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Regarding Vietnam: affects in Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic literature and film
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Content
REGARDING VIETNAM:
AFFECTS IN VIETNAMESE AND VIETNAMESE DIASPORIC
LITERATURE AND FILM
by
Cam Nhung Vu
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
May 2010
Copyright 2010 Cam Nhung Vu
ii
Dedication
To Dad, Mom, and Hieu for a lifetime of love, support, and encouragement.
iii
Acknowledgments
In the course of the researching and writing of this dissertation, I have had the great
fortune to meet, be mentored by, and become friends with extraordinary people. I am
most grateful for the guidance provided to me by my committee members: Jane
Iwamura, David Lloyd, Panivong Norindr, and my ever-present advisor Viet Nguyen,
who has seen me through the entirety of my years as a graduate student. Beyond giving
me invaluable feedback on my scholarly work, each member of my committee has shown
me that intellectual and political commitment, passion and joy in scholarship, and
collegiality and kindness can and should exist together in academia. I would like to
thank Viet especially for his always capable and steadfast guidance. He, more than any
other, has spent endless hours reading my work and helping me to think through the
project, and for that I am profoundly indebted.
I owe a great deal to colleagues and friends who have read and contributed
thoughtful comments to previous drafts of the chapters of this dissertation. I am
honored to have benefitted from their care, intelligence, and attention. They include
Phuong Nguyen, Viet Le, Fiorella Cotrina, Laura Barraclough, and the members of my
wonderful Vietnamese-language reading group, including Lan Duong, Yen Espiritu,
Kim Loan Hill, Mariam Lam, Viet Le, Thu Huong Nguyen-vo, Nhu Ngoc Ong, Lan
Pho, Thuy Vo Dang, and Chuong Dai Vo. Each has helped me to better appreciate the
beauty and complexity of cultural work.
I am grateful to Geoff Georgi, whose astute editing hand taught me to
appreciate “this” and “that.” Michelle Har Kim generously made herself available to
help me with the final editing of the dissertation. Thank you! During my time at USC I
iv
have been enriched by the camaraderie of friends from departments across campus. I
want to thank Viet Le, Wendy Cheng, Jesus Hernandez, Jason Goldman, Nisha Kunte,
Emily Hobson, Michan Connor, Reina Prado, Jennifer Stoever, Karen Yonemoto, Hilary
Jenks, Imani Johnson, Lata Murti, Anton Smith, Laura Fugikawa and Christine Jun for
sharing with me their ebullient spirits, tremendous talents, and gifts of friendship.
I am incredibly fortunate to have the support of dear friends whose
companionship, wisdom, and penchant for mirth making have sustained me. For years
of cherished friendship and for their abiding support during each phase of the writing of
this dissertation, I would like to thank Van Vo, Micaela Smith, Thuy Vo Dang, Chuong
Dai Vo, Kelley Gardner, Cathy Hue, Eileen Vo, Kimberly Min, and Sarah Riley.
Women mentors have made a profound impact on my life. I wish to thank Terry
DeMeo, Lanita Jacobs-Huey, Jayne London, Cynthia Young, and Kris Yi.
I am grateful for the dedicated work and kindness of the administrative staff in the
Department of American Studies and Ethnicity: Kitty Lai, Sonia Rodriguez, Jujuana
Preston, and Sandra Jones, and grateful too for the faculty and all those who continue to
make the department welcoming of all students’ scholarship. I thank George Sanchez
especially for his tireless work in supporting graduate students in our department.
Family in the U.S. and Vietnam have given me great joy and shown me endless
love and support. I especially thank my cousin, Lan Cao, who has been more than that
to me. I thank her for being a sister and confidant. And finally, I thank my parents, Son
Vu and Tuyet Nguyen, who, along with my brother Hieu, have provided me with the
means to proceed to the end of this dissertation and the love to know I would always be
ok. To them I dedicate the culminating work of these graduate school years.
v
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgments iii
Abstract vi
INTRODUCTION: Approaching Affects and the Critical Spirit 1
Introduction Endnotes 30
CHAPTER ONE: The Tale of Kieu and Renderings of Diasporic Selfhood 32
Chapter One Endnotes 76
CHAPTER TWO: The Look of Nostalgia: Seeing Vietnam in Transnational
Postwar Films 79
Chapter Two Endnotes 118
CHAPTER THREE: South Vietnamese Refugee Fathers: Secrets, Ethnicity,
and Affective Traces in the fiction of le thi diem thuy
and Nam Le 120
Chapter Three Endnotes 158
CHAPTER FOUR: Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn: The Management of Viet Kieu
Masculinity in Affective Community 160
Chapter Four Endnotes 200
CONCLUSION: Towards a Critical Diaspora Cultural Studies 201
Conclusion Endnotes 211
Bibliography 212
vi
Abstract
The aftermath of the Vietnam War/American War (post-1975) not only resulted in the
largest moment of Vietnamese bodily dispersal around the world, but also figured a
crisis in the affective management of the newly minted unified Vietnamese nation,
simultaneously forcing exiled refugees to configure new relations to nation and state,
notions of the future, and their own selves as bodies in a new world. My dissertation
explores how the cultural production of this era -- from artists in the postwar
Vietnamese nation and diaspora -- uses the grammar of affect to indict, excoriate,
impugn, lament, remember and reconcile the effects of war.
Because of the profoundly specular nature of the Vietnam War, images of loss,
grief, and terror continue to circumscribe representations of Vietnam and its postwar
subjects in Western cultural representation. Postwar subjects, construed as the
“Other,” then, are burdened with the responsibility to provide closure to the
unmitigated traumas of the Vietnam War. I argue that the cultural production of
Vietnam’s dispersed postwar subjects continues to be looked to, by a global viewing and
reading audience, for signs of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘forgiveness’ so that the history of
Vietnamese turmoil can be made coherent and therefore more amenable to market-
friendly narratives. In my dissertation I examine how the Vietnamese and Vietnamese
diasporic cultural producers under consideration turn to an economy of affects to torque
the narrative on forgiveness and healing as particularly vexing and difficult postwar
ethical imperatives. The texts I examine include diasporic renderings of Vietnam’s epic
poem, The Tale of Kieu, by the diasporic variety show Paris by Night and by the scholar
vii
and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh Ha, the contemporary literature of Vietnamese Australian
writer Nam Le and Vietnamese American writer le thi diem thuy whose stories detail
the difficult reckoning of children to their fathers’ failures, two films by two prominent
postwar directors -- Tran Anh Hung and Đặng Nhật Minh – in which vision and
nostalgia act as concomitant and paradoxical processes at work in remembering and
honoring Vietnam, and finally the popular-fiction of the Vietnamese-language writer
Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn, a popular personality of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through an
analysis of select works in his corpus, I examine how Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn identifies
sadness and sorrow as burdens of Vietnamese postwar masculinity. His depictions call
upon the sympathies and empathies of available “affective communities” in the diaspora
but they do so in complex ways that acknowledge other feelings and emotions that
emerge for his readers as they consider Vietnamese postwar men and manhood.
My dissertation follows the traces of affect in postwar transnational and
diasporic Vietnamese cultural representation and shows that an attention to affects does
more than give a glimpse into internal subjectivity; such an attention can offer Critical
Studies complex and varied language to assess how deeply it is that cultural texts are
underwritten by appeals for connection and understanding.
1
Introduction
Approaching Affects and the Critical Spirit
What happens when we stand beside an affect? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick asks this
of critical theory in Touching Feeling (2003) where she explores the “textures” of affect.
1
Sedgwick’s concern with the spatiality of being beside an affect, a topoi, or an object of
study is provocative, not just because it offers insight into the psychological possibilities
of sympathy and empathy, but because in cultural studies, especially cultural studies
that attempts to reckon with impossible affects, it offers an opportunity for reflection. It
invites critical studies scholars to question the privileged dichotomy among critical
circles to posit “inner” (hidden) and “outer” (public) spatial configurations of human
experience. Sedgwick’s admiration for the affect theories of the psychologist Silvan
Tomkins leads her to re-spatialize the terms of critical theory’s methods of
investigation.
2
Sedgwick’s call to situate ourselves beside our appointed inquiry leads me
to pose the question in this dissertation: What could cultural studies do if it privileged
allowing rather than the hyper-vigilance of guarding? Learning rather than knowing?
Lawrence Grossberg, in We Gotta Get Out of This Place (1992), thinks through
the possibilities of cultural studies as praxis in the contemporary U.S. political climate.
He arrives at a conception of cultural studies as “strategic intellectual practice,” one that
is attentive to “what matters in the world of political struggle.”
3
This has translated in
critical scholarship, at times, into either an unwillingness to permit
discourse/affects/expressions to unfold enough so that we can see what is actually
going on, or on the other side of the duality, into a political lethargy, an all too
accommodating sense of political nihilism, what Grossberg calls a lack of passions
2
(affects) in our political thought. Grossberg argues about the political culture of the left
in the aftermath of 1980s multiculturalism, “Whether because we have become too
fearful or too myopic, we increasingly censor the statements of our questions, thoughts
and hypotheses.”
4
In Grossberg’s assessment, the depoliticization of the political Left in
the early 1990s was organized culturally rather than politically. To return power to our
politics, we must bring our passions back onto the cultural studies agenda. By
Grossberg’s account, scholars must be passionate. But just how do we include ourselves
and our passions in our cultural theory without falling into a self-propagating
indulgence, especially when we know that our “selves” and “our” passions should be put
to the scrutiny of self-reflexivity?
Bruno Latour has put his concerns about the critical spirit thus:
Wars. So many wars. Wars outside and wars inside. Cultural wars,
science wars, and wars against terrorists. Wars against poverty and wars
against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My
question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the
intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is
it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destructions?
More iconoclasm to iconoclasm? What has become of critical spirit? Has
it not run out of steam?
5
Speaking from his intellectual position as a scholar of actor-network theory (ANT),
Latour suggestively argues for a constructivist critical studies rather than an abiding
attachment to deconstruction that has become so central to contemporary critical
scholarship. He asks,
What would critique do if it could be associated with more, not with less,
with multiplication, not subtraction. […] This would require that all
entities, including computers, cease to be objects defined simply by their
inputs and outputs and become again things, mediating, assembling,
gathering many more folds than the “united four.” If this were possible
then we could let the critics come ever closer to the matters of concern
3
we cherish, and then at last we could tell them: “Yes, please, touch them,
explain them, deploy them.” Then we would have gone for good beyond
iconoclasm.
6
Latour takes the position that objects and “things” are transient and affected. They
should be considered powerful actors in social life. From Latour’s encouragement to see
the affects in things, he pushes for constructivist critical studies that sees that “if
something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and
caution.” He argues for the direction of critique to move “not away but toward the
gathering, the Thing.”
7
The move toward--in Latour’s concern, the thing, and in this dissertation, the
affect-- suggests a willingness to be proximate. The goal of closeness is not to uncover
it (the affect) and unveil its “deeper truths,” but to be beside it, which can sometimes
make us beside ourselves. The difficulty lies in understanding the effects of affect: we are
forced to acknowledge that we affect outside the contours of our selves and that we
cannot protect against the integrations, inflections, and infections of what moves around
us. In this dissertation I argue that in postwar Vietnamese diaspora studies, to stand
beside an affect does not have to leave us unduly subject to the wiles of whatever political
and cultural formation is loudest. It offers us the opportunity to move “toward the
gathering,” the places for which ideology alone cannot account. These are dangerous
places. Dangerous because when it comes to affects, so closely related to feelings and
emotions, intellectual know-how cannot fill in for the gaps in understanding that are
intrinsic to trying to attend to another’s experience or perspective.
The importance of a serious consideration of the role of affects comes into play
when, for instance, we consider the ire of the resolutely anti-communist Vietnamese
4
American community that organized against the image of Ho Chi Minh in Orange
County in 1999, which resulted in the famous Hi-Tek protest.
8
In this instance, the
alternatives seem to be either to condemn or to justify the vitriol and nationalism that
were put on display by the community protest. Such analysis was rampant in
mainstream news coverage of the protest. I would suggest that we could ask what the
value is in exploring the “textures of affect” that were so evident in the community’s 54-
day protest where both impromptu and stylized performances narrated South Vietnam’s
cultural beauty and historical struggles. These lines of inquiry are interesting to the
extent that they promise no clean resolution. If you ask into the nature of affects,
feelings, and emotions, you must yield to individual and discrete perspectives. A
“strategic intellectual practice” such as Grossberg argues would assess the state of
affairs and look for historical conditions and patterns as it “faces new questions and
takes up new positions.”
9
This has been an important position for critical studies
scholars but is there room to explore new ways of being in relation to the object
(problem) of inquiry?
The concern about the nature of positioning, put forth concisely by Brian
Massumi in Parables for the Virtual (2002), is that in this eagerness, critical scholarship
that doesn’t expand beyond its comfortable theories and approaches to “problems” risks
rigidifying around poles, places, grids, positions. Massumi calls such practice the
“positional model.” According to Massumi, who is concerned with movement and its
potentiality for theorizing the body, in the “positional model,”
The very notion of movement as qualitative transformation is lacking.
There is “displacement,” but no transformation; it is as if the body simply
leaps from one definition to the next. Since the positional model's
5
definitional framework is punctual, it simply can't attribute a reality to
the interval, whose crossing is a continuity (or nothing). The space of
the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a
theoretical no-body's land.
10
Massumi places movement at the forefront of studies of matter and the body, and affects
are one central feature of the body’s movements. Massumi attends to affects because
they force us to have to deal with the body in motion, not the body as a signifier for
fixed “identity,” or even “identities.” I will return to Massumi’s definition of affects
later. For now, I wish to use Massumi’s call for an attention to the “space of the
crossing” and the “gaps between positions on the grid” as an echo of Sedgwick’s call for
a critical politics of being beside to see how it can productively contribute to this
dissertation’s concerns with Vietnamese diasporic postwar cultural texts. With an
explicit attention to how movements occur inside the body, or in the midst of crossings
and movements, these theorists ask for more than an affirmation of hybrid, interstitial,
or marginal sites. They ask for the body and its capacities to be re-theorized and re-
ordered against the prevailing paradigms that would insist upon the body as always
already “mediated.”
Moving West to East: Vietnam on the Edge of History
To begin my discussion of my diasporic considerations, I want to start with what
intellectual concerns I have as a participant in the field of American Studies (and
Ethnicity) as it intersects with examinations of “The Vietnam War,” which remains the
central paradigm through which “Vietnam”-ness is engaged. The “post-nationalist
turn” in American Studies importantly opened the door to scholarship and lines of
inquiry that de-center the West, and the U.S. in particular, from modes of analysis in U.S.
6
based scholarship. It is difficult to ascertain how successful this has been, however,
when one surveys the material on studies of “the Vietnam War,” which in general seem
to signal how the war has become an event in the making of American historiography
more than they see the war as an event in Vietnam and global history. By this, I mean
that in these studies there is an undercurrent of frustration, regret, and shame that
should not go un-theorized. Scholars in the West have been prolific in detailing how
arduous the task (in America) has been to remember and understand just “what went
wrong.”
11
Studies such as Neil Jamieson’s Understanding Vietnam (1993), which is
readily sold to tourists along the downtown sidewalks of Ho Chi Minh City, attempted
to intervene in the miasma and pain of postwar (U.S. American) understanding of
American war failure. His study of Vietnam is important and incisive because it draws a
picture of a nation that is complex and whose history is tortuous. However, it cannot be
left unanalyzed that his project contributes to the study of Vietnam as a means to
understanding “what went wrong.” This mediation is crucial. Jamieson writes in the
preface, “To no insignificant extent the war became defined in Washington, distorted in
Washington, and finally lost in Washington through a process that was out of touch
with any realistic understanding of what was in the much-touted “hearts and minds” of
the people.”
12
To understand why America fought the war, why it lost the war, and
what to make of it now, in the aftermath, Jamieson suggests we ought to travel to the
real hearts and minds of the real victims of the war: “To better understand ourselves, we
must understand the Vietnam War. To understand the war, we must understand the
Vietnamese.” Further, “Realizing that we must do this is the first and most important
lesson of Vietnam.”
13
The call to focus on the Vietnamese, while sound from a critical
7
perspective, can at times inflect with notions of atonement and self-recrimination.
Jamieson places his American readers in the position to learn the lessons of Vietnam,
which calls for reading audiences to understand war as a part of the American
curriculum. Jamieson, aligning with a host of other American scholars of the Vietnam
War, unequivocally states that “our understanding of this tragic episode remains
superficial and, I believe, in many respects simply wrong. We have failed to understand
our experience because, then and now, we have ignored the perspectives of the people
most deeply concerned with the war in which we became involved: The Vietnamese,
both our friends and our foes, as well as those who wished to be neither.”
14
Readers are
then treated to Jamieson’s understanding of the hearts and minds of Vietnamese history
and culture, which includes vast and expansive notes on the poetry, literature and local
custom of the Vietnamese people, “our friends, our foes, as well as those who wished to
be neither.” Here Jamieson hopes to rectify what he deems was so astonishingly absent
during America’s involvement in the war; or perhaps, he is interested in
dimensionalizing people who, for over twenty years, occupied much of America’s public
imagination and the resources of the military industrial complex.
I especially focus on this formulation of the Vietnam War that Jamieson’s text
exemplifies because I believe it makes a conceptual slide from putatively being about
“them” to being about “us.” The problem is not the self-interested analysis -- all
scholarship is self-interested in degrees. Rather, my concern is that this analysis has
become exemplary of the national lexicon on the Vietnam War, on Vietnam, and on the
Vietnamese diaspora in ways that impinge on studies of Vietnam in American Studies
and Ethnic Studies, fields that I am invested in. The lesson of the Vietnam War seems,
8
through the work of Jamieson, to direct us to look “outside,” “elsewhere,” to reach out to
our global neighbors, to alternative discourses, in order to find the historical
supplement. On the surface, this is a vastly important “step” in navigating towards a
more accurate historical understanding. But it is important to mind the assumptions
behind this step. Some concerns I have with this heightened interest in “their” hearts
and minds include the degree to which Jamieson seems to consider knowledge about
culture as equal to “understanding.” This understanding seems to bespeak an intimate
knowledge of Vietnam. The argument, espoused by U.S. based scholars who seek to
understand what went wrong, seems to require a dip into the pool of affect that
constitutes the Other. While a reading of this body of work’s affective engagements
with “Vietnam” is not a focus of this dissertation project, I do still urge the importance
of future scholarship to extend upon Edward Said’s “Orientalism” and Panivong
Norindr’s “phantasmatic Indochina” in order to read the centrality of affective
interlinkages in the construction of hegemonic global relations.
Ethnic studies scholar Yen Espiritu provides a cogent critique of U.S. war
morality when she charges that American memory of the war is rife with the rhetoric of
self-justification and inevitable victory that overwrites its traumatic history of loss and
failure in the Vietnam War. She writes, “the media have deployed the refugee figure,
the purported grateful beneficiary of U.S.-style freedom, to remake the Vietnam War
into a just and successful war. In other words, Vietnamese refugees, whose war
sufferings remain unmentionable and unmourned in most U.S. public discussions of
Vietnam, have ironically become constituted as the featured evidence of the
appropriateness of U.S. actions in Vietnam: that the war, no matter the cost, was
9
ultimately necessary, just, and successful.”
15
Espiritu demonstrates how the mainstream
media, reporting on the 25 years since the end of the war, have latched onto a narrative
of refugee gratitude to shore America up as a just and generous benefactor. Her
analysis is tremendously helpful to understanding how affectively charged the rhetoric
of U.S. benevolence was in media commemoration of 25 years after the war; it relied on
overwrought narratives about rescuers and rescuees. I would contend, however, that
the sufferings of refugees does not, in fact, remain “unmentionable and unmourned,” at
least not in U.S. cultural practice. On the contrary, I believe an emphasis on
Vietnamese refugee and Vietnamese national suffering has been imperative to the
project of “teaching and learning a lesson,” a lesson in which the Vietnam War has
become central in U.S. discourse. The belief that Vietnamese refugee sufferings, and
Vietnamese suffering overall, have been marginalized in public memory and
remembrance has been a mainstay of cultural studies’ critiques of postwar
commemoration in the U.S. But I would suggest that we revisit this accepted truism. I
argue that we do not have to go far, visit distant people or places, or search out
alternative discourses to land on the very specular and corporeal embodiment of
Vietnamese suffering, if that is what the searching was intended to do. As my chapter
on Vietnamese refugee fatherhood in diasporic literature argues, suffering has become
the very mark of Vietnamese postwar subjectivity. Furthermore, I question the
presumption that a nationally recognized “rightful” mourning for subjugated and
historically repressed memories and traumas provides adequate redress.
16
Any attempt to “understand” the Vietnam War/American War, and its
aftermath must be done with attention to how rife the history and discourse is with
10
aporias that a language of strict ideological deconstruction or historical
supplementation cannot undo, try as it might to get to the correct “lessons.” A turn to
“post-national” studies will have to deal with the psychic and affective dependence on
the “rightness” of America as the continuing center of considerations of the war conflict
in Vietnam from the 1950s-1975.
Diaspora Crossings, Diaspora Spaces, and the Travels of Affect
Countering the force of “Phantasmatic Indochina,” a concatenation of empire’s
phantasms and projections about Southeast Asia in general, and Vietnam in particular,
has been a central concern of Vietnamese diasporic cultural studies.
17
How this can be
done through the vectors of diaspora will be the basis of this section. Here I would like
to explain how I use diaspora and how my interests have been shaped by other scholars’
conceptual usage and framework for studying diasporas. I lean quite heavily on the
work of Brent Hayes Edwards and Rey Chow who parse out the potentialities and
limitations that a study of and through diaspora entails. Edwards, in The Practice of
Diaspora (2003), theorizes on the rise of black internationalism and uses diaspora as an
analytical tool and as an object of study. His definition defers to and departs from Paul
Gilroy’s definition. Edwards is attentive to the inherent risks of utilizing diaspora in
studies of black internationalism due to a global transatlantic history that has collapsed
black subjectivity and identity to an essentialism. Here I quote Edwards at length on
his use of diaspora:
We have generally come to make recourse unquestioningly to its level of
abstraction, grounding identity claims and transnational initiatives in a
history of "scattering of Africans" that supposedly offers a principle of
unity--as Paul Gilroy phrases it, "purity and invariant sameness"--to
those dispersed populations. I am arguing here neither to disclaim this
11
history of dispersal nor to substitute another abstraction (an alternative
principle of continuity, such as the oceanic frame offered by Gilroy's
Atlantic). Instead, I am emphasizing the anti-abstractionist uses of
diaspora. This is an ideological task that cannot be simply "won"--
it is continually necessary to attend to the ways the term always can
be re-articulated and abstracted into evocations of untroubled
essentialism or inviolate roots.[…] The use of the term diaspora, I am
suggesting, implies neither that it offers the comfort of abstraction, an
easy recourse to origins, nor that it provides a foolproof anti-
essentialism: instead, it forces us to articulate discourses of cultural and
political linkage only through and across difference in full view of the
risks of that endeavor.
18
(emphasis added)
I take particular note of Edward’s willingness to attend to the anti-abstractionist
dimensions of diaspora. His use is remarkable because of his attention to how diaspora,
in the context of concerns about black subjectivity around the world, invites, incurs, and
perhaps we could argue, is the result of the lurking dangers of “essentialism or inviolate
roots.” The abstractionist uses of diaspora may be characterized by theorizations of
connectedness, perhaps rooted in ideas of common origins. Edward’s contention is that
there are real practices that one can study and see that lay at the heart of diasporic
“connectedness.” Edwards is here moving “towards the gathering” rather than away
from it. Edwards traces fascinating communications between black intellectuals, artists
and writers across the Atlantic starting from the moment of W.E.B. Dubois’s famous
declaration of the world problem of the color-line. According to Edwards, that call
initiated a vibrant and bustling series of intellectual exchanges about definitions of
blackness and ways of advocating for black social experience across the world. Such
exchanges, however, were not without risks for what “blackness” meant across different
contexts and what this might entail for a politics of transnational and global black
diasporic connections; this danger Edwards puts at the center of understanding the
12
articulation of diaspora. Throughout his rich study he does not relinquish these
contradictions to the margins or include them as asides in his examination of “the
practice of diaspora.”
The concern of essentialism and diaspora is put differently by Rey Chow in a
critical essay, “Against the Lures of Diaspora.”
19
In this highly suggestive essay, Chow
looks at Chinese intellectuals in Western institutions of higher education and questions
what it means for them to study Chinese cultures and literature “back home.” Chow’s
critique is that these intellectual projects turn to a “minority discourse” that she sees as
forming an undercurrent in Western intellectual practice. According to Chow,
“minority discourse” is an attempt to bring the cultural production of postcolonial
subjects to the fore in order to “disrupt” hegemonic discourse at the “physical, familial,
institutional, and national levels.” Chow argues, however,
At the same time, the conscious representation of the “minor” as such
also leads to a situation in which it is locked in opposition to the
“hegemonic” in a permanent bind. The “minor” cannot rid itself of its
“minority” status because it is that status that gives it its only legitimacy;
support for the “minor,” however sincere, always becomes support for the
center.”
20
Even while Chow seems to reify knowledges produced “back home” because they are
subordinated to the knowledges produced “in diaspora,” I find her critique that “Current
trends in contemporary cultural studies, while being always supportive of categories of
difference, also tend to reinscribe those categories in the form of fixed identities”
21
to be
especially important for Vietnamese diasporic cultural studies, as it attempts to respond
to (and sometimes counteract) the moves of empire’s phantasms. By Chow’s estimation,
we must disinvest in the notion of minority suffering as a way to understand class
13
because it reifies suffering and becomes ideology rather than an analytical tool. The
theory that you could vindicate Chinese subalterns in language and literature by
obsessively rooting out the enemy turned out to be less strategy and more ideology.
Chow suggests that for a critical diaspora studies, or studies from the diaspora to be
effectual, “we must seek strategies that are alternative to a continual investment in
minority, in suffering, and in victimization.”
22
My interests in diaspora, shaped by the work of Edwards and Chow, lead me to
inquire into the specific movements in diaspora that occur at moments of exchange,
imagining, and formation. I use the term diaspora to include national formations in
Vietnam and to attend to their resonance and connections to Vietnamese overseas, as
well as the relation in reverse. From Chow, I learn to be suspicious of attempts to
“save” through reifications. From Edwards, I learn how to hold an idea, an
intellectualized formation, a “thing” in tension. Diaspora formations are inherently
simultaneously ephemeral, infinitely irreducible and also linked. Edwards relies on the
French term “Decalage” to help explicate this fine quality of diaspora. He states,
‘Decalage’ indicates the reestablishment of a prior unevenness or
diversity; it alludes to the taking away of something that was added in
the first place, something artificial, a stone or piece of wood that served
to fill some gap or to rectify some imbalance. This black diasporic
decalage among African Americans and Africans, then, is not simply
geographical distance, nor is it simply difference in evolution or
consciousness; instead it is a different kind of interface that might not be
susceptible to expression in the oppositional terminology of the
“vanguard” and the “backward.” In other words, decalage is the kernel of
precisely that which cannot be transferred or exchanged, the received
biases that refuse to be passed over when one crosses the water. It is a
changing core of difference; it is the work of “differences within unity,” an
unidentifiable point that is incessantly touched and fingered and
pressed.
23
(emphasis added)
14
In this dissertation, I begin an intellectual exploration of those “unidentifiable points”
that are “incessantly touched and fingered and pressed” at sites of diasporic exchange in
postwar Vietnamese literature and film.
Because the history of the Vietnamese diaspora since the end of the war in 1975
has been so inflected with resentments, longings, and ambivalent connections, my
project especially focuses on what I consider “diasporic crossings.” In my analysis,
“diasporic crossings” are those places in textual practice that, while they observe the
historical and putative differences among various diasporic formations, they
nevertheless, by account of various other attachments such as family, love, or economic
strategies, require the crossing over of such differences. Diasporic crossings as I mean
them can at times require the sharing of significations, space, and history; such
crossings must themselves be worked out. Diasporic crossings include moments of
disjuncture as well as moments of alignment. In this analysis, they constitute not just
sites of cultural and historical negotiation, but are places where affects cross and
consolidate.
To elaborate further on how diaspora spaces hold much promise for a
Vietnamese diasporic cultural practice that takes affect as primary, I return to my earlier
example of the Hi-Tek episode. In its aftermath, it unwound a complicated line of
public and social scrutiny about what it means to respect South Vietnamese history and
elder community members’ feelings in a condition of exile. This state of affairs
culminated in another highly contentious community backlash, one that I will call the
VAX episode.
24
Briefly, when a younger generation Vietnamese American cohort ran
an episode of a short-lived MTV style cultural show, “The Vietnamese American
15
Experience” (VAX), they highlighted the documentary Saigon, USA which explored the
impact of community politics on the youth.
25
In highlighting the documentary, VAX
ran images of the Hi-Tek protest along with the offending image of Ho Chi Minh.
Because VAX did not bookend these images with an “appropriate” commentary about
the righteousness of Vietnamese American anti-communism, the VAX producers were
accused by irate members of the older Vietnamese refugee community of being both
historically and culturally insensitive and wrong. The producers, in return, responded
with a call for the right to “democratic voice,” the very things that the refugees had fled
to protect. I was present for the community forum organized by the VAX producers in
November 2004 and watched as “sides” were consolidated and positions staked. The
debate in the room seemed to hinge on the unspoken call for the youth to respect what
they, as part of the 1.5 and 2
nd
generation, could not understand. Both the fact that the
youth were being addressed by elders and that these elders were speaking of a history
that preceded what the youth had known or experienced seemed to make the deepest
impressions in the room. This process seemed to bespeak the tenets of community
preservation, which both sides of the debate stated were of central importance. In other
words, in a debate that was couched as being about honoring South Vietnamese history
vs. letting younger people have a right to engage in Vietnamese and South Vietnamese
history on their own terms, the grounds of the argument shifted to what emotional
labors needed to be done in order to maintain and nurture notions of a Vietnamese
American identity. While mainstream media reporting on the VAX episode repeated
the idiom that Vietnamese American politics has centered too long on outdated notions
of virulent anti-communism and anachronistic attachments to a long gone South
16
Vietnam, what the meeting evidenced were the ways that emotions and affects can and
do get recruited to construct and nurture present-day ideas of self and civic identity.
26
VAX folded soon after. The costs of this negotiation were plenty. Not only
were the sentiments of a loud few (some arrived in full military fatigues, not an
uncommon sight at Vietnamese anti-communist demonstrations) seemingly affirmed,
but the youth were forced to subjugate their explorations of a younger generation’s
Vietnamese American experience to the necessity of filial loyalty to the history of the
lost homeland. History, memory, loyalty. These are lines of experience that have
produced major strains of analysis in Vietnamese diasporic studies. They run
throughout diasporic community politics. To fully engage them means that leaving our
analysis at the level of “positions” and strategic interventions leaves little room to move,
to move beside, to follow and to be with. For who here is the “victim” for whom
scholarship should take up? Is it the elder generation whose history has been blighted
and whose flag has been unceremoniously defiled? Is it a younger generation that has
been disciplined by an anti-communist praxis? Such spaces as culminated in Orange
County around the image of Ho Chi Minh ask that cultural and social theory follow
paradigms other than the one of oppressor and oppressed (though by no means are
those categories unhelpful). For example, what is the significance of “community” to
Vietnamese America in Orange County or, alternatively, what is “community” to both
sides such that they would, without explicitly discussing the terms, agree to its
preservation? How is “community” then reformulated and experienced, even if done so
at cross-purposes, by both sides? I believe that critical scholarship can intervene in the
understanding of such diasporic and community negotiations by shifting our analysis to
17
the affective contours of such meeting places. Rather than understand these instances
as markers of mistaken or faulty ideology, they can point us to understand the ways that
motivating affects intrinsically constitute diasporic formations.
To revisit the issue of danger and affects, I wonder whether if by seriously
engaging with affects, perhaps being infected by others’, or texts’, or historical affects, we
do not come to not know ourselves the same? And what if that means we leave open the
question of our political convictions? Can this leave open to be educated as to what they
can be? This leave “strategy” in a lurch. Strategize for what end? I don’t mean to
advocate for abdicating our politics or being politically obtuse, because there are times
when it is an exigency and an issue of integrity to take a stand. But don’t we also need
to preserve the room in our critical analysis to be ‘overtaken’, and swept off our
proverbial (analytic and corporeal) feet by the force of affects? Shouldn’t we
(sometimes) be left not knowing our “position”? This is also not to under-acknowledge
how much of contemporary critical work self-reflexively utilizes the theorist’s affects.
Or that it is necessary to think, theorize or write from the pull of affects. But should we
also make room in our critical work to acknowledge the degree to which we are always
affected and affecting subjects?
The philosopher and anthropologist Alphonso Lingis in Dangerous Emotions
(2002) states that “History presumes that we must learn from the deeds, triumphs, and
defeats of the past.”
27
He laments what that means for a critical praxis when he writes:
But the modern historian writes dispassionately, neither exulting in the
victory of Cortez nor weeping over the defeat of Moctezoma. He is not
writing in order to feel again and make his reader feel again the torrential
emotions of men and women long dead. He is not writing to crowd his
soul with all the loves and hatreds, despairs and exultations of those who
18
wrought great deeds and those who suffered terrible defeats. He thinks
that his contemporaries and their descendants should learn from the
lessons of history before launching enterprises and unleashing the
passions that will drive them; and he thinks that the lessons are not yet
in, the data are fragmentary and so often ambiguous. [. . .] And he
thinks that if emotions focus the mind, they also limit it. There is an
opacity to emotions; they cloud the mind such that it does not see things
in their whole context.
28
This may especially be so when we enter Vietnamese diasporic cultural studies, and
terms such as exile, refugee, war, loss, and nostalgia enter the lexicon. It is easy to fall
into a discourse on “victimization,” whether one advocates for its political expediency or
one bristles at its collapse into Vietnamese ontology. Here, Lingis offers his take on the
expediency of emotions to focus our analysis of the body:
Indeed, the mirth and the despondency, the irritability and the
enthusiasm, the rapture and the rage are the very visibility of a body. A
body's shape and contours are the way that it is held in a space that
excludes other bodies and us; a body's colors are opaque expanses behind
which the life-processes are hidden. It is through its feelings, drawing
our eyes into their fields of force, that a body emerges out of its self-
contained closure and becomes visible.
29
If we accept Lingis’ formulation that the force of emotions makes the body visible, then
we can re-examine the politics of body contacts in that VAX meeting room described
above. The “disciplining” of bodies, evidenced by the notably somber and visibly
subdued responses of the youth leads us to reconsider the activity of intergenerational
disciplining. At the VAX forum, this appeared as attempts to solicit an apology from
the VAX producers or acknowledgement of wrongs done and feelings hurt, a shaming
of sorts for having so insensitively comported oneself in the face of such historical and
irreducible pain. It is important to see the intimate connections between this
disciplining, the operations of shame and shaming, and its meaning for a corporeal, if
19
not national, visibility. Sara Ahmed, who examines national self-shaming, argues that
the process of shaming works to support nation-building. Ahmed writes about national
shame in Australia over its historical treatment of indigenous groups and concludes that
in the national context, recognition of one’s shame over national wrongs “works to
restore the nation or reconcile the nation to itself by ‘coming to terms with’ its own past
in the expression of ‘bad feeling’.”
30
This process, when at work in the interpersonal
and ‘everyday’ context requires that “Only when certain others see me do something
bad do I feel shame.” She goes on, “I may be shamed by somebody I am interested in,
somebody whose view ‘matters’ to me. As a result, shame is not a purely negative
relation to another: shame is ambivalent.”
31
Ahmed’s argument holds considerable
value for Vietnamese diasporic studies. The VAX episode was important to understand
because it showcased a profound intergenerational disciplining that aligned the younger
generation to the historical righteousness of South Vietnam. At the meeting a shaming
happened that not only gave the first generation of Vietnamese refugees an apology for
and acknowledgement of their painful pasts, but it affirmed a Vietnamese American
community formation, a South Vietnam in exile. That this happened through a shaming
process should be important to critical cultural analysis because it focuses our attention
on the ways that allegiances and formations are affectively constituted.
Ahmed’s study of the social quality and origins of emotions is useful, not just in
helping me to identify the way that a Vietnamese American community and a South
Vietnamese history was being formed/formulated, but also in helping me to see how
that work is done through bodies. According to Ahmed:
20
Shame can reintegrate subjects (Braithwaite 1989) in their moment of
failure to live up to a social ideal. Such an argument suggests that the
failure to live up to an ideal is a way of taking up that ideal and
confirming its necessity; despite the negation of shame experiences, my
shame confirms my love, and my commitment to such ideals in the first
place.
32
Ahmed’s emphasis on the intimate contours of the shame process through an elucidation
of its simultaneous rejection of a “bad” quality and desire for closeness and acceptance is
important to me in my concerns with how Vietnamese diasporic populations, overseas
and in Vietnam, make connections and “homes” for themselves. In the example I have
given above, I wish to emphasize how the protection of a legitimate South Vietnamese
history and the rights of elder Vietnamese refugees to exist in a “community” free of the
reminders of the failures of the past were presented through such emotionally charged
interactions as happened at the VAX forum. These are not isolated or rare occurrences
where generations cross paths and interact and exchange words and are changed by
those exchanges. I suggest that these interactions occur daily and in various ways and
across various media.
Affects and the Body as Subject
This dissertation project does not attempt to “theorize affect” or even to
“theorize through affects,” although these are endeavors that I hope to do at a later date.
I am, at this juncture, only able to enter the conversation on theories of affect in order to
clarify what I do understand (although even this is amenable to further elucidations),
and to explain why I am so compelled by the body (more accurately bodies) of work that
represents disparate, far-reaching and multivalent strands of interests. The scholars
from whom my understanding of affects is derived also show, implicitly as well as
21
explicitly through their work on affects, a concern with the need to push the boundaries
of critical scholarship to imagine new modes of engagement and new ways of identifying
and approaching “problems.” I hope to engage the texts I examine not because I think
they “represent” a truth or a truer experience of postwar Vietnam War/American War
consequences, nor because they subversively challenge a dominant representation or a
silenced history. That leaves me the task of finding a place other than those I have
described. I prefer, instead of the “interstices,” “between spaces,” or “margins,” (all of
which have been important aspects of critical theory, but which still aspire to locate a
place from which to ground analysis, or oneself, or one’s politics) Sedgwick’s call for a
practice of besides. This positionality is less a position and more a relation; one that
resists (not because it is recalcitrant) being situated. In fact, it is willing to situate
anywhere.
Affects became enlivening as an object of study for me first because a study of
them promised to bring theory straight to the body, the very blood of the thing.
Vietnamese “bodies” had been so taken for granted, so emblematic in their
representational value that I wanted to find a way to re-engage them but perhaps
through a different register than its representational or interpellated value.
Performance and performativity are valuable entry points to imagine what constitutes
bodies and identity. But there seemed a resistance in such theories to settle inside the
body. Rather, such theories seemed to intervene at the level of exposing the
coordinations of language, signification, and mimesis and to show how these processes
lead to the concretization of notions of the body. This body of work is so adept at
guarding the body against essentialisms and rooting out such possibilities wherever
22
they lay in historical, cultural, or linguistic semiotics that it left, still open, a need for
approaches that would add something back to the body. My engagements with affect
theories, which are admittedly still narrowly entered, provided me a field of inquiry that
was diverse in its approaches. What the scholars I have turned to understand
approaches to studies of affect seem to have in common is a desire to re-think
presumptions of the body. These reconsiderations of the body through an attention to
affects often diverged from the already received assumptions in critical theory.
I was first introduced to the study of affects by the work of Teresa Brennan in
The Transmission of Affect (2002). Her work, essentially, asked the question: what
happens to notions of the ‘self’ if we understand that the affects we feel may not be our
own. Brennan argues that the transmission of affects is a constant movement between
bodies and that affects literally get in under the skin effectively changing bodies’
physiological make-up. In Brennan’s argument, affects are too readily understood as
belonging to self-contained bodies. Prevailing psychological paradigms endeavored to
heal the patient by returning to her a full sense of self-identity and containment.
Instead, Brennan argues that affects are not personal at all. They are entirely social.
Brennan argues that in the 18
th
century a transformation occurred that fortified
the concept of the self-contained individual. “Rather than passifying forces to be
struggled with in an attempt to assert the voluntary course of the soul over them, the
passions become gradually equivalent to our true nature.”
33
This transformation
installs “the era of the ego.” If what we experience is social in nature, then through my
work I ask: what are our ethical responsibilities to those whose affects pass through
and/or take up residence inside us? This is a question that arises in my analysis of the
23
relationship between children and their South Vietnamese refugee fathers. In the
fictional work of le thi diem thuy, whose work I examine in chapter 3, I identity a child
narrator who struggles to understand what she is feeling.
Brian Massumi’s utilizes systems theory, chaos theory, and concerns raised in
“post-philosophy” in Parables for the Virtual to theorize movement back into the body.
Massumi challenges the concreteness at the core of the “positional model” of theoretical
analysis that I described earlier. Massumi’s study of affects repositions the body in
movement. His interests in affects hinge on what they mean for a concept of the body as
separate from any force of social life. He writes,
When a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides
with its own transition: its own variation. The range of variations it can
be implicated in is not present in any given movement, much less in any
position it passes through. In motion, a body is in an immediate,
unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary. That relation,
to borrow a phrase from Gilles Deleuze, is real but abstract, despite the
fact that it was meant to bring cultural theory back down to the local
level, since it involved an overarching definitional grid whose
determinations preexisted the bodies they constructed or to which they
were applied.
