“I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck”: submerged legacies, diasporic kinship, and queerness in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Background: Short stature in children is a significant global health concern, often indicating underlying nutritional, endocrine, or genetic disorders. Identifying the prevalence and associated risk factors in specific populations in regions with limited access to healthcare, poor nutrition, or inadequate prenatal care eg in rural or low-income communities, is essential for early diagnosis and timely intervention. Objective: This study aimed to assess the prevalence of short stature among children visiting the outpatient department of a tertiary care center and to explore the sociodemographic (lower SES, nuclear families) and clinical factors {chronic illness like hypothyroidism, diabetes, and bone age} associated with short stature. Methods: A cross-sectional observational study was conducted at the Department of Pediatrics, LN Medical College, and JK Hospital, Bhopal. A total of 210 children aged 2-12 years attending the outpatient department were systematically selected (systematic sampling) and approved by the IEC. Inclusion criteria involved children whose parents or guardians provided informed consent, while exclusion criteria included children with hypotension or those whose guardians did not consent. Anthropometric measurements, clinical assessments, and family histories were recorded. Short stature was defined as height-for-age below -2 standard deviations from the WHO growth standards. Results: The prevalence of short stature was 4.29%. It was more common among children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (55.6%) and nuclear families (66.7%). The highest prevalence was observed in children aged 5-8 years (77.8%), with no significant gender difference. Additionally, 77.8% of children with short stature had a chronic illness, such as hypothyroidism or diabetes. And 88.9% showed delayed bone age. The influence of maternal education was also significant, with 55.6% of affected children having illiterate mothers. Conclusion: The study found a relatively lower prevalence of short stature compared to other studies, but it was significantly associated with lower socioeconomic status, chronic illness, delayed bone age, and maternal education. Early detection, nutritional interventions, and addressing socioeconomic disparities, enhancing maternal education are essential to improve growth outcomes in children. Further research is needed to investigate the long-term outcomes of children with short stature and the effectiveness of targeted interventions.

Background: Acute respiratory tract infection (ARI) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in developing countries. Objective: To find out the prevalence and risk factors related to ARI among children between 0 and 5 years attending anganwadi centers in Kota city. Materials and Methods: A community-based, prospective, cross-sectional study was carried out in 14 Integrated Child Development Services center (seven zones) of Kota city covering 406 under five children during March 2015-February 2016. Results: The overall prevalence of ARI was 32% (130/406). Winter season, illiterate mother, >2 under five children at home, overcrowding, smoker in house, family member suffering from cough and cold in last month, smoky chullhas, low birth weight (LBW), partial immunization, inappropriate breastfeeding were significant risk factors for ARI. No associationwas found between prevalence of ARI and age, sex, religion of child, geographic location of house in terms of main road, place of birth (home or hospital), and birth order of the child. Conclusion: The prevalence of ARI was 32%. Significant risk factors were illiterate mother, more than two under five children at home, overcrowding, LBW, partial immunization, lack of exclusive or short duration of exclusive breastfeeding, use of biomass fuel, smoker in house, family history of cough and cold in last month, and kitchen attached to living room.

