Week on The Hill Trip Reflection - Cathleen Balid

From the desk of Cathleen Balid, PICS Intern with Legacies of War 2025

Don and Cathleen at Library of Congress

Today, and the rest of these three days, have left me wrestling a lot with the American political system and my smallness. And what I mean by that is that advocating  in this political system, in front of staffers, and oftentimes urgently showing up to representatives that may not even see you, makes you feel so insignificant. In the sense that you have this weight of history behind you, this history that you champion and defend and work tirelessly for, and your cause is swallowed among other neon printed shirts. Sometimes, a senator is moved; other times, their staffer is partisan, skeptical. It hurts when you hear men like Don share their stories of guilt—he’s a tall ol’ cowboy with a steel belt like a boxer and a Native American beaded cap on his white hair, a fragile man who walks slowly, yet decisively in this unbearable heat—and his representative, one vote out of four hundred and thirty-five, takes two years to finally be convinced. It hurts when you listen to Dat’s story of fleeing Northern Vietnam as a child—him, a Princeton alum from the seventies, who lived through the so-called Vietnam War—and a staffer from Washington D.C admits that Laos and Vietnam are low on the Capitol Hill hierarchy of political and strategic importance. It's an eye-opening experience, I think. It's an idea I’ve fought with that is recently surfacing again; the idea that my Southeast Asian heritage is significant, yet I have to fight to feel and be recognized. And while I am grateful to be Filipino, to have some political significance in the South China Sea dispute, I wonder if this is reductive, if my identity is only tied to how the Philippines can serve America. If that is all Washington, D.C. sees Southeast Asia as. 

Cathleen advocating during Week on The Hill

This work is so slow, is what I'm realizing. I've always thought and felt that a singular story could impact the way people think, could really convince someone a la The Chosen or The Night Watchman to help a cause. But this sort of advocacy makes me think that it’s not a single story but a sequence of stories, over and over and over again. Hard and repeated, like bombs. And within this repetition there’s an exhaustion that lies on itself and questions why this repetition is necessary, this necessity to prove something that should have already been known. It makes me think that America is so intertwined with foreign affairs and yet there are stories and experiences—identities—that are forcefully hidden and tucked away. And while these oral stories bring only a fragment of insight, and they are constructed slowly and exhaustively, I think it’s only lived experiences, told from an eye-witness, first-person account, that really make a difference. It makes me think of more mechanical processes: How do you convey a real story to stick, how do you get it to do something? A whole history lies in the signatures of these old men, and we are here sharing, showing up, hoping, because that is all we can really do. We, emphasis on the we. I think of the grassroots movements of Zohran Mamdani and the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement, these leaders in their smallness, and I think that maybe people have always been small and reliant on community. It is such a far cry from the self-individualism of Princeton, but it works: mobilization, the sort that brings together people of different backgrounds, works. 

On this trip, Don and Dat have taught me the most. These men have slow, fragile strides, and yet they contain history within their bodies. We look at geographical maps and black-and-white photos, and they have lived through it. It is so heartening to see them advocate and so disheartening that their generation is passing—that there is a possibility, a sure one, that these real, powerful stories will pass without this work ever having been completed. It astounds me that Congress asks, “Why should we care?” when these men have seen it and lived it. The Lao and Vietnamese people are their people, too, inextricably connected through steel bombs and shrapnel. I think I’m still trying to make sense of it all: how there can be a clear answer for reparations, a clear admission of American fault, and we are still thinking about how to prove that it matters.  

Dat sharing his story during our Evening of Hope

The question, then, is why I want to continue this early work. I don’t think it’s possible for me to cloak this in hope and inspiration, because I don’t want to color this war in the language of inspiration; I don’t want to celebrate these small victories, for fear that it will render us in this same position of asking, not reclaiming. U.S. aid to Laos and Vietnam is rightful. It is something that should have been done long ago. My work at Legacies of War is shaped by a passion to enact what is right, to restore and illuminate a culture that I have read so deeply in literary journals, witnessed in my travels, and felt in the pan-Southeast Asian team of Legacies. If there is something my trip from DC has taught me, something that I feel so intensely about now, it is that I want to do right by them. I want America, ultimately, to do right by them.