34
Throughout his very theoretically rich and dense book, Massumi returns to the point
that the body is “real-but-abstract.” This seeming duality is not meant to reinforce that
the body is mediated. Massumi continues,
Here, abstract means: never present in position, only ever in passing.
This is an abstractness pertaining to the transitional immediacy of a real
relation--that of a body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an
elsewhere and otherwise than it is, in any here and now.)
35
Massumi’s use of affect exposes the body as vastly open to “real relations.” The
examples he deals with in his study push me further into considerations of the potential
of bodies, bodies as potential.
24
Brennan approaches affects from an interest in psychoanalytic theory (she
engages Freud and Klein) and Massumi approaches affects through chaos theory,
systems theory, and science studies. Together, and along with many other theorists,
these two scholars show how a study of affects, of their logics, or in Massumi’s view,
their total lack of logic, can provide critical theory with multiple ways to re-engage
questions about what the body is, what the body does, and what it can do. This has
great value for me because, from my vantage point as a scholar interested in what has
become of Vietnamese postwar bodies, the history of their wholesale abandonment to
the ditches of discourses on humanitarian sympathy or as embodiments of war failure
demands renewed efforts to imagine these bodies differently.
Chapter Breakdowns
Across my chapters, I examine cultural texts and identify affects, emotions, and
sentiments that underwrite their aesthetics and logics. Through these chapters the
work of affects is shown to be an enduring aspect of diasporic cultural transmissions. In
Chapter 1 I explore how suffering as a national trope is taken up and reconsidered by
Vietnamese American cultural media. I argue that Vietnam’s most cherished literary
accomplishment, the 19th century epic poem The Tale of Kieu should be considered to
offer more than an enduring metaphor for the national and post-national experience.
The poem has survived colonialist eras and has been reinforced as a mark of Vietnam’s
cultural accomplishment. But I believe it should be read for its affective function. That
is, in its transmission across space and time, the poem provides a medium for the
exchange of shared experiences of injustice and suffering (Vietnamese has the
expression “chia buồn”).
36
Its ability to do this is illustrated when I show in my
25
comparative analysis how the popular Vietnamese diasporic video program Paris by
Night and the scholar and independent filmmaker Trinh T. Minh Ha both invoke and
transform the poem for their different ends.
In Chapter 2 I explore the visibility of different nostalgias on screen in the
representation of Vietnam. By examining Tran Anh Hung’s Scent of Green Papaya
(1993) and Đặng Nhật Minh’s Nostalgia for the Countryside (1995) I explore how an
imagistic nostalgia catered to the needs of Vietnam’s market integration in the mid-
1990s. This was a period when it was resolutely important to order an image of
Vietnam that would make it amenable to market relations. I consider how “national”
cinema was an important medium to negotiate the vexedness of Vietnam’s recent past.
This chapter also considers how a turn to nostalgia softened the hard lines of political
and historical dissent that to that point had made a unified notion of Vietnam globally
untenable.
In chapters 3 and 4 I explore the place of the South Vietnamese male in Western
popular parlance where he has for the most part been absent. By examining family
dissonances and male sorrow, these chapters explore how South Vietnamese refugee
manhood has come to stand in for historical aporias and failures. The fictional works I
analyze, through their explorations of the emotional realms between father and child
and men among their peers, offer more nuanced and deeper conceptions of South
Vietnamese refugee men. Chapter 3 examines how two diasporic English-language
fiction writers Nam Le and le thi diem thuy take on the project of representing the
South Vietnamese refugee male through the trope of father and child. I look at how the
relationships written between father and child are brokered by the emotional
26
dissonances embedded in the South Vietnamese refugee male’s historical experience as
failed war soldier and struggling subject in new national contexts. The chapter
examines how these authors offer different literary representations of the refugee
father’s internal world, a world that has largely been unattended to in Western literary
representation. The fathers in the texts I examine are haunted by the experiences of
war and refugee flight, resettlements, and the difficulty of belonging in new worlds. le
thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We are All Looking For (2003) in particular provides a text
about the South Vietnamese male refugee as an important affective counterpart for the
little girl narrator, not in general, but I argue, his presence is important in particular.
Rather then read the father’s presence as a textual instance of a historically produced
subjectivity, I argue that the text approaches his figuration as the very real and very
corporeally felt presence of a father whose emotional distance is registered quite deeply
by the narrator. Her resonance with his emotional disconnections reflects in the pained
daughter’s increasingly fragmented narrative, which creates a distancing effect that
reflects the narrator’s affective strategies. The child’s enduring adoration of her father
prevents the novel from becoming a tragic sociological treatise on the South Vietnamese
refugee male’s damaging effect on his family. In le’s novel, the father’s spectral presence
in the narrator’s life resonates throughout the text in haunting ways. In contrast, Nam
Le’s well-reviewed opening short story in his collection The Boat (2008) titled “Love and
Honor and Pity and Pride” is so hyperly aware and intrigued by the Vietnamese
refugee’s discursive constructedness in Western discourse that he is only able to
reproduce the same construction by reproducing in meta-narrative what New York
Times Reviewer Hari Kunzru calls the mire of “war porn.”
37
27
In chapter 4 I look at how male sorrow is depicted in the Vietnamese language
literature of Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn, one of the most well-known figures in Vietnamese
diasporic popular culture. His MC work for the video-variety show Paris by Night has
placed him at the nexus of old traditions and new influences. Through his hugely
popular fiction, in text and recorded on audiobooks, Nguyen has created a corpus of
literary works that depict diasporic life for the first generation of refugee Vietnamese in
the U.S. I examine in particular, his depiction of Vietnamese masculinity. I argue that,
as evidenced in his ability to charm and connect with diverse Vietnamese audiences in
Paris by Night, his literature makes use of the affective community among Vietnamese
diasporic audiences. His literature uses irony and satire to remove the sting of certain
disciplining moves in his work and creates a media corpus that can be read and
interpreted flexibly by audiences.
Concluding Comments
In this dissertation I explore how a study of affects can invigorate cultural
studies and social science understandings of postwar Vietnamese experience across
global locations. Though academic scholarship on Vietnamese experiences of the
Vietnam War/American War has greatly expanded in the last thirty years this
scholarship has shied away from explicit address of Vietnamese affects as such. Rather,
affects such as nostalgia, longing, and grief are treated as either symptomatic of the
impact of legacies of colonial violence or nationalist opportunism, or they are posited as
evidence of a forlornly imperiled abject victimhood. My dissertations attempts to
challenge existing paradigms that treat affects as “sentimental” and/or as patronizing
channels of social critique, particularly as they concern the treatment of Vietnamese
28
bodies, subjects, and populations. By bringing affective theories to bear on cultural
texts and articulations by Vietnamese national and diasporic subjects, I highlight what
the affect theorist Teresa Brennan describes as the “transmission of affect”; how in fact,
affects move across texts, bodies, and how they can both refuse and consolidate national
boundaries. In so doing I seek to bring affects to the forefront of social and cultural
analysis of Vietnamese postwar formations in community politics and cultural
productions.
I explore how diasporas affect each other, I explore their “boundaries” and their
places of “communal” associations. I don’t organize my study of affects to “uncover”
emotions or affects, but organize my questions to imagine what these meeting and
passing of affects, all of them historically and contextually inflected, can tell us about
how we might imagine and participate in the moment we live in.
With time and distance afforded by the passage of commemorations of “30 years
after the war,” the place of Vietnam in the global and Vietnamese diasporic imaginary
has visibly shifted. I take the position that we ought to take our positioning seriously.
That means that to understand our contemporary moment and engage with it “as it is”
is to realize that whatever position we take we must continuously engage in
reconceiving matter, history, our feelings, beliefs, our bodies, not as a matter of ethics or
morals, but because according to Massumi, it just makes pragmatic sense.
Through the chapters in this dissertation, I hope to offer a reading of
Vietnamese and Vietnamese American cultural texts as persistent with affects. Because
far from essentializing us, I believe an engagement with affects offers the possibility of
dimensionalizing us. An understanding of how we are feeling, what resides in us, or is
29
passing through us, give us textures, angles, and entry points. Because of the
contingency of affects, and the impossibility of knowing someone else’s affects, cultural
analysis is forced to be respectful of the cultural work produced by transnationally
formed and informed diasporic communities. We should not be expected to agree with
every assertion made nor should we abdicate our critical engagements and political
beliefs in subordination to feelings and emotions. I hope, rather, that our political
curiosities and our abilities to be socially and critically engaged are strengthened by a
deeper comprehension of how meanings are interpreted, transmitted, and attached to.
30
Introduction Notes
1
Sedgwick is interested in exploring beside because, “there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a
number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them.[…] Beside
comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling,
differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing,
warping, and other relations”(8). Sedgwick likes the turn to “textures” to aid the study of affect
because,
“texture seems like a promising level of attention for shifting the
emphasis of some interdisciplinary conversations away from the recent
fixation on epistemology (which suggests that
performativity/performance can show us whether or not there are
essential truths and how we could, or why we can’t, know them) by
asking new questions about phenomenology and affect (what motivates
performativity and performance, for example, and what individual and
collective effects are mobilized in their execution?).” (17)
2
I first came across Sedgwick’s deep affiliation with Silvan Tomkins’ affect theories in the essay
“Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins” by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam
Frank in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Winter, 1995), pp. 496-522. In the essay Sedgwick and
Frank outline the radical potential of Tomkins’ affect theories for contemporary critical theory.
Among the virtues of Tomkins’ work, Sedgwick and Frank state that Tomkins’ theory of affects
“depends on a number of different kinds of crossing between digital and analog forms of
representation”. This is important because it disturbs the naturalizing and “tacit homology:
machine: digital:: animal: analogical” that rests comfortably in current critical theory’s
fundamental frameworks (505-506).
3
Grossberg (18).
4
Grossberg (1).
5
Bruno Latour, “Why has critique run out of steam,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 205.
6
Latour (173).
7
Latour (171).
8
The Hi-Tek protest lasted 54 days and was considered a watershed moment in Vietnamese
American anti-communist politics. See Karin Aguilar-San Juan’s Little Saigons (2009) for an
indepth analysis of the cultural politics of anti-communism and place-making.
9
Grossberg (18).
10
Brian Massumi (3-4).
11
A cursory survey of this literature would include: Stanley Karnow, Vietnam, A History, New
York: Viking, 1983; Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1972;
Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, New York: HarperCollins, 1991 (I believe this study does
the best to represent a more self-reflexive historiography of the war); Lewis Sorley, A Better
War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, Orlando:
Harcourt Inc., 2007; George Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam,
1950-1975 4
th
edition, Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
12
Jamieson (ix).
31
13
Jamieson (x).
14
Jamieson (ix).
15
Yen Espiritu, “The “We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose” Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the
Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the “Fall of Saigon,”” American Quarterly (2006): 329.
16
In light of several critical studies on the inherent contradictions of national mourning and
public memorials, it is difficult to follow the presumption that there is a correlation between
adequate “justice” or healing effect and being appropriately mourned by the nation. See James
Young, Textures of Memory (1994), Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories (1997).
17
Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina (1997).
18
Edwards (12-13).
19
Rey Chow, “Against the Lures of Diaspora.” Theorizing Diaspora. Eds. Jana Evans Braziel and
Anita Mannur, New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 163-183.
20
Chow (168).
21
Chow (171).
22
Chow (170).
23
Edwards (14).
24
The significance of the VAX episode to notions of community and place-making is further
elaborated upon in Karin Aguilar San-Juan’s Little Saigons (2009).
25
Jang and Winn (2003).
26
An analysis of the cultural politics of the VAX forum in conjunction with the cultural politics
of the Hi-Tek protest were presented in a joint paper given by Thuy Vo-Dang and myself at the
30 Years After the War Conference at the University of California, Riverside in 2005.
27
Lingis (14).
28
Lingis (14-15)
29
Lingis (17).
30
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2004 (102).
31
Ahmed (102)
32
Ahmed (106)
33
Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (105).
34
Massumi (4-5.)
35
Massumi (5).
36
The Vietnamese expression “chia buồn” means to share one’s sorrows and sadness by telling
someone else about them.
37
Hari Kunzru, “Outside Ethnicity,” New York Times Book Review, June 8, 2008.
32
Chapter One
The Tale of Kieu and Renderings of Diasporic Selfhood
Still, still to hear her tender taken
breath
--John Keats, “Bright Star”
The Tale of Kieu, a narrative poem written in the early 19
th
century, tells the
harrowing and tortured story of Thuy Kieu, a young woman whose talents and beauty
are of such a magnitude that even “Flowers grudged her glamour, willows her fresh
hue.”
1
The poem is the literary product of the celebrated Vietnamese court scholar,
Nguyen Du, who is revered for creating a superlative text of rich emotional content. In
The Tale of Kieu (herein referred to as The Tale) Nguyen crafts a story that does many
things all at once. Its themes represent Vietnamese cultural achievement, nationalism,
morality, adherence to Confucian hierarchy, karmic retribution, romance, sex,
melodrama, and war. Epic in scope, The Tale has been at the heart of Vietnamese
conceptions of cultural achievement, and among Asian and Southeast Asian scholars in
the West, Nguyen Du’s The Tale is often pointed to as evidence of Vietnam’s cultural
heritage. The story of Kieu has provided a template for Vietnamese cultural
representations that are wide-ranging in genre and style. The cultural attachment to
The Tale also crosses temporal and geographic space as diasporic cultural producers
turn to its metaphorical and representative power to comment on postwar conditions
and life in exile. In this chapter, I examine how diasporic uses of The Tale in staging
and filmic reprisal show a clear understanding of the power of the poem’s affective
structures, and that these reprisals constitute and operate within what Raymond
33
Williams calls a “structure of feeling.”
2
I examine two very different representations of
The Tale by the stage-variety show Paris by Night and the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh Ha
to see how different conditions, politics, and aesthetic practices in diaspora produce
different manifestations of the protagonist Kieu and different ways of being engaged
with the poem’s emotional content. Through these reworkings of the meaning of love
and betrayal to The Tale, these works revise and reimagine Kieu to be more than a
stalwart of eternal grieving; her revised presence in a diasporic context points to the
composition of a diasporic subjectivity, that while it receives the traditions of Kieu’s
national past, uses her character to work out different emotional labors that are part of
diasporic differentiations. Central to The Tale’s ability to mediate different uses is the
text’s openness to “acts of watching, consuming, and enacting shared emotions.”
3
While Kieu stands poetically immortalized in pain, her cries reverberate to
audiences who are pressed to inquire into the nature of what ails her. Kieu’s
impassioned bereaving does two things: it acts as a place-holder for audiences to
voyeuristically enchant themselves with ideas of her performing for them and on behalf
of them, and in a more active register, Kieu’s crying signals that there is something to
investigate. In this reading of diasporic reformulations of The Tale, I suggest that as
both an aesthetic and a politics, the trope of suffering produces a discursive and affective
subject of history, one who historicizes the past in a particular mode for contemporary
understanding and usage and one who calls upon her audiences to be ethical witnesses
to the multitude of injustice that befalls the Vietnamese subject of history.
Furthermore, reading between the very different projects to re-present Kieu, I identify
competing discourses and interpretations of the “structures of feeling” that Vietnamese
34
Americans have lived through since the end of the war in 1975. According to Raymond
Williams, an analysis of structures of feeling can direct us to theorize the cultural
present and to examine art as emergent in the present and not to see it as already-
produced objects to be looked at as part of the past. For Williams, these structures are
“emergent” or “pre-emergent” and constitute social experiences that have yet to be fully
comprehended or signified. I want to highlight Williams’ discussion that “structures of
feelings” are intrinsically about how social forms “become social consciousness only
when they are lived, actively, in real relationships, and moreover in relationships which
are more than systematic exchanges between fixed units.”
4
According to Williams, art
forms should be considered as affected with the emerging present and should not be
considered as already constituted signifiers for a historical past. In my analysis of
diasporic interpretations of The Tale, I argue that these should be understood as art
forms that mediate and negotiate historical subjects’ relationships to self, other, and
nation: these art forms are fundamental components of the postwar Vietnamese
diaspora’s “structure of feeling,” which emerges as Vietnamese in exile and diaspora
engage in the work of making emotional and ideological sense out of the difficult past.
I begin with a contextual consideration of The Tale and discuss its reception in
Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic literary criticism to draw out some of the ongoing
and salient cultural politics that have impinged on its transmission across time and
space. Then I examine two of its specific translations and representations in
Vietnamese diasporic culture. I look at the popular diasporic stage-variety show Paris
By Night’s use of The Tale, and I then examine the scholar and experimental filmmaker
Trinh T. Minh Ha’s cinematic reformulation of the story in A Tale of Love (1995). This
35
chapter explores the affective space that is opened up by diasporic identifications with
The Tale and the character Kieu as apt and enduring metaphors, mirrors, or
representatives of postwar Vietnamese diasporic aesthetics and experience.
Vietnamese subjects’ identification with The Tale is largely argued by literary
and history scholars as resting on the injustice and accompanying grief that Kieu faces
under circumstances of woeful disempowerment. In the story, Kieu is initiated into the
rules of a feudal and karmic world when she is visited one night by the ghost of a
courtesan who tells her that virtue, talent, and beauty must be counter-balanced with
misfortune, pain, and suffering. The ghost, Đạm Tiên, tells her “your name is marked in
the Book of the Damned/ We both reap what we sowed in our past lives:/ of the same
League, we ride the selfsame boat.”
5
Kieu is so distraught over this portent, “Her
innermost feelings surged, wave after wave--/again and yet again she broke and cried.”
6
Kieu is comforted when she meets and begins a passionate love affair with the scholar
Kim Trọng, but their happiness is short-lived. Before they are able to marry or
consummate their relationship, they are separated when debtors pillage her family’s
home and threaten to arrest Kieu’s father. Out of filial duty, Kieu submits herself in her
father’s place and is sold into prostitution. Thus begins the protagonist Kieu’s first
cycle through the troubles that lie ahead. Kieu becomes stricken with karmic
misfortunes and her story narrates eternal grief and mourning.
If, as several scholars have argued, the theme of Kieu’s hardships and travails can
be abstracted to reflect on Vietnamese and diasporic historical conditions, then the
question arises whether this would highlight an emotionally charged and affectively
circumscribed codification of Vietnamese subjectivity. I consider the ways that the
36
poem and its protagonist facilitate a “passing” of affects such as sorrow and joy that are
central to Vietnamese diasporic postwar formations. Mariam Beevi has argued that the
poem’s themes of national pride and patriotism, the power of national language, and
moral and religious indoctrination have been transported in a “passing of tradition” to
other geographic contexts.
7
Beevi’s analysis of the poem examines how these themes
are regenerated in Vietnamese American contexts and continue to be carried out
through a fixation on the place of the woman. According to Beevi, as they are
regenerated they privilege transnational concerns. Beevi points out the enduring
qualities of the poem that persist.
8
As a circulating text that has served the needs of
varied political and historical contingencies, The Tale exists within a sociality that is
both material, in that many Vietnamese have learned its lines by heart, and immaterial,
in that it exists by heart in that its lines and verses have been memorized by countless
students of it. Vietnamese experience of over 2000 years of volatile foreign and
domestic rules requires that scholarship about Vietnamese cultural practice examine it
as an outlet for the expression of emotion and feeling that provides respite from the
hardships of dealing in and reckoning with a history of long-term war and upheaval.
Through an attention to the affects permitted to “pass” and circulate in re-tellings and
reformulations of Kieu’s story we can identify facets of the poem and its protagonist
other than its metaphorical and allegorical applicability that are important to
contemporary Vietnamese diapsoric life: namely the poem’s ability to be render
ambivalence as lying at the heart of Vietnamese subjectivity.
37
Diasporic selfhood, mourning, and memory
Huynh Sanh Thông writes about the emotional stronghold The Tale of Kieu
occupies for diasporic communities: “[o]ften psychologically and socially estranged
from a host country whose language they do not understand, many derive spiritual
comfort from Nguyễn Du’s masterpiece. They know most of its lines by heart, and
when they recite them out loud, they speak their mother tongue at its finest” (xl).
Indeed, as a dedication Huynh Sanh Thông notably writes “Tặng đồng bào tị-nạn Việt
Nam cùng thân-hữu khắp thế giới” (To Vietnamese refugees and their friends
throughout the world). Additionally, in the historical background to the same
translation Alexander Woodside writes that the The Tale of Kieu more generally “has
become a kind of emotional laboratory in which all the great and timeless issues of
personal morality and political obligation are tested and resolved (or left unresolved) for
each new generation.”
9
The Tale then can be said to distill a condition that speaks to the
experiences of Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic communities. The Tale’s durability
is facilitated across the vicissitudes of time and space on the basis of its emotional and
affective strength, which rests largely upon the ability of the protagonist to meet every
obstacle with emotional endurance. The emotional laboratory of which Woodside
speaks is carried out by the labor of a Vietnamese character so beloved that her labor is
considered to be concurrent with her very knowability. As Beevi argues, this reading
elides how this (affective) labor is a burden of for women and “the feminine.” To
recuperate the feminine labor that is dispensed with through such easy valorizations of
her virtues, I look more closely at how and what gets “passed” in the poem’s
transmissions into a Vietnamese American diasporic context.
38
The Tale has played a critical role in Vietnamese literature and in diasporic
cultural life because it functions as a “transmission of affect.” It is pedagogical in the
sense that it shows us a gamut of human emotion, as Woodside rightly points out. But
it arguably operates as a transmission of affect because it plays a critical role in keeping
an emotional life in circulation. Postwar cultural readings of The Tale by scholars in the
West often posit Kieu’s mourning, and by extension the mourning of the Vietnamese, as
critical to the formation of diasporic consciousness. According to this way of
interpreting the impact of the poem, Kieu’s mourning is critical in laying claim to global
subjectivity and to indict the operations of war. But if we are to consider the work of
Kieu’s mourning in ways that do not repeat the easy elision of feminine affective labor
that Beevi warns above, it is important to engage with mourning on more critical terms
than as simply an elegiac performance. The work of mourning forced separations and
the loss of a homeland in the diasporic context must be considered a process that does
not just identify an exile and diasporic perspective, but that also connects diasporic
subjectivity to historical pasts, which disturbs the very notion of a separate self.
In the edited volume Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2002), David Eng and David
Kazanjian reformulate the “politics of mourning” as productive rather than lamentable
in order to point us to a new politics of seeing that can confront the catastrophes of the
20
th
century through an affirmative engagement with history. Mourning, in their
reading, approximates Freud’s melancholia, which keeps an engagement with the past
and what is lost alive. Mourning then generates new sites for reformulating knowledge
about the past thus reinterpreting loss altogether. In their introduction, they write,
“what is lost is known only by what remains of it, by how these remains are produced,
39
read, and sustained.”
10
In this register, mourning becomes critical to recuperation. Acts
of mourning then are invested with the task of generating new sites of identification.
The productiveness of mourning is extended upon by Marianne Hirsch’s work
on “postmemory” which she describes as what conditions second generation’s
relationship to histories of trauma that they may not have direct memory of.
Postmemory refers to that body of thought and emotion that attends to the despair and
the longing for what never was and can never be. She writes that it is powerful because
its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection
but through an imaginative investment and creation. Postmemory
characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by
narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are
evacuated by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic
events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created.
11
Mostly seen through the mournful recollections of a generation removed from the direct
experience of the Holocaust, Hirsch’s emphasis on postmemory directs our attention to
the aspects of mourning that are generated by memory discourses. Postmemories are
the longing to connect to the stories that have created the realities we live in but can
never really fully know. Postmemory describes the circuit of mourning through which
many narratives about Vietnam pass in the diaspora.
The notion of mourning offered in Loss and the elucidation of postmemory in
Marianne Hirsch’s work speaks to the productive capacities that are enabled through
the transmission of Kieu’s story. For diasporic communities, it organizes the narrative
of exile and provides a point of departure for the conceptualization of a subject of
feeling. The poem facilitates an emotional engagement because it brings Vietnamese
40
diasporic audiences into a structure of feeling that encourages the identification of the
Vietnamese self as affectively engaged with the past.
Idealizing Kieu and the Contests For Her Soul
The way The Tale has attained representational power has been of great interest
to literary scholars. In this section, I examine the discourse leading to Kieu’s
idealization in both Vietnamese and Vietnamese American cultural production and
describe some of the critiques of this idealization. I then offer another possibility for
understanding the role of the representation of Kieu to the political and cultural life of
The Tale.
The Tale, in narrative structure, follows Sinic literary conventions of the time.
Nguyen Du, as a servant of the royal court, made travels to China on diplomatic tours
and became familiar with Chinese literature and poetry.
12
However, Nguyen Du wrote
his masterpiece using “chữ nôm,” the Vietnamese inflected form of the Chinese graphic
script. He infused the poem with Vietnamese sensibilities melding beautifully his
impressive Chinese cultural learning and the Vietnamese vernacular. I would here like
to examine the cultural analysis of Nguyen Du’s literary practices and choices because it
reflects on some tensions in the reception of the poem among scholars in the West. In
the introduction to The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry (1979), Huynh Sanh Thông, who
has provided the most popular English translation of The Tale, describes, in rather
tortured terms, how Vietnamese cultural ingenuity saved these “transplants from China,
the seedbed of all East Asian classical civilizations” from being fully absorbed and
assimilated by the Chinese empire.
13
According to Huynh Sanh Thông, here, in
Vietnamese literary history, and in the history of the Vietnamese poetic verse, can be
41
found the beginnings of Vietnamese nationalism. In this analysis, Vietnam, after 1000
years of Chinese domination, faced great political pressures: how could it remain
“separate” from a country that was so practiced at invasion? Huynh Sanh Thông
explains that, “The need to ‘civilize’ their country themselves and forestall Chinese
conquest lay at the bottom of Vietnamese monarch’s decision to borrow from Sung
China the neo-Confucian ideology and its institutional apparatus.”
14
The borrowing of
Confucian ethics and hierarchy led to the institutional adoption of Classical Chinese
script and the installation of civil service examinations. These two practices brought
literature to the fore of Vietnamese elite life. Vietnamese bureaucracy and institutional
life began to model the Chinese Confucian system, but while these Chinese-derived
practices were put in place, Vietnamese culture was quick to infuse and transform their
form and function. While Confucian ethics dictated decorum and restraint, the poetic
form in Vietnam “shed all its haughty reserve and fastidious aloofness to ‘go native’.”
15
Poets used any word and wrote about any vulgarity that circumstances justified. This
included a rather open stance on themes of love and sex. Huynh Sanh Thông hails this
“plebeianization” of the regulated poem as a sign of Vietnamese cultural and national
independence. According to this literary history, Vietnamese poetry is a product of
Vietnam’s early and hard-fought negotiations with the Chinese empire to retain and
protect their national autonomy.
Using this logic of Vietnam’s precarious political relationship to Classical China
and its strategic usage of Chinese social and literary forms, Huynh Sanh Thông argues
that Nguyen Du’s prized protagonist Kieu and her impossible circumstances reflect
“something at the very core of Vietnamese experience.”
16
Herein lies the most popular
42
interpretation of Kieu’s plight, she is reflective of Vietnam’s soul, the core of it all. Viet
Nguyen writes that “The Tale of Kieu became a classic of Vietnamese literature because
it presented a sophisticated interpretation of chastity that took into account the
contingency of circumstance and also because Kieu’s plight was read as political
allegory for Vietnam itself.”
17
Asian American scholars, and Vietnamese American
scholars in particular, have approached The Tale as a text that is problematic in its
depiction of Vietnamese femininity and womanhood. The critique has extended to
Western academic reception of the poem, which has tended to perpetuate the
“feminization” of Vietnam and celebrate the subjugation of the woman as the sine qua
non of Vietnam’s national possibility.
Beevi’s examination of The Tale focuses on issues of agency and thus reads Kieu
as a subject evacuated of any verifiable sign of it. Beevi writes, “in order to magnify the
victimization of the country as well as to emphasize the sanctity of its resources at the
same time, the depiction of Kieu employs a strategy of exaggerated victimization, in
which the female protagonist is thrown from one predicament to another, and where she
is always acted upon, rather than acting herself.”
18
Kieu is subjected to karma that
appears to be forced on her, not created by her own willful free acts. As a metaphor for
Vietnam, she is considered to be an emblematic victim of historical perversity. Huynh
Sanh Thông reaffirms the reading of Kieu as a tragic tale writing that the Vietnamese
“all have found in it some common denominator about their world that touches a chord
in their collective psyche. A clue, perhaps is a word that recurs throughout the poem:
oan. The nearest equivalent in English is the past participle: wronged.”
19
Beevi’s
reading eschews such a graceful slide from Vietnamese oan to a righteous national
43
identity. She argues that this interpretation “essentializes Viet Nam and presupposes
that there is only one ‘Vietnamese experience’ that all Vietnamese people share, whether
male or female, rich or poor. It insists that Viet Nam, as a country, is always a victim,
though it survives.” “Further, this collapse of the Vietnamese woman with the
Vietnamese individual undermines the real struggles that Vietnamese women must
confront in everyday life.”
20
These interpretations of The Tale illustrate some of the intense ideological
scrutiny that the text has received in the course of its life. In Vietnam, debates over the
properness of a prostitute, even a reluctant one, to stand as an emblem of the nation
have been waged since the beginning of the 20
th
century when the Vietnamese
Communist Party began to exert a strong presence in the social and cultural life of
Vietnam. The debates over The Tale in Vietnam in this period offer a rich literary
history because they promise to illuminate how issues of nationalism and gender have
been in long-standing competition in Vietnam’s politics of representation. These
politics have been fundamentally concerned with the assertion of a viable subject of
history, whether the subject be the nation or the individual. To get at a better
comprehension of Beevi’s notion of how The Tale is used in the passing of tradition, it is
important to consider the particular function of gender in the poem’s historical and
literary reception.
At the turn of the 20
th
century, when French colonial presence became more
prominent in the urban metropole, The Tale, in social discourse, traveled back and forth
between the poles signaling national culture or colonial collaboration. One significant
proponent of The Tale, a Vietnamese bureaucrat employed by the colonial
44
administration Nguyen Van Vinh traveled to France in 1906 to work at an exposition at
Marseilles. There he fell in love with French literature, art, philosophy, and journalism.
On his return to Vietnam he was convinced that for the nation to culturally
revolutionize, the people would have to embrace new cultural forms. Nguyen opened a
school, a translation bureau, and a printing house. His first publication was Kieu in quốc
ngữ, the Romanized script. He also published a French translation of Kieu in Indochina
Journal in 1913 to show Vietnam’s literary heritage to a French audience.
21
Nguyen’s,
along with his colleague Pham Quynh’s, support of the French colonial system made his
admiration of The Tale, also a story of collaborationist sorts, highly suspect among
Vietnamese nationalists.
22
This period, extending into the 1950s when the Communist
Party took control of Hanoi and the North, considered Vietnam’s literary center, saw
great debate over issues of representation, the nation, and issues of gender.
Though I am not a scholar of the cultural life of The Tale in Vietnamese literary
history, I believe that Nguyen-vo Thu Huong’s scholarship on the literary politics of
1950s Vietnam can be of help to parse out the ways that representations of the feminine
have come to service dissident politics in national literary representation. Nguyen-vo
Thu Huong, in her extraordinary study of sex and governance in Socialist Vietnam in
The Ironies of Freedom (2008), gives an analysis of the comparative literary
representation of the feminine in 1950s and 1980s Vietnamese literature. Nguyen-vo
argues that “dissident” writers of the 1950s were not dissident against the rule of the
Communist state—most of them supported the idea of a socialist government-- and
inversely, the Communist state did not feel threatened by them because they feared that
they wanted to unseat the Party. So why would the party be so stringent in its
45
repression of writers of the period who were also interested in socialist realism and how
did dissident writers of the period use the feminine as a means to cut through the
impasse? Nguyen-vo’s careful literary and historical analysis highlights that the party,
at the time preparing itself for the likelihood of war with the South and U.S. forces,
wasn’t interested in socialist realism as an aesthetic practice. It wanted a socialist
realism that would support the rule of a single party, the Communist Party specifically.
Thus writers who focused on the heart-rending and excruciating details of “real” life
were accused of being Western sympathizers and propagating an ideology of
individualism. The writers for their part believed that to unseat the alienation of
history, one had to become a “human subject” of history. Nguyen-vo explains, “The
party’s insistence on its status as the sole subject of history left no room for another
competing masculine-acting subject.”
23
Thus, turning from the masculinist
representation, which the state sought for its own representation, dissident writers who
argued for creative autonomy under the regime produced works using the feminine.
This was epitomized by Nguyen Manh Tuong’s journal translated publication of
Sophocles’ Antigone, which tells the story of Antigone’s resistance to the King who
forbids her from burying her blood relation and thus completing nature’s “truth of
death.”
24
Nguyen-vo stresses that in this telling “What this Antigone does is not
necessarily to wrestle individual sovereignty from that of the monarch in a more typical
liberalist interpretation. Rather, she asserts a separate subjecthood, which may or may not
be an individual.”
25
Due to the repressive injunctions placed on writers in this period,
writers’ turn to the feminine became a device for asserting a human subjecthood that
could exist despite the Party’s insistence on being the sole subject of history. The
46
feminine was used to make room for a representation that would attest to the people’s
real struggles in the face of war and national strife. So as not to be censored by the
nation’s cultural agenda to make Vietnam the sole arbiter of masculine historical
subjectivity, dissident writers emphasized the place of female characters and roles. The
feminine, in national representational politics, has long provided a key alternative for
the covert and subversive articulation of a self when it has been opposed and repressed
by national agendas.
This fascinating literary history echoes several issues that come up repeatedly in
the historical analysis of Nguyen Du, the writer whose own tortured heart has also been
lionized. I suggest that Nguyen-vo’s attention to literary strategy at the heart of
representational politics must be taken as fundamental in any consideration of
Vietnamese literary examination. Also, while critical literary scholarship ought to
subject gender representations to fastidious analysis, I argue that analysis of histories as
tortuous as Vietnam’s in Western academic institutions must be attentive to the
paradigms we put to them. In reading the importance of the feminine in a given text
scholars in the West are wont to attach to Western feminist critiques that hinder a
more thorough understanding of the complicated nationalist ties that bind underpin the
meaning and value of the feminine. I offer a modest attempt at putting Nguyen Du’s
role in the creation of The Tale to an interpretation that differs from the ones usually
offered in order to extend on how the mark of the feminine in The Tale can be located in
different places than the ones usually pointed to.
47
Nguyen Du: Betrayal at the Heart of National Culture
The Tale of Kieu has been described by Vietnamese literary critics as a reflection
of the writer’s own feeling of having betrayed his beloved Le Dynasty when the Gia
Long court, a part of the Nguyen Dynasty, took power. In the introduction to the
acclaimed English translation, Huynh Sanh Thông writes that the protagonist Kieu
“has been compelled to do the bidding of some alien power, to serve a master other than
the one to whom he or she should owe allegiance” (xl). If it stands to interpretation that
the poet Nguyen Du wrote The Tale, in some part, as a reflection of his own tortured
discontent, I propose an engagement with his text on the very grounds of this affective
dimension.
Vietnamese literary historians have been long engaged in attempts to write the
biographical history of poet Nguyen Du’s life in the Gia Long court under whose rule he
famously penned The Tale. One thread of historical analysis believes that Nguyen Du,
unhappy to be serving under the Nguyen court saw his own service as an act of betrayal
whose lament he could only express through his writing. As perhaps a means to
assuage his own sense of disloyalty and betrayal, Du created a female protagonist who
could shoulder the burden of his angst. Under the cover of the feminine, Nguyen Du
could more comfortably inscribe his own discontents against the ruling court. Nguyen
Du has been imagined by Vietnamese scholars as a national virtuoso of the linguistic
form, able to deftly craft poetry that simultaneously compels the emotions as it effects a
critique of foreign political rule.
26
Betrayal, both as it is marked in Nguyen Du’s
biographical history and for which his protagonist constantly suffers, has provided the
basis for popular literary readings of The Tale. But literary criticism has cast Nguyen
48
Du’s choices as circumscribed by external factors that underwrote the available
possibilities for poets and intellectuals of the feudal era, a way of reading that has
largely been kind to Nguyen Du’s persona.
Internationally recognized Vietnamese writer Nguyen Huy Thiep takes apart
this celebrated persona in one of his sardonic tributes to Vietnamese national history in
his short story “Vàng Lửa” (Fired Gold). Nguyen Huy Thiep’s body of work, much of
which came to fame during the 1980s marketization in Vietnam, was often ironic and
critical of the Vietnamese government and ridiculed notions of heroic Vietnamese
history. In “Vàng Lửa,” Nguyen Huy Thiep depicts Nguyen Du as anything but the
great paragon of Vietnamese literature. According to Vietnamese historian Peter
Zinoman, Nguyen Huy Thiep controversially depicts Nguyen Du as “underemployed,
mournful, and impoverished.” Nguyen Huy Thiep bleakly writes in his story, “Nguyen
Du sympathizes with the odd miseries of small and isolated destinies but does not
understand the immense misery of the nation.”
27
Playing on the idea of betrayal,
Nguyen Huy Thiep writes that Nguyen Du “is like a virgin girl raped by Chinese
civilization. The girl concurrently enjoys, despises and is humiliated by the
rape…Nguyen Du is the child of this same virgin girl and the blood which flows
through his veins contains allusions to the brutal man who raped his mother....”
28
Nguyen Huy Thiep dispenses with the adulation and reverence that is conventionally
reserved for address to national history and critically questions the authority of national
coherent narratives about Vietnam’s most revered poet. Summarizing national
literature’s The Tale as a violent story of rape and conquest, Nguyen Huy Thiep thereby
characterizes Vietnamese culture as the product of violence that has distributed its
49
wrath historically and that flows through the very embodiment of Nguyen Du himself.
Perhaps most jarringly, the virgin nation enjoys her violation at the same moment she
despises it. Nguyen Huy Thiep’s psychoanalytic image of the nation as concomitantly
pleasured as she is victimized complicates the standard analytic schema that allows
Vietnam to retain an unsullied victimization. Peter Zinoman comments that
Vietnamese cultural critics have focused critique mostly on the story’s depiction of a
weak Vietnam. Zinoman cites a Vietnamese critic:
We cannot agree with Nguyen Huy Thiep that the most prominent
characteristics of Vietnam are its smallness and weakness and that
Vietnamese suffer from an inferiority complex because of their proximity
to the great Chinese civilization. Compared with China, our country is
small. But it must be understood that although small we are not weak.
Are not our defeats of the Tang, Mongols, Ming, and Ch’ing in the 11th,
13th, 15th, and 18th centuries proof enough of our strength. That we
escaped the dangers of assimilation during one thousand year of Chinese
domination, is evidence of our proud and self-assertive civilization.
[Ta Ngoc Lien, op. cited.]
29
This critique emphasized a need for Vietnam to be viewed heroically (even though the
logic of the 1980s market era needed the rationale of Vietnamese revolutionary
governance to be challenged and critiqued in order to draw enough support to
legitimate a turn away from Socialist command market practices).
30
Nguyen-vo lists
Nguyen Huy Thiep among the dissident writers of the 1980s who used excessive
realism to critique the party’s social policies, and explains that Nguyen Huy Thiep,
picking up where the writers of the 1950s left off, also utilized the mark of the feminine
to organize his critique. According to Nguyen-vo, “Even when the feminine appears
mythical rather than empirical […] it served at the time as an opposing sign to state
sponsored masculinist historiography.”
31
Nguyen-vo argues that his representations of
50
the feminine embodied “autonomous and alternative positions” that were in contention
with official histories.
32
In “Vàng Lửa” not only is Vietnam feminized, but the
legendary and nationally reputed writer is feminized as well. He is her son and he too is
infected with the pleasure and violations of rape. In this depiction of Nguyen Du, all
measure of glorified idealization are deconstructed to leave only a nation that is only a
product of its violent past.
Nguyen Huy Thiep’s description of Nguyen Du departs from celebrations of him
as national spirit and importantly highlights how the use of the feminine is captured by
Nguyen Huy Thiep for all the contradictions that impinge on its representation. The
feminine is not ideal and idealizable, nor is it purely a sign of spoiled virtue. Though
“Fired Gold” was written as a critique of the government’s picture of national morality
and righteousness, it also provides a context for understanding the importance of
reconsidering femininity in representations of Vietnam. What does it mean when we
overlook a discussion of this facet of The Tale’s narrative—about the compelling forces
of compliance and collaboration when we favor a focus on national virtue and strength?
It reifies the nationalist discourse of good and bad, women as vanquished, men as
conquerors. Nguyen Huy Thiep’s depiction of Nguyen Du, who many argue is the
autobiographical basis for the character Kieu, provides an alternative reading of how the
vexed issues of collaboration and compliance with colonialism qua moral vice produces a
destabilizing affective space of ambivalent pleasure and shame. What if this affective
space centered The Tale’s allegorical relationship to the Vietnamese nation?
In “Fired Gold” Nguyen Huy Thiep shows that the national character of
Vietnam is intimately locked in psychic entanglement with colonial rape for which it
51
receives uneven attention. While the party line acknowledges the impoverishments of
colonialism wrought on the nation, it insists upon a narrative of ultimate national
victoriousness based on culture, strength, and moral character. But Nguyen Huy
Thiep’s discursively framed gendered violence against the woman’s body puts a
provocative irony at the heart of Vietnamese nation-hood. While it is the woman’s body
that is violated (in the story it is written as the Vietnamese nation) it is her son, Nguyen
Du, who is feminized and who bears the mark of her ambivalently experienced violation.
Nguyen Huy Thiep’s use of Nguyen Du, and not the narrative Kieu in “Fired Gold,” as
the mark of the feminine unveils the gender politics at the heart of the national poem.
