Women Watching Men

My mother’s name was Liao Lin. I almost died the day I was born, the same day she died, the day she was murdered by Edward Blake.

I was twenty years old when the Comedian died. I had traveled to America on a student visa while attending Dalat University, intending on a career in the arts. I didn’t know anything about the Comedian, but I knew everything about Edward Blake.

Blake was one of the many Americans who came to Vietnam believing they knew better than we did what was best for our country. They were consumed with an obsession to stop the spread of communism, embroiled in a Cold War with the Soviet Union they believed to have only one possible outcome. Somehow, even after the war we proved them wrong. I thought nothing of traveling to America on friendly terms, even if I had ulterior motives. 

For years I thought Blake was just another soldier. In Vietnam, in the community I grew up in, that’s all he was, an abusive lover who thought he could have his fun and leave without consequence, allowed to do what he pleased with total impunity. We knew not all Americans were like that. We were the “good Vietnamese,” after all, the side that fought with the Americans. We had no concept of superheroes. We thought Doctor Manhattan was a myth. 

Many years later I found a domino mask in my mother’s possessions, things that were saved for when I was ready. I was a headstrong young woman, then, not yet attending Dalat, convinced I already knew everything about the world. In America superheroes had already been banned. They were passing into the pages of history.

And then of course I came to America, and read an obituary in a newspaper, the death of a Comedian. Edward Blake.

History is a funny thing. You think you know what history is because there are books and textbooks and professors who will tell you all about it, sober commentators, documentaries, all of it. One day a giant alien squid changed history, and that is all anyone ever really found out about that.

In the fringes, of course, there was more. A tabloid journal printed what it purported to be the diary of Rorschach, a vigilante and former member of a team called the Watchmen. One of its members was Blake. Naturally I opted to take the journal at face value. It filled in all the blanks.

To the outside world it was paranoid delusion, dismissed at best as a hoax, at worst a sick joke, one more symptom of a diagnosed deluded mind, before his death finally caught and incarcerated with all the other criminals. I won’t disturb you with all the atrocities this man perpetrated over the years, all in the name of “justice.”

He claimed there was someone who did something even worse. Well, he had me at the Comedian.

Rorschach wrote how my mother wasn’t, of course, the only victim of Blake’s deprivations. Manhattan’s girlfriend. Actually, Manhattan himself, so troubled by the moral cesspool he saw all around him that he eventually outright forsook humanity.

And I thought back, again, on what had been done to me. I grew up without a mother, without a father, in a country that had been told for decades that it could not be trusted to handle its own affairs. My interest in the arts was a protective shield, a way to try and make some sense of a senseless world. To then finally learn that Blake was, throughout his life, actually considered a hero, let alone a superhero, it was difficult to process.

When my father shot my mother, he thought he was killing two people. He knew she was pregnant. All she wanted was for him to accept responsibility. He thought nothing of shooting her, of murdering her unborn child. He left the bar where it happened without a second’s thought, far more concerned about the face my mother had angrily slashed than whether or not he’d finished the job. In one sense he had. And yet in another, he hadn’t.

My mother had been far enough along that, even if premature, even if literally forced into the world, I still had a fighting chance to survive. And somehow I did. I’m told I remained small for my age for years, that the doctors constantly warned my guardians I had a “failure to thrive.” But somehow I persisted, perhaps because I had no idea, until later, how horrific my origins had been.

It was the day I found that mask. In Vietnam we have no such traditions. It meant nothing to me, and still meant nothing when my friends attempted to explain about American superheroes, even when they referenced the Comedian himself. All I had of my past was the name Edward Blake, and later what he had done to my mother. 

I sought peace in America. I wanted to find out if Blake indeed was a monster or if there was some other explanation. I sifted through service records. I saw how Manhattan had been brought into the war as propaganda. And how Blake had been used, and how the moment he was no longer useful, discarded.

And somehow I allowed myself to see that as the basic pattern of his life, that perhaps he could be understood, if not forgiven. And perhaps I could find peace, at last, with my mother’s memory. Somehow I doubt she knew any of this. She would not have known what that mask represented. Or that she had forced him to wear a different one, until, broken, he quit trying to hide altogether, the punchline to his own joke. Which, perhaps, had been the point all along.

He was already dead before I had a chance to meet him. The whole story was over; I was just an observer, watching the aftermath unfold, surrounded by oblivious people living in a world they didn’t understand. Same story as it ever was. Convinced they were living in a better world.

Well.