EIGHT DISPATCHES FROM THE PASTS/MEMORIES OF AIDS A Dialogue between Cecilia Aldarondo, Roger Hallas, Pablo Alvarez, Jim Hubbard, and Dredge Byung’chu Kang-Nguyễn, with an Introduction by Jih-Fei Cheng If I were not “queer,” I would not know aids. Without knowing aids, I could not be “queer.” I would also not be “queer” if it were not for the Cold War. If it were not for the Cold War, aids could not exist. Te past lives in memories like a narrative missing transitions. As Marita Sturken writes, “Both the Vietnam War and the aids epidemic have profoundly afected the experience of nationality. America is inconceiv- able without them.” 1 Sturken explains that the traumas borne of the Vietnam War and aids interrupted once commonly held “truths” as well as progress narratives: “those of American imperialism, technology, science, and mas- culinity.” 2 In turn, there has been widespread cultural productions to revisit these memories and traumas in order to seek a modicum of healing, even where healing must frst draw anger, and even when healing—nevertheless a cure—has remained impossible. Both of my parents were born in Nanjing, China, during World War II. At the end of World War II, followed by the Civil War and the ascendancy of the People’s Republic of China under Mao, they evacuated to Taiwan as children of the politically privileged Nationalist Party of China (Kuomin- tang, or kmt). Although they grew up under what they would describe as modest means, they did not experience the most devastating efects of more than thirty-eight years of martial law—the second-longest period of military rule in modern history afer Syria and Israel—installed by the kmt to vio- lently suppress Native resistance, lefists, Taiwanese independence, and/or pro-Japanese agitators. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/790143/9781478009269-009.pdf by guest on 06 April 2020