Our Humanity and Watching Others

Response to: “Ngo in the Life” by Mike Ngo (as part of Two Rivers: New Vietnamese Writing from American and Viet Nam)

Post Date: May 11, 2014

This reading describes Mike Ngo’s own time of trial when he is imprisoned for life within a prison facility. He recalls the previous traumas he has had to face during the time was a gang member, including when those around him died due to the actions of other gang members. He draws parallels between the hell he faces within the United States compared to the potential hell he would face in Vietnam, since he dreams the same event happening in these two different locations. He writes about the sadness he faces when his parents visit him, since he faces life in prison due to his previous activities as a gang member. Ngo describes how the US has turned against him by forcing him to working within a system of oppressive power, even though he and his family originally meant to escape from the oppressive powers in Viet Nam for the ideal of freedom. His own identity as a human is shaken and manipulated by the prison guards, since they use him for their tasks of keeping prisoners locked in. He perceives and describes how the society has failed him and the prisoners in certain ways, such as describing how the officers were enabled to mistreat and manipulate prisoners for their own purposes, instead of helping them.

An important part of this reading is how the narrator describes his humanity. The narrator describes how his own humanity has been taken in the prison block because he is forced to aid the oppressors by writing up prisoner records or taking stolen items from a member of the corrupt Department of Corrections. This loss of humanity comes as South East Asian immigrants, in addition to Vietnamese immigrants, were perceived to be inferior compared to others because they were not aided much and had to overcome many difficulties when living within a new continent. I would also argue that this loss in humanity is not only limited to prisons and immigrants, but also in how we humans treat each other daily. We often do not make an attempt to understand the consequences of our action and how we manipulate others for our own benefit, such as how national governments use immigrant families to support their claim of helping the immigrant community, while neglecting immigrants in other regions of the United States.

Question: How should we maintain our own humanity and individual identity when facing an oppressive force that manipulates our actions and intentions?

Posted by: Eric Yu

Section A01

This image of wiring and a fence is representative of how oppressive society is towards prisoners and those who oppose the law. This imprisonment of humans causes the loss of one’s own humanity due to how society is enabled to control the actions of the prisoner, similar to what Foucault describes about the Panopticon and how we watch ourselves within a larger prison due to the fear of being watched. Image from the American Civil Liberties Union.