Continuing with the organizational plan of this book, we will now proceed to examine the different arenas of memory that the Vietnamese-American community comprises and explore the ways in which the war-related narratives are handled in each of them. One of the unique characteristics of the Vietnamese-American collectively is its hybrid nature—situated as it is within and between two cultures. Pulitzer-Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen describes how the Vietnamese-American community “is the third force between the binary poles of Vietnam and the United States,” how it “simultaneously belongs to or in both countries” (2017: 566). We pointed in the previous chapter to the challenges many Vietnamese refugees faced upon their arrival in the U.S.; to that list, we now add the challenge of how to make sense of the American-Vietnamese War and how to understand one’s identity in relation to it. Thanh Tan, host of the Seattle-based Second Wave, a podcast exploring the Vietnamese-American experience, speaks for many second-generation Vietnamese Americans when she says the war “is the backbone of my identity. It doesn’t matter that I was born after the fighting ended. Whether I like it or not, the Vietnam War is my war, too” (NYT, 10/3/2017). And indeed, she has often not liked it. In the following, Tan explains how this struggle affected her in her formative years: