The Opinionist

My first year in China, 6th grade, I was suspicious of everything. My one friend that I still kept contact with during COVID was a history nerd, who seemed knowledgeable enough about it that I would have believed anything he said. You could have fully convinced me that the Chinese government was sifting through all my Discord messages to my friends in the U.S. or that there were government agents listening to every word I said. The first day of school in March, my gym teacher asked me if it was true that you could own a gun in America. It was the first of many times that I felt like the sole mouthpiece to “correct” the prejudices of my Chinese peers. I kept trying to explain things in terms of “Democrat” and “Republican,” that I didn't yet know the translations for in Chinese, things I knew nothing about — and yet I agonized over my unsatisfactory explanations every night in bed. My botched duties of righting all the ideological misconceptions of this new terrain, And then I rememb...

In “The Best We Could Do,” the American photographer Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for his famous photo, “Saigon Execution,” depicting a South Vietnamese general with his gun pointed at a Viet Cong soldier. The photo was broadcast all over the world, bringing light to the situation in Vietnam, but it was also taken out of context, ruining the general’s reputation and being distorted by American media into an oversimplification and stereotyping for their own narrative. It made me think back to the Violent Images synthesis essay we wrote a few weeks ago. I had been adamant about releasing images as truthfully as possible without censorship, even if they were violent, putting the general public as a higher priority than the people directly tied to a photograph. But the story behind “Saigon Execution” made me rethink my stance. On one hand, the photo did result in knowledge spread about the reality of the Vietnam War, and protests taken in action against it; but there were also unintend...