Here the turn to the feminine figure is done through an opportunistic collapse of the
national myth connecting the biography of the revered Nguyen Du with his defiled
protagonist. His story critiques a nation so caught up in the propagation of its own self-
image that it refuses to acknowledge the hobbling steps of its literary maternal, Kieu
and her author, Nguyen Du. As Nguyen-vo shows through her analysis of dissident
writers’ literary politics, the turn to the feminine does not so much undo national
masculinist subjectivity as it offers an alternative rendering of the nation; this one as
fundamentally conditioned by its ambivalently experienced colonial domination.
The point of identification with the forlornly written Kieu figures a duality
between those who see her as the loyal child of a patriarchal household caught in the
throes of a corrupt social order and those who sympathize with her lot as a woman,
suffering at the hands of cruel love and gender inequities. Following this second
interpretation, her hardships are a testament to her resilience and worthiness of
admiration because no matter what, Kieu endures. So what are we to make of such an
52
important mode of identification that rests its work on the story of a young woman sold,
scammed, and subjected to continual abuse? Our heroine does not fight against the
perils of unjust rule, as do the Trung Sisters in Vietnamese historical lore. Rather,
Kieu’s response is to produce aesthetically spun odes of sorrow. This Kieu is a poet and
a crying songstress. The Tale, in narrative form and content is a paean of grief,
laborious in its metaphors and insistent in its depiction that Kieu is a heroine cruelly
treated by society and fate. Is her redemption and rescue a possibility within a postwar
cultural politics that now actively engages in crafting the narrative past and often finds
its own liberation in the gallows of victimhood where grievances seem to be best heard?
And if not, then what can we say about the investment in Kieu’s rendered subjection to
the shadows of a persistent dark fate?
Seeing Kieu in Diaspora
If, as Nguyen Huy Thiep’s story suggests, we can look at the mark of the
feminine in more complex ways, can a diasporic representations that also fix on
(receives the passing of traditions of) gendered markers of Vietnamese subjectivity be
read differently? To get at diasporic representational politics it is first important to
situate diasporic vision and ways of seeing. Vietnamese histories of dispersal and
displacement make “radical new methods of seeing” and knowing necessary.
33
The Tale’s
affective aesthetic reflects the emotional conflicts that arise in a life of submission to
colonial and imperial rule and oppression. The Tale’s transmission across space and
time rendered through renewed renditions of Kieu’s plights and her troubled life
illustrates the continued significance of identifying through our emotions, a field of
being that stands outside of the disciplining boundaries of official national subjecthood.
53
It is important to consider how connections made to and through affects constitute a
“new method of seeing” as it relates to understanding and perceiving the history of the
past. I borrow from the idea of “machinic vision” explained by John Johnston and
extended upon by Grace Cho to help elucidate the necessity to configure “new methods
of seeing” in this era of dispersed Vietnamese populations and discuss its importance to
Vietnamese diasporic cultural analysis.
34
Johnston and Cho work through the medium of cinema, and I use their work as a
mediation to help me think through the significance of film and video media in the
Vietnamese diasporic representations of The Tale. In Johnston’s work, this new
“machinic vision” “presupposes not only an environment of interacting machines and
human-machine systems but a field of decoded perceptions that, whether or not
produced by or issuing from these machines, assume their full intelligibility only in
relation to them.”
35
This interaction composes an “assemblage,” in the Deleuzian sense,
encompassing both mechanical machines and organic bodies in an endless play of de-
territorializations and re-territorializations.
36
This vision is, importantly, to Johnston
“not so much a simple seeing with or by means of machines-although it does presuppose
this-as it is a decoded seeing, a becoming of perception in relation to machines that
necessarily also involves a recoding.”
37
This vision in Johnston’s words is distributed
“because what is perceived is not located at any single place and moment in time, and
the act by which this perception occurs is not the result of a single or isolated agency
but of several working in concert or parallel.”
38
Grace Cho furthers this notion of “machinic assemblage” to discuss how
diasporic vision is enhanced transgenerationally through a machinic assemblage that
54
can distribute perception across space and time in order to provide a different kind of
witnessing that is circumscribed by histories of dispersal. Cho’s use of “machinic
assemblage” to discuss diasporic possibilities of witnessing and seeing the past places
significance on the ways that diasporas assemble themselves through the visions made
available in technological advances in filmmaking and image production through their
passage into first world advanced-machinic societies. Efforts to represent and know the
past are rendered possible through “machinic assemblage,” which are filmic reprisals of
what has been historically obscured.
39
Diasporic renderings of The Tale operate
similarly as an affective assemblage for Vietnamese postwar communities who must
attend to the necessary work of constructing and/or asserting a viable Vietnamese
global postwar subject who has learned the lessons of war and colonialism in the most
intimate and fundamental way, from the inside out. That is, the meaning that is imbued
in postwar Vietnamese renderings of Kieu articulates a renewed interest in the creation
of a Vietnamese subject that makes affective use of the vicissitudes of postwar and
postcolonial histories, power, and its unwieldy ethics.
My analysis of diasporic renderings of The Tale refers to uses of affective
narrative aesthetics that speaks to and gives voice to the exiles’ perspective on
Vietnam’s turbulent history, but these affective aesthetic practices also enact a strategic
subject-making that is aligned with what Lisa Rofel refers to in Desiring China as the
creation of a new kind of human, in her work, called “the novel citizen-subject.”
40
In the
case of China, Rofel’s work shows that what looks to be a neoliberal campaign that
interpellates individuals as citizen-subjects is, in fact, dependent upon national
mobilizations within a network of global encounters, or what Lisa Lowe refers to as the
55
“intimacies” of nations. In Rofel’s analysis, “China’s ability to become a subject of
neoliberalism supports a global order in which every nation must do its part to produce
these new human natures.”
41
I am particularly interested in Rofel’s illustration of the process of producing a
new citizen-subject as a multi-sited negotiation between China and its global network. I
find in this supposition resonance with postwar Vietnam and the diaspora’s present
mode of cultural production, which maintains an interesting ambiguity and ambivalence
over the suffering subject. For what does this subject suffer? In this chapter, I draw
upon this inquiry about subject-making in cultural production to situate contemporary
diasporic imagery of Kieu as an effect of Vietnam’s transnational postwar cultural
economy. This postwar cultural economy engages in the parsing of the emergent
subject from the dynasties of imperial, colonial, and national empire.
Paris by Night and the Transmission of Affect
Paris By Night’s brief staging of The Tale is very interesting in that it illustrates
how there can be affective joy even in the staging of pain. In this performance I identify
a production of the self/body that feels through the staging of music, theme, dress and
context that has roots in the Vietnamese notion of “chia buồn” where emotions are
shared and therefore carried collectively. The body and emotions are social and live in
the social milieu. Paris By Night’s ability to frame this is a powerful component of its
success within the cultural life of the diaspora. Ashley Carruthers, describes the Paris
By Night program in the following way:
While the various segments may pander to individual tastes, the general
mode of address of the music videos is very much a collective one. The
diverse segments of performance only ever individuate parts of the
56
audience for part of the time. Audience members are constantly recouped
via the shows’ diegesis, and the anchoring role of the comperes and their
commentaries, into an overarching conception of the shared overseas
Vietnamese identity.
42
Carruther’s description of the production highlights its heightenedly social nature.
The diasporic variety show provides an interesting view of the ways that interpretation,
reimaginings and creative pastiches come together to tell narratives about origins. As a
pedagogical cultural tool Thuy Vo Dang has argued that through the staging of Paris
By Night “Vietnamese in diaspora are actively mediating their identities in relation to
mainstream culture, and that these identities cannot be fixed or neatly defined as either
oppositional or hegemonic.”
43
As it has gained popularity the variety show has become
the representative staging of diasporic culture. As scholars of diasporic popular culture
have previously noted, these representations often serve dual purposes in positing
ethnic particularity as well as transmitting culture to the second generation.
44
The
production aspects of Paris By Night, then, can be seen to serve a reproductive capacity,
to produce a sense of identity. This process of producing/reproduction can be analyzed
by considering how gender narratives such as The Tale are put to use on stage. I look
more closely at the two performances of one narrative arc from The Tale that begins in
Paris By Night 37 (1996) and is completed in Paris By Night 39 (1997) in order to inquire
into the way that cultural pedagogy, as Vo Dang argues, operates as a cultural idiom
that fastens to a fantasy and enactment of shared emotion.
Because diasporic cultural production operates within an environment of
uncertainty and ambivalence, it is important to look at the specific environment through
which the cultural production gets circulated to see how taken together they convey
57
specific emotions. I look into the emotional work the performances conduct, both in the
staging of the narrative and in the way they enlist diasporic audiences as affectively
constituted social critics. I examine how productions of traditional form such as The
Tale in diaspora provide forms of an affective identification that opens upon the
gendered pedagogical condition of diasporic life. In a more insistent vein I argue that
The Tale and the poem’s operatic heroine function as part of what Brennan calls the
foundational fantasy that attaches to certain conceptions of self-hood rooted in the
establishment of a coherent self, while at the same time, the stage performance insists
upon the diasporic audience’s openness to the transmission of affect.
According to Teresa Brennan, affects gets under our skin, literally passing
between subjects and the social environment. Brennan’s work on the transmission of
affect emphasizes the transmutability of our bodily and psychic boundaries. No longer
discrete bodies whose emotions and affects are self-generated, Brennan places us within
a social matrix and insists upon our constitutional interconnectedness to the world
around us and to each other. The western concept of the individual subject lays claim to
one who is rationally self-contained and a product of its own interiority. Through what
Brennan calls the “foundational fantasy,” the infant subject learns to resist the mother as
its origin and replaces this possibility with a projection of ideas of itself as the origin of
its self. This sets in a motion a chain of unacknowledged transference that rejects the
notion that anything experienced by it is affected by or affects those outside the self.
The subject is essentially self-contained. The problem arises when trauma is introduced
that disrupts the symbolic universe in significant ways. What trauma shows us is that
the subject is in fact intrinsically open to the affects of others. Brennan’s work makes
58
available an exploration of the stakes of our openness to the social environment. To
bring this back to the discussion of trauma, Brennan argues that those affects that
cannot be born by the modern ego do not disappear but get transmitted to others, who
become its carriers, passed on to others even if they did not experience the original
trauma. According to Brennan “othering” is a Western construction that relies on the
projection of unwanted affects in order to maintain a separate sense of the individual
self. She writes, “to be effective, the construction of self-containment also depends on
another person (usually the mother, or later in life, a woman, or a pliable man, or a
subjugated race) accepting those unwanted affects for us.”
45
Brennan’s work suggests
that the body is resolutely social and the biological transmission of affects, in her
argument through smell, is carried out and effectively changes the matter of our bodies.
Sara Ahmed echoes the notion that bodies are open to each other in a different
way. Ahmed suggests that bodies are in fact shaped by each other. Ahmed suggests that
bodies and the boundaries-- the very knowability of the self--comes out of the
impression left on us by others. Emotions, in Ahmed’s view, “must be seen as reactive;
shaped ‘by the contact we have with others.’”
46
For Ahmed, emotions “shape the very
surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time, as well
as through orientations towards and away from others.” Ahmed and Brennan explore
the ways that affect and emotion move through bodies from one to another; affect and
emotion is a process of transmission and transit. Their work, put together, also insists
upon the analysis of emotions as not pre-given forms that emerge out of the ego-centric
rational mind/body but are produced in and mediated by the social/cultural fabric.
These two scholars’ works invite me to understand how an affective economy operates
59
and to probe how The Tale circulates within it through its staging by Paris By Night.
More succinctly, what is being impressed and transmitted across the stage and screen in
that dialogic emotional exchange between the staged Kieu and the audience that
watches and critiques?
Throughout the 3255 lines of The Tale audiences witness one woman’s repeated
and enduring victimization, degradation, and symbolic social death (she consigns herself
to a lifetime platonic friendship with her beloved Kim Trọng). Pham Quynh’s
pronouncement that so long as The Tale exists, then Vietnam exists suggests that there
is a foundational element to attachments to The Tale. What are the possibilities in
reading viewer/reader response to Kieu as a form of ambivalent attachment to the
moving (unfixed, non-static) maternal? Following Ahmed’s analysis of emotion as a
social and cultural process along with Brennan’s insights on the foundational fantasy as
a process of consciousness-making that turns to and on the maternal, I look into what it
is that emotional ties to The Tale unveil.
Paris By Night paid homage to the resonance of The Tale when it staged musical
performances of one narrative arc out of Kieu’s long story of illicit love affairs; this one
with the wealthy businessman Thúc Sinh. The name Thúc Sinh is readily recognized in
Vietnamese vernacular as it describes the male social prototype who, though sweet with
words, is short on masculine follow-through. This social theme fits easily within Paris
By Night’s variety show emphasis on the traditional form in conjunction with
contemporary modern aesthetic. In Paris By Night 37 Las Vegas the show’s various
performances are bridged together by sketches of host Nguyen Cao Ky Duyen’s
“adventures” across Egyptian pyramids where she encounters scantily clad Graeco-
60
Romans in Vegas regalia. The Vietnamese woman is shown as flexibly signified and
part of a modern transhistorical aesthetic. However, significations of the female
Vietnamese figure change significantly when the traditional form is presented on stage.
After host Nguyen Ngoc Ngan introduces The Tale as being fundamental to Vietnamese
culture, popular diasporic singer Ai Van emerges on the stage in traditional Chinese
costume. Ai Van, known for singing nhạc dân ca
47
plays the title role Thuy Kieu.
Singers Ngoc Anh and Thai Chau play Madame Tú Bà and businessman Thúc Sinh
respectively. In this staging, under the hawk-like glare of Madame Tú Bà, several
women in the brothel serenade Thúc Sinh in an attempt to seduce him into choosing
them as his nighttime companion. He insists immediately that he is interested only in
the already highly sought-after Kieu. Kieu, harassed and degraded by Tú Bà,
reluctantly comes to sit with Thúc Sinh. What ensues is a heart felt musical dialogic
exchange between Thúc Sinh and Thuy Kieu. Dressed in traditional Sinic attire, the
duo perform a moving enactment of Kieu’s hard-won acceptance of marriage. Showing
Kieu to be a true romantic, Ai Van portrays an immanently wistful Kieu who knows too
well the hardships of believing in true love. This makes her eventual surrender to Thúc
Sinh’s promises all the more emotionally resonant. Tú Bà is played by Ngoc Anh as an
unscrupulously entrepreneurial female villain who delights in nothing more than
capitalizing on the unsavory business of selling women.
The hyperbolized virtues and vices of each character heighten the dilemma that
the heroine Kieu faces. In a world ruled by no knowable logic or rationale, Kieu must
become the representative bearer of burdens and learn to endure, a virtue that holds a
prominent position in Vietnamese proper womanhood. The ability to endure, “chịu
61
đựng,” plays an important role in situating not just Kieu and Vietnamese womanhood
writ large, but also is a helpful discourse in putting the Vietnamese diasporic experience
into context. The illumination of the virtue of enduring hardship gives voice to the
often socially embattled experience of racialized refugee status in the U.S.
The Tale’s hyperbolized characterizations and archetypal representations serve
Paris By Night’s campy and specular staging and may reveal certain aspects of diasporic
conceptualization of Vietnamese subjectivity engendered in the midst of cultural
negotiation. This is illustrated most vividly in the commentary provided by the
patriarchal voice of host Nguyen Ngoc Ngan. Though he adds an ironic and humorous
voice to the show Nguyen Ngoc Ngan’s commentaries are weighted by his known
presence in the diasporic literary community as a prolific writer of exceptionally
mournful tales about exile experience, loss and survival. While humorous and self-
deprecating, his commentary is charged with cultural and pedagogical content. As an
introduction to the performance Nguyen Ngoc Ngan explains that the epic poem has
had longstanding cultural cache. Its lines have been used in children’s lullabies, in
telling fortunes, as well as enlivening social debate. But this performance, explains the
host, will focus on the telling of one particular morality. Nguyen Ngoc Ngan explains
that beautiful women are often met with painful destinies, “đàn bà đẹp thường đau khổ.”
But don’t be too sad he cajoles, if you’re miserable, at least you know you’re beautiful!
As an updated cultural idiom, Kieu’s disastrous love life and unerringly painful
experiences get re-casted with highly attuned irony. This humorous introduction
provides a sharp counterpoint to the emotional performance that follows and shows
audiences a particularly diasporic flexibility to render emotional difficulty with skill and
62
care. But the message is clear, women suffer at the hands of men who fail to fulfill their
promises. The performance ends on a happy note with Thúc Sinh successfully receiving
Kieu’s hopeful hand in marriage. Audiences of course know that what awaits Kieu at
her new home is Thúc Sinh’s first wife, the infamously jealous Hoạn Thư. The
performance sets Kieu up on a precipice off of which she would soon fall.
At the conclusion of the installment Nguyen Ngoc Ngan tells a comedic story,
which connects to the shared knowledge that Thúc Sinh is notoriously fearful of his
wife, Hoạn Thư. Nguyen Ngoc Ngan relates a story of his early days in Canada living
in a home with a couple, a man and a woman. He is woken up one day by a loud
banging sound, and he wonders what it could possibly be. Having recently settled in
Canada after a harrowing boat escape, he feels he is prepared for anything. He learns
quickly that the turbulence this time around is caused by a domestic squabble between
the couple in this house. The woman has thrown a pot at the man because he has
displeased her. Thus there is ample evidence that the archetype lives in terror of the
angry wife is alive and well. Paris By Night’s commentary is rich with variations on the
theme of man’s status as whipping post for an unleashed female ire. It seems important
to note even in the moment of presenting Kieu’s impending misfortune and woeful
tragedy there is an issuance of woman’s dangerous proclivities, her threats to manhood
and masculinity.
One of the key signifiers of attachment to the character Kieu is the idea that she
is “đáng thương” (worth loving/lovable). This Vietnamese idiom regarding lovability
situates a particular Vietnamese discursive practice. When one is “đáng thương” one
has shown attributes of having suffered despite showing virtuous qualities, and is
63
therefore deserving of sympathy and care. This discursive practice is remarkable in
that it situates the one who has conferred the moniker as a social critic, as one who
evaluates the degree and condition to which suffering has occurred and therefore
determines the suitability of another’s lovability, whether they are “đáng thương.” Kieu
is the iconic figure for the discursive practice of “đáng thương.” The narrative depiction
of Kieu standing in hopeful anticipation of possible happiness together with the viewer
knowledge that she has suffered much and is to suffer more makes her “đáng thương”
indeed. She thus indexes a sentiment that regards women in the postwar period as the
ultimate bearers of war’s burdens. Together with the postwar ethic to ethically engage
another’s hardships, an affective channel is opened.
In the postwar diasporic social world Kieu is subject to masculine failings. The
performance of Thúc Sinh’s courtship of Kieu draws upon the audience’s role as social
critic. Thúc Sinh, so besotted with Kieu’s virtuous femininity enchants her with
promises and dreams of the life that is possible for them. So compelling are his
promises that our romantic-at-heart Kieu succumbs to his words and to her own
innermost hope that things in the end can turn out well. The performance of this
hopeful serenade draws on “ca dao,” a Vietnamese musical genre that recalls emotional
attachments to homeland and revives thoughts of lost loves. What are the chances that we
could be together? That I could have someone to share my sorrows and joys with? How long
will it be until I can return to my village?.
48
Kieu’s song enacts a kind of emotional
serenade to the audience that is compelling precisely because it capitalizes on the
idealization of love and faithful reorientation to one’s “quê hương,” an imaginary
affective topography and community that situates the audience as omniscient viewer,
64
social critic, and faithful son and daughter of the Vietnamese homeland. Just as Nguyen
Ngoc Ngan provides cultural commentary on Vietnamese social conditions, the audience
is invited to participate as social critic mediated through an emotional exchange with
Kieu. As one who is “chịu đựng” Kieu stands as the object of containment for those
feelings that exceed knowability, those feelings that disturb the foundational fantasy.
The performance of The Tale on the Paris By Night stage operates as purported
pedagogy about authentic culture but it opens up onto a pedagogy of diasporic social
criticism. This social criticism sets the parameters for what constitutes women’s proper
virtue and femininity and has the curious condition of reifying the subjectivity of the
one who critiques.
I believe that understanding the violence embedded in the foundational fantasy
must be understood as a component element that frames Kieu as a maternal
object/bearer of Vietnamese subjectivity. I also see the potential, in the social-critical
response of that sees Kieu as “đáng thương” for an emotionally derived politics that sees
the self in others, an analysis that is conditioned by understood commonalities of loss,
misrecognition and grief. The knowledge that is attached to renderings of The Tale of
Kieu are impressed onto the cultural consciences of Vietnamese audiences and makes it
possible for them to knowledgeably read the narrative and assume omniscient viewer.
The commentary provided by the show’s hosts underscore the purported gendered
pedagogy for life in diaspora.
What the first episode sets up as hopeful prospect, the second performance in
Paris By Night 39 completes as failed possibility. In the second performance, Kieu
returns to Thúc Sinh’s home and learns that she is second to an unwelcoming first wife,
65
the infamous Hoạn Thư, whose horrible treatment of Kieu has earned her a role in
Vietnamese vernacular as an archetype for a woman’s jealous wrath. The reification of
the jealous wife as foil to Kieu’s idealized femininity has a great pull for diasporic gender
relations in that it calls upon the polarity of the powers that conspire to limit male
virility. When Hoạn Thư is known for emasculating Thúc Sinh and rendering him as
the failed romantic, Kieu stands as the unfulfilled love object to whom Thúc Sinh has
limited access and can only yearn for impotently. On stage, the performance is
compelled through the interaction between Hoạn Thư, played by Trang Thanh Lan,
and Ai Van as Thuy-Kieu. Together the women enact the dualistic facets of women’s
nature. The reified terrors of Hoạn Thư are the backdrop for affirmations of Kieu’s more
pleasing femininity. This pleasing femininity though cannot be separated from the
karmic fate that belongs to Kieu, that are indeed the conditions of viewer interaction
with her. Kieu’s fated destiny to endure suffering is the condition of her social-being as
beautiful and idealized love object. Kieu as perfect love object frames a complicated
relationship with audiences when one recognizes that the narrative completes precisely
at the moment of her social death. In the poem’s narrative Kieu eventually sheds the
hopes and dreams that she started with and sees in herself failed virtuousness. In
essence, she is a soiled being and cannot live up to any of her suitors’ ardent admiration.
In the end she enjoins her first and final suitor Kim Trọng to accept this and live with
her in a strictly platonic relationship based on friendship.
Throughout the course of The Tale, and particularly in its incarnation in Paris
By Night, Kieu facilitates an emotional relationship that bears that the marks of
historical and temporal experience. As conclusion to this section I will make a brief
66
commentary on Kieu’s symbolic role as melancholic subject. Kieu’s presence on the
Paris By Night stage invites audiences to realize their roles as social critics who can
reflect on what is appropriate for men and women. They are also encouraged, through
commentaries provided by the Paris By Night hosts to consider the difficulties put to
these roles within diasporic conditions of postwar life. This is staged on the premise of
women’s sad lot as they are faced with disappointment in their love relationships with
men. But this also reifies the role of the Vietnamese diasporic man whose failures, it is
posited, are the conditions of women’s sadness. The reification of love, love against all
odds, love against the atrocities of Tú Bà and Hoạn Thư enlist audiences to see Kieu as
“đáng thương.” What is often construed in literary and academic criticism as Kieu’s
unchanging status as the eternally grieving is shown in the diasporic reality show as
flexibly deployed to provide space for an affectively framed social criticism. On the
Paris By Night stage, Kieu stands out as an emotional counterpart for audiences.
Performances such as those enacted by Ai Van and her fellow actors moves audiences
precisely because they recite an affective practice to confer kindness on one another,
while at the same time they leave for Vietnamese womanhood, as a burden of affective
labor, the performance of grief and grieving.
While Paris by Night very much participates in the burdening of the feminine
with acts of mourning, the scholar and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh Ha aspires to find
other ways of using Kieu as a vessel of affect. Rather than confine her to the lament of
impossible love, Trinh’s re-interpretation of Kieu is as a body whose senses are
heightened by love. Trinh’s project attempts to reposition the Vietnamese diasporic
67
female as an agent of her own senses and not as a figuration of nation or tradition as she
has previously stood for.
Trinh T. Minh Ha’s A Tale of Love
Can there be such a thing as creation anew in Vietnamese diasporic cultural
production? Trinh T. Minh Ha attempts in her film--sometimes referred to as her first
“narrative” film—A Tale of Love, to divorce the telling of a love story from its more
generally accepted representations. Trinh’s body of academic and artistic work is
fundamentally concerned with the refusal of narratives that attempt to represent the
female Other to Western eyes. Intervening in cinematic and ethnographic discourses
that claim to be able to unearth the inner recesses of “woman, native, other,” Trinh’s
oeuvre is insistent on finding alternative forms of representation. To add to her corpus
of critiques of representation, Trinh’s A Tale of Love resists the tropes that have held up
throughout The Tale’s expansive cultural history.
Trinh explains that love is an activity of the self in love with love. She focuses
on the self’s experience of love in her film to disrupt the “exceptional-individual love
story.”
49
This is reflected in the title, which tells “A Tale” and not the “The Tale” of
love. She also attempts to sever Kieu from the melancholy that wants to claim her.
However, her film ultimately participates in the continued alignment of the feminine
Kieu with the health of the nation.
In A Tale of Love, the main character, also named Kieu, works for an urban-based
women’s magazine and is assigned to research Vietnam’s great epic The Tale of Kieu and
its impact on contemporary Vietnamese. Kieu lives in a multiracial, immigrant dense,
and urban environment in the U.S. far from her family in Vietnam, to whom she sends
68
letters and remittances. Like Thuy Kieu, this Kieu also earns extra money to send to
her family by selling her body, except in this story she models for her lover, the
charming photographer and womanizer, Alikan. When Kieu one day shows up
unexpected at his studio, she spies him cheating on her with another model. Trinh
heightens the complicity of the viewer’s spying on Kieu spying on her lover who is
himself engaged in dubious and illicit activities as he photographs his model in sexually
provocative repose. Rather than begin the long lament characteristic of the scorned
lover, Kieu watches the scene in rapt fascination and then leaves. She steps out onto the
city sidewalk, turns her face up to the sky and thrillingly enjoys the first drops of new
rain. Trinh’s emphasis on love is to revel in the self in love with love. Ranging from
the film’s use of color, emphasis in the textures of the many traditional costumes Kieu
wears when she poses in front of the camera, in the characters’ interests in perfumes and
scents, to the film’s experience of gazing, watching and seeing, Trinh sets out to
reintegrate the body’s experience in love rather than to simply privilege the narrativity
of love as a story, with lovers curtailed by their rapture and heartbreak.
According to Trinh, traditional narrative films that tell the love story usually
privilege the actors as the primary points of interest and setting becomes secondary.
The camera’s logic is focused primarily on the movements of the actors and moves
according to their actions. Trinh explains,
The camera’s movement is subjected to the actors’ movement and the
framing of this, to the immediate legibility of the object shown.
None of these norms entirely applies to A Tale. Small differences may
escape the inattentive eye, but they are precisely what challenges the
perceptual system of moviegoers.
50
69
Trinh hopes to reorient the viewer’s senses in relation to the visual film experience by
highlighting elements other than character and story. Her interest in space and the
setting of the city are evident throughout the film. At the end of the movie, Kieu
manages to slip past Alikan who pursues her on foot down a city sidewalk. She emerges
from behind a wall painted over with mural images and graffiti and then the camera
pans up. The camera rolls up past the wall and ends with a shot of the sky. The film
was hailed as a critical success by feminist filmmakers and critical film theorists who
praised her for being able to defy standard conventions in the telling of both a love
story and Vietnam’s most beloved poem.
51
Of her project in A Tale of Love, Trinh
explains that she was interested in redirecting the cinematic experience of love, stating
that even though she was using some narrative elements in the film it was still at the
service of reimagining what the experience of love could be in cinema. But since The
Tale is a story about deep emotions, what is the emotional impact of a film that refuses
the conventions of “the love story”? When asked about the emotional impact of her
film, Trinh says,
films that resist serving up a story or a message without merely falling
into the trap of serving Art, often leave the spectator at a loss. For me,
since brain and body are not separable—[…]—the nonverbal events in
the film and what is not sayable in the actors’ dialogue are just as
important, if not more, than what is actually said. Often, people who
have problems with the content or the performance of A Tale and whose
rejections can sometimes be fiercely anti-intellectual (not to mention
sexist), are precisely those whose viewing of the film remains primarily
intellectual. Such a viewing never accounts for the impact of a film on
the spectator’s body.
52
She reinforces the non-separation between body and mind and insists that her film does
in fact impact on the body. She criticizes those who would intellectualize the elements
70
of her film as being too disparate by arguing that cinema can affect on levels other than
through narrative story-telling. Her resort to suggesting that a rejection of her film on
the terms that it isn’t affective is a result of the filmgoer’s “primarily intellectual” (and
sexist) viewing habits interestingly brings up the question of how she figures the
correlation of the body and mind that she earlier stated were not separate at all. One
male audience member critiques her for her film’s non-adherence to the narrative
structure of The Tale. He tells her that her cuts and splices make the viewer enter the
narrative in unexpected and varying places and this made him see “the space between
makers and characters.”
53
He could then see clearly that the “very tough person”
(Trinh) was not at all like the “timorous” film protagonist (Kieu).
54
This critique,
though intended to show dissatisfaction, was entirely satisfying to Trinh because of the
speaker’s acknowledgement that her film prevented him from falling into the spell of
directly correlating characters to filmmakers. I would also add though, that it is not
just her cuts and splices into the film that cuts up the filmgoer’s ability to connect to the
affects of the original poem and leaves some “at a loss,” but rather shows a failure of the
poem to be affectively translated without its structure in story and narrative and the
accumulating affects that narrative builds upon.
Because Trinh’s work in A Tale of Love is continuous with Trinh’s larger
intellectual concerns having to do with postcolonial, postmodern, and Third World
feminist cultural politics, her work critiques the opportunism of western ethnographic
filmmaking and renders possible new ways of looking, seeing and representing the third
world woman that have been widely embraced in postcolonial practices of visual
representation. The legacy of this is that her works are adept at critiquing the
71
paradigms through which representations come to produce knowledge about Otherness.
A Tale of Love reflects many of the concerns of what Rey Chow refers to as
“iconophobia” when she discusses it as a fundamental concern with the mediated image
as corrupted and therefore to be rejected.
55
In A Tale of Love Trinh simultaneously
critiques and embraces the image. When the film depicts lush imagery that celebrates
the nature of multisensory experiences of love A Tale of Love participates in
iconophobia’s opposite: hyper-iconography. But this image is the result of no
“forepractice.” She states that “Rather than merely conforming to the ideal of seeing
with both eyes while shooting—one inside, the other outside the lens and the frame so
as to foresee one’s moves” she relies on “the eye that only sees reality via the camera”
because she has “no desire to capture per se. You simply start a move and then simply
continue it to see what comes into that framing in time and space.”
56
This practice
captures only the unknowable and unplanned moment, and is a practice that is aligned
with critical and experimental cinema’s resistance to omniscient representations and the
camera’s all-knowing gaze.
Finally, I conclude a consideration of A Tale of Love with Trinh’s comments on
the representation of the Nguyen Du’s poem. She states,
The conclusion of being in love with Love is one that I introduce in my
own tale, one that is informed by the feminist struggle and its
questioning of power relationships exerted in the name of love. Kieu’s
tumultuous and wretched love life, her being forced into prostitution, her
passion and sacrifice have all been extensively written about and used as
an allegory for Vietnam’s destiny. But no one has really linked Kieu’s
denouement to Vietnam’s geopolitical, socioeconomic, or artistic and
ethical situation today. Perhaps I can venture into saying that
independence entails complex forms of re-alignment, and that Vietnam’s
opening up, which for many means assimilation of the free West, can be,
despite all the mistakes and drawbacks, a way of keeping Her distance
72
from all three nations: China, Russia, and the U.S. Infidelity to others
and to one’s own ideals, even when dictated by circumstance, can only
lead to difficult places, and hence, there’s definitely no simple happy
ending there.
57
Trinh offers a reading of the poem that re-situates the feminine in relation to the
protocols of fidelity. She reads Nguyen Du’s poem as coextensive with the
contemporary global situation of Vietnam. She regards Vietnam’s new openness with
the world market as a sign of geopolitical strategic necessity, a reading that is
sympathetic to the tough choices that Nguyen Du’s protagonist faced, but the nation
(and Kieu’s) “infidelity” seems her to portent her decline. Trinh’s engagement with The
Tale, though attempting to diverge from the accepted metaphor of the feminine figure
as embodiment of the nation (diasporic or homeland), nevertheless, as shown through
this comment, is marked by a persistent intransigence in placing the feminine marker at
the nexus of national developmental history. How Kieu fares still seems to be a
reflection on the state of the nation. Despite the film’s picture of Kieu’s emotional
liberation from Alikan’s grasp at the end of A Tale of Love, she must still, after all, find a
means to earn enough to send home to her dependents in Vietnam.
Affects and A Move Towards Engagement
Trinh’s critical intervention in the representation of Kieu to the West provokes a
consideration of the ethics of Western engagement with Vietnam and Vietnamese
Othered subjectivities. In his article, “Speak of the Dead” Viet Thanh Nguyen tries to
parse out an ethics to the politics of engagement with the legacy of the Viet Nam War.
Nguyen suggests that Vietnamese and diasporic critical and cultural scholarship must
center on questions about our own acts of complicity and self-interested violence. It is
73
an ethics that Nguyen compellingly shows us is haunted by the dead, the forgotten, and
the missing whose actual histories can never be fully honored with minority discourse’s
tendency towards emphasis on victimization because this discourse fails to disclose the
moral ambiguities that lie at the heart of all acts of war. Nguyen’s article points out
how difficult it continues to be in Western academic engagements with Vietnam to
move beyond the circumscribing discourse of victimization. One way to pursue
Nguyen’s call for a self-reflexive ethics of engagement and to critically engage with
Vietnamese and Vietnamese cultural texts from a perspective that sees dimension in
them rather than posits their static representational value is to engage in a reading of
the affective work, or the “structures of feeling” that they operate within. Because
ambivalence about exile and diaspora must be attended to, an attention to the
“emergent” and ephemeral qualities of affect provide important material for diasporic
cultural politics.
Indeed, the postwar period for Vietnam has been marked by intense travels and
“border crossings.” From boat refugees to Humanitarian Operations’ (HO) sponsorship,
family reunifications, and diasporic returns to Vietnam, the modes and methods of
movement have reached beyond the finitudes of proper national allegiance. The
paradigmatic narrative about loss and exile has been greatly disturbed by the realities of
globalization which have made “betrayal” more the norm than the exception. The anti-
communism of diasporic community politics has had to bend to the desires of those who
remit money, visit, and go back to live in Vietnam. These ambivalences produce a need
for an ethics of engagement that continue to (productively) perplex Vietnamese
diasporic cultural scholars. It is towards this question that I hope a consideration of the
74
affective dimensions of The Tale of Kieu leads us to better facilitate our own
engagements. An understanding of the way The Tale of Kieu has been imagined helps us
to better understand the ethical grounds upon which we tread when we conjure Kieu,
see her, or interpret her historical and contemporary manifestations. Furthermore, the
treatment of affects has much to tell us about the important work of “productions of the
self” that are of such importance to contemporary diasporic cultural studies. As Mariam
Beevi reminds us “the study of culture is not merely a “reflective” task, but a creative,
subjective, and self-originary effect as well.”
58
Beevi reminds us that through
engagements with the character Kieu, Vietnamese cultural producers engage in the
active construction of the “self.”
Conclusion
Since its inception The Tale of Kieu has produced reading publics whose received
interpretations have provided recourse for the sufferings of war and that have bemoaned
the costs of national strife. Identification with Kieu, the protagonist, lifts the everyday
burdens of those in vexed exile as well as those in the Vietnamese nation-state so that
their narratives align with that of the (lost) nation. In its extraordinary use of
Vietnamese poetics, The Tale postulates that there is something beautiful about the
profane, that the dutiful are those who must sin and that under the conditions of karmic
rule, what seems bred by divinity may be destined for destitution. In this chapter I have
given a brief analysis of how Nguyen Du’s The Tale has been read and received by
Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic literary criticism in order to draw out some
specific concerns that continue to prevail on its interpretation in the contemporary
moment. I have argued that cultural texts have the power to narrate, document, instill,
75
and facilitate intense and spectacular grief. This is exemplified in the The Tale, which
exists at the foundations of Vietnamese national and diasporic formations and which
gets reworked as various diasporic formations attempt to construct a representative
diasporic subjectivity out of an emotional comportment with the enduring poem.
As a marker of national politics, The Tale has been a plentiful source of material
for the work of nation building. Read as a particularly Vietnamese text, The Tale is
looked upon to uphold Vietnamese national culture, discipline wayward femininities,
and uphold patriarchy. How can we understand The Tale in a world that is by now less
dictated by the imperatives of war? What is familial duty, filial piety, clan loyalty, and
betrayal in such an era that is defined less and less by categories like colonial and
anticolonial, nationalist and imperialist and more by immigration and globalization?
These are some of the questions I believe should still be addressed through
examinations of the poem’s continuing resonance in postwar Vietnamese and
Vietnamese diasporic cultural life.
I have argued that Kieu’s emotional labor provides a trans-historical and trans-
spatial witness to the countless injuries at the height of Vietnamese consciousness:
colonial, gender, class, and exile violences. A main concern in this chapter has been to
draw out the function of feeling and emotion, trauma and grief in the gendered
narration of beautiful nationhood. Nguyen Du’s narration of The Tale has provided a
template for understanding the power of emotion and affective expression as a response
to forces outside of one’s control.
76
Chapter One Endnotes
1
Huynh Sanh Thông, Tale of Kieu (line 26).
2
“Structures of feeling” is Williams’ phrase to describe the cultural hypothesis that there is an
accumulation of “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” in a given historical
period that critical scholarship can identify. R. Williams Marxism and Literature (1977, 132).
3
I wish to express my gratitude to Viet Nguyen for his comments and for his suggestion to
think about the importance of Raymond Williams’ contribution to theorizing the cultural
practice and the sociality of shared emotion and feeling.
4
R. Williams (130).
5
Huynh Sanh Thông, Tale of Kieu (lines 200-201).
6
Huynh Sanh Thông, Tale of Kieu (lines 221-222).
7
Mariam Beevi, “Passing of Literary Tradition,” Amerasia Journal 23:2 (1997) p. 28.
8
This seems to be confirmed in Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen’s Vietnamese Voices (2003) in
which she examines four Franco-Vietnamese fictional and autobiographical texts that parallel
the story of Kieu.
9
Alexander Woodside, “Historical Background” in Huynh Sanh Thông xi.
10
David Eng and
11
Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile” Poetics Today, Vol. 17, Creativity and
Exile: European/American Perspectives II (Winter, 1996), pp. 659-686.
12
See Huynh Sanh Thông, Tale of Kieu “Introduction.”
13
Huynh Sanh Thông, Heritage (xxv).
14
Huynh Sanh Thông, Heritage (xxvi).
15
Huynh Sanh Thông (xxx).
16
Huynh Sanh Thông, Tale of Kieu (xl).
17
Viet Nguyen p. 121
18
Mariam Beevi “Passing of Literary Tradition,” Amerasia Journal 23:2 (1997) p. 30.
19
Huynh Sanh Thông, Tale of Kieu (xxxii).
20
Beevi (31).
21
This is discussed in Neil Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (67) and in Hue Tam Ho Tai,
Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (110).
22
The controversial French appointed cultural administrator/scholar Pham Quynh asserted in
the 1920s that “as long as The Tale of Kieu lasts, our language will last; and as long as our
language lasts our country will last.”
22
Pham Quynh’s attachment to The Tale of Kieu led to his
faithful organizing of a festival dedicated to celebrating The Tale as well as writing numerous
articles expounding on The Tale’s virtues in French funded newspapers. Central to Pham
Quynh’s assertion is that in order to be and to exist coherently within the social formations of
French colonialism one must see and experience oneself reified. This is described in Hue Tam
Ho Tai’s Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution p. 10 (1992).
77
23
Nguyen-vo Thu Huong 199.
24
Nguyen-vo Thu Huong 195.
25
Nguyen-vo Thu Huong 195 (emphasis added).
26
See Mariam Beevi Lam (1997) and Huynh Sanh Thông (1979) for further details of Nguyen
Du’s biographical history.
27
“Fired Gold” in Crossing the River (200).
28
“Fired Gold” in Crossing the River (200).
29
Taken from Zinoman article “Nguyen Huy Thiep’s “Vang Lua” and the Nature of Intellectual
Dissent in Contemporary Vietnam” on Viet Nam Generation Journal & Newsletter V3, N4
(January 1992).
30
Nguyen-vo Thu Huong, 211.
31
Nguyen-vo Thu Huong, 207.
32
Nguyen-vo Thu Huong, 208.
33
Grace Cho, borrowing from David Eng’s work in Racial Castration, argues that “new ways of
seeing” are possible through technological mediums that permit transgenerational vision. See
Grace Cho, “Voices from Teum: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora,”
The Affective Turn (2007): 156.
34
John Johnston, “Machinic Vision,” Critical Inquiry (26.1): 27-48.
35
Johnston 27.