Tanya Evans has a very clear and consistent goal for this book: to persuade academic historians, especially, that family historians should be taken much more seriously, not dismissed as dilettantish hobbyists. As the director of the Centre for Applied History at Macquarie University in Australia and the leader of many workshops on how to do family history, Evans is well positioned and qualified to advocate on behalf of these industrious and enthusiastic researchers. Unfortunately, this book seems unlikely to make many converts.Evans too often belabors the obvious or writes opaquely. Take this key sentence, for example: “My continued research with family historians is committed to the belief that the historiographical projects of social and cultural history, with the history of emotions, are mutually constitutive; that learning and teaching should be collaborative; and that history researchers should aim for pedagogical and political impact” (p. 26). The book is also weakened by her portrayal of family historians as uniformly progressive and sophisticated.The book’s primary source of evidence is often at the heart of its circular, unconvincing assertions. The author sent a list of thirty-seven largely open-ended questions to family-history practitioners who responded to her invitation “to share their motivations, discoveries and the impact of these [motivations and discoveries, evidently] upon their lives” (p. 21). One of the questions asks if researching your family history has “helped you to develop your interpersonal (communication, listening and empathy) skills? If so, in what ways?” (p. 155). Evans is then able to quote from, in a chapter entitled “‘I’m much more empathetic now’: Family history, historical thinking and the construction of empathy,” several people out of the 136 who had responded that, yes, as a matter of fact, this work had made them more empathetic. When Evans is more specific about what proportion of her sample responded affirmatively to her questions, the evidence does not necessarily support her argument. For example, though less than 20 percent of those surveyed answered affirmatively to the question of whether or not feminism had “informed your work at all,” she reports this as “a significant proportion” of her (largely female) sample (p. 155, p. 63). This reader wished for a much wider range of primary sources and a much fuller and more even-handed treatment of the conservative ends, political as well as cultural, that family and local history often serves.That said, Evans certainly presents extensive quotations from the survey suggesting that family historians may indeed be much more sophisticated and progressive than is commonly assumed. As she points out, academic historians lecturing to and writing for dwindling audiences can hardly afford to ignore fellow practitioners who are so numerous and enthusiastic. This book is a flawed but timely call for mutual engagement, curiosity, and respect.

In his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), Ocean Vuong attempts to reweave the historical threads that have been brutally severed by American imperialism, forced migration and the imperatives of assimilation, as a practice of survival. Drawing on his own experience as a Vietnamese refugee, Vuong situates a Vietnamese American queer protagonist at the centre of his non-linear narrative, which excavates the boy’s family history to trace the multiple histories of displacement informing who he is today. The novel’s temporal disorientation becomes a formulation of queer temporality that activates a critical reorientation of how experiences of refuge are typically represented—a coming into consciousness known as “refugeetude”. Such a critical reorientation serves a dual purpose. Firstly, by foregrounding the protagonist’s—and his family’s—shattered recollections, Vuong challenges dominant accounts of the Vietnam War and recovers the voices of those that are effaced by Western representation, thus assembling a more inclusive “just memory” of the war. Secondly, the novel disrupts the teleological narrative of progressive assimilation that is prevalent in refugee discourse by revealing the enduring forms of violence that displaced subjects must still face in contemporary America. By queering the normative temporality of refugee experience, the novel demonstrates how the characters’ refugeehood is not finite but ongoing, necessitating a continuous search for healing and resilience.

<i>Special Report:</i> Asian American Hate Incidents—A Co-occurring Epidemic During COVID-19

Socialization of a child is something that is typically a natural phenomenon, but for children with disabilities, it can be difficult and especially challenging. Aim: This study aimed to explore the habits and socialization among primary school children having visual, hearing, and intellectual disabilities. Design: Cross-sectional descriptive research design was used in this study. Setting: This study was conducted at special needs schools in Assiut city; includes El-Fekria school for mentally retarded children, El-Nour for blind children and El-Amal school for deaf and dumb. Sample: A convenient sample included parents of 588 disabled children. Tools: A structured interview questionnaire was used. It includes characteristics of the child and their parents, family history and consanguinity, medical history of the child disability, as well as parents' knowledge about disability. Results: The majority of children were males, from rural areas, have illiterate fathers and mothers, they had positive history of disability and consanguinity, & the majority of parent had unsatisfactory level of knowledge. Conclusion: disabled children are more likely to have socialization problems. Their parents' knowledge about disability is very low. Recommendation: The current study recommended that provide support and education programs for parents to improve the care provided to children with disabilities.

Composition and improvisation in the aspect of the music infl uence on the expressive structure of the fi lm

