergency situations – this translated into threats of nuclear war though I didn’t fully understand that then.
Television broadcasted only in black and white. Color was several years into the future, but the local station broadcasted emergency warnings. That was the beginning of the Emergency Broadcast System. A test pattern would come on the small screen while an announcer gave advice on what to do in an emergency. We had air raid drills at school where we crouched under our desks or against the walls in hallways. It was the early fifties: advertisements for bomb shelters, fears of communist takeovers, scenes of atomic bomb tests, television dramas about Soviet spies like I Led Three Lives, Radio Free Europe, the Iron Curtain, McCarthyism, blacklists, and the end of the Korean conflict.
I discovered Afghanistan in the first volume of a family encyclopedia that my mother bought one volume at a time from the grocery store. There was no mention yet of Vietnam in the news although the French were there – the area was part of French Indo-China. Some years later I would lose high school friends in South Vietnam, and I would become politically radicalized largely because I was from the South and had seen discrimination firsthand, some even committed by family members. It felt important to do something positive.
The world of the imagination that I fed from my school library began to absorb realities that I had known only as fictions. All those alien invasion sci-fi movies of the fifties were simply metaphors for communists and any kind of ‘other’ cultural group infiltrating and taking control.
Art has a way of mirroring our concerns and fears, our doubts and our prejudices. It also gives us ways to distance ourselves from those burdens to be able to consider them through other eyes and other voices. This enables us to see more clearly into ourselves and possibly learn from our own experience as it is mirrored back through that filter of art. History allows us hindsight, and art gives us insight, but for both we have to be willing to engage and to be open to whatever we may find.