36
Johnston explains de- and re-territorializations: “Where bodies and machines enter into
machinic relationships, that is, become parts of an assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish
two opposed processes: at points of instability, where a functional equilibrium gives way to
movements of change and becoming, there is what they call a decoding or deterritorialization;
but on the opposed face of the assemblage, in contrast to these “lines of flight,” there are
processes of stratification, involving redundancy and re-coding, or reterritorialization” (28).
37
Johnston 29.
38
Johnston 44.
39
According to Cho, memories are then constituted by the pastiche practices of modern
technology.
40
Lisa Rofel, Desiring China (Durham ; Duke University Press, 2007). Rofel’s cultural studies
critique of China’s postsocialist public culture identifies a re-invigorated interest in the
articulation of a desiring subject who bespeaks China’s turn from the idealism of the Cultural
Revolution towards a global cultural capitalism. Rofel’s work points to the cultural impact of
China and, additionally, Southeast Asia’s economic integration into the global market. Rofel is
quick to point out that the cultural adherence to economic integration has not been wholesale
adopted by China and its citizens, but, rather, that it has been negotiated as a process of
subjectification. The creation of a proper cosmopolitan subject through public culture debates
about the parameters of what constitutes proper desire illuminates that contestations and
reconfigurations are central to subjectification.
41
See Lisa Rofel Desiring China (2007): 20-21.
78
42
Ashley Carruthers, “National Identity, Diasporic Anxiety, and Music Video Culture in
Vietnam,” House of Glass: Culture, Modernity, and the State in Southeast Asia. Ed. Yao Souchou.
Pasir Pajang, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2001, 124.
43
Thuy Vo Dang, “Imagining Community: Vietnamese Diasporic Nationalism and Cultural
Memory in Paris by Night.” Master’s thesis. University of California, San Diego, 2003.
44
See Thuy Vo Dang (Dissertation 2004) and Nhi Lieu (2007) in “Performing Culture in
Diaspora: Assimilation and Hybridity in Paris by Night Videos and Vietnamese American Niche
Media,” Alien Encounters, Eds. Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen.
45
Teresa Brennan 12.
46
Sara Ahmed 4.
47
“Nhạc dân ca” is a humorous and upbeat musical form dedicated to regaling regional
characteristics.
48
This is my translation of the dialogue spoken by the Paris By Night character Kieu.
49
Trinh T. Minh Ha Cinema Interval 7.
50
Trinh T. Minh Ha Cinema Interval 11.
51
The critical praise is evidenced throughout the praiseful interviews transcribed in Cinema
Interval (1999) and The Digital Film Event (2005).
52
Trinh T. Minh Ha Cinema Interval 8.
53
Trinh T. Minh Ha Digital Film Event 50.
54
Trinh T. Minh Ha Digital Film Event 50.
55
Rey Chow, “Towards an Ethics of Postvisuality: Some thoughts on the Recent Work of
Zhang Yimou,” Poetics Today Winter 25:4 (2004): 676.
56
Trinh T. Minh Ha Digital Film Event 48.
57
Trinh T. Minh Ha Cinema Interval 8.
58
Here Beevi summarizes an argument made by Rey Chow in Primitive Passions (1995) on the
nature of “new ethnography”.
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Chapter Two
The Look of Nostalgia: Seeing Vietnam in Transnational Postwar Films
I don’t think there is a Vietnamese
audience. I’m very flattered that some
people have seen the film, but in Vietnam
you can take nothing for granted.
Anything could be reversed and seen in a
different light.
1
Tran Anh Hung
Behind the most successful films, we usually
realize the spiritual appearance of those
who made them. They are not made by
images but the spiritual appearance.
2
Đặng Nhật Minh
Setting and Background
In the epigraphs above, the two directors on whom this analysis focuses suggest
that in the first instance, what is seen cannot be presumed and in the second, what holds
in the image is not its content, but the spiritual force behind it. As statements on the
power of the cinematic image, their words speak to the difficulty of creating and
apprehending a loving image of Vietnam. The two works I pose together, Tran Anh
Hung’s Scent of Green Papaya (1993) and Đặng Nhật Minh’s Thương Nhớ Đồng Quê
(Nostalgia for the Countryside 1995), effect a moving diegesis on what it means to see
Vietnam from the vantage point of postwar remembrance. Although they speak from
distinct perspectives--Tran is exiled Franco-Vietnamese, and Đặng is heralded and
sponsored by Vietnam’s cinema industry--this analysis brings their works together to
examine how the films, in the context of postwar global market interests, compose and
distort the “look of nostalgia.” In this chapter, I suggest that at the height of Vietnam’s
80
emerging visibility in the global market, these directors’ projects engage in
considerations of Vietnam’s spirit and soul.
I situate the films against Vietnam’s portentous emergence in the 1990s global
economy, a placement that was aided by cinematic narration and images of Vietnam. To
smooth Vietnam’s transition into new global relations, it was important to resolve the
phantasmatic and emotional void caused by colonialism and empire’s crushing loss in
Southeast Asia and cultural workers were tapped to draw Vietnam as a viable global
partner as well as a viable affective interlocutor. It is not surprising then that to explain
their films, these directors tell stories of their searching and looking for an image that
could adequately pay tribute to their love of the country. Tran’s floating camera work
and Đặng’s stunning panning scenic shots evoke images of Vietnam that are poetic and
pastoral. In their works, at least in image, the war has not yet reached Vietnam. Their
films were especially welcome in the West because past colonial phantasmatic
conceptions of Southeast Asia had saturated previous cinema inducing a thirst for the
counternarratives of those who had lived the other side. Publications and translations
of literature from Vietnam and its diasporic storytellers detailing the grief of the
postwar years slaked the war-guilt-abyss that had descended upon the West, most
notably the U.S. The 1990s brought multiple gazes and ways of looking at Vietnam as
postcolonial consciousness focused attention on the discourse of the oppressed. The
world’s attention concentrated on how postwar nation building would fulfill or fail the
previous era’s revolutionary promises and eager eyes searched for how free-market
economics could gain a foothold in Vietnam’s Socialist regime.
81
Economic and Cultural Contexts
In 1986 Vietnam introduced vast economic and governmental overhauls under
the banner of đổi mới (change for new) policy. With it came a cultural policy called
“Cởi Mở” (openness) which gave license to artists to create cultural texts that more
openly reflected their thoughts on Vietnam without fear of government reprisal.
3
The
arts enjoyed relative latitude to be expressive and the decades-long war years had
certainly built enough experience to produce tales of treacherous irony and bitter
sorrows. The Vietnamese documentary filmmaker Tran Van Thuy showed two films
during the years immediately following the cultural policies initiated under đổi mới: Hà
Nội Trong Mắt Ai (Hanoi in Whose Eyes) (1982) and Chuyện Tử Tế (The Story of
Kindness) (1987). Both films dealt with the irony of a Vietnamese government that,
during the war years, heralded freedom and good treatment of its people in order to
shore up nationalist sentiment, but ended up, in actuality, serving the interests of money
and power in the postwar period. His films, perhaps taking the freedom to be honest
too liberally, were immediately banned from public showing. Literature, especially, saw
a flurry of publication by dissident writers such as Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, Dương Thu
Hương and Bảo Ninh whose works quickly won over international audiences and
enjoyed wide translation and circulation. All of these works, which claimed to represent
or highlight essential facets of the nation, argued for the right to determine the grounds
of artistic freedom and challenged the party’s claim to a singular vision of love and
loyalty.
Among the diaspora, the mid 1990s marked the beginning period of access both
to return to Vietnam and to the means of representation in a mass cultural market.
82
With greater opportunity to return to the country Vietnamese diasporic cultural
producers began to get a foothold in representations of Vietnam, opening up new
questions about what they would see once they were back.
4
I look at the films of a
national and a diasporic filmmaker to consider the function of sight, vision,
representation, and nostalgic emotion in works that are, in their conception, considered
representations of the essence of Vietnam. These films emerged during the cinematic
renaissance of films about Vietnam in the 1990s. Following my analysis I seek ways to
understand the emotional qualities of these films in light of the demanding hand of
global trade and its commercial needs that situates these films as distinctive vantage
points for nostalgia and love of the country. The films I examine testify to the ways
that global trade is regulated by affective discourses that fuel its ongoing project of
dramatizing and reconciling national narratives worldwide.
Tran, of Scent of Green Papaya, explained that he was looking for the “rhythm of
the Vietnamese soul” through which he could introduce Vietnam to the world’s
cinematic screen; this image would be illustrated through the eyes of a long-departed
son. Treating his film as a piece of art, like a painting, Tran made painstaking efforts to
frame his images with meticulous attention to their capacity to reflect essence.
5
Đặng,
in response to a question about how a man from the Hanoi city-center could so aptly
portray the internal world of the Vietnamese countryside wrote that, “Though I live in
Hanoi, I merely have to step out into the city and I meet people from the countryside….
They carry baskets heavy with kohlrabi, tomatoes, cabbage, and they walk all over the
city to make a few dollars… I don’t have to go anywhere far, the country people are
right in the heart of the city I live in.”
6
These directors speak of wanting to convey an
83
essential spirit of Vietnam, one that is immediately available to them. Through their
words one can hear articulated nostalgia for what in Vietnamese life could not be
obliterated by time, progress, or war. Vietnam is not evoked in the image, but in an
expression of its essence.
As I delve into the layers of these films’ nostalgic undertones I take inspiration
from what Svetlana Boym eloquently explains in The Future of Nostalgia (2002) when
she writes: “There should be a special warning on the sideview mirror: The object of
nostalgia is further away than it appears. Nostalgia is never literal, but lateral”(351).
Cinema provides a key ground to understand the arduous routes of perception between
viewer and image and in this chapter I examine how nostalgia may operate with the
object further away than it appears. Nostalgia is necessarily born of a condition of
distance so I begin by looking at the distance between the nostalgic subject and the
object of longing, between the director’s eye and the essence for which he longs,
between the lover and the beloved as constituent parts in the unfolding of nostalgia for
a vanished and vanishing Vietnam.
Boym emphasizes that nostalgia tells a love story. Her study of twentieth
century cultural texts of exiled writers and artists of the Russian diaspora finds that
nostalgia reflects a deep sentiment that encompasses the experience of imagining from
afar a home that ultimately existed only as a fantasy. She says, “Nostalgia is a sentiment
of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love
can only survive in a long-distance relationship” (xiii – xiv). The emphasis on spatial
and temporal relations echoes the Benjaminian notion of aura as an emergent quality in
the distance between the art patron and the art object. Benjamin explains that the
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patron’s proximity to the object permits a historical reciprocity, a return of the patron’s
look. In other words, the object looks back.
Experience of the aura...rests on the transposition of a response common
to human relationships, to the relationship between the inanimate or
natural object and man. The person we look at, looks at us in turn. To
perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the
ability to look at us in return.
7
Aura, then, permits a relationship of mutual recognition and admiration. Nostalgia, as a
romance, longs for the experience of proximity in which the lover and the beloved are
locked in a mutual gaze, through which the patron constitutes himself as a historical
and sentient being; but, critically, it makes do with distance.
Boym differentiates between two forms of nostalgia. “Reflective nostalgia” does
not attempt to rebuild the space of past proximity; rather, it loves the play of distance
on memory. The experience of recollecting the past as memory produces its own form
of pleasure, not as a re-experience, but as a separate entry into the past of its own. The
reflective nostalgic is “enamored of distance, not of the referent itself” (50). The
nostalgic occupies a vantage point fashioned by the journey. Conversely, “restorative
nostalgia” turns against us when we get caught up in rectifying that distance with
paradigms of return, not just spatially but temporally. When the time and space of
mutual admiration has come to pass and the experience of recognition diminishes, the
nostalgic, in this instance, long suffers without enjoying its pleasures. Through an
examination of these films’ cinematic images I see how film acts as a crucial forum for
Vietnamese directors to reflect on the past in ways that could refashion what it meant to
love and remember Vietnam. Through an engagement with theories of the gaze, I also
explore how circuits of power often undergird nostalgic looking and threaten to return
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the object of longing to its proper place in restorative nostalgic fashion, thus locking the
nostalgic traveler in a temporal and spatial nowhere. I consider also the relationship of
love to a postwar nostalgia. How does love look when the object of one’s love does not
look back? Is there a way to experience and express nostalgia as an unrequited love?
This offers a way to understand exiled perspectives and expressions of affection that lie
in the shadows of historical reciprocity. This chapter examines how vision and
nostalgia mutually inform each other providing the nexus for understanding the
incongruencies and impossibility of love in the postwar period.
The analysis of nostalgia as a form of love, concomitant with a way of seeing,
speaks to the contradictions of love’s expression within a market driven cinematic
economy. The stakes in this market for both a diasporic and national cinema hinge on
how authentic each can be. The questions posed to Vietnamese and diasporic
filmmakers continue to be whether they can create an appealing enough narrative and
image of Vietnam to replace Western-centric phantasmatic images, and how they
manage to garner acknowledgement as providing a truly “representative” image of
Vietnam. The long and embittered polarization between North Vietnam and its exiled
South Vietnamese countrymen has made the notion of ‘authentic’ representation a
highly troubled discourse. In this period, it seems those who can speak from a “neutral”
ground, those who can discuss love and longing for Vietnam without the distractions of
“politics” are the ones to rightfully claim to know the “real” Vietnam. Can the love of
Vietnam depicted by Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic filmmakers be deep enough
to solicit the reverence of a global viewing audience that seems tired of “politics as
usual” and desires another chapter in its quest to understand Vietnam?
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Much of the nostalgic undertones of the two films I consider draws on the
sympathies aroused by joyous love and impossible love. Joyous love comes through the
successful projection of love and its reciprocated return. Impossible love burns through
these narratives as a condition of love given and yet unreturned either because of death
or rejection. But these films put unrequited love at the forefront of their storytelling,
suggesting that we see love as a deeply singular activity. Roland Barthes formulated
“love’s languor” this way:
amorous fatigue: a hunger not to be satisfied, a gaping love. Or again,
my entire self is drawn, transferred to the loved object which takes its
place: languor would be that exhausting transition from narcissistic
libido to object libido. (Desire for the absent being and desire for the
present being: languor superimposes the two desires, putting absence
within presence. Whence a state of contradiction: this is the “gentle
fire.”) (156)
The desire for the loved object has taken residence inside me and in its absence I have
been constituted. In the gap opened up by love’s languor, I have undone the separation
of myself and the object of my desire through the burning of that “gentle fire.”
Exhausted by the hunger that must not be satisfied, I finally find the satisfaction of
amorous fatigue.
It is this paradoxical striving and never attaining that also underscores the
Lacanian theory of the gaze, a central paradigm for the analysis of desire and fantasy in
modern cinema. Gaze theory plays with the shifting ground of the “I” who sometimes
sees, is always seen, and who loses sight. This interplay finds its fruition in a postwar
Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic cinema that plays with the impossible ground of
home, faithfulness, and loyalty. Nostalgia is important because it suggests an ability to
express love without reciprocity among a network of those who understand the
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sentiment of longing and who participate in ongoing consideration of the misbegotten
past.
What is the nature of love if it is unreturned? And what is its nature when it is
returned anew? A cinema that relies on missed glances, absent stares, and longing looks
suggests a story of star-crossings and unrequited love. Through these films’
meditations on nostalgia, I examine the contradiction between love’s singular
experience and its exchange within a commodity culture by delving into the affective
drives of transnational postwar Vietnamese cinematic representation.
Scent of Green Papaya
[W]hen I decide to make a movie, I have no national
mirror for myself. I’m alone. That’s hard.
8
Tran Anh Hung
Tran Anh Hung’s three most well known films form a triptych meditation on
Vietnam. His first film Scent of Green Papaya (1993), was dedicated to memories of his
mother. He dedicated Cyclo (1995), shot in Ho Chi Minh City, to his father. Vertical Ray
of the Sun (2000), filmed in Hanoi, was a culminating film that brought the story of
Vietnam to the family life of the North where the influence of Western culture and the
war economy seemed far less pronounced. These films set Tran’s work apart from his
French contemporaries, whose works disavowed Vietnamese subjectivity in order to tell
the story of the West in its Indochina colony. Tran insists, as a director, upon being
identified as Vietnamese to his soul, thus staking the claim to make representative
images of Vietnam that herald his unique vantage point. He would be the prodigal son
of Vietnam’s languishing representational politic. That it is ‘hard’ to not have a
‘national mirror’ suggests that Tran desires to see something of himself that he cannot.
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His desire is rejected and it is how he compensates for that missing image that this
section will return to.
In saying he had no ‘mirror’ for himself, Tran was perhaps talking about his
aversion to the images of Vietnam proffered by recent Franco-cinematic representations
of Vietnam, most notably L’Indochine (1992), L’Amant (1992) and Dien Bien Phu (1992).
He said, “what they said about Vietnam…is uninteresting to me. The stories could have
taken place in Kenya. The humanity of the Vietnamese people is not visible through
those films. All they have is a setting.”
9
This critique is important because his own film
would have to do without the authenticity of setting. Made on a soundstage just outside
Paris, Tran’s diasporic vision—what he projects of his fantasies of Vietnam-- illuminates
the aesthetics of nostalgia in telling ways. As context for his film, Tran referred often
to the desire to honor his mother, to recall his memories of Vietnam before he left at the
age of twelve; a purpose explained by what he sees as the limited picture of Vietnam
offered by western representation. “Violence has masked for years the humanity of my
people.”
10
In representing Vietnam’s humanity, Tran chose to call upon his childhood
memories of his mother’s graceful movements as she went about caring for the home.
Thus, this film--his ode to Vietnam--would differ from what had come before it.
Mùi - Scent
In the opening scene of Scent of Green Papaya, a young girl, perhaps 10 years old,
emerges from under a lamplight. Shyly she looks around and knocks on the door of her
patron’s home. She has come from the countryside to work for a merchant family,
headed by a kind and busy mistress. The rest of the film is a heightened visual and
sensory narrative following the everyday labors of a servant girl who is surrounded by
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the graces and sufferings of women in colonial Saigon. The film follows her until she
too has become a young woman, ready to take on the role of proper womanhood in
Vietnamese life.
Tran’s choice in naming the central character Mùi plays on the notion of scents
and smells. How do you encounter and know Vietnam if you begin with smell? It
brings cognition back to active bodily knowledge, literally taking in the smell of
Vietnam and forsaking other methods we have been trained to use to comprehend a
thing. To direct their acting, Tran had the actresses playing the young and adult Mùi
act as a lemur would. Thus Mùi is intimately and innocently connected to the present
and the present is a world that is composed of natural elements. Mùi’s fascination with
watching ants, looking at frogs, and elegantly performing her household duties
polishing pottery and wiping floors seem to be at one with her nature. There is nothing
strenuous or clumsy about her work. The film takes particular visual delight in
showing Mùi’s rapt attention to the quotidian beauty of everyday wonders. She marvels
as if recognizing and seeing, a flower, a tree, or a bird for the very first time. Her seeing
is refracted as the film’s recognition of the “rhythms of the Vietnamese soul.” Mùi sees
nature in a way that the other characters do not. The film invests in her devotion to the
sensations aroused by her environment and this visually orders what we see on screen.
It is as if as spectators we are allowed to see Vietnam as Mùi does, but this vision shows
only as much as the frame will permit. His film ultimately shows us that experience is
built on an accumulation of the past as memories made of significations, always unstable
and never complete.
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The visibility of Mùi either enamors or disturbs viewers. She is so visible in her
lack of interiority that even her desire for her eventual paramour Khuyen is only
expressed with a shy smile or a bowed head. At the end of the film her near silence is
broken when she learns (from a man) to read and recite poetry, ostensibly about the
endurance of Vietnam. She is shuttled away from her mistress and sent to work for
Khuyen, where she endures his tumultuous engagement with his fiancée before finally
finding narrative resolution in her submission first to Khuyen, as his servant and
mistress, and finally to language itself. But this submission is the very mark of the
film’s visual irony. While critics have read Mùi’s submission as a rehearsal of
patriarchal Vietnamese story-telling, I believe that in the logic of the film this
submission closes the character Mùi off from knowability. In this film, the narrative of
desire is summarily recited as an ostensible parallel of the filmmaker’s (and thereby
extension the diaspora’s) longing for Vietnam. But a closer examination of the logic
desire and how it propels the scopic drive can unlock the tendency to collapse what is
visible in cinema (as what is desired) with a correlated politic of representation. What
appears as excessive visuality in Scent of Green Papaya is interesting because there is
very little that is made visible.
The Problem with Seeing
Scent of Green Papaya delights in the image and the visual in contrast to the
concerns of contemporary cultural theory’s deep suspicions over image and content.
The film’s foregrounding of the lush image of Vietnam seems in direct contrast to the
political exigency in postcolonial and feminist cultural theory to resist the modes and
methods of knowing that had historically rendered the Other as extraneous alterity.
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Visuality was a method at the center of such critique. Rey Chow discusses this politics
through a working through of the ethics of “iconophobia.” Iconophobia, Chow
describes, is an ethically driven “suspension of (or aversion to) physical or
phenomenological vision.”
11
According to Chow, an ethics of visuality that would place
the suspicion of Orientalism as the decisive political project in cultural analysis limits
what we can say about and find in cross-cultural work, since such an ethic declares that
the image cannot be trusted.
Indeed, Scent of Green Papaya seemed to do exactly what cultural critics were
most suspicious of. Heralded by some as a Vietnamese cinematic achievement, the film
was panned by others for once again subjecting Vietnam to historical obsolescence. To
these critics, one of whom was Tran’s mentor, Vietnamese-French director Lam Lê,
Tran’s exclusive emphasis on the visual aspects of story-telling was a disservice to the
people to whom he claimed such affinity. Said Lê, “To evacuate History from his
smaller story, in order not to pain some spectators, the auteur has ushered history into
his film, despite himself.”
12
To these critics the absence of any narrative comment on
Vietnam’s historical situation in the 1950s and 1960s was an unconscionable denial of
imperialism and colonialism. They condemned this highly visual Vietnamese film for
making Vietnam invisible.
Through a reading of the ambivalent ethics of visuality in Scent of Green Papaya I
argue for a re-engagement with the image through the lens of nostalgia so as to avoid
the trap that Rey Chow alludes to when she warns against being condemned to an
iconophobia that keeps us “oscillating, forever neurotically, between the extremes of
super-vision (surveillance of others) and introspection (gazing at oneself).”
13
In this
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reading of Scent of Green Papaya I investigate how the film utilizes an
aesthetic/technology that visually, through film technique, evokes qualities of nostalgic
memory in order to approximate a recuperation of a forgotten and lost past. I should say
that this endeavor fails in the sense that it is always an approximation, but holds
promise for cultural theory because it provides a site for the meeting of fantasy and
desire, a place where we can read an encounter with the traumatic Real of a historical
inevitability. That is, the nostalgic image is lovingly revived, but only through a
visuality that is always exceeded by what is missing. The film’s visual aesthetic
instantiates nostalgic memory as a technological potential meted out by the camera’s
ability and love for vision and the visual . This potential supplements a desire for an
imaginary location called Vietnam. I ask: is there a visuality to nostalgia that we can
identify?
One aspect of the filmic techniques of memory that I identify in the film is the
distance the film keeps from the affected action or plot of the narrative. That is, we
never become emotionally compelled by the stories unfolding. Mùi is never shown to be
terribly forlorn or affected by the tragedies that occur in the household in which she
works. None of the other characters’ emotions are pursued deeply. Mùi stays always in
a safe removed distance from the despair and anguish of the household and the camera
similarly facilitates this distance from moments of impact. This distancing is an
interesting cinematic element that is intrinsic to how memory marks our distance from
the events of the past.
The relations between people in Scent of Green Papaya show a continual
transference of emotion. Transferring the love for her deceased daughter onto Mùi, the
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mistress of the house sends her away, and we see the resultant heartache over her
doubled loss. At the moment of Mùi’s “confrontation” with her mistress’s anguish the
film overtakes us with the sounds of what appears to be a fighter jet or air jet and the
camera shuttles us to the next scene where we are met once again with the reassuring
smile of a peaceful Mùi. It is as if “machinic memory” cuts us off from the point of
confrontation, from confronting the realities of our losing our everyday connections—
what Tran Anh Hung is wont to call a particularly Asian way of being. In comments
about filmic use of confrontation, Tran says, “Confrontation is an interesting device in
filmmaking, because it's dramatic and noisy. But in Asia this isn't necessarily so. In a
Confucian world order, harmony is the most important.” He says, “Keeping suffering
within oneself means never throwing it out on the table. If you discuss it, you keep it
alive. Whereas when you keep it inside, in time it dissolves. That's the big difference
between Asia and the West.”
14
This might be better understood as a particularly
diasporic technology of memory that is able to invoke memory and cut it off where it
causes disruption, so that we are always left with what there is to be nostalgic for.
Beyond a culturalist explanation of why his camera will not show moments of
confrontation, I suggest that the camera’s inability to envision these moments is a
reflection of the film’s larger project, to instill a desire that must remain haunting.
What is it about the nature of suffering that we can only see its shadows and remnants,
never itself in its fullness? What is it about seeing that is being explicated?
Todd McGowan’s indepth engagement with Lacanian gaze theory is helpful to
address the preceding questions. In The Real Gaze (2007) McGowan examines the
relationship between the gaze and desire and holds that it is desire that directs the gaze.
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If correct, McGowan’s thesis points at the importance of understanding the intricacies
of desire. McGowan’s crucial analytic move is to read Lacanian desire not as the desire
for mastery over a love object, i.e. that the camera’s gaze searches for an object to
conquer and know, but rather as what Lacan describes in his later work as a relation
wherein the subject has a desire for submission to an other. For a Vietnamese global
cultural praxis, the ostensible desire that orders representation has been to create a
legibility to the world at large. What comes about in textual analysis is a cinematic
gaze that is at crisis to identify legibly with a subject-position.
Desire, understood in this way recognizes that the camera’s gaze is not
subjective, but objective. What this means is that the gaze is not constituted by a desire
for identification; it does not order the spectator’s safe and coherent knowing of himself
and his world. The spectator cannot identify with the camera’s gaze because in this
formulation, the gaze is not a medium. Rather, in his explication of Lacanian theory,
McGowan says that instead of focusing solely on the spectator’s identification with the
gaze, we should understand the spectator’s relationship to desire. The gaze changes
from a mode for identification to becoming an operation that is ordered through the
logic of desire--a desire for submission, not mastery. For McGowan, the gaze is in
collaboration with the operations of the realm of the Real, which cannot be represented
or known because it constitutes a void in knowledge. The gaze is constitutive of
Lacan’s definition of lack, the objet petit a, the secret of the Other that we wish we knew,
even though were we ever to know it our desire would be gone. Thus it is that desire
requires a submission to the other in a way that defers our ever attaining the secret of
the other’s jouissance. McGowan says that “desire emerges in response to the
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indecipherable gaze”(33). The gaze is that “something” that undoes our scopophilic
power by the materiality of existence (the Real) that always exceeds and undercuts the
structures of the symbolic order. It “rips open our illusion of subjectivity” displacing us
from the position of scopophilic control. It makes us realize that the relations of
visuality are unstable and that categories of seer and seen are intrinsically in peril. Even
when the subject sees a “complete image” something remains obscure: the subject
cannot see the Other at the point at which it sees the subject. The gaze of the object
gazes back at the subject, but this gaze is not present in the field of the visible.
15
McGowan’s powerful elocution of the seductive interlocking powers of the gaze is fully
engaged in Scent of Green Papaya, a film that eschews an open textual reading of
explication and denouement, preferring instead the heightened drama of looking, seeing
and perceiving.
This film plays with unattainability that lies at the very heart of nostalgia. The
very memories that Tran so lovingly wanted to convey provide the keys to his direct
explication of their ephemeral nature. It is his desire that is put to screen, and it is his
desire as the logic of gaze that is ever present in this highly visibly structured film.
“Framing” is believing
Cultural scholar of Vietnamese and diasporic cinema Chuong Dai Vo has
elsewhere traced an academic criticism that saw the film as a “a lament for the loss of
innocence, an unresolved treatment of fetishes and a reconsolidation of the heterosexist
nation.”
16
In this section I argue that bound up with the problematic of nostalgia in
reading Vietnamese postwar film is the critic’s relationship to the image on the screen.
Critics have received the film as both cinematic accomplishment and, conversely, as
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fetishistic indulgence. These readings have centered on reading the film’s images as an
open text. What enraptured audiences who saw Scent of Green Papaya for the first time
was undoubtedly its achievements in cinematography. This first feature length film by
Tran swept critics with its resounding silence, filled in for with the subtle sounds of
crickets, fluttering leaves and the verdant surroundings that housed them. The
declaration that the film was “difficult” lay in its unexpectedness. It was excessive in
that it severely limited dialogue. Audiences used to the expressed and overwrought
narratives of previous Vietnam-centered texts may have expected an “open text” that
would permit access to the overdetermined narrative of devastation and melancholy of a
Vietnamese postwar film. Instead, spectators were met with the breathless splendor of
visual images of Vietnam and its people.
But these images were not of Vietnam directly. Tran filmed in a suburb of Paris
on a soundstage on which he created a vision of 1950s Saigon. The result was imagery
that literally overtook the film’s frames. One film journalist responded “as soon as the
first images roll, one feels the humidity and mugginess of the extreme Orient, the
softness of its lights, the bicycle of the merchant, the house with its many rooms, waxed
floors, everything seems more real than nature” (qtd. in Blum-Reid 65). Tran had
wanted very much to shoot this film in Vietnam, but there were just enough difficulties
in the early 1990s, before market liberalization and before the normalization of
Vietnamese relations with the global trading world, that the director would have to
shoot in France.
It is for me a huge handicap to shoot in France, because I don’t see how I
can take a frame in an apartment. By this I mean, that it is an entire
interrogation linked to the writing of a film. In addition, it is entirely
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related to cinema. Vietnam gives me this freedom, this range of frames,
and allows me to make everything believable… people won’t say, but
what is the position of the camera, why such an awkward angle, this will
not seem strange because of space.
17
Tran is referencing the limitations of shooting on a sound stage where every detail of
every setting needed for filming has to be constructed. Unlike shooting on location, the
landscape on the set of a soundstage does not provide this “range of frames” so that the
logic of the visual is dependent on which frames are possible on the set. Each frame
then will be highly interrogated and accounted for by the techniques of set design and
camera work. Tran’s use of sweeping overhead shots is calculated to give the
impression of total access, but I argue that it does so as a way to overwrite the
limitations inherent to seeing. These limitations are both born of the condition of
diasporic filmic production and of the capacity of scopic vision.
This film, I argue, illustrates a particularly diasporic project in which Tran Anh
Hung plays with the constructs of memory as visually constituted forays. Explaining
his interest in Vietnam to Cinéaste journal he says, “What usually interests me is
Vietnam today. At the time I was writing the screenplay, I did not have the financial
means to know Vietnam today--I was living in Paris--which means that The Scent of
Green Papaya is the result of an economic situation and a mental point of view.”
18
Looking through windows, looking for the other, looking for who is looking at
you, losing sight of who you are seeing and lighting up the room in order to see, hiding
oneself in plain sight so that the other won’t see you—in all these ways, visuality is a
very important part of this film. It registers as a question about what we see. The film
is obsessed with what mediates being able to see. Audiences are shown lush imagery,
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we see through the camera’s lens a rapt ardor for the Vietnamese “soul” and “spirit”: its
verdant ethereal beauty. Does this mean we are the masterful omniscient seer? Tran’s
film and I suggest the ethics of memory for which the film renders as a visual
technology, engage the spectator in such a way that problematizes that relationship to
images of Vietnam. In the story Mùi is compelled to stare at the merchant family’s altar
and looking back at her is the picture of the family’s deceased young daughter Tố. Mùi
encounters a neighbor, an old man who walks by the house daily to wistfully glimpse for
a sight of the grandmother praying dutifully upstairs, his star-crossed love. These are
unrequited gazes—the little girl who could have been, the old man who gazes without
seeing—these are unrequited gazes --- some satisfy, some leave us haunted. Mùi’s gaze
is searching but for no objet a—it is posited as a “pure gaze” without a need to identify.
Even the shy look invites a reading of the other’s desire, yet desire is never expressed.
Tran says that he wants to make people feel, but not with a compelling story and
affected characters. What seems left is to feel with our senses. On the relative silence of
the film Tran explains “I wanted to create that intimacy as much as I could between the
viewer and the film.”
19
He wants his viewers to know Vietnam as an experience and he
manages this by creating a cinematic experience of nostalgia equipping his images with
visual technologies that approximate memory, and thereby leaning heavily on a global
cultural discourse that in the 1990s hungered for a native take on Vietnam.
His recourse to the splendor of the image awakens in Vietnamese diasporic
cultural theory a need to continually assess our positioning vis-à-vis the political
protocols of ethical visuality. How do Vietnamese cultural producers through the use of
technologies of seeing, attempt to reinform notions of the postwar subject? What is
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important for scholars to consider about memory projects in a postwar world? From
diasporic and national perspectives the films I engage understandably follow different
pursuits on what the Vietnamese past has entailed. Đặng Nhật Minh’s Nostalgia for the
Countryside is a filmic adaptation of Nguyen Huy Thiep’s short story. Nguyen Huy
Thiep, known as a Vietnam’s premier and internationally translated literary voice
insists that we see Vietnam via its closely cloaked rubric of glorious revolution so as to
more starkly contrast its social avarice and see its hyper-contradictions. These
juxtapositions are found everywhere in Nguyen’s social critique. Read together these
two films and their authors reflect a nostalgic drive, not purely in their imaginative
ruminations on Vietnam, but on the function of art and the cinematic apparatus. Each
director is searching out his own formula for a way to impress Vietnam onto the global
world screen.
Nostalgia For the Countryside
While in Contemporary Asian Cinema (2006) Anne Ciecko states that Asian local
cinema in places like South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines have produced
astounding successes, the local accenting of narrative and use of local talent has not
translated to similar box office success in Vietnam. With the exception of a few films,
Vietnamese cinema has lagged behind the wild profits of imported films. In the same
edited volume, Panivong Norindr explains “Cinema as a state propaganda apparatus
used to disseminate the ethos of a Socialist society no longer resonates with the desires
of young audiences whose scopophilic pleasure is firmly entrenched in special effects-
packed action films, and more technologically advanced films” (CAS 57). Cinema was
accorded a crucial role in Vietnam’s national genealogy when Ho Chi Minh signed a
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decree in 1953 for the advancement of the production of national Revolutionary
Movies.
20
Cinema would henceforth document the glorious victories of nationalism
over foreign imperial intruders. Half a century later, Vietnamese cinema has moved out
of the hands of firm central state control and is increasingly entrenched in the demands
of the global market. In national cinema the documenting of glorious victory has given
way to a desire to pursue the foibles and intransigencies of the modern era: “the people”
exalted in the former era’s film propaganda are being unfolded from banners and are
found instead roaming the screen searching for a place from which to speak. In turn the
state’s cultural rhetoric has hedged around the language of globalization and global
culture. Chuong-Dai Vo has identified the power of debates over “change” and “reform”
to affect the Vietnamese cultural politics from 1987-1990. During this time intellectuals
openly challenged the relationship between the state, governance, and the arts,
suggesting that the reform of corruption ought to include a loosening of the state’s ties
to cultural production.
In cinema, the concerns have interestingly focused on the spiritual livelihood of
newly ordained modern subjects. No longer “the people” or the proletariat, concerns are
made audible about how the Vietnamese public will be affected by the myriad influences
and choices they now encounter in a globalized film-viewing environment. Đặng Nhật
Minh laments that film topics have turned away from the reality of the country towards
Hong Kong-style martial arts infused cinema. “Many films imitate the plots of martial
Taiwanese and Hong Kong films. Foreign, especially Hong Kong films imported in
mass into Viet Nam for the past 5 years have marked themselves on Vietnamese
society’s cultural and spiritual life” (Vietnamese Cinematography 128). Đặng Nhật Minh is
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deeply invested in the fruition of a “national cinema,” and the making of Nostalgia for the
Countryside bears the marks of that agenda. In the conceptualization and within the
contours of the film I locate important moments that illuminate the developing give-
and-take of a national cinema in relation to the geopolitics of global culture. The
nostalgic aesthetics that infuse this film reflect the filmmaker’s concerns for the correct
tutelage of Vietnamese consciousness through cinema.
In early 1995 the Japanese media outlet NHK invited Đặng Nhật Minh to
contribute an original film to the inaugural Asian Film Festival to be held in Tokyo at
the end of the year. NHK invited five filmmakers from India, Thailand, Mongolia, Iran,
and Vietnam, and promised seed money for each film project. For emerging filmmakers
in third world countries, investment money for film was tantamount to artistic utopia.
Proud to have been personally selected by representatives of NHK to represent
Vietnam, Đặng Nhật Minh set out to make a film that would adequately show Vietnam
to the world:
This was the first time that I would have total control over issues of
spending on a film. I remember the words of a Bulgarian colleague:
never give concessions to a film’s chairman. Now I don’t have to give
concessions to anyone. Chairman Tat Binh confirmed to me: this is your
film, other people are sponsoring you. I will spend money however you
decide, just make a film that is really good, if not we will be humiliated in
front of the world. The team working on this film agreed that the
making of this film would be a huge challenge in terms of Vietnamese
cinema’s honor because at the same time that NHK invested in our
filmmaking, they invested in 4 other directors of other Asian countries.
We had to make sure that Vietnam did not fail in comparison to the other
countries. The responsibility that we shouldered was like coaching a
national soccer team in a match against other countries.
21
Đặng Nhật Minh would later say that the making of this film was the happiest time of
his filmmaking career. The juxtaposition of remarkable joyousness and hypervigilance
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over being hyper-visible to a national and transnational audience creates a hypertextual
experience of postwar nostalgic desire. This desire is configured by a constant state of
attention to the partialities of censorship, both from the state and from a collective
Vietnamese aesthetic sensibility. Opinions on how to correctly tell the story of Vietnam
were shaped by the politics of the scopic drive. What is permissible to see on screen and
what is not continue to be in contention in Vietnamese global culture. How Đặng chose
to go about producing his representation of Vietnam will constitute the rest of my
analysis. Vietnamese filmmaking in the postwar period would be heightened by a sense
of national competition, and questions about success and failure are drawn as
components of national identity. Composing the shots of this representative film would
prove to be a joint venture between Đặng’s freed up artistic license, the demands of a
global Vietnamese historical aesthetic and a global audience hungry for visions of the
real Vietnam.
Origins
In the years following the end of the country’s civil/American War, we meet the
characters in Nostalgia for the Countryside in the làng quê (home village). The làng quê or
quê hương is the traditional home village to which all persons of Vietnamese descent are
supposed to have ties. It constitutes, in the social body politic, an imagined homeland
that Vietnamese of all strata can claim connection to ancestral relations by way of the
father. The film is set sometime in the 1990s and the main male character, 17-year-old
Nhâm, tells us early on “[f]rom the main road you can hardly see my village. Ba Vi
mountain is in the distance. It seems close but it takes a day by bicycle to get there.”
Nhâm’s affections for his làng quê are summarized in his easy and poetic ability to situate
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the village for viewers, reminding Vietnamese audiences near and far that the home
village lives on always just a little beyond the field of vision.
Life in the làng quê is characterized by the cyclical temporality of agricultural
harvest, provincial affections and familial ties. There is little need to leave the village,
and people rarely do. Nhâm introduces his mother as a typical example of someone who
has never gone far even from her house within the village. Nhâm explains that when
people do leave the village for various reasons they are mythologized as having died in
far off lands. As we follow Nhâm’s narration viewers learn that though poor, the làng
shows signs of the increasing influence of modern technology, including the presence of
a television set that a relative in Germany has sent one of Nhâm’s neighbors, Uncle
Phụng. Nhâm is pious and readily takes on the role of village son, giving help where
any is needed. His father is long dead, a casualty of one of the country’s fights for
revolutionary independence. Nhâm’s older brother rarely returns to the village; he has
left, ostensibly to search for work and money. Nhâm is the only male left in the
household and is responsible for the care of his mother, younger sister Minh and his
brother’s forlorn wife Chi Ngữ. Asked one day to meet a neighbor’s returning niece
from the United States at the train station, Nhâm obediently agrees and greets his one
time childhood friend, Quyen at the train terminal.
Together, Quyen and Nhâm constitute the film’s doubled vision of nostalgia for
the countryside. Nhâm is not only the village son and brother but as the film’s narrator,
acts as the town’s existentialist poet. Of himself, Nhâm says: “I write poetry. My
thoughts often wander. I think of life’s many hardships. I think of my mother’s
loneliness and I think of Chi Ngữ’s heartbreak.” According to Nhâm’s poetics, the
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hardships of life are not conditioned by a particular social or political circumstance.
This permits him to grant a colloquial practice of “tội nghiệp,” an admixture of pity,
love, and duty, upon all those to whom he feels affection. Quyen returns to the làng quê
after many years spent living abroad. We learn that Quyen fled Vietnam with her
father and when asked why, she explains, “It was the only way of escaping from my
husband.” A rather curious dehistoricizing of the conditions under which Vietnamese
fled Vietnam after the Vietnam/American War, this explanation keeps in line with the
Vietnamese government’s longstanding position that Vietnamese refugees after the war
left by choice. Quyen’s return to Vietnam signified a desire to reconnect to the land of
her origin. Exploring the fields with Nhâm, she laments, “Sometimes I wish I was a girl
again.” This lament itself takes on multiple meanings within the narrative. As a desire
for her own childhood, this statement is shown to be Quyen’s fond longing for more
innocent times. However, within the development of the story, girlhood and happiness
take on ironic meaning. I return to this point in a later section that considers the notion
of lost daughters. For now, I mean only to highlight the layers of nostalgia that are
evoked by Nhâm and Quyen’s sense of desire for the countryside.