Halfway through the 2006 memoir comic Fun Home, the reader encounters a photograph that the book’s author, Alison Bechdel, found in a box of family snapshots shortly after her father’s death. The picture—“literally the core of the book, the centrefold” (Bechdel qtd. in Chute “Interview” 1006)—of Alison’s teenaged babysitter, Roy, erotically reclining on a bed in only his underwear, is the most tangible and direct evidence of her father’s sexual affairs with teenage boys, more confronting than his own earlier confession. Through this image, and a rich archive of familial texts, Bechdel chronicles her father’s thwarted desires and ambitions, probable suicide, and her own sexual and artistic coming of age.Bruce Bechdel, a married school teacher and part-time funeral director, was also an avid amateur historical restorer and connoisseur of modernist literature. Shortly after Alison came out to her parents at nineteen, Bruce was hit by a truck in what his daughter believes was an act of suicide. In Fun Home, Bechdel reads her family history suspiciously, plumbing family snapshots, letters, and favoured novels, interpreting against the grain, to trace her queer genealogy. Ultimately, she inverts this suspicious and interrogative reading, using the evidence she has gathered in order to read her father’s sexuality positively and embrace her queer and artistic inheritance from him. In The New York Times Magazine, in 2004, Charles McGrath made the suggestion that comics were “the new literary form” (24). Although comics have not yet reached widespread mainstream acceptance as a medium of merit, the burgeoning field of comics scholarship over the last fifteen years, the 2007 adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis into a feature film, and the addition of comics to the Best American series all testify to the widening popularity and status of the form. Memoir comics have established themselves, as Hillary Chute notes, as “the dominant mode of contemporary work” (Graphic 17). Many of these autobiographical works, including Fun Home, recount traumatic histories, employing the medium’s unique capacity to evoke the fractured and repetitive experience of the traumatised through panel structure and use of images. Comics articulate “what wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought” (Said qtd. in Whitlock 967). The hand-drawn nature of comics emphasises the subjectivity of perception and memory, making it a particularly powerful medium for personal histories. The clear mediation of a history by the artist’s hand complicates truth claims. Comics open up avenues for both suspicious and restorative readings because their form suggests that history is always constructed and therefore not able to be confirmed as “ultimately truthful,” but also that there is no ultimate truth to be unveiled. No narrative is unmediated; a timeline is not more “pure” than a fleshed out narrative text. All narratives exclude information in order to craft a comprehensible series of events. Bechdel’s role as a suspicious reader of her father and of her own history resonates through her role as a historian and her interrogation of the ethical concerns of referential writing.Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity critiques the hermeneutics of suspicion from a queer theory perspective, instead advocating reparative reading as a critical strategy. The hermeneutics of suspicion describes “the well-oiled machine of ideology critique” that has become the primary mode of critical reading over the last thirty or so years, suspiciously interpreting texts to uncover their hidden ideological biases (Felski, Uses 1). Reparative reading, on the other hand, moves away from this paranoid mode, instead valuing pleasure and “positive affects like joy and excitement” (Vincent). Sedgwick does not wholly reject suspicious reading, suggesting that it “represent[s] a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly” (Touching 129). Felski, paraphrasing Ricoeur, notes that the hermeneutics of suspicion “adopts an adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings” (“Suspicious” 216). In this fashion, Bechdel employs suspicious strategies to reveal her father’s hidden desires and transgressions that were obscured in the standard version of her family narrative, but ultimately moves away from such techniques to joyfully embrace her inheritance from him. Sedgwick notes that paranoid readings may only reveal that which is already known:While there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. (Touching 139)This is contrary to suspicious reading’s assumption that violence is culturally shunned, hidden, and in need of “unveiling” in contemporary Western culture. It would be too obvious for Bechdel to condemn her father: gay men have been unfairly misrepresented in the American popular imagination for decades, if not longer. Through her reparative reading of him, she rejects this single-minded reduction of people to one negative type. She accepts both her father’s weaknesses and her debts to him. A reading which only sought to publicise Bruce’s homosexual affairs would lack the great depth that Bechdel finds in the slippage between her father’s identity and her own.Bechdel’s embrace of Bruce’s failings as a father, a husband, and an artist, her revisioning of his death as a positive, creative act full of agency, and her characterisation of him as a supportive forerunner, “there to catch [Alison] as [she] leapt,” (Bechdel 232) moves his story away from archetypal narratives of homosexual tragedy. Bechdel’s memoir ends with (and enacts through its virtuoso execution) her own success, and the support of those who came before her. This move mirrors Joseph Litvak’s suggestion that “the importance of ‘mistakes’ in queer reading and writing […] has a lot to do with loosening the traumatic, inevitable-seeming connection between mistakes and humiliation […] Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?” (Sedgwick Touching 146–7).Fun Home is saturated with intertextual references and archival materials that attempt to piece together the memoir’s fractured and hidden histories. The construction of this personal history works by including familial and historical records to register the trauma of the Bechdels’ personal tragedy. The archival texts are meticulously hand-drawn, their time-worn and ragged physicality maintained to emphasise the referentiality of these documents. Bechdel’s use of realistically drawn family photographs, complete with photo corners, suggests a family photograph album, although rather than establishing a censored and idealistic narrative, as most family albums do, the photographs are read and reproduced for their suppressed and destabilising content. Bechdel describes them as “particularly mythic” (Chute “Interview” 1009), and she plunders this symbolic richness to rewrite her family history. The archival documents function as primary texts, which stand in opposition to the deadly secrecy of her childhood home: they are concrete and evidentiary. Bechdel reads her father’s letters and photographs (and their gothic revival house) for sexual and artistic evidence, “read[ing] the text against the grain in order to draw out what it refuses to own up to” (Felski “Suspicious” 23). She interprets his letters’ baroque lyrical flourishes as indications both of his semi-repressed homosexuality and of the artistic sensibility that she would inherit and refine.Suspicion of the entire historical project marks the memoir. Philippe Lejeune describes the “Autobiographical Pact” as “a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name” of the author (19). Bechdel does not challenge this pact fundamentally—the authoritative narrative voice of her book structures it to be read as historically truthful—but she does challenge and complicate the apparent simplicity of this referential model. Bechdel’s discussion of the referential failings of her childhood diary making—“the troubled gap between word and meaning”—casts a suspicious eye over the rest of the memoir’s historical project (Bechdel 143). She asks how language can adequately articulate experience or refer to the external world in an environment defined by secrets and silence. At the time of her childhood, it cannot—the claim to full disclosure that the memoir ultimately makes is predicated on distance and time. Bechdel simultaneously makes a claim for the historical veracity of her narrative and destabilises our assumptions around the idea of factual and retrospective truth:When I was ten, I was obsessed with making sure my diary entries bore no false witness. But as I aged, hard facts gave way to vagaries of emotion and opinion. False humility, overwrought penmanship, and self-disgust began to cloud my testimony […] until […] the truth is barely perceptible behind a hedge of qualifiers, encryption, and stray punctuation. (Bechdel 169)That which is “unrepresentable” is simultaneously represented and denied. The comics medium itself, with its simultaneous graphic and textual representation, suggests the unreliability of any one means of representation. Of Bechdel’s diaries, Jared Gardner notes, “what develops over the course of her diary […] is an increasing sense that text and image are each alone inadequate to the task, and that some merger of the two is required to tell the story of the truth, and the truth of the story” (“Archives” 3).As the boyishly dressed Alison urges her father, applying scare-quoted “bronzer,” to hurry up, Bechdel narrates, “my father began to seem morally su

