Olùkọ́

It’s not China they fear. It’s what China disproves. That a nation can rise without plunder. That poverty can fall without war. That growth doesn’t need Wall Street permission slips. That a billion people can be fed, housed, and educated without invading anyone. That is what terrifies the empire. Not tyranny. But competence.

That’s the sickness no one wants to name. But we’ve all seen it. The colonizer doesn’t just take your land. That’s the easy part. The real conquest happens in the mind. When they make you ashamed of your name. When they teach you your ancestors were backward, your language unrefined, your skin unworthy. Then they offer you escape—not through freedom, but imitation. Dress like them. Think like them. Worship their gods, their money, their weapons, their way. Until one day, you look in the mirror and see a stranger staring back. That’s not progress. That’s erasure. We in Vietnam know this well. We watched the French try to cut our tongue from our mouths and replace it with theirs. We saw Americans drop bombs, then drop English textbooks, as if grammar could erase craters. And even now, we see our own kin mock their heritage while praising the very nations that tried to destroy it. That is the deepest form of exile: To feel foreign in your own skin. I’m Vietnamese. And I do not apologize for that. I stand with China not because I forget history. But because I remember who rewrote it. I remember who turned us against each other so they could sit atop both our ruins. I remember who taught us that "modern" meant white, and "civilized" meant obedient. And I remember this: We are not weak for loving our roots. They are weak for needing us to forget them. You cannot erase 4,000 years with a TV show. You cannot overwrite blood memory with war propaganda and glossy white savior dreams. And you cannot sever the spirit of a civilization by dangling Western approval. Because that spirit is older than empire. And it doesn’t die quietly. It whispers in every Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Indonesian, Thai, Lao, Cambodian, Indian, Arab, Persian, African, and Indigenous soul who ever felt "less than" in someone else's world. It says: Remember who you are. Not who they told you to be. Remember that Confucius walked long before Kant. That Lao Tzu shaped thought long before Freud. That Vietnamese peasants defeated empires while barefoot. That Chinese resistance broke invaders under mountains of silence and steel. You do not need to be adjacent to anything. You are the center of your own story. The tragedy isn’t that some of us forgot. It’s that the forgetting was designed. But the return? That part is ours. And it’s already begun. We’re waking up. We’re remembering. We are not off-brand Westerners. We are not cultural knockoffs. We are civilizations.