These two versions of nostalgia differ from the one offered by Tran Anh Hung’s
film because of the nature of their understanding of Vietnam. Quyen is not taken up
with her imagined past, but is quickly taught about the hardships that face the village.
Educated about the disparities that face village life by the town schoolteacher, Quyen is
told that scientific progress has not helped the people of the countryside, and that where
it has entered village life, it has exacted such high costs that most are unable to enjoy it.
(This vast disparity between modern progress and local lack of privilege is a theme
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Tran Anh Hung takes up in his later work Cyclo.) The relationship between Quyen and
the village schoolteacher, the film’s representatives of the diasporic gaze and that of the
homeland, is figured differently than the traditional binary described by an East/West
divide. It offers a relationship between the homeland and diaspora that is not
oppositional or resistant. As the film considers what has been taken from the
countryside and what has been denied to it by the uneven development of modern
progress, what emerges is a syncretism that helps us understand lack and loss by
offering a distinct mode of transnational meeting in which each side affected is made
aware of the cries of postwar injustice and discontent. This is a vision of Vietnam that
could appeal to the world.
As a metaphor for distant but not forgotten origins, Nostalgia for the Countryside
posits the past as available to all sectors of Vietnamese postwar subjectivities. Made in
the 1990s, during Vietnam’s initial period of relaxed border and market practices,
Nostalgia for the Countryside and Scent of Green Papaya usher in new dialogues in
cinematic representation on the possibilities of diaspora and homeland relations
particularly as they pertain to a scopic drive that provides a forum to narrate postwar
Vietnamese subjectivity.
Based on the short story by dissident Vietnamese writer Nguyen Huy Thiep,
Nostalgia for the Countryside gives a somber look at the ways that loss has been figured
on the body of the Vietnamese people and the land. The country village, for which
Nhâm and Quyen have affection, has always been the source of Vietnam’s greatest loss.
Against the bustle of city life, the countryside is where soldiers are conscripted, widows
remain, migrants retreat from and exiles leave. The countryside is also an important
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site for national governance. The countryside is the site of re-education and of
devastating land reforms, and a certain melancholy over this history hangs over the film
like a specter.
Providing a critical overview of Vietnamese contemporary cinema, Chuong-Dai
Vo reads the film’s gaze as privileging a decidedly male voice of the countryside.
22
Juxtaposing the diasporic Quyen’s naivete to Nhâm’s somber perspectives on life in the
village, Vo suggests that “the film refuses to validate the diasporic subject’s
observations and instead represents the local male subject as the repository of truth,
intellectual consciousness and critical perception of the socio-economic disparities
developing in the globalizing of the Vietnamese economy.”
23
Nevertheless, Vo sees the
film’s preference for Nhâm’s ability to see (it is his viewing practices as sexual
maturation that drives several key shots) as a problematic gaze. Vo says that in this the
film does two things: it privileges the male character as capable of introspection and
transformation and secondly, in marking Nhâm’s perspective as a failed bildungsroman,
it makes a masculinist critique of the fetishization of the countryside as stuck in time.
This reading takes the gaze as logics of character and subjective seeing.
Recognitions and Returns, Circuits of the Gaze
Đặng Nhật Minh’s filmmaking is subtended by a patriarchal paradigm linking
the women characters to the director’s own personal and national sense of spiritual
development.
24
How women fare—from the upheavals of colonialism through to
modernity’s shifting re-alignments---remains a central concern in Vietnamese global
postwar filmmaking. Whether such concerns reflect a refashioned feminist discourse
should be considered in future work is a valid question, but the concern I have in this
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chapter regards how women in Nostalgia for the Countryside are used to reflect an
ongoing regard about the impact of war on the inner life of a spiritualized Vietnamese
landscape. I will explore the filmmaker’s use of triangulation as an organizing principle
for the depiction of contemporary Vietnamese internal life.
Because nostalgia tells the story of what is longed for, it presupposes a need for
reckoning and even ultimately for mourning. Nostalgia for the countryside installs an
object over which loss is circumscribed. The reflective nostalgic, in Boym’s formulation,
learns to inhabit this landscape of the imagination, straddling the past and the present
in order to produce a viable discourse about the future. Nostalgia for the countryside
points towards a Vietnamese lament for a pre-figured loss of origins. Đặng Nhật Minh
tells the loss of multiple forms of innocence. Love for the countryside points toward an
idealization of the bucolic and a desire to locate origins. Nostalgia in this film furnishes
as a realizable narrative to bridge difficult geopolitical Vietnamese identities under the
rubric of Vietnam’s newly minted globalized cultural consciousness. I believe the film’s
emphasis on relationships among its archetypal characters serves as the crux of a story
meant to locate points in Vietnam’s postwar struggles, struggles internal to subjects’
knowledge of longing and frustration that has been handed to them as part of a modern
postcolonial legacy. Through the film we see that these internal struggles need only to
be recognized by the other to find resolution and for there to emerge a third space.
I made sure to invite [Nguyen Huy] Thiep to my home to explain my
idea to create a triangulation between the three main characters: Quyen,
Nham, Ngu in order to draw out the essence of the film. In the short
story there isn’t a triangle among the three characters but I felt it was
essential to the film. Nham lived with his sister-in-law Ngu in the same
home without knowing that he was her sole emotional outlet during the
years she was alone and far from her husband. It is only with the
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appearance of Quyen, the Viet Kieu who refugee’d and returns and to
whom Nham is drawn that Ngu’s innermost feelings emerge. It is at this
moment that Nham understands the depth of his sister-in-law’s
loneliness, he is moved by the feelings she has for him. A feeling that
goes beyond brother and sister has developed between them.
25
Đặng here explains that what is essential to images of Vietnam is translated through
emergence, an almost spiritual expansion of the inner-world until it becomes
recognizable in the eyes of another. I emphasize in the following reading how intimacy
and submission to the other emerge as telling discourse in the triangulations that Đặng
Nhật Minh has posed. In the space of intimacy and submission we can recognize the
contours of a cinematic gaze that operates outside the prescribed parameters of time,
border zones and politics and inscribes a different envisioning of loss—loss is not to be
reclaimed or mourned, but loss comes to reflect a constitutionality that blurs a
Vietnamese global cultural praxis that can delineate the terms of adequate
representation.
Vietnam’s wartime loss has fixated on the story of its fallen soldiers. Women as
victims are primarily understood as grieving mothers and lonely wives. In Nostalgia for
the Countryside, as in Scent of Green Papaya, the theme of lost daughters takes a more
prominent position. Lost daughters are those who have died as well as those who live in
death. Perhaps the most provocative moment in the film comes during a would-be
sexual encounter between Nhâm and his lonely sister-in-law Chi Ngữ. This encounter
is built up to through several visual renderings of moments of unrequited recognition.
We learn that Chi Ngữ is disappointed repeatedly by her husband, Nhâm ’s brother,
whose only presence in her life comes through his letters telling her of his next long
foray to far off places in search of work. Though Ngữ has been married for five years
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she has only seen her husband a handful of times, each time for no longer than three
days. Growing increasingly distraught Ngữ begins to believe that her husband is
making a fool of her, cavorting with other women while she obediently waits for him.
Her mother chastises her, “When you’re a wife you have to bear things like this. Keep
this to yourself or you’ll be a laughing stock.” Ngữ’s mother’s words thematize the
wife’s duty to silently bear the burdens of her husband’s indiscretions. Ngữ, however,
anguishes over her loss, which is importantly not about her husband, but about herself.
Pouring her heart out to Nhâm, Ngữ cries, “I’ve suffered so much since we married. I’m
losing my womanhood. I’m so afraid.” This loss of womanhood turns Ngữ’s 17 year-
old brother-in-law into a desired object to whom she directs her attentions. In several
of the camera’s shots, Ngữ stares off blankly into space, signifying her loneliness and
discontent. Though she begins to turn her vision towards Nhâm, his is wholly focused
on Quyen. Desire is in constant deferral because Quyen seems to only feel a mild
affection for Nhâm. This triangulated gazing comes full circle when the two women
encounter each other, a quiet scene that I believe holds important lessons for an analysis
of the conjunction point of the unreturned look, an immensely central configuration of
postwar Vietnamese nostalgia.
Halfway through the film, Quyen comes looking for Nhâm. She comes to his
home, also Ngữ’s home and asks if she has seen him. The camera turns to focus on
Ngữ’s expression as she gives Quyen a long once-over; the actress Thúy Hường is
doing her best to distill a reaction of disdain, jealousy and self-doubt. The layers of
jealousy unearthed point at Quyen’s freedom from the duties of marriage, home and
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hearth, things that have bounded Ngữ . What is poignant in this confrontation is
Quyen’s response, which is to avert her eyes permitting Ngữ’s look and assessment.
Quyen’s submission to Ngữ in this brief encounter marks a moment of recognition.
Neither woman is naïve about the difficulties that women face in domestic life. Quyen
has ostensibly fled Vietnam to escape an unhappy marriage. She previously explained
that to escape the refugee camp she had to agree to marry a Western man before finally
being able to “live alone.” In her submission to Ngữ’s assessment, Quyen permits the
gaze that would see in each of them the inverted reflection of the other. In this
moment’s encounter each woman sees in the other what could have been. For
transnational Vietnamese audiences, in Ngữ is registered what might have been had
Quyen stayed in the countryside rather than fleeing with her father. For Ngữ, Quyen
represents both the other woman that she projects as her husband’s and Nhâm ’s
preoccupation, as well as her own alternative possibility. In this field of highly charged
identification there exists both a rejection and a submission. Ngữ must submit to the
identification she encounters in Quyen, because it is to the possibility of her own
alternative reality. In the submission to the other’s looking the film exposes a facet of
the Vietnamese transglobal gaze; it recognizes subjects not through discrete locations
and placement in history and time, but through looking: what is reflected back is a
distillation of desire as a circuitous track that necessitates an other. It seems that all the
desire that Ngữ feels is brought to the fore in the moment she recognizes in Quyen
herself, but not herself.
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The brief encounter with the logic of the gaze in this moment between Ngữ and
Quyen can be further crystallized by referencing back to an earlier instance in Scent of
Green Papaya. The intimate contact between the one who looks and the one who is seen
but never known is illustrated in the mystery young Mùi experiences in looking at the
picture of the family’s long dead daughter, Tố, who peers with constancy from her place
atop the altar. Said Tran,
I’m sort of imprinting the gaze of the characters in order to suggest their
wonder, their looking. It seemed to me the kind of thing one would do at
the birth of cinema. For example, in the very simple scene where Mùi
looks at the photographs on the ancestors’ altar, you see that she is
looking, then you see what she is looking at—very simple. Still, there is
a feeling there that is extremely difficult to define clearly.
26
The film shots are thick with the overlapping directions of what is seen, by whom and
what it means within the realities of a life where a young girl comes as a wraith-like
replacement for the one who was killed. She dies with a childhood malady and the
father comments, in passing, that perhaps she is in a better place. The rapt wonder that
Mùi has in seeing Tố excites her and compels her to feel even closer to her mistress, the
mother figure who has unofficially adopted Mùi as her own. What I find in these
moments of contact is akin to the Baudelairean poet who encounters the woman in the
modern city. There is the contact, the captured moment when time is arrested; when
birth/life/death are experienced in an apparent time collapse. In the contact between
two strangers in the modern city is a shock of recognition. Here is described a nostalgia
for the past that is at one and the same time double-edged with the contours of
‘diasporic intimacy’—that connectedness made possible through distance. “Diasporic
intimacy” is Boym’s term for the uncanniness often experienced by the diasporic who
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has found a reflective nostalgia adequate enough to contain the vicissitudes of longing
and exile, that can contend with both the pains and pleasures of distance and exile. As
the poet in the Baudelaire poem is shocked with recognition in the context of the
modern city, where he little thought he would find such a moment of intimacy, I
suggest that in moments of Vietnamese nostalgia, where time collapses are common,
space is bounded in a single moment’s reflection, images are immediate and corporeal,
the shock of recognition hits with surprising clarity.
To return to the provocative moment between Nhâm and Ngữ, one night when
Ngữ breaks down in tears and seeks solace she asks Nhâm, “Em có thương chị không?”
(Do you care about me?). Yes, he responds. “Em đừng bỏ chị một mình” (Please don’t
leave me). Crying, Ngữ throws her arms around Nhâm and he embraces her, closes his
eyes and the two of them momentarily give into a passing pleasure. Ngữ breaks their
embrace and Nhâm, standing alone, looks down at his hands, which show the evidence
of his enjoyment. He notes, “From this moment on, I became an adult.” In this
climactic moment Ngữ confronts, not her desire for Nhâm, but her fear of her lost
womanhood and loneliness. In addressing this fear to an other, the other that stands as
her object of desire, Ngữ is able to adequately reveal herself and confront her lack. In
Đặng’s words “It is only with the appearance of Quyen, the Viet Kieu who refugee’d and
returns and to whom Nhâm is drawn that Ngữ ’s innermost feelings emerge.” This
triangulation involving Nhâm, Ngữ, and Quyen reveals a necessary reliance on an other,
the other side of one’s identification, which unmasks one’s own. In the next scene of the
film, Ngữ and Nhâm are working in the fields. Ngữ delightedly finds a nest of baby
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birds and joyously picks each one up one-by-one and feeds them her saliva. Ngữ’s
treatment of the birds turns her into a maternal figure and Nhâm looks upon her with a
different kind of desirous attention. Just as Nhâm has now become a man, Ngữ has now
become the maternal, she attains the womanhood she had been so afraid she would
never have. The relationship between these characters constitutes a mutually beneficial
gaze, one that allows the other, the object of desire, to provide narrative closure for
one’s lack or inadequacies. The women, Ngữ and Quyen, embody a foil to each other’s
long search for internal happiness. In Đặng’s film, this triangulation provides benefit to
the Vietnamese national subjects, but remains unsettling for the diasporic.
Diasporic Undoing
On their way home from school, Minh and Quyen’s young cousin Mee are killed
by a truck carrying industrial construction material that crashes into them.
Symbolizing the runaway costs of modernity hurtling at too fast a pace into the
countryside, the truck metaphorically destroys the family’s greatest hope of achieving
happiness and potential economic mobility. Ironically, her future would have been the
closest to being touched by the good fortunes of modern progress. But, I argue, their
deaths also reflect an uncanny fixation in postwar film on the absent other, the lost
daughter that also operates in Tran Anh Hung’s film. After Minh and Mee’s death,
Quyen reflects on her time in the countryside.
Living so long so far away, I forgot where I was from. But now, wherever
I go, wherever I live, I can never forget. I’ve looked for happiness all my
life, but I never found it.
In the recognition of her origins, made possible through the traumatic confrontation
with the death of the two young girls, embodied as the countryside’s woebegone future,
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Quyen comes t o see that what she had been longing for her whole life was not to be
found. The return to her origins initiates a traumatic reckoning of her eternal and
somber ties to the countryside. Upon her departure, Nhâm asks Quyen “Chị có về nữa
không?” (Will you return again?). “I don’t know,” she responds. Quyen’s relation to the
countryside is no longer mediated by a spatial connection but is now mediated in the
memories that she will always retain. In the search for origins and happiness, Quyen’s
return home has brought her face to face with a melancholic reminder of the country’s
lost daughters, such as she seems destined to be.
In the above reading of Nostalgia for the Countryside I attempt to map the
cinematic gaze by seeing how the gaze in this film does not reflect a parallel
identification of viewer to narrative perspective. Reading privileged gaze as an
identificatory politics in postwar narrative is symptomatic of a desire to critique
narrative closure as too facile a trope to adequately represent the realities of
contemporary Vietnamese life and perspective. Đặng attempts to make a film that
would be “representative” and would critically position the world gaze upon Vietnam as
a spiritually composed but economically languishing country. He would direct the
country and the world’s sight on a correct image of Vietnam’s potential and its dangers.
What emerges is a treatise on how notions of ‘self’ and ideas about Vietnam, the
countryside, and origins are composed of vectors of sight and seeing, across the diaspora
and back. History emerges in jolts of recognition as when Ngữ and Quyen share a look
that betrays what might have been.
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Conclusion: Nostalgia and the Lures of Desire
In this chapter I have tried to outline the field of the visible in two films enjoying
transnational acclaim as both potent assemblage of a Vietnamese nostalgia practice and
simultaneously as examples of fetishistic cinematic representational politics. Readings
of the heroic and problematic qualities of subjectivity and identification in these films is
supplemented by my readings in which I examined how the gaze exposes subjectivity as
always only a stain. That is, I have endeavored to show the “spectral nature of
subjectivity: a projected presence whose substance can only be surmised through its
shadow”
27
– we recognize ourselves obliquely through the indirect routes of seeing.
In visual analysis we can perhaps find symptoms of the gaze, instances when the
conventions of seeing are made vulnerable to the conditions of the Real, when what we
expect in vision is fantastically destabilized. What we need is a critical eye that reads
texts and engages the fantasy therein not as an endpoint for analysis but as a means so
that we see the symptom that points us to the conditions of our longing.
In this chapter I ask what is the relationship between the self and other and how
does the camera facilitate this through the gaze? I argue that if we look into the messy
desires and projections that bind we can search out possibility and productivity in
mining them, not in spite of them. In my engagements with past scholarly work on
these films, I suggest that reading the gaze as a form of viewer identification is specular
failure.
These films participate in a travel of affect and this affect bleeds into a form of
cinematic nostalgia. I have understood nostalgia in these films as a marker of the
detritus of the collective dream about Vietnam. From a postwar global perspective
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these films provide entrée to a new framework for identifying authentic Vietnamese
subjectivity that measures the worth and value of war via the affective utterances of
representatives, participants, and victims of war.
As a succinct summation of my political endeavor here I have tried to argue that
what we read is impacted by how we read. Those who have been the experiential
purveyors of war trauma, war memory and war wounds are those who embody, carry in
the body, the detritus of the collective dream gone mad. Up to early 1990s Western
representation has dominated images of Southeast Asia. Marked in cinematic narrative
by allegorical madness, the West has been emboldened to languish in its own madness
while unable to fully attend to the madness in its counterpart—few books or films made
by the West have dealt with the brutality and mania that held a stranglehold on the
imagination of politicos of East and Southeast Asia. As a suggestion for future
scholarship, I believe an engagement with the desires that structure Vietnamese
postwar representation can take us a long way to developing a cultural theory practice
that can confront the realities of vexed Vietnamese postwar life that has included the
building of a Vietnamese nation itself a manager of neo-empire.
In pursuing the love story that undergirds these films’ looking and searching for
nostalgic sentiment, this chapter aspires to contribute to the discourse on loss that
seems fundamentally coeval with love. At the heart of all war, and war is an originary
narrative for a nation like Vietnam, is the telling of love gone terribly awry. How loss is
figured as an unjust and restorable objective has driven the mechanics of national
governance. The melancholy of threatened and then broken national and regional
identifications has given way to a push for the more reasonable process of mourning, the
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replacement of the lost object with another. In A Lover’s Discourse Barthes suggestively
recounts that when exiled from the Image-repertoire—in the instance of the lover’s
symbolic separation from the love object—lovers are thrown into a delirium. “Amorous
passion is a delirium; but such delirium is not alien; everyone speaks of it, it is
henceforth tamed. What is enigmatic is the loss of delirium: one returns to… what?”
(106). What if in mourning and melancholy the question to pursue is not how to
appropriately “let go” of the love object—but to apply analytic pressure to the death of
the love object as a constitutive element. If love is assessed by the degree to which the
love object’s loss and absence has altered the lover, then we are tethered to the objective
of restoring the lover to his originary condition, pre-love. To question what ever was
the love object to begin with? In this scrutiny the love object may disintegrate
altogether leaving us to that question Barthes asks, one returns to….what?
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Chapter Two Endnotes
1
Robert Sklar, “The Politics of Pure Emotion: an interview with Tran Anh Hung,” Cinéaste Fall
26:4 (2001): 69.
2
Đặng Nhật Minh, qtd. in Luong Xuan Thuy, “Woman’s Destiny Through Films By Đặng
Nhật Minh” in Vietnamese Cinematography (Viet Nam: The Gioi Publishers, 2008) 404.
3
For further reading on Vietnam’s renovation cultural policy see Zachary Abuza Renovating
Politics in Contemporary Vietnam (2001), Kim Ninh A World Transformed (2002), and Nguyen-Vo
Thu Huong The Ironies of Freedom (2009).
4
Such films included Tony Bui’s Three Seasons (1999), Le Ly Hayslip’s autobiography-turned-
film Heaven and Earth (1993), Tran Anh Hung’s Cyclo (1995), and Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000).
5
Alice Cross, “Portraying the rhythm of the Vietnamese soul: an interview with Tran Anh
Hung”Cinéaste Summer 20:3 (1993): 35. In this interview Tran explained his interest in making
a film like ‘free and large form’ like a modern painting.
6
“Hiện tôi ở Hà Nội. Nhưng, thưa chị, tôi cần bước chân ra đầu phố thôi là tôi đã có thể gặp
những nông dân như chị. Họ quày những sọt su hào, cà chua, bắp cải nặng trịch, rong ruổi cả
ngày để bán được vài nghìn bạc…Thưa chị, chẳng cần đi xa, nông thôn ở ngay trong thành mà
tôi đang ở.” (Đặng 137, English translation mine)
7
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations. Ed.
Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1968 (188). I was directed to Benjamin’s
discussion of aura through Svetlana Boym’s in-depth analysis of Benjamin’s aura in Future of
Nostalgia (2002), Introduction.
8
Cross 37.
9
Cross 36.
10
Qtd. in Blum-Reid 71.
11
Rey Chow, “Towards an Ethics of Postvisuality: Some thoughts on the Recent Work of
Zhang Yimou,” Poetics Today Winter 25:4 (2004): 676. Because vision and visuality are
implicated in the problematic of seeing and constituting otherness Chow goes on describing that
“[a]gainst the image as such, they [those critics who turn to an ethics of iconophobia as a
vigilance over the image] have popularized a kind of permanent wakefulness—as if one could
combat the lure of the visual by not closing one’s (critical) eyes and as if, simply by remaining
watchful, (critical) sight itself could exorcize and ward off the charms of illusion” (678).
12
Qtd. in Blum-Reid 71.
13
Chow (2004), 678.
14
Sklar 70.
15
See McGowan Chapter 1.
16
Chuong Dai Vo, Unpublished Paper “Nostalgia and Modernity in Diasporic Vietnamese
Films” 2003 (Author’s Private Collection).
17
Interview with W.M. Makki 1995 (qtd. in Blum-Reid 65).
18
Cross 36.
119
19
Cross 36.
20
Tran Dac. “Viet Nam’s Motion Picture Industry After Four Decade: Recognized Achievement
and Worrying Issues” in Vietnamese Cinematography: A Research Journey (2008).
21
“Đây là lần đầu làm phim mà tôi được toàn quyên quyết định mọi vấn dề chi tiêu. Tôi nhớ
lại lởi của một đồng nghiệp Bulgarie nói với tôi trước đây: không bao giở được nhân nhượng
với chủ nhiệm phim. Bây giò thì tôi chả phải nhân nhượng ai. Chủ nhiệm Tất Bình xác định
vơí tôi: đây là phim của ông, người ta tài trợ cho ông. Ông quyết thế nào tôi chi như thế, miễn
làm sao phim cho thật hay không thì bẽ mặt với thiên hạ. Cả đoàn làm phim chúng tôi đều
nhận thức rằng việc làm phim này là một thách thức lớn đối với danh dự của điện ảnh Việt
Nam, bởi vì cùng một lúc đầu tư cho chúng tôi làm phim, Đài NHK còn đầu tư cho 4 đạo diễn
của 4 nước châu Á khác nữa. Phải làm sao phim Việt Nam không thua kém phim các nước đó.
Cái trách nhiệm nặng nề này chúng tôi tự nhận lấy cho mình là đội trưởng một đội bóng đá đi
thi đấu trong khu vực.” (DNM: 2005: 124-125 English translation mine)
22
Chuong Dai Vo, “Vietnamese cinema in the era of market liberalization” in Political Regims
and the Media of Asia, eds. Krishna Sen and Terence Lee (2008): 77.
23
Chuong-Dai Vo, “Vietnamese cinema in the era of market liberalization” in Political Regimes
and the Media in Asia, eds. Krishna Sen and Terence Lee (2008): 77. See this article to read
further on Vo’s analysis of Nostalgia for the Countryside in regards to its concerns about
Vietnamese identity in a globalized economy, the costs and benefits of rapid modernizing, and
the perception of Vietnam by those visitors and returners during Vietnam’s postwar
reconstruction.
24
Tran Dac “Viet Nam’s motion picture industry after four decades” in Vietnamese
Cinematography (2008): 24.
25
Tôi cẩn thận mời Thiệp lại nhà trình bày ý định của mình về mối quan hệ giữa ba nhân vật:
Quyên, Nhâm, Ngữ để tạo ra cái lõi kịch tính bộ phim. Trong truyện ngắn không có mối quan
hệ tay ba này, nhưng tôi thấy nó rất cần thiết cho bộ phim. Nhâm sống với chị Ngữ trong một
nhà, nhưng cậu không biết rằng cậu là chỗ dựa tình cảm duy nhất đối với chị Ngữ trong những
ngày sống cô độc xa chồng. Chỉ khi xuất hiện Quyen, cô gái Việt kiều di tản trở về và Nhâm
bị hút hồn vào người phụ nữ đó thì những tình cảm thẩm kín bên trong của người chị dâu mới
trỗi dậy. Đến lúc này Nhâm mới hiểu được hết nỗi cô đơn của chị mình, cậu cảm thấy xúc
động trước những tình cảm của chị Ngữ dành cho cậu. Một thứ tình cảm hơn cả tình chị em đẫ
xuất hiện giữa hai người. (DNM 126, English translation mine)
26
Tran interview in Cineaste (Cross: 1994).
27
See McGowan Chapter 1.
120
Chapter Three
South Vietnamese Refugee Fathers: Secrets, Ethnicity, and Affective Traces in
the fiction of le thi diem thuy and Nam Le
The Vietnamese refugee father stands as a peculiar mix of humility and
stubbornness. Humble because, ostensibly, Vietnamese masculinity failed him, and
stubborn because rather than submit to that failure he would shed all that binds him to
Vietnam and shift his bodily affiliation to other lands. In my own family that was
relayed as a story of my father’s willingness to journey with the boat refugee wave of
1979, even if it meant leaving without his young wife or newborn daughter. Such was
his ardor for a different reality.
With the publication of recent fictional works by Vietnamese diasporic writers,
literary representation of Vietnamese postwar experience has revisited the resonance of
the South Vietnamese father. How does he fare after all the challenges of resettlement
and acculturation, and in the eyes of his children, who is this figure that set the family
on such a path?
1
An examination of childhood and children’s relations to important
parental figures provides an opportunity to think through the emotional worlds of the
postwar Vietnamese experience. In the stories of authors le thi diem thuy and Nam Le,
I think through how the child’s developing self-formation narratively emerges against
the father’s dissipating presence. According to object relations theory, children attach
to “objects” in their environment and “introject” them in the process of ego formation.
Following this theory, I examine the relationship between children narrators and their
fathers to examine how the affective relationship between them constitutes the “object”
that is intimately tied up with “self”-formation.
2
The child characters in the stories I
examine contemplate how their Vietnamese refugee fathers exist within an affective
121
realm that the children understand variously: as a reflection on the self, as a rejection of
the self, as an ongoing dimension of the historical impact of war on their most intimate
spaces. I argue that the elision of the South Vietnamese experience of war, in both U.S.
and Vietnamese historiography, must be explored to identify its affective consequences
for successive generations. I explore what it means for a child to grow up with a
spectral presence in the form of a father figure who may be physically present, but is
emotionally and psychologically removed in ways that haunt the child’s developing
sense of self. The narratives I examine focus on the child’s relationship to father figures
who exist in the text as embodied apparitions, virtual presences, extant fragments,
always just beyond the child’s full emotional and psychological grasp. I argue that the
affective trace of the Vietnamese refugee father’s spectral presence reflects fiction’s
grappling with the significance of a loss at large in the imaginative comprehension of
the Vietnam War/American War.
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1993) elucidates how haunting specters
exist in the U.S. literary canon. In her book, Morrison describes an American literary
imagination that is beset with a curious racializing specter. By exploring important
texts in the American literary canon, Morrison probes the ways that specific invocations
of “Africanness” shore up a white “Americanness.” Morrison apprehends the specters of
Africanness as an important counterpart to U.S. racial logic. According to Morrison,
American literature, especially because it grapples with what it means to be American,
operates against the specters of those who underwrite that modern American liberal
subject. I borrow Morrison’s reminder to read American literature with an attentive
eye towards its shadow presences. I believe the corpus of American literature about the
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Vietnam War/American War continues to be haunted by the spectral presence of the
South Vietnamese war experience, an experience that the two authors I examine name
outright through their attention to the emotional relationships between refugee
children and their South Vietnamese refugee fathers. With the introduction of these
two writers to the body of fiction dealing with the aftermath of the war, the South
Vietnamese soldier and the refugee father, move as a spectral presence to be further
considered in our understanding of the representational politics of war and exile. David
Lloyd, in writing about Irish specters of hunger, argues that to adequately contend with
the devastation of elided and yet still present pasts, we must “make room for specters.”
3
That is, rather than to mourn or reconcile with the horrors of unspeakable pasts, we
must find a means to let specters have life, not in order to make amends, but because
they point us to “understanding the unrealized projects of the past not as the mere
debris of progress, but as the openings in which other possibilities live on,” “[f]or the
dead are the contemporaries of every unfinished struggle against domination” (179). In
Vietnamese American literature that contends with the South Vietnamese father, we
must make room for the ambivalent process of reckoning that is so well preserved in the
ways that children experience their parents. As Avery Gordon so thoroughly explains
in Ghostly Matters (1997), “Haunting is a part of our social world” (27).
Because the reception of these two fictional works has leaned heavily on their
authors’ biographical details, I examine how the works, in turn, confront ethnic reading
habits in the West and how the texts imagine and convey ethnicity through their
particular engagement with South Vietnamese father figures. I focus on the ways that
affective relationships between refugee fathers and their children are written in the
123
context of a postwar Vietnamese diasporic literature that attempts to delineate the
outlines of a specific Vietnamese diaspora, that of the children of the refugee wave.
Because these texts cover experiences that are common to refugee families, they move
through themes of separation, diasporic intimacies, dashed hopes and fitful
reconciliations; they fall into that set of “representative” Vietnamese refugee texts.
4
But
through an examination of the narrative choices they make, and an analysis of how their
works figure into ethnic literary reading and writing practices, I argue that these works
show the difficulty of positing a fully separate and self-contained literary self in relation
to the telling of the Vietnamese refugee tale.
Departing from the earlier works of Le Ly Hayslip and Lan Cao, whose family
based narratives were burdened with the representative task of introducing Vietnamese
people to the West, Le’s and le’s works are contrastingly more lyrical, due in no small
part to a loosening from the constraints of cultural explanation--a hobbling bane of
contemporary ethnic literature. Hayslip’s autobiographic When Heaven and Earth
Changed Places (1993) introduced Western readers to Vietnamese war victims as female
and always full of forgiveness for the transgressions of their male counterparts. Cao’s
Monkey Bridge (1997) again centered on the ways that Vietnamese women and young
girls experienced postwar life as karmic retribution for the weaknesses of Vietnamese
men. Both of these stories emphasized that for the postwar subject, healthy
acculturation and acclimation to Western family and social life were signs of salvation.
Nam Le and le thi diem thuy offer narratives that focus not on what it takes to
meet possible futures, but on the nature of living with the disappeared past. In this
chapter I examine both Le’s collection of short stories, The Boat (2008), with a particular
124
emphasis on his literary engagement with children and fathers (most notably in his
standout opening story “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride” and closing story “The
Boat”), and le’s debut novel The Gangster We are All Looking For (2003) about a young
girl’s comprehension of new life in San Diego with her father. These works bring
Vietnamese fatherhood to personal reflection under the mantle of children’s poignant
longing for a parental figure larger than war, politics, and all that could make their
mothers cry. In the works of these two authors, themselves children of refugee parents,
I locate a poetics of self-dissolution and self-becoming that brings postwar Vietnamese
diasporic subjectivity into intimate articulation with South Vietnamese wartime
masculinity. I am interested in the ways that these authors (de-)compose narrative
subjectivity and what it means for a practice of ethnic literary reading that, in its
narrowest sense, searches out the ‘ethnic’ as a marker of difference. This chapter offers,
at this time, only a brief sketch of the ways that these two works limn the cultural
parameters of South Vietnamese and refugee masculinity, I look at how these texts
attempt to delineate this masculinity’s cultural and ontological edges, a project that I
believe is simultaneous with other efforts to do the same, done notably through the
popular work of figures like the diasporic personality Nguyen Ngoc Ngan and diasporic
cultural mediums such as Paris By Night. This is a dialogic exchange that is playing out
among different cultural fields; I describe this further in my chapter on the fiction of
Nguyen Ngoc Ngan.
I focus on these authors’ works because they touch upon two primary issues: the
first being the relationship of children to their fathers in the unfolding of Vietnamese
refugee experience, and the second being the function of the Vietnamese diasporic ethnic
125
writer in the politics of representation within the domain of “ethnic literature.” These
two issues drive my analysis and help to elucidate the aesthetics of affect in the literary
exposition of Vietnamese postwar experience. Affect continues to powerfully
underwrite Vietnamese diaspora literature, as writers pursue the themes of displacement
and reconciliation negotiated among family members who, at first settlement, have only
each other to turn to. But I argue that an attention to the operations of affect is of
central concern because it exposes the fraught nature of relationality, how subjects do
or do not connect to each other, that lies at the heart of the Vietnamese postwar
narrative. By this I mean to point attention to an extant tutelary aspect of the
Vietnamese war related narrative. Images that circulate within narratives about
postwar Vietnam include orphans in need of quick rescue, ghost-soldiers, ghost-war
victims, war-brides, refugee bodies, foreign sponsors, a whole nation’s disappearance
and its people cast into the wide-open sea. For these refugee bodies, salvation came
only when ports were friendly, when camps were made available to these suspiciously
indignant, resolutely homeless dissenters. These images are inexorably about needs
that linger. I believe these tutelary aspects infect the reading practices of Western
readers encountering “Vietnam” through the words of the refugee children’s generation.
This chapter puts that reading practice under scrutiny and re-reads what it means for
Nam Le to receive such inordinate recognition (and disbelief) for his ability to “step
outside” himself and narrate so many different subjectivities across his collection of
short stories. I believe this recognition exceeds the “ethnic literature” tenet that ethnic
writers should only write their own ethnic selves, and that this recognition conveys, in
spite of itself, a fascination with the affective place Vietnam has held in the global
126
discourse. Responses such as Nam Le has received point to how Vietnamese bodies are
read as affective placeholders for a particular historical moment. The Vietnamese war
ravaged body is a highly important one to Western war memory practices. For Nam Le
to both be a writer of the representative Vietnam war victim’s story and explore other
types of national subjectivities within one collection threatens not just an ontology at
the heart of Vietnamese victim storytelling, but, where his writing celebrates the fiction
of that storytelling, it threatens to displace the affective relationship between the
Vietnamese war victim and its tutelary West.
The stories I examine use the intergenerational transfer of affects as inherited
and as relational to create an aesthetic that intersects with the revelatory nature of
“ethnic literature” in contradictory ways. The corporeal body as site of personal
revelation is manifested in the history of our affects. This was what made Hayslip’s
autobiography so pressing; it provided the West with an affected counterpart, someone
on whom to pin national self-flagellations and recriminations. Through her heart-
rending tragedies, Western--and particularly U.S.-- guilt was confirmed and cathected.
But in a reading of these present authors’ descriptions of the child coming-to-be against
the figuration of the father threatening-to-dissolve, I see a critical confrontation with
the generic expectations of “ethnic literature.” These authors’ works move the “ethnic”
Vietnamese refugee subject to a different register. Vietnamese refugee fathers are the
source and the site of ambivalently experienced emotional ties for their children, and
these ambivalences cannot be neatly attenuated by recourse to paradigms of
‘forgiveness’ and reconciliation. These authors’ narratives suggest that through the
eyes of children who always need and through the eyes of fathers who cannot always
127
give, we can locate an archive of affective ties that underwrite Vietnamese postwar
refugee life in ways that disrupt Western paradigms of victim storytelling. The story of
the fall of South Vietnam is a story of how failure wrested bodies into unforeseen
circumstances. These stories explore the aftermath that families experience as they
make sense of such upheaval.
The perspective of children in the narrative exposition of Vietnamese diasporic
family life evinces a tension between the descriptive voice, which describes the quotidian
events of everyday immigrant life, and the prescriptive voice, which describes the more
abstract experience of everyday life such as, for the refugee family, the experience of
racism and racialization or the child’s steadfast desire to find heroism in parents’ every
day lives in a new homeland. These two voices can be generalized to describe the
function of ethnic literature. It shares with the larger reading public how life is lived
under the constraints of being “ethnic” in the U.S.. What Le and le do is concentrate
stories concerning Vietnamese refugee family life to the prescriptive voice, where the
emotional world is more fully traveled. This, I argue, is in keeping with the
expectations of current ethnic literary authorship that must reveal much more than the
fictions of mundane happenings; for Vietnamese refugee literature, it must reveal the
fallout of war on the psychic and emotional life of war’s last victims, the children who
obediently followed where their parents went. Most poignantly, the relationship to
fathers takes a prominent place in both authors’ endeavors and I use this opportunity to
probe fathers as a theme because it has had less attention in Asian American literature
than of the more readily accepted trope of mothers and daughters.
5
Because aspects of
these authors’ works rely on semi-autobiography, they fall more broadly into the
128
autobiographical fiction genre that continues to circumscribe how mainstream audiences
can grasp the experience of Vietnamese generations in diaspora. That is, the narration
of the Vietnamese experience in diaspora, how families have carried on in the wake of
their resettlements is tethered to an ontology that wishes to see the story of Vietnam as
transparent and palpable, a project that I argue marks these works as part of the
continuum of postwar reckoning and reconciliation. Narratives told through the voice
of the child give a roadmap for how Western audiences can be “accountable” to the
effects of violence of empire on the lives of children. Among Western readers, if there is
a way to deal with the guilt of American action in the Vietnam War it is through its
effect on children.
Genre and Aesthetics in the Formulation of the Self
Because mass exodus from Vietnam organized around last minute preparations,
families often traveled in turns, with one or both parents separated from their children
with hopes to be reunited at a later time. Here, I pause for a brief description of a
pioneering Vietnamese American novel to illustrate the tendencies of popularized
narratives about Vietnamese family life. Following the successful lineage of Asian
American fictional works such as Woman Warrior (1989) and Joy Luck Club (1990), Lan
Cao’s Monkey Bridge (1997) did much to bring the inner world of the Vietnamese refugee
family into the light of a mainstream Western reading audience. The book emphasized
the viable metaphorical use of the Vietnamese female body and detailed the wrenching
obligations of motherhood and childhood between two protagonists, Thanh and her
daughter Mai. Thanh, unable to come to terms with the loss of her homeland and
unable to fit her body to the cultural environment of the United States, ultimately
129
succumbs to her body’s sickness. Mai, torn between a daughter’s love for her mother
and a desire for and ability to adapt to Western life, is finally orphaned and put in the
capable hands of American caretakers. Moving on the underside of this story is another
secret one that tells of Thanh’s dubious parentage. Thanh is the literal and figurative
child of Vietnam’s tumultuous political landscape. At the culminating point of this
secret story Thanh witnesses the man who has raised her murder the landlord who was,
in fact, her biological father. As an introduction to the Vietnamese family, this novel
followed the conventions of popular Asian American literature, displacing the political
narrative of Vietnam onto the emotionally driven individual failings of men and playing
out its consequences on the bodies of women. The ultimate hope for Mai, the daughter,
is to be freed from the karma of a violent Vietnamese past, which comes about when the
mother(land), ravaged by the atrocity of war, is finally destroyed. The use of
Vietnamese women’s bodies to represent the limits and possibilities of Vietnamese
subjectivity in the West is available only via the failures of Vietnamese masculinity.
Politics are played out through the hands of men, as landlords, peasants and heads of
families; they are the ones who fight and lose wars, make devastating decisions and
chart the course of family legacy.
Lan Cao’s professional training was as a lawyer and she had little noteworthy
literary training. With the publication of Le and le’s fictional works, Vietnamese
diasporic literature moves into the sphere of Western literary professionalism. The
aesthetic quality of both works I consider has been a strong point of literary critics’
appraisal. This high acclaim reflects a celebration of the literary accomplishments of the
1.5 and second generation Vietnamese in diaspora whose identities move away from
130
“exile” and “refugee” towards “diasporic” and “cosmopolitan.” Nam Le has achieved
remarkable success, winning several internationally prominent awards and writing
fellowships, and has been reviewed twice by the New York Times, once by Michiko
Kakutani who claimed in a review (entitled, “A World of Stories from a Son of
Vietnam”) that “in most cases his sympathy for his characters and his ability to write
both lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits enormous visceral power.”
6
Though his are transcontinentally narrated short stories, it is still his first story “Love
and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” a roman-a-clef treatment
of a Vietnamese Australian’s relationship with his father mediated through the
character’s own fictional writing, that is “[b]y far the most powerful, most fully realized
story in his collection.”
7
le thi diem thuy, too, has been reviewed in the New York Times
with positive acclaim for her “deft” use of language and for prose that is “precise and
uncluttered.”