Klanica pet je vrlo složen postmoderni roman, koji, na površini, ima cilj da ispriča priču o bombardovanju Drezdena; međutim, ovaj roman treba posmatrati kao nešto mnogo više od običnog istorijskog romana. Tvrditi da je istorija i samim tim stvarnost, dok istovremeno go- voriti da to nije u potpunosti tako jeste ono što Linda Hačion naziva istoriografskom metafikcijom. Prezentacija i ideja stvarnosti i metafikcije verovatno su najznačajniji pojmovi ovog romana. Rat je haos, i naracija je haotična; Vonegat pravi paralele između Drugog svetskog rata i Vijetnamskog rata uz pomoć putovanja kroz vreme tako što skače iz jednog vremenskog okvira u drugi, iz jednog rata u drugi, čime stvara nelinearnu priču. Umesto da pokuša da odgonetne smisao haosa, Vonegat ga prihvata i njime oslikava izlomljenost sveta. Dok dekonstruiše ustaljene pojmove tradicionalnog pripovedanja, on uspeva da pronađe „američki glas“, koji je sposoban da ispriča priču o američkom društvu.

ObjectiveTo determine risk factors associated with borderline intelligence during intra-uterine life, delivery and the neonatal periods.MethodsIn a case-control study, 200 year one schoolchildren aged 6 years were recruited. A standard...

