SAM LUO

Elegy to Saigon

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O Saigon— 

We read about you in the 11th grade. 
In fifth period, American history where the textbooks 
authored by your oppressors only say so much 
about our involvement. I get asked, Do you miss Saigon? 
Miss Saigon as if I’ve ever been. Not “Miss Saigon” produced 
by your oppressors—by their stage play: Writing off your starved 
girls in a severed country as prostitutes. Pretty & powerless. We wrote 
about our indifference. Our textbook language of pith over pity. Still, 
we were eager to write you into our history books & that’s one way of apology.
In our books. In our multi-editioned American history textbooks, a new print every
year. We read about you & we moved on. We overwrote our inventory of casualties; flipped
pages past the cadavers. Past war. But we paid our dues. We memorized the date of your collapse for
the test. April 30, 1975. See? We care. We didn’t sweep you under the rug. We milked every American
dollar we could rack from your cows. Your cowering girls. Your dying. We cashed in on that because
we care. Though, we forget & expect you to forgive. 

I don’t know how to tell you of your people. Of their fleeing and your grandchildren. How they
continue to bleed, now, on American soil. We read about it on the news. Another war. The race war.
Your oppressors make very little from this. The textbooks too new to monetize this tragedy. 

I think we will wait. Will move on. In this elegy— 
we glimpse into the cruelty of the oppressor. I tell you the oppressor is cruel.
If you were here, you would sigh at my redundancy. You could read 
a poem about oppression and know you are elegized. 

You could see your people plastered on the sidewalk in America, in the New York Times,
their innards spilling onto the bustling streets of New York. You would.

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