8
Both writers’ talents were honed in professional writing residencies and
le too has won several prominent awards and fellowships, including ones from the
Guggenheim Foundation and Radcliffe Foundation. These professional biographical
details preface my reading of their texts because they help to imply the degree to which
Vietnamese authored texts are now subject to measures of literary pedigree-ism. That
is, their works may exceed being merely “ethnic lit” because of the critical value their
authors have garnered. These texts, then, are more “art” than previous literature of the
Vietnamese postwar experience, lending them a performative and representational
value. They are lyrical, imagined, made-up. The professionalization of the narration of
war experience, though, belies the near-shock that met Nam Le’s other pieces in which
he uses Jewish, Colombian, and Japanese narrators, while it bespeaks the comparatively
131
muted reaction to le thi diem thuy’s work, considered much closer to her own
biography.
These works negotiate children’s perspectives as they reflect on their parents,
especially their fathers. The filial duty to parents extends, I believe, to the diasporic
writer’s sense of duty to the history of diaspora. A question arises, is there an obligation
to family and diaspora that emerges in literary representation? This assumption is
critiqued in Hari Kunzru’s review of The Boat in which Kunzru comments that in the
opening story, “Le is struggling with the problems of becoming a minority cultural
worker (to commodify or not to commodify, that is the question).”
9
Kunzru concludes
his review stating that “Le is starting to grapple with the subtleties of authenticity, but
one comes away feeling that it’s not really his subject, that he has a future as a very
different kind of writer.”
10
Kunzru’s comments reflect a fatigue at the mire of “war
porn” that “Love and Honor” evokes, which comes close to a disdain for practices of
effete literary multiculturalism.
11
Says Kunzru of “Love and Honor,” “Amazingly, Dad
turns out to be a native of My Lai, a survivor of the massacre – exactly the type of
material that is gold dust to the experience-scavengers of Iowa.”
12
In a “damned if he
does, damned if he doesn’t” situation, Le commented that if he was going to write about
the war and go the “ethnic route” then he would do so unapologetically.
13
However,
Kunzru’s comments point out the pressures for ethnic writers to produce knowledge
about their “selves” through a recognizably self-revelatory literature.
In light of this pressure I would like to comment on the autobiographical details
that inform these works and the ways that “ethnicity” and representation form an
alliance in the propagation of transparent subjectivity. Rey Chow argues, in regards to
132
film in general, and The Joy Luck Club in particular, about the representational power of
Western and non-Western subjects:
In terms of the conventions of representation, the West and its “others”
are thus implicitly divided in the following manner: the West is the place
for language games, aesthetic fantasies, and fragmented subjectivities; the
West's others, instead, offer us “lessons” about history, reality, and
wholesome collective consciousnesses. This division has much to tell us
about the ways “ethnicity” functions to produce, organize, and cohere
subjectivities in the “multicultural” age. (100)
Chow goes on to describe the cultural push for the autobiographical element as a part of
the multicultural agenda to exhume the Other’s interiority from its dark recesses.
Chow refers to Foucault’s disciplinary “repressive hypothesis” as the mechanism that
urges the unveiling of one’s secret and repressed inner world. Says Chow, “Ethnicity is
here the ‘secret’--the truth of subjectivity--that must be released into the open in order
for human social identity to be properly established” (105). Thus Chow argues that
non-western subjects are under the pressure to relieve themselves of the burden of their
secret ethnic selves by virtually unveiling in cultural texts via confessions, melodramas,
memoirs and autobiographies. Thus these works would instantiate ethnicity as a
fundamental purveyor of subjective identity. Chow’s criticism of ethnicity as a
technology of ontology speaks to what I see as the literary market pressure for
Vietnamese-identified authors to pen narratives that will push “Vietnamese” themes
such as suffering, national failure, and the pursuit of redemption, which stand in
remarkably well for what Chow calls “postmodern explorations of humans in general”
(108, emphasis original). As an addendum to this it is important to consider the life of
“secrets” and their importance to specific humans. According to Chow, secrets push for
exposure, and the ethnic subject is purportedly full of these hidden potentials.
133
Following the repressive hypothesis, secrets are a burden to subjects who endure them,
a burden relieved through a “coming out.” But as secrets intersect with a literary
aesthetic, they can hold much more potential. By their very nature, secrets are valuable
because of the shroud that they live in. David Jauss, literary critic and writer, argues
that secrets attain their value through the weight of the silence that buries them. A
secret is like carbon turned to diamonds: “to reveal it in a way that conceals it—in other
words, to tell a lie about it—allows the secret to retain the luster that silence has given
it” (10). Jauss encourages fiction writers to develop a literary “autobiographobia,” to see
that a revealing of oneself does and ought to come from an expressed interest in the
lives of others rather than through an explicit focus on the self. This indirect exposure
of the self is a narrative technique that would vary the sometimes self-indulgent
qualities of hyper self-revelation. I believe that the authors under consideration work at
the juncture of these two pressures, to reveal oneself at once with a simultaneous
agenda towards fiction in general. I argue that for a literary market interested in
redemptive storytelling from the sons and daughters of South Vietnam’s exodus, an
insistence on maintaining the value shroud of secrecy is of necessity, lest the story
implode, its viscera eviscerated. The ability to tell only so much, and not to indulge the
educated reader with too much “undressing” is an important criteria put to ethnic
literature.
Laura Kang offers a critical intervention in the disciplinary categorization of
Asian American texts. In Compositional Subjects (2002) Kang explores how the shifting
location of Asian American texts across disciplinary categorizations bespeaks presumed
knowledge about the Asian American subject. In her examination of the canonization
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and generic categorization of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976) as
autobiography across multiple disciplines (women’s studies, Asian American studies,
American studies, and literature) against the text’s own refusal to participate in naming,
Kang concludes that:
Rather than a racist or culturally ignorant mistake, the autobiographical
fixation of the book has been crucial to this canonization by affirming the
socially inclusionary capacities of literary studies. I would extend this to
suggest that the book's canonization has paved the grounds for the later
establishment of “Asian American literature” as a legible and legitimate
field of literary study. (63)
Kang argues that one fundamental way of legitimating literary study was to embrace a
politics of difference through which the “Asian American experience” was most ideally
crystallized in The Woman Warrior, a text that could be marked by presumptions about
the author’s gendered and ethnic social identity as resolutely “Other.” It wasn’t so
much racist reading practices that were at issue; the issue was the legitimation of
contemporary literary study. Kang’s critique further explains that ethnic subjects and
their fictional works serve the legitimating needs of disciplinary formation. I
extrapolate that “postwar subjects” and their fictional tales can also serve a function in
legitimating not just ethnic literature but also the national project of postwar
reconciliation. Together Chow and Kang provide important frameworks for my critical
reading of the literary reception of The Boat and The Gangster because of the heightened
interest in these works as “representative” texts of the postwar Vietnamese experience,
rather than of the postmodern Asian American experience.
The writers I examine develop alter-egos in their narratives that borrow heavily
from their own autobiographical history and write narrative arcs that are familiar to the
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experiences of children of refugees to the U.S. Inherent to both authors’ work, though,
is a deviation from the expectations of transparent story-telling; they do not work
within the expository moves of “ethnic” literature, which in its most trite formulation
gives a crash course in cultural competence and assumes a correlation between the
content of a literary work and the author’s experience.
14
The “voice” that emerges as a
result of the aesthetic choices made by both writers leads to a questioning of the identity
of that “voice”: whose is it and how does it work its ideological maneuvers? Beyond
ideology, how does the literary self voice its most basic desires? That these author’s
represent a generation brought up in the West allows their literary works to more
easily fit within diasporic national frames, in le thi diem thuy’s case it is “Asian
American” and in Nam Le’s case it is “Asian Australian” – although I would argue that
Nam Le’s unique success has given him cache as a cosmopolitan writer, made more
malleable for the needs of a global literary circuit. And so I explore the ways that
“voice” and identity are carved out of an affective aesthetics that forms the structural
backbone of their respective pieces.
How Fathers Figure
In a literary study of post-colonial narratives Paul Sharrad argues that the
autobiographic narration of childhood can be symbolic of empire. He writes, “[t]he
depiction of growth from childhood can also dramatise the psychology of colonial
experience and, in the process, exorcise the legacies of unexamined symbols,
assumptions and emotional responses inherent in the ‘trauma’ of growing into and out
of colonialism.”
15
According to Sharrad, childhood memories, explicated in the
autobiographical narrative, attend to the shifting terrain of post-colonial traumas that
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register deeply in the psyche of the child. This contention that childhood narratives are
embedded with the drama of empire is especially Freudian and follows the repressive
hypothesis. Says Sharrad,
The prevalence of memories of childhood in post-colonial fiction can be
put down to the need for rehearsal-celebration-cum-exorcism of the
‘birth’, ‘growth’ and ‘maturation’ of a new society as well as an escape
back to the comforting womb. In either case, it evidences a consciousness
of exile from the parent and the past even as it seeks to examine the
qualities of both in order to determine the outlines of a new self.
16
Here Sharrad echoes the paradigmatic (de-)linking of the post-colonial child to/from an
originary womb. Overtures about the trauma of this preternaturally maternal
disconnection are expressed through the theoretical work on postcolonial families, in
particular about those in exile. This literature, often issued from a feminist scholarship,
outlines the peripheral and, therefore, progressive position of the third world
postcolonial woman subject who, as mother, must juggle the responsibilities of cultural
representation and, often, motherhood.
17
This body of scholarship privileges the
“mother” in “motherland” and reads children’s narratives as speaking specifically to
connections with the mother. In the post-colonial condition, Vietnamese refugees must
contend with the place of the father. It is often the father’s failures, his traumas and his
ghosts that shadow the consciousness of Vietnamese diasporic family life. Parenting is
clear. It comes with expected conventions and responsibilities: genuine love and care
being unquestioned protocols. What is less certain is the responsibility of the child to
parents. This question was framed earlier by Lan Cao, whose novel Monkey Bridge
described the searing responsibility that confronted Mai, a daughter who was burdened
with the duty to care for her disfigured and culturally unassimilated mother. But it is
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her mother’s brokenness over the loss of her father(s) that the novel focuses on.
Similarly, love and caring for and by father figures emerges as a central concern of the
two authors I examine.
Memorizing faces in the dark: The Gangster We Are All Looking For
Set in a soon-to-be predominantly Vietnamese ethnic district of San Diego, The
Gangster We Are All Looking For describes a young girl’s early life with her father in the
U.S.; her mother had been left standing on a beach in Vietnam. At the age of six the
young narrator escapes Vietnam with her father and is raised among a group of men
that she would refer to as uncles, not because they shared a blood relation, but because
they were men who had made the boat exodus with them. Together they merged into a
patchwork of kinship. The men would eventually work as household laborers for her
father’s sponsor and so the group are tentatively welcomed into their first American
home. In lyrical prose le describes a childhood of rapt fascination with the wonders of
everyday objects. One day the young narrator fixates on a curio cabinet that holds a
butterfly encased in a glass disk. Eager to free the butterfly the narrator smashes the
disk into the cabinet and, as a result, along with her father and uncles, is promptly
evicted. These fanciful stories constitute a narrative that frames itself around the
perspective of a young girl, tireless with curiosity about the world around her and
infinitely infatuated with the myth of her father. The child’s perspective has been a
central conceit of scholarship concerned with alternative visions of “national
experience.” Indeed, Rocio Davis argues that Asian American childhood challenges
“national experience” and raises questions regarding self-representation and
signification. He argues, “The increasingly dialogic nature of life writing reflects a
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multivoiced cultural situation that allows the subject to control and exploit the tensions
between personal and communal discourse within the text and signify on a discursive
level” (Davis 165). Similarly, Alicia Otano’s study of child perspective in Asian
American bildungsroman argues for a sustained analysis of child perspective as a
literary device, not simply to be read as an anthropological corollary between character
and author. Arguing for looking closely at literary technique, Otano says “It is a series
of choices made by the author which attribute the narrator with a particular
consciousness which belongs to a child. These choices are reflected and can be studied
by analyzing the language used to transmit the child’s voice and vision” (16). Otano
traces the theoretical arguments of literary scholar Yuri Lotman and says that by
centering point-of-view the literary text can be understood as a re-creation of the world
seen by a particular consciousness. “Point of view is, thus, inherent in the very
definition of literature and plays a major role in structuring a model for the relationship
between a personality and the world” (17). This creates an argument for the primacy of
the child’s perspective as a focalizing technique as it relates a perspective of the world.
Otano argues that
In this type of literature, the use of a young narrator provides an
innovative angle of vision for the author because of its naivete and
immature understanding, or exquisite perception characteristic to
childhood. At the same time […] the child’s need to be outspoken and
tell everything only serves to emphasize the hypocrisy of an adult world.
(37)
However, Otano is invested in the purchase of a narrator who eventually comes into full
adult consciousness that can “balance” the demands of living in an inside/outside duality
of “home” culture and mainstream American culture.
18
In this line of argument there is
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an investment in the fruition of a mature adult perspective that will eventually bring the
narrative to a proper understanding, no longer naïve but mature and capable. Here
David Shih’s work on Vietnamese autobiography in Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh’s South
Wind Changing (2004) is instructive. Shih argues that Vietnamese autobiography in
English radically alters the conventions of Western autobiography because it challenges
the presumptions of selfhood.
19
Where traditional autobiography relies on the
narrator’s expertise on his/her own self and experience, the Vietnamese refugee
experience has made the centering of a “self” distinct from the group untenable. In sum,
since the Vietnamese war experience is predicated on the systemic violence that was
unleashed widely, there is no way to tell one’s autobiographic story without a forthright
attention to other people’s devastation. Though Shih’s work treats autobiography and
not bildungsroman, I believe the correlation between the genres in their common
investment in a developing “self” warrants putting them in dialogue because it bears on
the pressures placed on contemporary Vietnamese diasporic authors in “ethnic
literature.” As writers who want to “correct” perceptions of Vietnam that the war had
done much to make murky, and who must delineate the specificity of a Vietnamese
diasporic literature, the writers I examine must confront the pressure to enfigure a
coherent narrative “self.”
If, as I argue, narrative fictions about the postwar Vietnamese diasporic
experience operate within a literary continuum of reconciliation and resolution, I
suggest that le thi diem thuy’s use of the child perspective makes it impossible to
conclude a neat presumption of narrative reliability. What is described, through the
vision of the child, amounts to an “incomplete” picture of events as they happened.
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What clouds it is the child’s wild affections for her father, a kind of complete ardor born
of the fact that he carried her across the ocean and together they had survived. Of her
memories on the boat exodus the narrator recalls,
We were escaping so we needed darkness. But I don’t remember
darkness and I don’t remember light. I was waiting in the boat, and the
boat filled with people; but I remember no one other than my father. He
walked slowly toward me, gently pushing everyone else aside. (108)
Her love for him blossomed in the years they spent, an exclusive duo, in America and
through how he manages, in the midst of refugee struggle, to allow for her to live out
the fullest imaginative world of a child.
The focalization of the child’s voice allows le to effect another narrative
technique. By using the child’s simple descriptive language, le crafts devastatingly
simple observations. Such examples are often found in relation to how the narrator
understands her parent’s pains. In this example, the young girl is flush with excitement
to release a trapped butterfly. She can hear it crying and tells her uncles about the
power of crying, how we should do all we can to appease the one who cries. An uncle
says,
“But what does crying mean in this country? Your Ba cries in the garden
every night and nothing comes of it.”
“Just water for Mel’s lawn.”
“Nothing.”
They went back to work. (27)
These passages are left open, the narrator does nothing to unpack their meaning, to
assuage readers that she knows how to hear this and what emotionally to do with it. I
suggest that this manner of opening up the narrative invites readers to fill in the
emotional work that the narrator, as a young and vulnerable child, cannot. The
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prospect of a child being glibly confronted with the fact of her father’s crying each
night, helpless and alone, coming so matter-of-factly lets us in on the delayed
understanding of a child. The reader is engaged affectively, asked to surrender to the
jarring experience of a child’s recognition that her father is broken and scared.
When her mother finally reunites with them the young family moves into a
small apartment in which her parents’ bed is across the room from hers. The cramped
quarters colluded with the child’s sense of boundless contact. The narrator describes
one night “I heard muffled laughter, whispers, the word “Anh” and then quiet. / Beside
me my parents became long and dark bodies rising and falling like waves” (61). le’s
novel is replete with forthright descriptions of intimate and emotional moments very
much in keeping with the aesthetic quality of children’s language. In the reality of tight
spaces where refugee families lived, the young girl describes how intimate spaces would
play an essential role in her coming to knowledge of herself and her parents. Her ‘self’
develops from an intimate knowledge of her parents. The diasporic intimacy
engendered in these spaces pervades the narrator’s eventual sense of self. She later
reflects on her father,
By the way we’re sitting, with legs slightly apart, hands flat on our knees,
torsos bent forward, and by the way we’re laughing, first with our eyes
and then our heads thrown back, it is clear to everyone around us that we
have become each other. I dream we live in one room. It is a small room.
We share a bed. As I am lying down to sleep, he is getting ready to
leave. He sits down on the edge of the bed and I know, from the weight
of his body, that he is leaving forever. (120)
le’s use of the child perspective in tone and indicative voice to describe her sensory
knowledge of her environment makes this narrative especially in touch with physical
space and bodily discernments. In the above passage the narrator easily sees herself in
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her father, they are the same. The child has not only turned into her father, but her
father has become her. The borders of their selves have taken on an aqueous quality.
This is to suggest that in the face of the narrator’s eventual departure--she would run
away from her father’s increasing drunkenness and violence--she is inextricably
connected to him not just by filial loyalty, but by an identification that has taken root
inside her. John Hawley argues that the search for the father in Asian American
literature signals a desire for an assertion of identity and selfhood. Hawley argues this
mostly in relation to male protagonists who seek a father figure to whom they can safely
identify and find resolution. le’s novel undoes the desire for a sense of self by offering
identity as something born from a daughter’s life long devotion rather than born of
frustrated desire for an impossible object. She says, “I grew up studying my father so
closely as to suggest I was certain I saw my future in him” (116). The bitterly sweet
impact of this understanding is written into the edges of the novel’s structure. The
adolescent, then teenager, and then adult narrator would run away, eventually moving a
continent apart to get distance from her parents. In a particularly moving passage the
narrator describes an incident when she had run away and her father had found her.
Here I quote at length:
Before I had run away for good, my father once came to pick me up at a
shelter. As we sat in a conference with two counselors, he was asked if
there was anything he wanted to say. He shook his head. When pressed,
he looked down at his hands. He apologized for what his hands had done.
The counselors understood this to mean he was taking responsibility for
his drunken rages. They nodded in approval. But then he drew his
palms together and apologized for all that his hands had not been able to
do. He spread his hands wide open, and said, in Vietnamese, to anyone
who could understand, there were things he had lost grasp of.
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The room seemed to shrink in the face of his sorrow. Beside him the two
counselors were like tight little shrubs no one had ever watered. I
thought they had no right to frown at my father. I could not wait to get
us out of there. I told the counselors that I was ready to go home. I
remember crossing the parking lot, my hand in my father’s hand, the two
of us running to the car as though we were escaping together again.
(119)
Filial duty would explain that the narrator stands by her father in the face of
Western interlopers who would threaten a father’s righteous patriarchy. I am
particularly struck though by the imagery of the two holding hands and running
together, an image that suggests their collusion, their togetherness and of course the
reference to the original escape. le’s development of this child narrator though stops
short of issuing a perspective that historically or biographically gives way to authentic
“interiority.” Her story is not interested in developing the child’s interiority and agency
as such. What is developed instead is a literary aesthetics that is rooted in Vietnamese
refugee experience that knows well the intimacy of small spaces and the emotionality of
family dramas that are set to the landscape of a child’s busy imagination. le’s premise is
to explore the father’s impact on a little girl. The father is a former South Vietnamese
soldier, released from his term in a re-education camp, who then set sail in the open
waters. In his new land he is a gardener, able only to keep his family in impoverished
quarters and no longer even able to affect the bravado of his former Saigon gangster
days. Here he is refugee, unemployed, a humanitarian object, an artifact of war.
Such a cost is lost on his daughter who sees only that there is heroism and
sadness in him, and since they are the same, these too must reside in her. She would be
repelled by his growing instability, but this is not what marks the most moving
passages in her novel. A young girl’s growing into full and conscious adult perspective
144
lies on the outskirts of a story that insists upon exploring in-depth a child’s beguiling
infatuation with what was possible in the life her father provided. In the affections
stirred, le poses a story of a young narrator’s coming to be as a intertwined with her
father’s coming to be. He is the gangster we have all been looking for.
“Love and Honor and Pity and Pride”
Of the seven short stories presented in The Boat, “Love and Honor and Pity and
Pride,” “Meeting Elise,” “Half-lead Bay,” and “The Boat” center on emotional tales
about children, often wanting, and parents who are helpless to provide. “Cartegena” and
“Hiroshima,” in a similar vein, narrate from a child’s perspective. Through these short
stories I examine Le’s own stated critiques of the politics of “ethnic literature” vis-à-vis
my own reading of his marked status as the prodigal son of Vietnamese global
subjectivity and contemporary multicultural literature. The title of Le’s collection, The
Boat, stands for many things all at once. It reminds readers that the writer is, himself, a
product of the movement of people across the South China seas during that chaotic
period in Vietnamese history when war had displaced political dissenters and
international intervention seemed forlornly unable to keep up with the continuous flow
of stateless bodies in critical need. The opening story of the collection is a tender
narrative about the writer’s obligation to tell certain kinds of stories, namely those that
“otherwise wouldn’t be told,” and how the writer must come to terms with the
implications of unveiling such stories that perhaps are not meant to have public life.
But the narrator, also an author, is different from the collection’s author, Le. At least,
that is what Le would have readers reflexively ponder. The Boat as a vessel of
movement also describes the travel that Le takes to encompass various national
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subjectivities throughout his collection. As readers move from story to story they are
met with an array of tautly researched and highly refined literary images traversing
international boundaries and identities. This is where Le achieves his greatest
commentary. Critics declare “Few young writers are driven to step outside themselves
and their own experiences so decisively.”
20
Indeed, a survey of Le’s critical reviews
shows a special attention to the biographical details of what makes Le special as a
writer: his “experience” and “background.” Interviews with him show signs of the
production of a literary personality. Le is one of those writers who will “step outside
themselves and their own experiences” and the reason is that his background
“‘sensitized him’ to very different cultural settings, giving him an unusual ability to
identity with his characters.’”
21
Le is more circumspect about the ability to inhabit
another’s experience. “I do believe that you can never know yourself, let alone the
person next to you, let alone the person halfway across the world,” says Le, “yet at the
same time, I believe there is nothing like fiction to fully thrust you into someone else’s
consciousness.” He goes on to declare where for him, writing demands an ethical
imperative. “I have probably seen more of the world than pretty much all of my
ancestors combined” he explains, “So to not at least attempt to write about that larger
world ‘would have been in some sense an abdication’; trying is ‘an ethical imperative’.”
22
Le’s collection begins with his most lauded story, “Love and Honor and Pity
and Pride” in which he creates a narrator not unlike himself. He said he made the
decision to write this narrator so not let himself “off the hook.” He continues, “A lot of
people assume that writing from your real life is easier” but for him “it’s much more
difficult”
23
because he has to be more discerning about whether his experience will
146
translate well to the page. Le says that “One of the chief ambitions of the story was to
play with that idea of what we consider to be authentic, how much autobiography is
implied or assumed, how we read something differently if we think it’s been drawn from
the author’s life.”
24
So in effect, the experiment was to play with fiction’s faultlines and
to imagine how far afield the reader could go in his or her reading practices.
The narrator, called Nam, struggles with writer’s block and considers taking up
the solicitation from friends, colleagues and mentors to do the “ethnic thing” and exploit
the ready-made hunger for writers to avail readers of their ethnic lot, to unveil the
secret as Rey Chow would have it. Though defeated by this, under the pressure to meet
deadlines and almost in surrender to the literary market, Nam (the narrator) literally
writes the “ETHNIC STORY.” Says the narrator “Fuck it, I thought. I had two and a
half days left. I would write the ethnic story of my Vietnamese father. It was a good
story. It was a fucking great story.”
25
And so Nam writes the story of My Lai through
the eyes of his father, a young boy who had survived the massacre but had witnessed an
entire village’s murder and whose sense of the world would forever be circumscribed by
those events. Le writes the ambivalence of telling this story, of exposing Vietnamese
identity to the expectations of its victimization.
“Why do you want to write this story?” my father asked me.
“It’s a good story.”
“But there are so many things you could write about.”
“This is important, Ba. It’s important that people know.”
“You want their pity.”
I didn’t know whether it was a question. I was offended. “I want them to
remember,” I said.
He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Only you’ll remember. I’ll
remember. They will read and clap their hands and forget.” For once, he
was not smiling. “Sometimes it’s better to forget, no?”
147
“I’ll write it anyway,” I said. It came back to me—how I’d felt at the
typewriter the previous night. A thought leapt into my mind: “If I write
a true story,” I told my father, “I’ll have a better chance of selling it.” (24)
Kunzru considers passages like these to be an ipso facto treatise meant to seek
permission to write Le’s other stories. Says Kunzru, “It reads as a manifesto of sorts, a
way for the author to assert his right to roam outside ethnicity, and to justify the rest of
his collection, which neurotically avoids the ‘Vietnamese thing.’”
26
That is, until the
very end of the collection, when once again Le circumnavigates another very trenchant
Vietnamese refugee theme, the boat exodus.
The relationship between Nam and his father is a precarious one. Estranged by
dint of each other’s perceived failures, father and son have not seen each other in three
years. Nam explains,
Here is what I believe: We forgive any sacrifice by our parents, so long as
it is not made in our name. To my father there was no other name—only
mine, and he had named me after the homeland he had given up. His
sacrifice was complete and compelled him to everything that happened.
To all that, I was inadequate. (19-20)
The narrative about father and son pursues questions about truth and sacrifice. What
are the obligations of the writer and son to his father’s history? --which, especially in
the literary market, is understood to be his own. Sau-ling Wong argues that the
assertion of identity for Asian Americans is done primarily through citizenship and
tethered to this is a search for the midpoint between “necessity” and “extravagance.”
Wong states: “The terms Necessity and Extravagance signify two contrasting modes of
existence and operation, one contained, survival-driven and conservation-minded, the
other attracted to freedom, excess, emotional expressiveness, and autotelism” (13).
27
From this Wong examines expressions of the literary self through these “modes of
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existence.” John Hawley writes of Asian American literature that pursues the search for
the father: “this struggle pointedly expresses itself in questions of masculine self-
definition” (185). In Hawley’s argument, in order for a recuperative definition of Asian
American masculinity to take hold, the male protagonist of a given work must navigate
between the polarities of Necessity and Extravagance in order to find a point at which
he can fully reconcile with the reality of his father. He must find the middle ground
between the search for a socially acceptable form of masculinity while also finding solace
in an identification through an emotional connection. I suggest that Nam Le’s opening
story is a meditation on the perilous search for that midpoint and that the stakes for Le’s
work is a literary citizenship. How will Le define himself as a writer and how will his
narrator’s relationship to his Vietnamese refugee father mediate that membership?
Like le’s protagonist, Nam too ran away from home to escape the punishing
glare of his father’s disappointment. Upon returning home, the family, the narrator
muses: “never spoke of anything much at all, and it was under this learned silence that
the three of us—my father, mother, and I living again under a single roof—were
conducted irreparably into our separate lives” (21). The distance between them compels
Nam to hope for his father’s acceptance. Having written a story he believes will honor
his father Nam hopes:
He would read it, with his book-learned English, and he would recognize
himself in a new way. He would recognize me. He would see how
powerful was his experience, how valuable his suffering—how I made it
speak for more than itself. He would be pleased with me. (27, emphasis
added)
Nam hopes that through reconstituting his father’s story in literary form he will redeem
his father in the eyes of history and that he will redeem himself against his father’s worn
149
expectations. The power to tell his father’s story would lie in his hands. Written as a
gift and a figured as a burden, the story shows this speaking for as the Vietnamese child’s
relation to the father. Le’s figuring of the relationship between the narrator and his
father differs from le’s in that it posits a different point of view and therefore provides a
different focalization technique. Le’s adult narrator is a pensive professional writer who
has a strong ability to create and discern meaning that informs his interpretation of
interactions with his father. Therefore, the relationship is built around such adult
thematics as “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Le took
inspiration from William Faulkner’s listing of these terms in his Nobel Prize acceptance
speech in 1950 in which he encouraged writers to turn to telling stories of “the old
human verities.” To a young child, as is present in le’s novel, such thematics are not
understood cognitively as things to do, honor your father, love your father, pity your
father, sacrifice for your father. Thus sacrificing for her father does not have a
redeeming quality. Filial duty in The Gangster is not written around what acts each can
do for the other because it seems that the capacity to do for each other is obviated by the
circumstances of the father’s new place in the world. le writes that the gangster, her
father, “apologized for all that his hands had not been able to do.”
At the end of Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride” Nam’s father does the
unthinkable. He burns the only manuscript copy of the story Nam has written about
My Lai in a homeless man’s gasoline drum. In Nam’s words “I knew with sick certainty
what he had done.” “He started up the bank then, and saw me. I was so full of wanting
I thought it would flood my heart. His hands were empty” (28). Nam continues, “If I
had known then what I knew later, I wouldn’t have said the things I did. I wouldn’t
150
have told him that he didn’t understand—for clearly he did. I wouldn’t have told him
that what he had done was unforgivable” because “all I saw was a man coming toward
me in a ridiculously oversized jacket, rubbing his black-sooted hands, stepping through
the smoke with its flecks and flame-tinged eddies, who had destroyed himself, yet again,
in my name” (28). In this depiction of fathers and sons the pursuit is one of being
adequate to the expectations of manhood and masculinity. In Le’s short story men face
war, they succeed, they bond over tales of survival, they publish. Ever the recalcitrant
child, Nam obstinately struggles with all of these becomings. Le’s narration of the
weight of a father’s history and his narrator’s wistful longing for redemption seem to
aptly fit within the literary ethnic bubble in which the parents’ generations are always
just beyond the reach of their wanting children and where no acts of love and honor,
pity and pride, compassion and sacrifice will be enough to bring that gap to a close. The
ending of the short story pierces the father/son drama with a deeper lesson about
Vietnam, war and memory. Wishing he knew sooner, the narrator muses “it occurred
to me how it took hours, sometimes days, for the surface of a river to freeze over—to
hold in its skin the perfect and crystalline world—and how that world could be
shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable” (28). The narrator is apprised
of his own blindness and of the power of the word, not to create, but to destroy. Ethnic
literature, its obtuse insistence on experience and autobiography, takes a hard hit, and so
too does a writer’s loyalty to the word over that too-hard-to-articulate experience.
Is Le’s collection successful in its stated desire to flout the conventions of ethnic
literature? If marketing is important to contemporary literature, then it’s significant to
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account for how The Boat is structured, how it is advertised to readers at large. In an
interview with author Charles D’Ambrosio, Le affirms to D’Ambrosio,
You’re right to imply that sticking “Love and Honor … ” up front wasn’t
an easy decision for me. I’m generally averse to the kind of vertical self-
consciousness that spines that story, and I knew the arguments in it
would invite simplistic reading, well-meaning dogmatism, as well as all
grades of misconstrual. …To me, it seems pretty clear “Love and Honor
… ” can’t be reduced to manifesto simply because it’s not trying to say
anything new; the only aesthetic preferences stated therein are fusty and
old-fashioned: that fiction be judged as fiction, on its own terms, on its
own merits. So why did I do it? Looking back, I reckon maybe I wanted
to reserve all my rights. I wanted to pull out the sharp elbows and carve
out as much space for myself as I could.
28
In effect, he wants it two ways, to “reserve” his right to be Vietnamese and
articulate from that vantage point while wanting to have his fiction judged “on its own
terms.” His statement reflects an awareness of the difficulty of holding that position:
the ethnic writer who is just really good. Jauss’s critical book of essays about
contemporary fiction writing urges that collections be conceived of as a whole story
unto themselves, thus the order and placement of stories is central to what it is that the
author wants to convey.
29
The collection begins with a Vietnamese Australian’s conflict
over representation and how to love and honor his father. It suggests that pity and
pride are at one with the child’s understanding of his father. Over the span of the
intermediate stories Le takes on other subjectivities and explores how relationships
between children and parents, fathers in particular, exist in a range of emotional
closeness. In “Meeting Elise” a daughter refuses her father’s reconciliation efforts. His
absence in the intervening years made a relationship for them impossible. His only
solace lies in watching her from a distance and rejoicing that “She has wrung all my
weaknesses out of her strong, straight body” (93). His longest story, “Half-lead Bay”
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spans seventy pages and sits in the middle of the collection’s narrative arc. It is a story
about a Euro-Australian family, in particular a young boy’s maturation punctured by his
mother’s abrupt decline with multiple sclerosis. Against the others, it offers the most
warm account of what a father can do for his son. After being knocked around in a
schoolyard fight over a young girl’s affections, the son is picked up by his father, “Jamie
held fast to his dad’s shoulder. At the edge of the clearing his dad stopped, turned, as
though to kiss him on the head, then said, ‘You’re okay, son’” (162). To wrap up the
collection, the eponymous story “The Boat” brings the underlying survey of familial
relations back to the saga of Vietnamese people’s survival. Such an order of narratives
brokers the simultaneity that Le wants to achieve.
It is helpful here to return to Rey Chow’s discussion of Joy Luck Club. In Chow’s
analysis of a barely noticeable but still important scar on the character An-Mei, she
identifies an “ambivalent idealism.” The scar on An-Mei, blown up on the screen, is not
just a fetishized embellishment signifying on her (China’s) violent past, it is as well “the
mark of a representational ambivalence and inexhaustibility…which participates in our
cultural politics not simply as the other, the alien, but also as us, as part of our ongoing
fantasy production” (112). The film’s attempt to render ethnicity through the scar
reflects, despite its effort to project, a selfsame fantasy production; that is, a production
not only of the other, but of the self as well. I argue that Le’s narrative strategies are
illustrative of an ideal ambivalence. To this Le’s participation and willingness to be “a
son of Vietnam” while disavowing that any literature, let alone his, should be evaluated
for anything less than “its own terms”—by which I assume he means not its
autobiographic back story (is that not a part of its terms?)—reflects the privileges of a
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position that can both know a secret and dangle it ambivalently before others, an ideal
position indeed.
The Boat (becoming and dissolving in water)
While it is easy to imagine that the 1.5 generation, to which Le and le belong,
identifies with an in-betweenness, a hybridity, a multiplicity, or a polysemous location—
usually abstracted, a nowhere-ness--I am more interested in what it is specifically that
these authors offer by way of identification. In this section, I pursue the issue of
becoming and dissolution more closely through these authors’ depiction of the
Vietnamese self and body against movements through the Pacific Ocean.
The Vietnamese diaspora is intimately knowledgeable about the boat as an
experience and a point of departure. Vietnamese refugee boats were often helmed by
fishermen, who were often no more suited to navigate open ocean waters than the
escapees stowed there. The short story “The Boat” is a methodical description of human
wasting common to the refugee boat experience. Le’s short story centers on Mai, a
young woman braving the journey with strangers who become as dear as kin. As the
boat whips about the ocean, Mai’s memories shuttle back to her father, of his leaving for
war, of his imprisonment, and his eventual blindness. During stretches of time shackled
to the other passengers and their desperate flesh, Mai retreats into her memories. Mai
recalls a visit to her father, already blinded, in a hospital, “She felt insolent looking at
his face when he didn’t look back” (239). She is stricken with her desire to be seen by
him. “Look at me, she wanted to say. She considered moving into his fixed line of sight
but didn’t dare. Just once, she thought. Just look at me once, Ba, and I’ll do anything
you want” (239). Le uses these beseeching requests to accent the ways that children are
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constant with need. During the desperate days on the boat, Mai dreams of her father,
images of him are persistent. His youth and his vigor and his affections are all
combined in a dream and memory that have dissipated. In one of her reveries, Mai is
startled by her remembrance of disappointment and anger at how he had separated from
her and broken the child’s spell of eternal togetherness. “It was Ba who left Child”
(253). “She missed him with an ache that was worse, even, than the thirst had been. All
she’d ever known to want was his return” (253). I argue that embedded in this story, as
with others in the collection, is an appeal to the ways that parents can and do fulfill and
fail their children. For Vietnamese refugee fathers, failure has been written into their
very being-ness, which appears in the West as non-being, just war artifact, to be pitied
and resurrected.
In le’s novel, selves are not seen, only traced. Faces are felt with the hand such
as when the narrator’s mother sees love in her father's profile in a darkened movie
theater. le writes that the narrator’s mother was,
[w]atching him with a strange curiosity, a feeling that made her want to
trace and retrace his silhouette with her fingertips until she'd memorized
every feature and could call his face to mind in any dark place she passed
through. Later, in the shadow of the beached fishing boats on the
blackest nights of the year, she would call him to mind, his face a warm
companion for her body on the edge of the sea. (80)
It is not just the facile difference between the two boat experiences depicted and
the conjuring of male faces that occurs; in one story it is fitful, in the other it is
comforting. I am interested in how these are types of representation that contribute to
these works’ enfiguring of the male. Asian American masculinity has importantly been
examined via sexuality, psychoanalysis, articulateness, and violence.
30
From the
155
Aiiiieeee! editors’ proclamations and insistence on physical prowess to the pacifist
inclinations of feminist thinkers’ depictions of moral masculinity, Asian American
cultural studies has long debated the terms of what makes a man. I suggest that
together, these two authors I have examined explore the affective spaces of South
Vietnamese manhood, not through the foregrounding of the subject in question, but
obliquely, through the intersubjective world he inhabits. As the narrator in Le’s
opening story struggles with whether to write his father into being, to enfold him into
contemporary literary existence, so too, does my project advocate for a way to honor the
secrets of Vietnamese fatherhood. The story of Vietnamese refugee life is haunted by
the quietude of fathers’ and young men’s treks into war, of their mysterious trips to re-
education camps and their imprisonments. Through the searching imagery and
language of children yearning for the solace of the father, the authors I have examined
illustrate the tensions that Vietnamese diasporic authors bring to contemporary ethnic
literature that wants to capitalize on the ethnic subject’s most secret stories.
Conclusion
In the works of the authors I have examined, I pay particular attention to the
child’s perspective in depictions of Vietnamese fatherhood and masculinity. I have
argued that Nam Le’s struggle to become more-than-ethnic writer nevertheless still
fundamentally ascribes to the tenets of “unveiling” that are mundane to ethnic
literature. The author weaves his ambitious desire to write cosmopolitan literature
around his collection’s ironic turn to the “ETHNIC STORY.” The question I started
out with was to consider how contemporary writers use the South Vietnamese father
figure to enfigure a “Self.” Nam Le’s use is an ambivalent one that hopes to offer a meta-
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critique of ethnic literary markets and their reading expectations while it
simultaneously benefits from the South Vietnamese refugee father’s silence and
historical elision. le thi diem thuy’s use of the literary figure moves more obliquely
around his spectral presence. Through her attendance to the child’s language and
understanding of her emotional loyalties, le offers a story about how spectral presences,
as seen through a father whose presence is always sought after but not always
attainable, always assert upon the present.
These works’ attention to the beguiling language of children, even adult children
speculating on their elders’ world can productively lead to a poetics that ask that we
learn to be with things that are not yet understandable cognitively. As children learn to
be with an ever-unfolding world, they do so affectively. Their perspective,
conceptualized as a being with, is an incipience that can be fruitfully mined, not simply as
narrative device but as an aesthetic technology of postwar contemplation.
31
The stories
I have considered describe lives that have been marked by the violent transportation of
human bodies across the Pacific Ocean under dramatic and jarring circumstances.
Yunte Huang’s indispensable examination of the poetics of the transpacific imagination
argues for a poetics that can engage the centrality of the Pacific Ocean, and its various
historical crossings of the last century, by foregrounding not only its geopolitical
hermeneutics, but also its metaphorical life. He writes that instead of looking to bridge
the gap between the two, “the transpacific lesson is one of learning to live in or with the
gap (between metaphor and geopolitics) in the spirit of a hermeneutics of recognition
and acknowledgement” (5 Huang). This is a poetics of acknowledgement that offers no
decisive solution to how to come to terms with the fact of the Pacific Ocean as the stage
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of massive forms of colonial violence and modern nation-building, but suggests that the
solution is “to live with it, live in the gap” between historical account as fiction and as
enduring truth (144). For Vietnamese diasporic postwar contemplation, the pull
continues to be how to find that gap and live in its contradictions.
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Chapter Three Endnotes
1
In the sociological study Family Tightrope (1995), Nazli Kibria showed how resettlement in
America had piled pressures onto Vietnamese refugee families to reconfigure their domestic
power structures, giving mothers and women more responsibility outside the home thus giving
them more leverage to negotiate power at home. Because there were greater economic
opportunities for female low wage laborers, husbands and fathers became secondary financial
supporters. Patriarchy in the household was not openly challenged, but cracks in its credible
visage would begin to show.
2
My understanding of object-relations theory is derived from Melanie Klein’s theorization of
infant ego structuration as the infant’s incorporation/introjection of the care-giver’s (mother’s)
“good” and “bad” parts. The child’s ego is thus constituted intersubjectively through a passing
back and forth of projections, introjections, drives, and identifications. This is described
throughout Klein’s corpus. In particular, see Klein Love, Hate and Reparation (1964).
3
See David Lloyd, “The Indigent Sublime: Specters of Irish Hunger,” Representations 92 (2005):
152-85.
