My foreword to the Japanese edition

of Postcards from the End of America:



Thinking I could make a difference, I wrote Postcards, but it has only changed my life. Nothing else. An immigrant, college drop-out and lifelong financial failure, I’m an outsider in the US, but so are all the characters in this book. Traveling across America, I gravitated towards the types of people I was already familiar with in Philadelphia, where I lived for three decades. Waiters, cooks, bartenders, construction workers, factory hands, mechanics, a cleaner of emergency spills, a prostitute, the unemployed, several homeless, etc., they belong to the so-called “bottom half,” but since their ranks are increasing so relentlessly, it’s more appropriate to speak of “the bottom majority.”

Though constituting most of America, these mostly unseen and mute folks have zero influence on how the US is run, and when they were tricked into voting for a conman named Donald Trump, they were even mocked as “deplorables.” A few years earlier, a different group of frustrated citizens had mounted the Occupy protest, but that, too, came to nothing. Mostly college-educated young people, they became symbolically homeless by camping out in each US city. All homeless Americans are already protesters, however, for their numerous presence is a fierce refutation against the relentlessly propagated image of this nation as fabulously wealthy.

In publishing this heretical account of a hollowed-out America, I’ve become not just more marginalized, but an ex-American. With almost no means of survival left in the US, I have returned to my native Vietnam.

This morning in Saigon, I checked the Philadelphia newspaper to discover a shop owner had just been shot with an AK-47 in a robbery attempt, and 1,217 Philadelphians died in 2017 from drug overdoses, up from 907 in 2016. Each day, there are appalling news from all across the country, but this doesn’t surprise me in the least, for I’ve been watching the end of America for many years now.





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