30 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 83, NO. 2 (EXTENDED DIGITAL VERSION) 83 No.2 WALLS TUMBLING DOWN: TEACHING BLACK FAMILY HISTORY AND GENEALOGY IN SOCIAL HISTORY CONTEXT By Katherine Scott Sturdevant Family history—which to this historian means the rich, contextual narrative of a family over time (the “flesh”) built upon the skeletal genealogy charts of names, dates, and places (the “bones”)—has become increasingly popular, with so many trends to prompt its rise. Those trends, of course, include the website dominance of Ancestry.com; the intriguing but everchanging results of DNA testing; and the appeal of “finding family” stories through all media. African American family history is no exception to these trends; indeed, it has spawned some of them. So many of us who practice family history are fulfilling needs, goals, obsessions, and callings by researching, recording, analyzing, synthesizing, and legacy-making. Most important: sharing precious primary sources of family history—such as recording oral tradition or preserving documents, artifacts, and photographs—is a service to society and to the history of all of us, by capturing resources before they are lost. Therefore, teaching students to do family history well, with best methods, and conscientiously interpreted in the context of that family’s times, is a gift to the historical record as much as any research results from historians’ scholarly work with primary sources. Overcoming “the Brick Wall of Enslavement” “Brick wall” is a popular genealogical term for an informational barrier one hits in generational research, a barrier that frustrates the researcher, who tries many ways to address the problem, to find the sources and methods that will get around the barrier. Some African Americans have been understandably reluctant to attempt genealogy and family history over the years, because of “the brick wall of enslavement.” Enslavement can be a research barrier. When people refer to it as such, they mean that records showing Black people by name diminish (or the names change) when researching back to the pre-emancipation period of history. This is a problem but is not insurmountable. As shown often on the PBS series Finding Your Roots with historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. (and in his earlier series African American Lives, featured in the following Lesson Plan), there are ways around this brick wall. Censuses and schedules of people who were enslaved show how many Black people and White people were on a plantation, with their gender and age indicated, and this is useful information, though painful. Gathering statistical information like that can make it apparent which enslaved person is your ancestor. Indeed, Reconstruction (the period after the Civil War when Union troops occupied the South, 1865–1877) is a rich period for family research. Former enslaved people sometimes seem suddenly born full-grown into historical records because, during this period, the Freedmen’s Bureau first identified them as named individuals. This is when you see them searching for their separated family members; legally marrying someone who might be new to them or might be someone to whom they were unofficially married already; and choosing new legal first and last names. Freedmen’s Bureau records are some of the richest in which to start a search, but you are starting after emancipation, after likely new identities, and after probable disconnection with the previous “owner.”1 BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 83, NO. 2 (EXTENDED DIGITAL VERSION) | 31 83 No.2 One modern source can catapult the researcher over the brick wall of enslavement to a much earlier time: DNA. As interpreting DNA becomes more sophisticated, Black researchers can see general locations and cultures of their African origins. This can seem disappointingly broad and distant at first, but is a great discovery. With that information, a person can research those African cultures and perhaps even pinpoint likely routes and time periods of transit to the Americas. DNA also offers the opportunity for researchers to find and connect with fellow descendants of common ancestors. As fellow descendants contact one another—say, through a medium like Ancestry.com messaging—and form a network, they can better discover the locations and identities of the owners and their enslaved people who were previously anonymous. Each advancement is not a panacea, so the...

This article situates the recent phenomenon of historians writing openly about their own familial and kin networks. After a brief discussion of the evolution of family history as a scholarly field, this article foregrounds the experiences and words of a number of African Americans who engaged in a diverse range of historical, genealogical, archival, and memorial “family history” work over the last two centuries. In the context of slavery, I approach family history as a form of enslaved resistance and anti-slavery argument. In the post-emancipation era, I consider African American family history within and beyond the nascent historical profession amid the racist national backlash to Reconstruction and the early Jim Crow era. From the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance to the modern civil rights era, I explore the popularization of African American family history, the rise of the “new” social history, and the waves of men and women who entered the profession at the intersection of scholarship and social movement. In closing, I reflect upon African American family history in the post-civil rights era, from Roots to the rise of genetic genealogy, and the legacies of these transformations for the historical profession.

This PhD focusses on the body of work that has emerged from the author’s compositional practice between 2008 and 2015. It tackles a range of issues including (dark) tourism, identity and remembrance, and the tensions between history, narrative and myth; from folklore practices to postwar Eastern Europe and the Holocaust. Three extended projects using field recordings and interviews as their primary source material are examined: a soundscape study of Padstow, a composition dealing with the soundscapes of historically-charged places, and an ongoing project that further explores issues of memory, narrative, and myth-making. Through a detailed contextual investigation of these sound-works, the text endeavours to provide a dialogue between the phonographies of the sites and voices featured in the compositions and the social, historical, political and economic forces that have contributed to the making (and metamorphosis) of these places and communities. The author develops a number of notions including the construction of schizo-narratives: an editing technique where fragments of interviews are reorganised to create unexpected and non-linear narratives, and sonic chorographies: the use of field recordings to represent not only the fragmentary delineations of a soundscape but also to operate a re-scaling of the elements depicted to highlight crucial aspects of the socio-political fabric of a specific place. These elements lead to an investigation of the territory of disembodied voices – the phenomenological mechanisms of interaction between disembodied voices and the sonic environment – as well as a reflection on the perception of acousmatic identities. From the multitude of conflicting histories that underpin the origins and beliefs associated with the Mayday festival to the problematic site transformations that have occurred in Krakow and Auschwitz as a result of the Holocaust tourist trade; from the dislocated narratives of ‘twin language’ to the imagined myths of the lost Jewish community of thirteenth century Hereford, this PhD endeavours to show how disembodied voices and soundscapes might be creatively and conceptually explored through plurality and contradiction, as a territory where no element is fixed, where no narrative is crystallised, where identities are in constant motion, where meaning is always transient.

Evidence of the value of systematically collecting family history in primary care is limited. To evaluate the feasibility of systematically collecting family history of coronary heart disease in primary care and the effect of incorporating these data into cardiovascular risk assessment. Pragmatic, matched-pair, cluster randomized, controlled trial. (International Standardized Randomized Controlled Trial Number Register: ISRCTN 17943542). 24 family practices in the United Kingdom. 748 persons aged 30 to 65 years with no previously diagnosed cardiovascular risk, seen between July 2007 and March 2009. Participants in control practices had the usual Framingham-based cardiovascular risk assessment with and without use of existing family history information in their medical records. Participants in intervention practices also completed a questionnaire to systematically collect their family history. All participants were informed of their risk status. Participants with high cardiovascular risk were invited for a consultation. The primary outcome was the proportion of participants with high cardiovascular risk (10-year risk ≥ 20%). Other measures included questionnaire completion rate and anxiety score. 98% of participants completed the family history questionnaire. The mean increase in proportion of participants classified as having high cardiovascular risk was 4.8 percentage points in the intervention practices, compared with 0.3 percentage point in control practices when family history from patient records was incorporated. The 4.5-percentage point difference between groups (95% CI, 1.7 to 7.2 percentage points) remained significant after adjustment for participant and practice characteristics (P = 0.007). Anxiety scores were similar between groups. Relatively few participants were from ethnic minority or less-educated groups. The potential to explore behavioral change and clinical outcomes was limited. Many data were missing for anxiety scores. Systematically collecting family history increases the proportion of persons identified as having high cardiovascular risk for further targeted prevention and seems to have little or no effect on anxiety. Genetics Health Services Research program of the United Kingdom Department of Health.

Like many families who were on the “wrong” side of the Việt Nam war, my family history has effectively been “displaced” from official discourse in Việt Nam when the country was “reunified” in 1975, as well as in the discourse of public history in the U.S. which has overwhelmingly emphasized the “lessons” of the “American Experience” in Việt Nam. Using my family history as an index of historical processes, I hope to introduce windows on the continuities of what noncommunist Vietnamese do and think. My family folklore is utilized as a way to create opportunities for other non-communist Vietnamese here and elsewhere to connect, articulate, or remind them of a pattern from the past that can provide a contemporary coherence with an ethic workable for the future.