4
The term “diasporic intimacy” is borrowed from Svetlana Boym’s book The Future of Nostalgia
(2002) which I more fully engage in Chapter 2 on vision in cinema. I use the term here to
describe how children are especially adept at expressing the tenderness of home, particularly
when they must navigate diaspora spaces. Boym describes diasporic intimacy eloquently thus:
“To feel at home is to know that things are in their places and so are you; it is a state of mind
that doesn’t depend on an actual location” (251).
5
This point is made most clearly in the evaluation of critical work about daughter relationships
to mothers in Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976) and Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club (1990). In
Vietnamese diasporic literature, works by Lan Cao (Monkey Bridge) and Le Ly Hayslip (Heaven
and Earth) place the role of the mother at the center of postwar refugee experience. See Wendy
Ho, In her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American Mother-Daughter Writing, Walnut Creek:
AltaMira Press, 1999.
6
Michiko Kakutani, “A World of Stories from a Son of Vietnam” New York Times book review,
May 13, 2008.
7
Michiko Kakutani, May 13, 2008 New York Times Book Review.
8
Paul Baumann,“Washing Time Away” May 25, 2003 New York Times Book Review.
9
Hari Kunzru, “Outside Ethnicity” June 8, 2008 New York Times Book Review.
10
Hari Kunzru, “Outside Ethnicity” June 8, 2008.
11
Hari Kunzru, “Outside Ethnicity” June 8, 2008. The critique of effete multiculturalism is
cogently put forth in Rey Chow’s article “The Fascist Longing in Our Midst” in which she
argues that multiculturalist liberal agendas in academic appointment and scholarship operate as
a fascist sheen of remarkable representational politic (Ethics After Idealism 1998).
12
Hari Kunzru, “Outside Ethnicity” June 8, 2008. Here “Iowa” refers to the prestigious Iowa
Writer’s Workshop where Nam Le wrote the bulk of his stories for The Boat.
13
Le’s comment was made at an event at the LA public library on September 16, 2009. He was
reflecting on his ambivalence about writing about the war saying that if he did so he would be as
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obnoxious about it as possible, thus he would write about a father who survived the My Lai
massacre and depict him as a lone figure on an Australian street huddled over an oil drum.
These details are taken from my notes of the library event with Nam Le.
14
A critique of the function of the author to a piece of writing and its interpretive value is
articulated by Michel Foucault when he discusses the “author-function” which displaces the
author as origin in regards a text’s content. I am grateful to David Lloyd for his comments.
15
Sharrad (140).
16
Sharrad (141).
17
This body of work is exemplified by works such as by Angelita Reyes, Mothering Across
Cultures: Postcolonial Representations, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001; Chandra
Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003; Francoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature,
Identity, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995.
18
Otano, in Speaking the Past: Child Perspective in the Asian American Bildungsroman (2004),
celebrates how Asian American writers narrate childhood through a “dual perspective” which
involves the older “self,” now, able to allow the child’s perspective of then. She writes, "The
dual perspective[…] illustrates the mature self's return to those childhood experiences as a
reconciliation with what was lived and an acceptance of its contribution to what one has
become" (31).
19
See David Shih’s dissertation, “Representation and Exceptionalism in the Asian American
Autobiography,” (1999) University of Michigan.
20
Steven Winn, SFGate.com “Nam Le’s Long literary journey” June 12, 2008.
21
Patricia Cohen, New York Times Books, Profile May 14, 2008 “Stories to Explore Someone
Else’s Skin.”
22
Patricia Cohen, New York Times Books, Profile May 14, 2008 “Stories to Explore Someone
Else’s Skin.”
23
Steve Winn, SFGate.com June 12, 2008 “Nam Le’s Long, literary journey.”
24
Patricia Cohen, New York Times May 14, 2008 “Stories to Explore Someone Else’s Skin.”
25
Nam Le (17).
26
Hari Kunzru, “Outside Ethnicity” New York Times Book review, June 8, 2008.
27
Quoted in John Hawley “Gus Lee, Chang-Rae Lee, Li-Young Lee: The Search for the Father
in Asian American Literature” in Ideas of Home: Literature of Asian Migration (1997).
28
Interview with Charles D’Ambrosio/Bomb Magazine 108/Summer 2009.
29
See Jauss’s chapter “Stacking Stones” in Alone With All That Could Happen (2008).
30
See David Eng’s Racial Castration (2001), Viet Nguyen’s “The Remasculinization of Chinese
America: Race, Violence, and the Novel” (2000), King-kok Cheung “The Woman Warrior vs.
The Chinaman Pacific” (2002).
31
Brian Massumi discusses incipience as inherent in affective unfolding. This formulation
stresses the tension of constant and continuous unforeseeability and open potential every time
affects move or operate. See “Introduction” in Massumi Parables for the Virtual (2002).
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Chapter 4
Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn: The Management of Viet Kieu Masculinity in Affective
Community
Arguably one of the most popular figures in Vietnamese-language diasporic
culture, Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn affects a handsome persona. He is often pictured with his
hair neatly combed, his smiling eyes behind scholarly spectacles, his figure trim in
neatly pressed suits, and his stature calm and whimsical. He entertains and solicits the
affections of a diverse diasporic population. His literary work notwithstanding, he is
perhaps best known as the male counterpart of the MC duo of the hugely popular
diasporic variety show Paris by Night. In that format, Nguyễn ostensibly portrays the
“Regis” to his MC partner Nguyễn Cao Ky Duyen’s “Kelly.”
1
When asked about his
childhood aspiration to be an entertainer, Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn demurs and explains that
his prolific career as a writer, poet and entertainer in the Vietnamese diaspora is merely
a happenstance, something that was thrust on him through the convergence of life and
history.
2
This self-deprecating response is consonant with his demeanor at large and
contributes to his draw and success in Vietnamese diasporic cultural life.
Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn has been with Thuy Nga’s Paris By Night production for 18
of the company’s 27 years. During his tenure, Nguyễn has charmed innumerable
viewers with his humble but sharp humor. Throughout their time together on stage,
the two MCs amicably bicker back and forth about the virtues of good masculinity and
proper femininity against the pressures and remarkable circumstances of exile and
diaspora life.
3
As perhaps telling of the ongoing cultural politics of the Vietnamese
diaspora, the biographies of the two MCs read like credentials for Vietnamese exile
161
identity. Nguyễn Cao Ky Duyen is a trained lawyer and performer, and is the daughter
of Nguyễn Cao Ky, the former Vice President of South Vietnam. Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn is
an accomplished writer, a former South Vietnamese high school literature teacher, and a
former South Vietnam ARVN lieutenant. He also served three years in the Communist
Party’s Reeducation Camps. Both figures have catapulted to diasporic fame through the
Paris by Night medium.
Several academic examinations have focused on Paris by Night due not only to its
exceptional success and brash displays, but also to its meaning for Vietnamese diasporic
culture.
4
In this chapter’s examination of Vietnamese diasporic masculinity I turn to the
figure of Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn and his less discussed literary works. Vietnamese
diasporic literary analysis has mainly focused on works published for Western and
multi-national audiences, such as those works that are written in English or are widely
translated into multiple languages for worldwide distribution. Less attention has been
paid to Vietnamese-language literature that is published for local and locally distributed
consumption. My analysis demonstrates the centrality of Vietnamese-language literary
materials in the articulation of Vietnamese diasporic and transnational identities.
Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn’s partnership with Thuy Nga productions has spawned an
entertainment empire. With a strong hand in the production of Paris By Night, both on
and off-stage, Nguyễn has also published numerous short stories and series-novella
collections that have been recorded onto audiobooks, all of which have been popularly
passed around the Vietnamese diaspora and among audiences in Vietnam. This
circulation has situated him comfortably among trusted Vietnamese diasporic voices. In
his literature, Nguyễn utilizes just enough English and American references to make
162
diasporic accomplishment and differentiation noticeable to his audience. His
Vietnamese-language stories are peppered with references to Western culture such as
“Starbucks,” “business cards,” “jogging suits,” “savings bonds,” “mutual funds,”
“mortgage,” and “chateaubriand.” His position as a forward-looking cultural icon—one
who introduces diasporic audiences to new artistic talents, engages sensitive social
themes, and partakes in contemporary Western life—is tempered by his abiding
reverence for Vietnamese traditional culture and patriarchy, and for the difficult
experiences of exile life. When asked in 1992 for the details of how he transitioned from
being solely a writer to being an on-stage personality in Paris By Night, he responds:
Động cơ duy nhất lúc bấy giờ thúc đẩy tôi là tôi nghĩ đến cha tôi ở
Sàigòn. Tôi không về VN được, mà tôi muốn cha tôi nhìn lại tôi sau hơn
10 năm xa nhà. Băng Thúy Nga thì người ta sang đi sang lại, sang lậu
trong nước rất nhiều. Thể nào cha tôi cũng trông thấy tôi và nghe tiếng
tôi nói.
5
The most significant motivation for me at the time was in thinking about
my father in Saigon. I couldn’t come back to Vietnam, but I wanted my
father to be able to see me again after being away from home for 10
years. Thuy Nga tapes were copied and passed back and forth, often
copied illegally in Vietnam. Somehow, I knew my father would be able to
see me and hear my voice. [Translation mine]
His response reflects a child’s honor of his father. The theme of the separation of
children from their parents is turned into an opportunity to assert one’s unfailing family
loyalties and to place one’s parent at the crux of one’s life choices, even if one is far from
home.
Nguyễn’s orthodox morality and his articulateness lent itself to Paris by Night’s
changing format. Paris by Night’s beginning shows centered mostly on producing
multiple, short, and entertaining artistic productions. The show was described as
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having an “MTV-style” format. In the early 1990s, as talk-shows became more popular
in mainstream media, Paris by Night producers decided to install recurring hosts who
could switch the production to a more audience friendly talk-show structure. In the
interview cited above, Nguyễn explains that another main goal of his is to spread
Vietnamese culture. He says, “Tôi có thể xử dụng diễn đàn ấy để nói chuyện văn học và
lịch sử với các bạn trẻ lớn lên ở nước ngoài.” (I knew I could use that platform to talk
about culture and history with young people who have grown up overseas.)
(Translation mine)”
6
In his first published work, The Will of Heaven (1983), a personal memoir of the
early postwar years, Nguyễn describes how he fled Vietnam in 1978 and, after a period
in Malaysia at a refugee camp, settled in Toronto, Canada in 1979. As a member of the
first generation of Vietnamese refugees and migrants, Nguyễn, who will be 64 years old
this year, stands as a remarkable example of the cultural “bridge” that later generations
represent. It is this position, and how he uses his literary work to promote his cultural
translatability, that the rest of this chapter will explore. That is, my analysis will focus
on how textual strategies, a savvy understanding of diasporic and transnational politics,
and an ability to emotionally draw and appeal to diverse audiences contribute to making
Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn a leading voice in Vietnamese diasporic culture. An important
perspective for comparing postwar diasporic consderations of masculinity is to examine
his works, as they significantly engage the lives and internal worlds of Vietnamese
diasporic male subjectivities from the first generation of Vietnamese refugees. I am
concerned with how a Vietnamese masculinity is affected by Nguyễn’s literary work,
and how this masculinity can be productively situated against the prevailing
164
representations of Vietnamese first generation masculinities as depicted by English
language literature and in critical analysis.
Critical analyses of Vietnamese refugee masculinity – and migrant masculinities
in general —have focused on the social and economic dimensions and pressures endured
by men who have had to renegotiate their labor and social value not only within the
family, but also in ethnic communities and mainstream society. Such negotiations have
often resulted in the diminution of men’s patriarchal status, as women and children
become socially and economically more viable subjects in new national contexts.
Sociologists argue that these new sets of negotiations create new masculinities that
challenge hegemonic notions of manhood.
7
This body of analysis contributes to our
understandings of the “social construction of masculinity.” This has been important
work because it de-centers the Euro/Western hegemony that definitions of masculinity
have tended towards in critical analysis. This analysis tenders masculinity as a social
category of identification that has unfairly beleaguered those without the “correct”
national, racial, or class backgrounds.
What remains to be further explored are the ways in which masculinities are
lived and experienced. My analysis attempts to follow the encouragement of Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick who argues in Touching Feeling (2003) that it is important to get
around the topos of hiddenness or depth that proceeds from the dictum that scholarship
should unearth what textual pathologies are truly hiding underneath. This, Sedgwick
describes, is “typically followed by a drama of exposure, that has been such a staple of
critical work” (8). Sedgwick continues, “Beneath and behind are hard enough to let go of;
what has been even more difficult is to get a little distance from beyond, in particular the
165
bossy gesture of “calling for” an imminently perfected critical or revolutionary practice
that one can oneself only adumbrate” (8). Instead, Sedgwick suggests taking up
Deleuzian planar relations to look for the potentiality of besides, which offers “some
useful resistance to the ease with which beneath and beyond turn from spatial descriptors
into implicit narratives of, respectively, origin and telos” (8). In my analysis, this
appears as a desire to sidestep-- for the moment-- the tendency among scholars of
Vietnamese diasporic and transnational culture to center on and admonish the political
agendas embedded in cultural displays, that are deemed repressive and dualistically
Manichean, even if they are at best called “contradictory” in nature. Scholarship that
exhibits this tendency usually identifies some form of cultural practice that is
immanently sexist, racist, or classist (the most popular denigration being “bourgeois” or
“colonial”) and show how this practice occupies a contradictory in-between space where
it advances one project (deemed worthwhile) while at the same time it endangers
another project (that advances equality).
8
I do not mean to suggest that these projects
are not significant and important (I also aspire to do them well in my own work), but I
do mean to point at the difficulties that arise when using this framework to deal with
Vietnamese post-war politics. To borrow Sedgwick’s words, “One's relation to what is
risks becoming reactive and bifurcated, that of a consumer: one's choices narrow to
accepting or refusing (buying, not buying) this or that manifestation of it, dramatizing
only the extremes of compulsion and voluntarity. Yet it is only the middle ranges of
agency that offer space for effectual creativity and change”(13). By “middle ranges,”
Sedgwick means to find a location that does not need to always “know better” than the
position that one attempts to more fully understand. What happens when, as scholars,
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we move beside the discourses we identify for study? What are the moments of danger
that emerge and require us to both find opportunities for creativity and to identify
change as it occurs?
New Works in Vietnamese Postwar Experience
New important work about Vietnamese refugee and migrant men has begun to
explore the experiential dimensions of Vietnamese manhood. Hung Cam Thai’s
sociological case studies in For Better or For Worse : Vietnamese International Marriages in
the New Global Economy (2008), Thuy Vo-Dang’s dissertation study “Anticommunism as
Cultural Praxis: South Vietnam, War, and Refugee Memories in the Vietnamese
American Community” (2008), and Phuong Nguyen’s “People of the Fall: Refugee
Nationalism in Little Saigon 1975-2005” (2009) each take as the focus of their study--
whether of marital acts, anti-communist community activities, or exile collective
movements-- the activities of Vietnamese diasporic and refugee men in the postwar
years. Hung Thai’s book-length treatment of the meaning of transnational marriages
involving Vietnamese diasporic men argues that “international marriages among
individuals of the same ethnicity living in different parts of the world are anchored not
only in migration histories and colonial pasts but are also motivated by the need for
material as well as emotional recuperations of self-worth that make such marriages
necessary” (19). The centrality of self-worth is reflected in Vo Dang’s analysis of
anticommunist community activism in San Diego that, through various civic and local
organizing efforts, bolsters a forgotten South Vietnamese historical identity. That men
are often the leading figures of these efforts in San Diego becomes a site of ambivalent
analysis for Vo Dang. She argues that these public articulations are an assertion of a
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specifically South Vietnamese identity, driven by calls for remembrance of South
Vietnamese history and identity. But her analysis shows that these masculinist
assertions take on different tinges in domestic contexts. In a chapter on silence in the
home, Vo Dang shows how the vulnerabilities of South Vietnamese masculinity emerge
as enhanced silences in the home where the recuperation of lost memories is repressed.
Phuong Nguyen studies the role of Vietnamese refugee men in Orange County who
articulated a refugee nationalism that could reflect a situated ethnic identity that would
assert South Vietnamese national identity while also countering negative racial
stereotypes of Vietnamese refugees in the U.S.. This community relied on collective
memories, articulated through music and community media, to mobilize collective
affective support that could then translate to civic participation. These studies
contribute a closer analysis of Vietnamese diasporic masculine identity through
attention to community and interior processes. They put the question of how men have
responded as affective counterparts at the crux of their examinations of the migration
experience.
Vietnamese diasporic and refugee masculinity has also been a conceit of recent
fictional works by Vietnamese diasporic authors. In my previous chapter on le thi diem
thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For and the collection of short stories by Nam
Le, The Boat I argued that the narrative prominence given to South Vietnamese
fatherhood presented father figures who are beset with an ongoing introspection just
outside the reach of their children. This gets simplified in cultural discourses as the
“cultural” gap/clash that marks the first generation as so vastly different from the
Western - influenced 1.5 and 2
nd
generation. This is typified in an essay by Andrew
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Lam, published in the edited volume Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War,
Literature and Film (2009) in which he writes of the Viet kieu (Vietnamese abroad) in
California that there is a “New Vietnamese” --youngsters who are “very much at home
with all these conflicting ideas, dissimilar languages and sensibilities” (179). In Lam’s
consideration, the new Vietnamese have moved on from the “us-versus-them” mentality
while men, like his father, are still attached to the past. He writes:
While my father considers himself an exile living in America, I consider
myself an American journalist who happens to make many journeys to
Vietnam without much emotional fanfare…. History for my father, and
for those men still wearing their army uniforms three decades since the
war ended, has a tendency to run backwards, to memories of the war, to a
bitter and bloody struggle whose end spelled their defeat and exile. And
it holds them static to a lonely nationalism stance. They live in America
but their souls are in Vietnam.
The rest of the world, transformed by the various forces of globalization-
-mass movement, high-tech communications, integrated economy, the
thaw of the Cold-War--had moved on beyond the old rancor, beyond that
us-versus-them mentality. (176-177, emphasis added)
Lam’s description heightens and emphasizes the alienation between children and fathers
as a generational gap reinforced by nostalgias and memories. These issues are
reworked in the fictional works of le thuy and Nam Le. Their works attempt to provide
dimension to the Other (the father) and offer alternatives to the “generational
gap”/culture clash motif popular in ethnic literature. According to this paradigm,
affirmed in Lam’s essay, the unbridgeable gap is comprised of a history that is only
knowable by those who have gone through the turbulence of the wartime period and
who suffered its full impact. What I hope my previous chapter elucidates, is that these
fictional works with child narrators offer father figures who can and ought to be further
understood, not simply as tortured loners, but as men actively coming to terms with the
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conditions of postwar life. My analysis in this chapter argues that if we are to depart
from notions of the Vietnamese first generation diasporic man as “unknowable,” and
suffering from his own interior demons then by engaging the literature of Nguyễn Ngọc
Ngạn we may gain insight into a drastically different take on the preoccupations of
these men.
Creating affective communities – The Will of Heaven
I argue that through his literary work and through his iconic status as the
“Regis,” or talk show figurehead of Vietnamese-language diasporic communities,
Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn draws out different complexes of diasporic masculinity than have
been represented in English-language and critical texts. I analyze how his texts attend
to other facets of diasporic life than “old rancor” and “past attachments.” Through his
particular perspective in depicting contemporary family life, Nguyễn’s literature draws
the attention of both male and female audiences. His use of irony is particularly useful
in how his work is able to build affective communities, which I describe as a specific
diasporic consciousness that is attuned to ongoing social and cultural negotiations
among disparate Vietnamese global communities and that draws upon collective
affections such as outrage, empathy, and laughter. Through his use of ironic and
sardonic tone, Nguyễn strategically partakes of the rhetoric of Vietnamese victimization
and offers a cast of characters that are as calculating as they are curtailed by historical
and social circumstances. Let me state early on that I find Nguyễn’s work
“problematic.” He wholly embraces “bourgeois” forms of consumption, affirms
patriarchal structures such as how men should be moral leaders of families. But rather
than call his work “contradictory” -- in that it both relieves reader stresses by offering
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humor and pleasure while at the same time promoting gender inequities, I argue that
these things may not be contradictory at all. I suggest these components of his work
operate concurrently as part of a complex of affective appeal in Vietnamese-language
literature and media in the diaspora. There is a danger that I am arguing that
Vietnamese-language audiences enjoy and prefer “gender inequities” such as Nguyễn
promotes and are therefore entertained by his discourse. Rather, what I want to say is
that readers, listeners, and audiences are discriminating and identify Nguyễn’s irony and
interpret his literature in complex ways. Reader and audience reception need to be
further explored as they concern Vietnamese language media. When I assert that
Nguyễn draws forth an “affective community” I am drawing attention to the ways in
which his works address emotional difficulties that individuals and families struggle
with in diasporic life, difficulties that I believe resonate among many Vietnamese
American readers and listeners in his audience.
To gain a better understanding of how Nguyễn’s body of work is conducive to
drawing together a community of affect, I begin my analysis with a consideration of his
first published work. The Will of Heaven (1983) is an English language book, published
shortly after Nguyễn had settled in life in Toronto, Canada. The book, meant mainly
for an English-reading and Western readership, was among one of the few at the time
to center on Vietnamese people’s experience of the Vietnam War. It is a memoir
account of the years surrounding Nguyễn’s internment in a Communist Reeducation
camp from 1975-1978. In it, Nguyễn details his rather privileged life as a young
bourgeois high school literature teacher in 1960s Saigon. He dutifully serves a term in
the Southern Army of the Republic of Viet Nam and is an abiding loyalist to the South
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Vietnamese government that would preserve his status and family’s relative wealth.
When the American forces withdraw and Northern forces take over the South,
Nguyễn’s life is thrown into upheaval. Newly married and father to a young son,
Nguyễn is terrified when, because of his social status and past military service to the
South, he is ordered into a reeducation camp. What was first described as a three day
re-education term turned into a three year ordeal of back breaking labor and desperate
attempts, not just for escape, but to survive the test of being “re-educated.”
In this experience, Nguyễn’s charisma and entertainment skills would be an
important asset. Nguyễn learned that if he affected a docile and accommodating
demeanor, he could curry favors such as when he becomes appointed cultural director at
one of the camps, thus giving him reprieve from having to work long days under the
glare of the midday sun. He writes of the necessity of a measure of uplift amidst the
direness of camp-life:
I knew the danger to me was not physical, but mental. It was fatal to
indulge my moods of depression and self-pity. / Quite purposefully, I
began to cultivate a cheerful exterior and even became extroverted in my
associations with my fellow prisoners and even the guards. I loved to
sing and in the evenings I tried to lighten everyone’s mood by singing
their favorite songs. By so doing I found both pleasure and a kind of
therapy. (133-4)
What Nguyễn writes about as a form of survival, as he describes his attempts to appear
an ideal “cán bộ” (cadre: the term used by the North Vietnamese Army to refer to those
held in the camps), the Vietnam War literary scholar Renny Christopher calls a form of
collaboration. Christopher’s reading of Nguyễn’s Will of Heaven excoriates, as
unremitting, Nguyễn’s affinity for Western culture and alignment with American forces
against the North. In Christopher’s book American War/Vietnam War she criticizes the
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Vietnam War literary corpus, which she says has solely privileged “official” narratives of
the war by emphasizing Western experiences of American GI’s. According to
Christopher, Nguyễn’s memoir and its description of life in the re-education camp is
“self-pitying” and performs a confirmation of official narrative of the atrocities of the
war by spending the bulk of his descriptive writing on the three years in re-education
camp rather than on his equivalent three years spent fighting in the ARVN.
9
Christopher describes Nguyễn’s racism against Montagnard people (mountain dwelling
people) and his obvious classist patronizing of country people. His narrative of hardship
gets little more than an admission from Christopher that “Although a reader might wish
for a less self-pitying rendition of camp conditions, one cannot dismiss Ngan’s suffering”
(68).
Christopher urges for examinations of “unofficial narratives,” which she finds
among texts by authors like Le Ly Hayslip. Her subsequent reading of Hayslip’s When
Heaven and Earth Changed Places valorizes a text written by a peasant woman about her
and her poor farmer family’s multiple subjugations. First, by virtue of her poor
peasantry, Hayslip’s family struggles to find economic stability; then her village, located
in the central region, is targeted by both Northern and Southern/American forces for
recruitment; and finally, as a woman, she is raped and victimized by several men who
use her body to assert their power. She finally moves to the United States with her
American husband but even then is hampered by great bureaucratic difficulty. Hayslip’s
narrative essentially points out how class systems oppress Vietnamese peasants and
American soldiers who are often also the poorest in the U.S. class system. Importantly,
Christopher champions how Hayslip’s book “reveals this class alliance of transnational
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governing classes against transnational underclasses covertly” (71). In looking for
“cross-cultural” readings, how narratives attempt to speak across ideological divides,
Christopher argues as follows:
Hayslip does not make any sort of overt analysis—she simply tells
stories. She does this in part because her goal is reconciliation of all
sides, but also, perhaps, because she wants to draw in rather than to
alienate her readers, many of whom might think that peasants are
uninteresting drudges, and that the poor suffer what they must, anyway.
Hayslip is aware that on both sides of the ocean her audience will be
middle-class readers who might not immediately identify with her story,
both because of her position as a peasant and because of her sympathy, at
least in the beginning, for the Viet Cong. She works against this obstacle
by simultaneously insisting on the dignity, worth, and rootedness in
tradition of the peasants and downplaying her sympathies for the Viet
Cong. (71)
Importantly, Christopher argues that Hayslip accomplishes this by putting herself at
the center of the narrative. “She enlists the readers’ empathy and invites her audience to
identify with her and her family members, therefore making herself and her family
familiar rather than exotic, understandable rather than inscrutable” (71-2). Against
Nguyễn’s narrative, Hayslip is presented as offering a less ideologically choreographed
explanation of the happenings of wartime and post-wartime.
While I agree with much of Christopher’s reading of Nguyễn’s memoir and
agree in particular that it reflects prevailing ideologies about the war, I would like to re-
examine this memoir and, by considering his later fictional work and his cultural
popular persona, to see how it lays the groundwork for his later role as an effective
affective mediator for Vietnamese diasporic audiences. I argue that Nguyễn should be
considered a significant figure who moves between spaces of reconciliation in ways that
have yet to be fully comprehended by Vietnamese diaspora postwar scholarship. In
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considering reconciliations, scholars often think paradigmatically of reconciliation as
bringing together two opposing sides to a point of peace, or at least of bringing one side
to a peaceful determining point. For Vietnamese postwar life, when families have too
often been physically separated by the vicissitudes of history, it has been crucial to press
for possible forms of reconciliation. Whether it be exiles reconciling with the new
Vietnamese government enough to return to or visit Vietnam, younger Vietnamese
diasporic children reconciling to their parents’ (at times) unreachable pasts, or
Vietnamese family members reconciling to those who have been separated from them
for decades, postwar life has required renewed attempts to reconfigure new family
formations and understandings of the self. Reconciliation, at the most immediate level,
the level of everyday personal and interpersonal exchange, requires a different set of
considerations than that of national reconciliations. I argue that this can be addressed
by looking at how popular media engages the quotidian.
My argument does not try to recuperate Nguyễn’s narrative in The Will of
Heaven from Christopher’s assessment of its classist and patronizing tendencies. But
rather, I agree that these very same qualities situate his memoir as among those early
exilic narratives that stress pre-1975 Saigon-ese consciousness and culture as extant
and very different from those of the North or the countryside. This urban
cosmopolitanism would be important to how Nguyễn would figure into future diasporic
popular consciousness. But first, I re-read his memoir not for instances that reflect so
much self-pitying narcissism, nor a self-conscious “invitation” for others to identify with
Vietnamese people, but for instances of affective communalism as a textual strategy very
different from how Hayslip enlists the emotions of her readers.
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Drawing upon the victim
Christopher does not deny that Nguyễn’s tale evidences his own clear suffering;
when he escapes Vietnam by boat his wife and young son, with whom he has just
reunited, fall victim to the violent surges of the open sea. What is striking, though, is
the manner in which suffering is presented throughout his text. While Hayslip’s textual
and reconciliatory strategy is to make her body and her personal history the axis upon
which multi-national readers could reflect and with which they could identify, Nguyễn
spends much of his time describing the suffering of those around him.
In the early days of his camp internment, Nguyễn stumbles upon a crumpled
letter written by a Southern woman to her husband fighting in the army. Upon reading
the woman’s words of concern and love Nguyễn writes, “I stopped reading. How
similar this letter sounded to the ones I had received in the Delta from Tuyet Lan.
Suddenly I felt guilty about my unfeeling intrusion into the lives of this unknown
couple…I wondered where this recipient was now. Did he possibly get back to Saigon
in time to flee to freedom with his wife and child? Or were his bones bleaching now in
some desolate spot not far from here, a victim of the “heavy fighting around Tay
Ninh”?” (104). Throughout his three years across several camp locations, Nguyễn
highlights several individual stories of men who suffered brutally under the repressive
re-education mandates, which stressed that only when each person had “met the
requirements” and “absorbed” the principles of re-education would he get to go home.
Because of his noticeable singing and musical talents, Nguyễn is directed to put
together a Tet (Lunar New Year’s) performance at the Chu Van An School where he is
first interned. Thus begins Nguyễn’s relations with higher-ranking guards and officials,
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what Christopher criticizes as his collaboration. When a fellow prisoner, Phương, at
the Bu Gia Map camp comes to Nguyễn to report that his wife, who had been permitted
to visit him, had been raped by a guard on her way home, Nguyễn beseeches him to
understand that they are only prisoners and have no rights in the eyes of the camp’s
leadership. He seemingly rejects Phương’s pleas for rectification. Christopher argues
that while Nguyễn laments being mistaken by Phương for an apologist for the camp
leadership, “Ngan is unwilling to admit that it not only seems that way—it is that way”
(69). But this reading should be put into further context. Christopher’s analysis does
not deal with the precarious nature of the position in which Nguyễn found himself. At
several junctures in camp-life, Nguyễn takes the position that it is better to survive and
return alive to his wife and child than to invite the ire of governing camp officials. He
learns that he can do this by placating their wants and expectations, an aspiration that
other prisoners do not share. However, it is this position that allows Nguyễn to
nevertheless intercede on others’ behalf at important moments. When a prisoner Tru at
the Bu Gia Map camp attacks a guard for desecrating the South Vietnamese flag, he is
punished by being tied to a wooden column in an upright position for three months.
Plagued by harsh conditions, mosquitoes and rope burns, Tru is not released even to
eat. When fed by guards, he spits his food in their faces, yells curses, and is slapped for
his insolence. This goes on for days at which point Nguyễn intervenes and suggests
that it would be better for all parties if someone else could feed Tru so that the guards
are not shown to lose face daily by Tru’s diatribes. He suggests himself and is given
permission. During one feeding, he pleads with Tru:
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Tru,… everybody knows that the commandant doesn’t intend to keep
you out here for three months. That sentence was just given to frighten
the rest of us into obedience. He’ll release you as soon as you show signs
that you’re sorry. He wants to be able to show us what a generous man
he is, but you must give him reason to do so. All of us are suffering with
you. You must pretend you are penitent so the commandant can show
himself merciful. (243)
Tru’s fate was eventually decided when at a “review” of his case with a military official
he obstinately refuses to self-subjugate. Later, when an other elder prisoner, Dr. Van
discusses Tru’s heroism, Nguyễn asks, “What am I, Van?.” “It’s very obvious to me
what you are, Ngan,” he responds. “You’re a survivor—a goddamn survivor” (256-7).
This ambivalent response, both a refusal to affirm Nguyễn’s choice to remain silent on
his rejection of Communism and at the same time an acknowledgement of his
shrewdness in negotiating the terms of the re-education camp, reflects upon Nguyễn’s
learned ability to survive whatever ideological waters in which he finds himself.
The victimization that Nguyễn describes draws largely from the ways that
others are mistreated and how they suffer under the rules of the postwar re-education
enterprise. What is “spectacular” about the text is the degree to which bodies are
subject to violence. Here, Christopher’s critique of Nguyễn’s choice to center on his
three years in the camps versus spending an equal amount of time on his three years in
active military service is important. Indeed, it is here that we can locate his text’s
ideological project to restore the historical account of the ways that South Vietnam and
its male citizens were programmatically relieved of their positions as traditional
patriarchs of their families and society. To center on camp experiences resists the
Vietnamese “official” history that would write these camps as “educational” and
“voluntary.” As a refugee and exile project, the endeavor to continue South Vietnamese
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history by detailing the atrocities and injustices of the prevailing “Revolution” was a
critical intervention and beginning point for the formation of Little Saigon
consciousness around the world.
10
While not affecting a “heroic” masculinity, Nguyễn,
nevertheless, through his text’s documentation of the Communist military’s repressive
apparatus reinstates a historical account of South Vietnam’s misfortunes for American
and Western audiences.
Christopher’s argument about Nguyễn’s lack of awareness of his own wealth and
privilege vis-à-vis others (such as a pedicab driver who gives him a ride home to his wife
once he is released from camp) nonetheless must be couched against what he does point
attention to. Christopher argues “The pedicab driver earns Ngạn’s approval when he
declares that he does not like the Communist regime because nothing has changed—he
does not own his own pedicab” (67). When Nguyễn declares that “we” are all poor now,
Christopher argues that “his conception of poverty differs greatly from that of the
pedicab driver, but he is unwilling or unable to see that difference” (67). While I don’t
dispute that Nguyễn may be unwilling to see that his own position remains relatively
privileged, his narrative is still very much attuned to what others see. As Nguyễn and
the pedicab driver go through postwar Saigon, the first Nguyễn has seen of the city in
three years, he muses about the driver:
No doubt it seemed to him that there was a kind of retributive justice in
what was happening in Saigon. All his life the fine homes and villas of
the rich had been a deadening reminder to him of his own grinding
poverty and the wide gulf existing between the classes in the old, clearly
defined social structure of Saigon. How often he must have compared his
hand-to-mouth existence with the sheltered ease and luxury of the lives
of the wealthy! (296)
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Examples such as these show Nguyễn’s interest in providing the reader with a
multitude of impoverished and suffering experiences, not only his own. His memoir
provides a scan of various, but especially male circumstances. He valorizes no particular
form of masculinity, as those who suffer as “heroes” in Dr. Van’s formulations are shown
to unwittingly cause the suffering not only of their wives and families, who endure
extreme and difficult circumstances without their presence at home, but also of those
other prisoners and friends among them who are helplessly forced to witness the
treatments handed down as a consequence of their heroism.
I agree with Christopher’s claim that Nguyễn’s narrative is condescending when
it repeatedly provides a reading of others’ minds and motivations. This is a
condescension that situates Nguyễn as the generous purveyor of interiority. Ashley
Carruthers’ (2006) reading of Bourdieu’s “strategies of condescension” as it relates to
Viet kieu relational politics with local Vietnamese is instructive here. Though Nguyễn’s
interaction described above is between two Saigon Vietnamese, the class difference
between the two posits a social distance that makes Carruthers’ description apropos.
Carruthers describes this condescension strategy as “when one occupying a higher
position in the social space denies or negates the social distance that separates his or her
from those occupying lower positions. Paradoxically, the symbolic negation of distance
implies at the same time a recognition of that distance…thus allowing one to enjoy both
the advantages of proximity that the negation of the distance brings, and also the
advantages of an objective social distance that continues to exist despite its symbolic
negation” (438).
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Viet Kieu Popular Masculinity: Good (Đàn Ông Đứng Đắn) and Bad (Đàn Ông Hư
Hỏng) Men
The establishment of Vietnamese postwar communities around the world has
created a push for Vietnamese diasporic cultural productions that are attentive to the
changing patterns and values of these populations. Stuart Cunningham and Tina
Nguyễn have argued elsewhere that a cultural medium such as Paris By Night fulfills
three criteria: 1) it maintains a traditional heritage 2) it negotiates between cultures 3) it
asserts new hybrid identities.
11
Nhi Lieu extends upon Cunningham and Nguyễn’s
three points, and argues that videotexts such as Paris By Night support new bourgeois
and exilic identities. She argues that “these cultural productions privilege a "new"
diasporic Vietnamese subjectivity, shedding an "impoverished refugee" image for a new
hybrid, bourgeois, ethnic identity" (195-196). Her work on examples of the use of
women to parade fashion trends as a sign of capitalist consumer sensibilities shows how
femininity becomes the vehicle through which bourgeois and exilic sensibilities are
consolidated. In this section, I would like to explore how, through Nguyễn’s literary
work (which is also heavily circulated among Vietnamese diasporic circles) refugee and
first generation Vietnamese diasporic masculinity is marked as an important locus of
“new” diasporic identities. In Nguyễn’s attention to affects through literary and
narrative interiorities, however, these masculinities are not only signs of “new” diasporic
identities, but they show identities in motion -- that is, identities as they are shaped and
produced by the activities and patterns of diasporic and transnational exchange.
In this reading I focus on two of Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn’s most recent fictional
works, the short story “Nước Mắt Đàn Ông” (“The Tears of Men,” 2007), and the series
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novella Việt Kiều (Overseas Vietnamese, 2006) because of their attention to men’s place in
new social formations in the diaspora. These texts are also important because they were
recorded on audiotape (not all of his stories are recorded), thus exponentially increasing
their circulation. The paucity of Vietnamese-language book publishers makes buying a
book more expensive than purchasing it on audiotape or getting it by other means.
12
Nguyễn’s role as cultural bearer takes especially paternalistic routes. While
cultural analyses such as Nhi Lieu’s importantly show the differential uses of women’s
bodies to procure both filial duty to the traditional past and duty to particular
conceptions of proper femininity in contemporary society, less work has been done to
consider the ways that concepts of masculinity are concomitant in the establishment of
virtuous and non-virtuous social character. Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn’s Viet kieu-male
prototype can be broadly described across his texts as upper middle-class,
entrepreneurial, highly marriage-desirable, and suffering the inequities of transnational
cultural capital. In the U.S. he is caught by a social order that ostracizes him for such
deviances as leaving his wife and family, and in Vietnam he suffers the inability to assert
a fully present male dominance. How Nguyễn turns this rather obnoxious social
identity into a sympathetic character is an important textual strategy.
Việt Kiều – Rapscallions, Charlatans, and Heartbreak
In his popular series-novella (first published and recorded as a series of parts),
Nguyễn introduces readers to ông Thành, a sixty year-old Vietnamese American man
who, in the opening pages, brings readers/listeners straight into the bustle of current-
day Saigon. Ông Thành arrives at Tan Son Nhat airport and immediately hails a cab to
a low-cost hotel. Friends and family do not greet him at the airport because they do not
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know to; this trip to Vietnam is a secret. He is on a mission to figure out if his twenty-
two year-old Vietnamese girlfriend, Hương, for whom he plans to leave his 30-year
marriage, is faithful to him—that is, if she is worth a potentially humiliating and
expensive divorce. He has already funneled money from his family’s 7-11 business in
the states to buy Hương a quán (local café) to keep her occupied when he is away.
Ông Thành figures that, realistically, it was highly possible that a young
attractive Vietnamese girl, while likely to appreciate an older and wealthy Viet kieu
man, may just as likely want other means of entertainment when he is away. He resorts
to hiring a local xe ôm (pedicab) driver to inconspicuously observe Hương at the
restaurant and to report whether any obvious male courters visit her. Nguyễn describes
such exchanges as involving multiple layers of calculation. Ông Thành begins by
asking the driver, Phi, what he earns on an average day. While Phi ponders the most
potentially lucrative response to this obvious Viet kieu man, ông Thành asks instead
how much he makes on his best day. Phi responds that his work is a hardship, some
days he makes 20 or 50 thousand dong (the equivalent of $1-$4 USD), or perhaps he
will spend all day driving around and not catch one customer. Ông Thành offers him
50 thousand dong for one day’s work, to match his best earning. Phi recants this
amount and decries that it is much too little money for the purchase of an entire day’s
worth of gas. They eventually agree to 100 thousand dong for Phi’s time. Ông Thành
asks that Phi spy on his “niece” Hương whom he says he plans to marry off to a Viet
kieu in America. But first, Phi must help him ascertain if Hương is indeed a virtuous
girl, worthy of this match. If on the first day, no one visits Hương, then Phi will be
asked to return for a couple more days, just to be sure. Phi gladly accepts the offer; it
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requires little work, just an afternoon spent sitting and drinking coffee in a café with
pretty girls. Phi figures that to really make it worth his while, he will report,
regardless, that on the first day no one out of the ordinary visited Hương. Ông Thành,
for his part, assumes that the exorbitant money he is paying Phi will assure that Phi will
honestly report what he sees. This type of negotiation, described by Nguyễn with
meticulous attention to each person’s interior computation, begins to show itself as part
and parcel of life in Saigon, and is especially a burden for Viet kieu men. Before the two
men part, ông Thành gives Phi his local contact information written down on his
American business card.
Phi liếc nhanh cái tên Thành Phạm in đậm nét ở giữa tấm danh thiếp,
phía dưới có them hai chữ nhỏ là “General Manager” mà Phi không hiểu
là chức vụ gì. Mà dù có hiểu thì Phi cũng chả biết ông Thành la General
Manager của công ty nào, hang xưởng nào, bởi ông không hề ghi chỗ
ông làm. Ông in business card vu vơ như vậy cho oai thôi, vì ông biết
hai tiếng general manager khi dịch sang tiếng Việt là “Tổng Giám Đốc”
thì người ở quê nhà sẻ thấy ông cực kỳ vĩ đại.” (96)
Phi immediately made out the name Thành Phạm pressed into the middle
of the card, on the bottom were written in smaller letters “General
Manager” but he didn’t understand what position this was. And even if
he did know, he wouldn’t know what company or factory he was general
manager of because he didn’t put that on the card. Ông Thành printed
these cards vague because they were for show only. He knew that the
two words: general manager, when translated into Vietnamese meant
“Company Director” and people in the homeland would think that he was
a very important person. [Translation mine]
One of ông Thành’s Viet kieu cronies, Cụ Phát, corroborates the need to self-
aggrandize:
Thành ra về Việt Nam không nói dóc cũng không được! Mình không
khoe chức vụ thì dễ bị thiên hạ coi thường, tại vì cái xã hội Việt Nam từ
ngàn đời vẫn trọng bằng cấp và chức tước! (98-99)
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As it turns out, when you come back to Vietnam you can’t not tell lies! If
we don’t brag that we have an important position then we’ll be seen as
common because this Vietnamese society has long placed value on
diplomas and titles! [Translation mine]
Nguyễn’s consciousness of Viet kieu men’s “plight” is interesting on several counts. In
the earlier example Nguyễn once again displays a form of narrative condescension,
wherein he attributes to Phi a lack of cultural cache: he does not understand English
language titles. But this is important in Nguyễn’s narrative project in Việt Kiều, which
for over 600 pages, almost entirely sets itself in current-day Saigon. Nguyễn depicts
Saigon in terms that must negotiate the sensitivities of a Viet kieu and refugee-diaspora
reading audience. Ashley Carruthers’ (2007) fascinating work on the tricky issue of
visual representations of Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City as it was named in 1976) among
the diaspora is instructive. Carruthers compares the visual representation of Saigon in
music videos by Thuy Nga and a smaller company, Rainbow Productions. Carruthers
argues that older more established cultural broker companies such as Thuy Nga
understand the refugee diaspora’s high sensitivity to anything involving Vietnam’s
current government, including representations of its capital city. In Thuy Nga’s 30-
year postwar commemorative video, 30 năm viễn xứ, it shows images of pre-1975
Saigon accompanied by a nostalgic rendition of the song “Sài Gòn ơi” (Farewell Saigon).
Rainbow Productions, a relative newcomer to diasporic media, produced a low-budget
commemorative video with its opening montage of current-day Saigon set to a lively
song “Sài Gòn đẹp lắm” (Saigon is beautiful). In the montage, young scantily clad
women carouse about the city partaking of local food vendors and shops having a
jubilant time. Carruthers shows how older viewers of the first generation refugee
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diaspora negatively perceived Rainbow Production’s images. He explains, “In public
diasporic culture, Saigon is typically not imagined as a place that can be prosaically
returned to, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of overseas Vietnamese do this
every year. In the exilic mode of discourse, these quotidian returns are typically
bracketed from the mythicized Final Return that would signify the fall of communism
and, ironically, the end of Diaspora” (73). Though by 2010, these sensitivities have
given way to more relaxed attitudes about Saigon’s visual presence in diasporic media
(the upsurge of Vietnamese diasporic filmmakers are eager to make use of lower
production costs in Vietnam), writers like Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn must still proceed
cautiously in the depiction of life in Saigon.
In Nguyễn’s story, Saigon is a city of illicit dealings where it seems as though
everyone is caught up in the trap of survival and trust should be given with caution.
But Nguyễn splices this story of duplicitous dealing with very poignant insights into
the motivations of each of his characters. In the example of the exchange of ông
Thành’s business card (essentially a calling card in Vietnamese social circles) with Phi,
Nguyễn surely patronizes the local working-class; yet at the same time, he exposes Viet
kieu men as intensely self-conscious of their social value. These men, cụ Phát included,
return to Vietnam and find the conversion of their economic and cultural capital to their
advantage, but they are hounded with worry that this value is provisional. They are
hyperaware of their marginal status and limited rights as overseas Vietnamese in
Vietnam. The issue of Viet kieu men liaising with and marrying Vietnamese women
speaks to issues of needing social worth as discussed by Hung Thai and of the
precarious nature of national belonging as discussed by Ashley Carruthers (2002).
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However, in the case of Nguyễn’s Việt Kiều, ông Thành and Cụ Phát (who also annually
sojourns to Vietnam to consort with his lover) are not like the single men of Thai’s
study, who have difficulty meeting compatible marriage partners in the U.S. (as in
Thai’s study). They are both older-generation men who have been in long-term
marriages and have adult children. The issue is not so much a lack of an available niche
marriage market in the U.S., but seems to involve the first generation diasporic male’s
“mid-life crisis.” In a narrative that showcases Nguyễn’s penchant for social-life
commentary and storytelling, Việt Kiều offers a compendium of various elder Viet kieu
men’s fears of their lack of desirability. When cụ Phát’s son-in-law, Minh, decides to
make a visit to Vietnam, cụ Phát broods over their comparative desirabilities and the
discomfort of being seen next to and compared with the young and more handsome
Minh.
Chính cụ Phát mới là người cảm thấy khổ sở hơn nhiều. Hai cha con vô
vũ trường, đi tắm hơi, gội đầu, hát karaoke, nói chung là những chỗ bán
dâm trá hình, thì cô nào cũng chỉ muốn vồ lấy Minh vì Minh trẻ trung,
lịch sự lại đẹp trai. (454)
It was the elder Phát that suffered most [when the pair go out together].
When they went to a disco, to the sauna, to get their hair washed, to sing
karaoke, mostly any place where prostitution was available, everyone
would want to get Minh because he was younger, well mannered and
handsome. (Translation mine)
He then muses, “Cụ tiếc rằng khi đất nước mở cho những cuộc vui bất tận thì cụ đã già
mất rồi.” / “He regretted that just as the nation was opening to allow endless forms of
play that he was already too old to enjoy them” (454, Translation mine). For Vietnam
to receive such an endorsement as this is ironic given cụ Phát’s questionable morality.
Cụ Phát’s waxing on the unique suffering of men his age, unable to fully participate in
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the sexual “choices” now made available under Vietnam’s “opening,” reflects on the
relatively unrestricted commercial sex freedoms that have been ushered in by neoliberal
market practices. Nguyen-vo Thu Huong argues in The Ironies of Freedom (2008) that
Vietnam, in the post-đổi mới era, saw an increase in the discourse of consumer “choice”
concomitant with a heightened discourse of commercial sex in both government policy
and cultural production. According to Nguyen-vo, the Vietnamese government’s new
market practices rely on the production of new kinds of consumers with newly
privatized intimate desires. Commercial sex becomes a mainstay of the government’s
new market and cultural practice, linking sex with global and international market
interests. The world of Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn’s Viet kieu “sex-patriates” participates in
this commercial sex market and I argue, produces the Viet kieu man as a legible global
market subject.
13
The fruition of these Viet kieu men’s concerns appears in the figure of Hương,
the twenty-two year old lover of ông Thành, who schemes with her Vietnamese lover,
Tuan, to trick her naïve Viet kieu suitor into transferring all of his money from his
family’s business into her bank account. Feigning adoration for him, Hương is the
epitome of spoiled femininity. But even this figure is given a social commentary that
more evenly adjudicates the politics of transnational interpersonal exchange. When the
employees in her café cast judgment on her for deceiving the kindly ông Thành, Hương
scolds them:
Mở mắt ra mà nhìn!...Việt kiều già như lão, về đây lấy vợ trẻ như tao,
làm gì có tình nghĩa. Chỉ là mua bán thôi.
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Cái nhà này, cái quán này, đâu phải lão cho không tao! Tao đổi cuộc đời
tao hai năm cắn răng phục vụ lão mới có, như thế là đủ rồi. Thuận mua
vừa bán. Không ai lừa gạt ai! (207)
Open your eyes and look! … A Viet kieu as old as him, returning to
marry someone as young as me, this is not about love. It’s a market
trade.
This house, this café, he didn’t give it to me for nothing! I gave two
years of servitude to him and that’s enough. It’s like a market exchange.
No one is cheating anyone! (Translation mine)
Hương offers a dubious feminist argument, that her catering to ông Thành and shoring
up his social value is equivalent to labor that should be rightfully compensated. She
casts their relationship into market terms, “mua bán” (buying and selling) and insists
that in reality no one is being victimized.
Not to short shrift on layers of duplicity, Nguyễn has Hương betrayed by her
lover, Tuan, an entitled but financially desolate child of a local politburo. Tuan never
planned to marry Hương as she had fantasized, but was using her to cash in on the
scheme to get hold of ông Thành’s wealth. Because ông Thành is Viet kieu, he does not
have legal rights to own businesses or property in Vietnam. The house and business he
has purchased for Hương are owned under her name as dictated by current-day
Vietnamese investment laws. This detail elaborates on the multiple currents of
alienation that Viet kieu men engaged in mixed-up relationships with Vietnamese
nationals, such as ông Thành’s relationship with Hương, are subject to. Though his
relative cultural capital, as a financially solvent and Western influenced male, is in many
respects highly valued in Vietnam, the Viet kieu man is, nevertheless, subject to other
forms of alienation. Carruthers’ (2002) work on the highly contested nature of national
belonging for Viet kieu returners is helpful to further comment on this theme as it
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emerges in Nguyễn’s work. Carruthers argues that although Viet kieu share the same
racial identification as Vietnamese locals, they are marked as outsiders and therefore
subject to various forms of social rejection. Carruthers points out that though Viet kieu
have the privilege to move transnationally, they cannot “exchange pure mobility for the
weighty commitments of time, acculturation, and identification that the notion of
national membership entails.” Rather, he argues that “national belonging, far from
having been made obsolete by the emergence of transnational social fields, is in fact a
key form of cultural capital operative in them” (424). Carruthers details how local
Vietnamese use social acts to ostracize Viet kieu who have not yet gained the local
cultural cache that accrues through daily performative acts of local belonging. He calls
this process a “practical national belonging” and favors it over the dualistic and
insufficient “citizenship” paradigm to describe how people attain nation-based cache.
Embodied and performed citizenships are about what people do everyday and how they
invest in the quality of life of the local community. Carruthers argues that though the
accumulation of economic capital in the West turns into converted cultural capital in
Vietnam, this process is not an automatic one. It is fraught with difficulties for Viet
kieu—such as “manifestations of resentments and modes of exclusion” (428). For men
like ông Thành, according to Việt Kiều, such alienations include double-dealings when it
comes to their emotional investments. A sense of belonging is a hardship. To affirm his
own masculinity, ông Thành desires to be wanted by young and beautiful women.
When he finally has the economic and cultural capital to attain this, it is at an age when
he has already married and must meticulously calculate his next moves as well as the
moves of the women he chooses to pursue. So desperate is his desire to belong to
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someone (desirable) that as soon as he realizes Hương’s tricks he is thrown into a fitful
sense of obsolescence. He immediately turns his attentions to Hương’s sweet-tempered
employee, Liễu, and asks her if she will marry him and move to the U.S. This bizarre
and rather humorous turn of events highlights his emotional immaturity. Distraught at
the prospect of being unwanted, Viet kieu first-generation masculinity caught at the
nexus of transnational interpersonal politics unravels.
In Việt Kiều, the men of this generation are infantilized and shown to be
emotionally needy. The fallout of such unrestrained emotional disturbance is that
families are broken, the men end up emotionally abandoned, and the social fabric of both
Vietnamese and Viet kieu life is further threatened by greed and duplicity. The issue of
victimization emerges more complexly. Nguyễn shows a society in Saigon that is full of
opportunists whose damaging effects on “good” masculinity and femininity cannot be
easily categorized as a problem of Vietnam’s, as in the argument that the social
environment in Vietnam breeds such possibilities. Rather, I suggest that Nguyễn poses
it as a problem of emotional faculties. He critiques social structures that would support
opportunism and greed, but he elaborates this critique through the wrought illustration
of men’s poor sense of self and how this unfolds as a display of curious love-object
choices.
While life in this transnational space is filled with questionable relations, the
ones that do provide some means of reliable emotional sustenance are the ones between
Viet kieu men because the men can identify with the difficulties of their counterparts.
For ông Thành it is through his friendships with cụ Phát and ông Vượng, both older
Viet kieu men who have romantic liaisons with younger women in Vietnam, that he
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retrieves some emotional equilibrium. Their bonds accumulate in public spaces of
diasporic life and become mobile support networks when they cross paths in Vietnam.
When cụ Phát spies his friend ông Thành in a local restaurant in the States, Nguyễn
writes, “chỉ có ông Thành là người tri kỷ có thể chia sẻ tâm sự thầm kín với cụ” (“only
ông Thành could understand and share cụ Phát’s innermost confidences”) (85,
translation mine). These relationships are sustained by how men relate to other men
and help each other to save face in front of “thiên hạ” (the public/society at large).
When his manhood is bruised by news of Hương’s infidelity, ông Vượng offers ông
Thành consolation:
Chuyện gì rồi cũng sẽ qua! Cần nhất là phải bình tĩnh. Bọn chúng mình
đứa nào cũng già cả rồi! Trải đời đã nhiều, vui buồn không thiếu. Ông
đừng có xuống tinh thần quá mà hại cho sức khoẻ! Tôi mới gặp cụ Phát
trước hôm vào Việt Nam. Mới ngày nào cụ thất tình tưởng ra nghĩa địa
rồi. Bây giờ yêu đời lắm. Chả nhớ nhung gì chuyện cũ nữa! (259)
Whatever the situation, it will pass! The most important thing is to
remain clear-headed. The whole lot of us are old now! We’ve been
through a lot, no shortage of good and bad experiences. Don’t get so
down that your health suffers! I just saw cụ Phát when he arrived. It
wasn’t long ago that he was miserable and thinking about death already.
But now, he loves life. He doesn’t think about anything from the past!
(Translation mine)
When he can’t budge ông Thành from his dour mood ông Vượng invites him to go for a
night on the town and even sends a prostitute to his hotel room as a consolation. The
ridiculousness of this type of “emotional support” is not carelessly bypassed. Rather, it
is carefully pointed out in Nguyễn’s characteristically understated and satirical manner.
On his audiotape recording, Nguyễn’s emotionally wrought voice and non-ironic
reading emphasizes the irony of men so concerned about being taken advantaged of by
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younger women that they believe offering sex-for-cash to younger women on each
others’ behalf is an effective balm for each others’ hurt feelings. But more than hurt
feelings, Nguyễn shows that it is a bruised social identity and self-worth that is at risk
when these men place the value of their masculinity on their cultural conversion in
Vietnam. And it is each other, a patchwork of like-minded consorts, who are able to
offer each other a communalism that is impossible elsewhere. Family members and
society at-large are likely to judge these older men for their lascivious sexual appetites,
their lack of responsibility to their families and children, and their outrageous lack of
social decorum. It is only amongst each other that they find peers who will accept them.
This network of care becomes a curiously significant site where Viet kieu first
generation masculinity finds its most sincere support. This seems to be the brunt of
Nguyễn’s agenda in Việt Kiều. The story offers little by way of traditional masculinity.
Instead, the male characters are reflective of positionalities that show the follies of a
chaotic social order. But importantly, all characters are given an interiority that shows
their calculations as driven by the difficult economic or social positions in which they
exist. This attention to placing importance on people’s difficult positions and how
Nguyễn manages to extend critique without resorting to direct and unmitigating
judgment recalls his role in the re-education camps. There, at several junctures,
Nguyễn found just the right way to phrase a concern, or ask for a reprieve on behalf of
those men who took the “heroic” route by loudly defending and asserting their South
Vietnamese nationalism. All of Nguyễn’s characters are deemed worthy of compassion,
all are shown to be equally filled with contradiction and hypocrisy. It is the rare
character that showcases traits of impeccable masculinity or femininity.
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“Nước Mắt Đàn Ông” – Virtuous Masculinity
As Việt Kiều illustrated, for Viet kieu men, “good” masculinity hinges on being
affectively in control. In “Nước Mắt Đàn Ông” the protagonist, ông Quang, a fifty year-
old Viet kieu man in Orange County spends half of the story suffering the death of his
wife who is stricken with cancer just before a planned trip back to Vietnam for the first
time. As she lingers on her deathbed, he dutifully and sincerely attends to her, all the
while keeping his breaking heart at bay. She begs him to make just one promise: to not
remarry until all three of their children have finished high school and graduated from
college. He quickly assures her that this is the easiest promise to keep. He promises her
“Con em cũng là con anh. Việc học hành của chúng nó, anh có bao giờ lơ là đâu! Anh
sẽ set-up cho mỗi cái quỹ education fund, chỉ dành riêng cho việc học, khỏi vay tiền
chính phủ!” (“Your children are also my children. I would never disregard their
education! I will set-up an education fund for each of them, enough to go to school
without needing to borrow government loans!”(245, translation mine). Five years after
she has passed, ông Quang has made good on every promise. At 55 he is unworried by
money, business, or family obligations and finds that he is free to travel back to
Vietnam. But as a “good” man, he is unfazed by the temptations that Vietnam has to
offer. It is only when his father passes away that he must return for burial obligations.
His first return to Vietnam is premised on filial duty only. He has lived the last five
years celibate and dutiful to his children, despite how highly sought after he is by
women in Orange County. The women whisper to each other: “Của chìm của nổi không
biết bao nhiêu, nhưng nội cái bảo hiểm bà Mỹ Linh để lại cũng đã hơn một triệu rồi.”
(“I don’t know about his liquid or non-liquid assets, but with just the insurance money
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his wife left alone, he is worth more than a million dollars.”) (255, translation mine).
While Viet kieu women were shown to be suffering wives in Việt Kiều, here, they are as
calculating and money-minded as the young Vietnamese women epitomized by Hương.
When ông Quang returns to Vietnam, he is reunited with his childhood friend
ông Thiện. The two men have kept in touch throughout the twenty-five years they
have been separated and, when together again, it is as if they have never been apart.
They are bonded not only by their childhood friendship, but by the experiences of
escape from Vietnam by boat. They both wanted to escape with their families, but by
happenstance, ông Quang had enough connections and was successful while his friend
did not meet the same luck. To this Nguyễn writes, “mỗi người một số mệnh” (“each
person has their own fate”). On his return, ông Quang spends his days riding passenger
while his friend plays tour guide from their motorbike. The two spend endless hours
catching up and joking with each other like they did as youngsters.
One day, it occurs to ông Thiện to ask his friend if he would be willing to marry
his oldest daughter, Giang, so that she could go to the U.S. and escape her
heartbreaking memories in Vietnam. Giang was engaged to a fellow who took a trip to
Canada for vacation. While there, he met another woman, decided to marry her, and
never returned. Giang was spurned and had since ignored all mention of love or
marriage. At thirty, she was well beyond the marriageable age in Vietnam and was
considered “ế” (a term used to describe unsellable goods). Her parents, concerned that
she had lost interest in her life, thought a marriage of convenience to their trusted
friend might provide a much-needed opportunity to start over. Giang and ông Quang
negotiate the function of this marriage, both too timid to broach the topic of whether
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they could love each other for real. The twenty-five year age gap between them and the
fact that she is his best-friend’s daughter make this a very sensitive topic.
While the two dance around the issue of whether this could, in fact, be a
marriage based on real emotions, ông Quang reflects on how it would appear to his
children and to others in his community if he were to bring a young wife such as Giang
back to the U.S. He decides to stand by the promise he made when his wife died that he
would never marry again. Though Giang shows obvious signs of truly loving him, and
though she is young enough to still be attractive yet old enough to not cause too much
of a scandal, ông Quang decides to forego this possible future happiness. He lets her
know his intentions, but offers that if she insists upon coming to the U.S. then he would
be willing to go through with a marriage if it would help her. The decision to marry,
then, is up to her. What happens next is a one-upsmanship of virtuousness. Giang
explains her final decision to her sister, “Tao tưởng chú yêu tao thì tao nhận ngay. Hóa
ra tao sai!” (“If I believed he loved me, then I would accept immediately. As it turns out,
I was wrong.”) (310, translation mine). The concern, voiced in Việt Kiều, that older and
wealthy men such as ông Quang are easy prey for Vietnamese women who scheme to
come to the U.S. is countered in Giang, who, due to her sincere and “true” Vietnamese
femininity, refuses to marry a man she loves if he does not willingly choose to love her
back. She explains further to her sister,
Mãi đến hôm qua bố mới cho tao biết là lúc vợ chú Quang hấp hối, chú
ấy có hứa là không lập gia đình lại…Cho nên dù thích tao đến đâu, chú
cũng không phản bội được!...Đó mới là người đàn ông hiếm có trong xã
hội! (310)
Dad just told me yesterday that when his wife was dying, he promised
that he would never marry again… That’s why, no matter what his
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feelings are for me, he cannot cheat on his promise! … That is rare
among men in our society. (Translation mine)
As if an antidote to the moral depravity of the cast of characters in Việt Kiều, Nguyễn
offers a more facilely digestible trope wherein the older male of the refugee diaspora
locates his self-worth through pride in his accomplishments: his industrious enterprise
as a diligent businessman, his happy marriage, his three accomplished children, and the
respect of the community around him. This is a man who is secure in his place among
his peers. In a rather odd evasion of the problem of belonging that plagued his male
characters in Việt Kiều, ông Quang is, in this story, fully comfortable with his niche in
the world. In the absence of a female romantic-partner, he finds fulfillment in upholding
his honor. The tears of men, in this formulation, seem to signify that he must withstand
all manner of temptation for the duration of his life in order to both honor a promise he
made to his wife and lead a life of true moral certitude.
Conclusion
Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn’s literature offers an important insight not just into the
representational politics of “good” and “bad” masculinity, but also, I suggest, on the
relative strengths of an affective community in Vietnamese diasporic life. While the
“community” is vastly heterogeneous and comprised of multiply contradicting and
different strands of political and cultural thought, there exists a suggestion of a thread
that runs through a Vietnamese diasporic “community.” Namely, a communally
acknowledged field of affects derived from one’s sense of what “thiên hạ” (public) would
think of a person’s morally questionable actions. Particularly as Viet kieu move across
transnational spaces, the desire for a sense of acceptance and cultural capital become
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heightened. For Viet kieu men, the desire to live out the fantasy of cashing in on one’s
conversion value in Vietnam contributes to imagined and real “tệ nạn” (social evils) such
as divorce, bankruptcy, and loss of face. On the level of addressing ideology, Nguyễn’s
fictions exercise a management of masculinity that show how the refugee man can
prevail if he shows moral and ethical propriety. Therefore, these stories pivot around
the themes of home-life, marriage, and family duty. They serve as cautionary tales about
the ways that families still pivot on the role of the man. He can still break a mother’s
heart, destroy a family’s hard earned economic security, show himself to be weak-willed
and easily manipulated by social pressures.
On an affective level, I question why these stories are so popular and
“successful.” Is it because readers enjoy being “taught” about Vietnamese morality? Do
women readers enjoy having their worst complaints about men validated? Do men,
such as my father, bristle at the stereotypical depiction of men as sexual naïves? I want
to suggest that through a consideration of “thiên hạ” that Nguyễn’s characters are so
taken with, we can gain insight into how Nguyễn makes use of a diasporic formation
that is still very much attuned to issues and difficulties in the social fabric of Viet kieu
life. This is certainly something that Thuy Nga Productions is able to tap into across
their various media platforms. To consider the importance of “everyone else” or the
“public,” we are moved to consider the ways that this entity figures into “community”
and one’s sense of belonging in the Viet kieu diaspora. Carruthers’ work on “practical
national belonging” corresponds with Karin Aguilar San-Juan’s analysis of the
importance of space to the elaboration of a sense of community in Little Saigons in the
U.S.. Aguilar San-Juan emphasizes the sociological observation that communities can
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act as “zones of safety” for ethnic populations in post-migratory experience. Place-
making involves a daily exchange that can contribute to identifications with a concept of
“community.” In Aguilar San-Juan’s words:
In fact, staying Vietnamese is not an act of constancy but of purposeful,
and ultimately strategic, shifting and changing in order to arrive at new
ways of being Vietnamese in a U.S. context. This thoughtful and
deliberate recalibration of culture and identity allows Vietnamese
Americans in Orange County and Boston to find a new “equilibrium
state” in which Vietnameseness is redefined so as to serve a myriad of
simultaneous and sometimes contradictory social and historical functions.
(xxvii)
According to both Aguilar San-Juan and Carruthers, the ability to command one’s space
and be recognized as a productive part of communal spaces is integral to the
accumulation of local cultural cache and a sense of identity and belonging. This sense of
belonging is portrayed as highly volatile for first generation Viet kieu men who, in a
U.S. context, may feel marginalized and feel their patriarchal position threatened or, in
Nguyễn’s story, feel sexually absent in the new social landscape. Neo-liberal capitalism
in Vietnam’s new market economy has created a highly lucrative and rampant sex-
economy. The first-generation Viet kieu’s fantasy of a “Final Return,” as Carruthers
discusses, is relatively marginalized in Nguyễn’s stories. Rather than a political return
to Vietnam, his Viet kieu men attempt to participate and dominate in Vietnam’s sexual
politics. Nguyễn’s Viet kieu men are not angry or resentful patriarchs who are still
ruminating on “past attachments.” They have latched onto a future that is defined in
terms of attaining desirable sexual-being status, though this desire is foiled by
consciousness that “thiên hạ” judge them for what they most fear themselves to be, old
and doddering men who have only their bank accounts and passports to cushion their
199
sense that their heydays have passed. This seems to be the ultimate sorrow of first
generation Viet kieu masculinity.
200
Chapter Four Endnotes
1
This comparison was made by Nhi Lieu (2007).
2
In an interview with Hương Kieu Loan, Nguyễn explained “Còn tôi, viết văn cũng như lên sân
khấu hoàn toàn là do sự đẩy của hoàn cảnh, không hề định hướng từ nhỏ.” [As for me, writing
and being on stage has been entirely due to the circumstances I was in, I never thought about it
as a child.] (Translation mine)
http://www.honque.com/PhongVan/pvNguyenNgọcNgạn/pvNguyenNgọcNgạn.htm
Accessed January 1, 2010
3
Nhi Lieu describes the role of the MCs in Paris by Night thusly: offer moral instruction, comic
relief, stage debates about gender roles, set overall ambiance (2007).
4
See Lieu (2007), Carruthers (2001), Cunningham and Nguyễn(1999).
5
From online interview with Hương Kieu Loan.
6
From online interview with Hương Kieu Loan.
7
This is in following with the significant contributions of R.W. Connell in his book Masculinities
and set forth by the studies in Migrant Men (2009).
8
In the field of postwar Vietnamese diasporic studies, this type of analysis comes to mind when
dealing with highly sensitive topics such as occurred around the Hi-Tek video protest in Orange
County in 1999. The question was, “Was the Vietnamese American’s resolutely anti-communist
stand a sign of its ideological inflexibility?” This is also identifiable in works that have dealt
with Paris By Night as a diasporic medium.
9
Christopher uses Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn’s given name, Ngan, while I refer to him using his
patronymic, Nguyễn.
10
See Phuong Nguyen’s dissertation “People of the Fall” for further analysis of the politics of
Little Saigon formation in Orange County.
11
See Stuart Cunningham and Tina Nguyễn, “Popular Media of the Vietnamese Diaspora,”
Globalisation and Diasporic Communication 6. 1 (1999): 71-92.
12
Home-made audiotape copies, and the popularity of sharing CDs, along with being able to
hear Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn’s dramatic reading voice, makes the audiotape versions of Nguyễn’s
literary works preferred among his audience. Nguyễn’s newest audiobook tapes are also
popularly shared online on popular Vietnamese language sites such as www.tialia.com and
www.uminhcoc.com. Though the bookstore and audiostore keepers each insisted their medium
was the better medium to consume Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn’s stories, I found the book reading
frustrating due to poor binding and pages that immediately fell out.
13
“Sex-patriate” is a neologism that brings together “expatriate” with the notion of their
participation and heightened interests in sexual exploits in the country of their residence,
usually a third world nation.
201
Conclusion
Towards a Critical Diaspora Cultural Studies
In the inaugural edition of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies Yen Le Espiritu posed a
crucial project to the fields of Asian American Studies, American Studies, and Vietnam
Studies.
1
In it, Espiritu cautions against taking wholesale the benign tropes of
“American exceptionalism, immigration, or even transnationalism,” but she instead
urges scholars to critically engage “around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence.”
2
This call for an engagement in issues of war, race and violence insists upon the
historical contextualization of Vietnamese refugees and exiles in American historical
and cultural consciousness. I emphasize Espiritu’s exhortation to once again reconsider
these themes as tropes for analytical consideration as a call to radicalize the ways we
consider them. It is important to understand Vietnamese narratives that must
themselves be contextualized within the histories of modern warfare. To engage in an
examination of war, race and violence, we must do so with caution to the interpellating
pull of “victim” and injury as a subject-making discourse. In an examination of Left
political theory Wendy Brown critiques the attachment to injury and the wound as a
focal point for liberation politics. She asks, “[h]ow might certain wounded attachments
and profound historical disorientations form the basis for ungrounded persistence in
ontological essentialism and epistemological foundationalism, for infelicitous
formulations of identity rooted in injury, for litigiousness as a way of political life, and
for a resurgence of rights discourse among left academics?”
3
Brown’s critique of Left
political theory’s attachment with wounds and victimization should be an important and
productive reminder to Vietnamese diasporic cultural studies that we must seek out
202
other ways of engaging the postwar Vietnamese histories of dispersal and cultural
practice. Yet at the same time, as Vietnam’s war history begins to fall into the category
of the “past” and the primacy of war and colonialism recedes from contemporary
cultural consciousness, an attentive engagement with the themes of war, race, and
violence becomes more of a concern.
My dissertation has argued that an attention to affects is one way we can
radicalize methods of engaging issues of war, race, and violence. By nature affects are
unwieldy, unpredictable, and highly resistant to critique for they are the very mark of
the personal and idiosyncratic. It is their seeming untouchability that makes them both
dangerous to nationalist agendas when they threaten to recruit citizen-subjects’ to
alternative loyalties and yet highly amenable to certain forms of propaganda or appeal.
Affects mark the very sites of our availability to the environment around us. In my
dissertation I have explored how cultural texts: film, variety-show stagings, and
literature of the postwar Vietnamese diaspora have revealed remarkable knowledge of
the power of affects to configure and contest the contours of diasporic selfhood, procure
cohesion of an exile community, and posit a historical past that deserves and invites
sympathy and empathy. But it is important to do more than show that emotions are
ever-present among the diaspora. My dissertation has tried to show that the texts I
have examined participate in a “structure of feeling” that highlights contact points
between subjects that divide as well as cohere them.
In these pages I have brought together cultural and artistic texts produced by
Vietnamese national artists with texts issued by artists in the Vietnamese diaspora with
particular emphasis on U.S. based writers and artists. I have particularly been
203
interested in post-war texts as texts that contemplate the legacy of war and its impact
on families, identity, and the experience of movement among those Vietnamese subjects
who made the exodus and those who remained. I have argued that examinations of
Vietnamese postwar populations for the most part of have had to look globally at how
“communities” have formed vis-à-vis the notion of a Socialist Vietnam. Thus it is that
the “Vietnamese American community,” as the descriptor is usually referred to in the
U.S., is what is often invoked at the costly price of installing a homogeneous
representation of the Vietnamese diaspora. In this dissertation, I look critically towards
the ways cultural productions expose the more explicitly contradictory and paradoxical
formations of Vietnamese postwar subjectivity that I identify through attention to
dimensions of experiences of affects.
In future work I hope to expand the corpus of texts scholars in the West use to
examine the impact of the Vietnam War. Though scholars have identified a
“Vietnamese community” in diasporic ethnic enclaves, they have yet to fully engage the
ways those communities have utilized cultural spaces to assert their cultural and
pedagogical agendas and the complexities that arise when those cultural spaces must
negotiate competing interests that necessarily emerge in the process of diaspora
building. Some critical scholarship has examined the Paris By Night variety show video
franchise, but has stopped short of theorizing how cultural texts affectively negotiate
the vicissitudes of what is considered “diaspora building.” In future work, I hope to look
to Vietnamese-language memoirs, newsprint editorials, and early Vietnamese refugee
fiction as critical texts to examine the affective response to war and resettlement and
204
address how the notion of a “public” became integral to the movement of affects in those
media and during that time.
Furthermore, I hope to expand on what cultural studies analyzes by insisting
that sociological data and cultural ephemera of the immediate postwar years provide key
textual traces of affect. This brings attention to texts that have either been overlooked
in scholarship, or have attained such excessive representational value that their affective
bearings have been elided in favor of analysis of their ideology-value. I believe that
Western scholarship on Vietnam postwar experience has too long framed Vietnamese
subjects, whether abroad or in the homeland, as abject and silent victims or omitted
their experience entirely in favor of highlighting the failures of Western empire. When
cultural texts by Vietnamese artists are analyzed they are still often framed around
ethnic migrant paradigms with emphasis on the perils of assimilation into Western
culture, or, for those in Vietnam, assimilation into a new global and modern society. In
addition, because psychoanalytic paradigms have too facilely treated Vietnamese
subjects as trauma victims.
I have argued that critical scholarship on Vietnamese populations and
subjectivity has turned away from treatment of affects and any systems having to do
with corporeal processes. Instead, through this dissertation I have tried to pay
attention to the still lingering affective traces of war and its effects on postwar
experience to shed light on how scholars might derive new language to understand such
highly contested processes as community formation.
One such example of community formation I addressed is the ways that
mainstream representations have treated the famous Hi-Tek video store display and
205
protest of the image of Ho Chi Minh in Orange County. Such an example and the media
treatment of it highlighted contestations of ideology as fundamental to understanding
the community while treatment of the event’s affective dimensions depicted the refugee
population as sentimentally anti-communist. Scholars such as Karin Aguilar San-Juan
have done a great deal of work to situate these community politics within the
Vietnamese diaspora’s ongoing efforts and struggles with “community” cohesion. But
what is left outside analysis is how performative uses of affect were enacted to drive
both the tremendously impactful protest and how they underwrote the video store-
owner’s claims of his victimization at the hands of an undemocratic community process.
Affects and their powerful fields of persuasion are used to great extent by Vietnamese
postwar populations because they are effective, but it is important to consider why they
are effective in the postwar Vietnamese diasporic condition. I argue that more attention
should be paid to how these affects persuade within the historical and social fabric in
which they emerge. Affect theorist Sara Ahmed argues that affects, what she calls
emotions, are “reactions” to others that define boundaries, skin, and notions of “self.”
They are a pure sociality. Brian Massumi agrees that affects exist as a pure sociality,
but he differs on whether and how that sociality is already a part of the body, or more
accurately, whether and how sociality is emergent in the body as such. These exciting
affect theorists, among others, provide a rich field of investigation of what the body and
its affects really are and what they can do. These theories traverse multiple fields of
study that I believe can be invigorating to Vietnamese diasporic cultural studies’
concern with what constitutes a subject, a subject of history, a subject of the social
environment, and the body that that subject moves within.
206
When I was in Vietnam, a cursory survey of conversations yielded the opinion
that the Vietnamese are over the war and are busy adjusting to global trade and tourist
labor demands while it is the diaspora population that is still nostalgic and holds onto
outdated resentments. I endeavor to reconceive of what “progress” means and what
“moving on” has meant for Vietnamese populations across the globe. In moving this
project forward, I hope to expand the analysis of postwar Vietnamese experience from
what it can tell us about ideology to what it can tell us about the nature of how people
are changed by war and how they come to effect change on their environment. A theory
of affects permits me to consider more fully how affects are embedded in social fabrics.
In order to make a scholarly contribution to fields other than studies focused on
Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, in future work I want to apply analytic pressure
to the terms “multiplicity, hybridity, and heterogeneity” because they have had a great
impact on Asian American Studies. These tripartite terms have been of tremendous
importance to Asian American studies scholarship’s theorizations of the racialized
subject. I believe an engagement with affects, as properties of the corporeal and social
body cuts to the heart of notions of self-hood and can expand how Asian American
studies approaches its investments in the study of subjectivity.
My intellectual investment in Vietnamese-language research leads me to my
research goals of fieldwork in Vietnam and among Vietnamese-language generations
and diasporic communities. I have an explicit interest in ethnographic work particularly
in locations of crossings where national borders become--not obsolete or contested--but
highly compelling. These are not “marginal” sites. Rather, they are sites such as in
Vietnam at the Women’s Cultural Center where I conducted a short ethnographic study
207
in Vietnam. As quotidian sites, these are places where Vietnamese and Vietnamese
diasporic populations travel to everyday in the process of living, but they are also,
importantly, places where they encounter vast networks and connections that expose
the transmissibility of everyday acts of living a postwar Vietnamese life.
Further Explorations into Victim-hood and Vietnam
A vexing question that continues to trail humanities and social science inquiries
into Vietnamese and Vietnamese diaspora-based studies is to understand if and how the
trope of victim can be productively connected to analysis of the history of war in
postwar life. I am interested in exploring the meaning of victim-hood to
conceptualizations of the Vietnamese body through a consideration of cultural studies
analysis of cultural and sociological texts in conjunction with experience in future
fieldwork in Vietnam.
The task of the victim is dual: to heal from brokenness and to forgive one’s
aggressors. This was nowhere made more explicit than in Le Ly Hayslip’s
autobiographical narratives When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989) and Child of
War (1993). Through her narratives about being victimized by Northern Communists,
by members of the Southern military, and eventually U.S. society Hayslip’s texts
brought the Vietnamese female body to center stage. Hayslip’s graphic stories and her
eventual Buddhist proclamation to forgive all her aggressors and to accept that karma
had brought the war into her life provoked criticism from Asian American studies
scholars who criticized her for subjugating herself to the violence of empire. Because
she lived in the U.S., her refusal to blame Communists for her traumatic experience
additionally brought criticism from the Vietnamese American refugee community,
208
which saw her as sympathetic to the Vietnamese Socialist government’s war campaign.
Hayslip’s situation illustrates the difficulties that arise with the designation “victim.” It
burdens the victim with the call to do justice to history and the memory of the war.
Hayslip’s call to heal the wounds of war through forgiveness was highly
suspicious to Vietnamese American anti-communist praxis and to Western leftist
critical scholarship. The thrust of my dissertation departs from contemporary cultural
theory’s critiques of tropes of healing. These critiques see calls for “healing” as offering
too hasty and linear a process moving too directly from trauma to healing, and that the
discourse on healing too often elides profound historical processes. While
contemporary cultural theory has valuably argued for the necessity to stay engaged at
the moment of trauma, my dissertation has pushed for a way of engagement that is
flexible enough to see the necessity of moving on and moving forward that is critical for
living in the world, especially in the contemporary moment when other themes become
more pressing. Because reconciliation has been too long enmeshed in discourses of
“forgiveness” and the tidiness of closures, I argue for a reckoning and recognition as
alternative relationalities that permit a moving forward. Alternatives to war
“reconciliation” come up at critical junctures in the narrative texts I examined and are
carried forth through a peaked attention to the affective dimensions of postwar life
which detail the impossibility of completion and closures. What reckoning and
recognition offer is an invitation to openly acknowledge the sins of the other, an
invitation that reflects back the sins in oneself -- a dialectic process at the heart of
longstanding conceptions of the self.
209
Vexing Diaspora
The study of the Vietnamese diaspora has understandably grown in
simultaneous progression with the emergence of Vietnamese scholarly presence in the
U.S. academy. These scholars’ works have often provided critical correctives to
Western monolithic ideas of Vietnam. This corrective is encapsulated in the idiom that
Vietnam is a country, not a war. Amerasia Journal dedicated a volume in 2003 to
Vietnamese Americans: Diaspora and Dimensions. Guest editor, Linda Trinh Vo
reminded readers that the diaspora must be increasingly studied as a diverse cohort of
1.5 and even third generation Vietnamese Americans. Indeed, Vietnamese diasporic
subjecthood is a fast growing area of study that is beginning to challenge the ways that
Vietnamese identities align with, resist, and contradict the specific racial ethnic social
constructions that attempt to define them their particular Western locations.
Vietnamese American as well as other Vietnamese diasporic scholars are providing
insight into the myriad ways that diasporic formations restructure narratives of the past
in order to make sense of their current locations. Exciting work is being done by these
scholars; one in particular, Thuy Vo Dang is studying how anti-communist discourse
operates as cultural praxis in a San Diego Vietnamese community. This anti-
communist framework situates this community in dynamic and at times problematic
negotiation with the production of meaning about how it was that they have become
who they are--unjustly exiled, but resiliently successful and proud. This body of
analysis critically thinks through how diasporic subjects operate as subjects and
communities in new locations.
210
I hope that in this dissertation I have expressed my most sincere intellectual and
emotional investments in culture, cultural production, Vietnam, its dispersed subjects,
and all subjects that move across nations and each other each day and under differing
circumstances. These interests reflect some of the many interests I have that have been
nurtured by a profoundly exciting and supportive network of colleagues, peers, and
mentors who have modeled the best in intellectual and affective engagement. Because I
have sometimes pondered (and doubted) the “good” value of academic inquiry (my own
in particular) I think it is perhaps appropriate to end my dissertation, the culmination of
my years struggling with theory, the Vietnamese language, literary texts, “fields” and
traditions of study with a thought on stupidity. I will let Brian Massumi have the last
word on this topic. He writes (in an explanation of the importance in his work of
experimenting with thought by working through examples):
You have to be willing to surprise yourself writing things you didn’t
think you thought. Letting examples burgeon requires using inattention
as a writing tool. You have to let yourself get so caught up in the flow of
your writing that it ceases at moments to be recognizable to you as your
own. This means you have to be prepared for failure. For with
inattention comes risk: of silliness or even outbreaks of stupidity. But
perhaps in order to write experimentally, you have to be willing to
“affirm” even your own stupidity. Embracing one’s own stupidity is not
the prevailing academic postures (at least not the way I mean it here).
The result is not so much the negation of system as a setting of systems
into motion. The desired result is a systematic openness: an open
system.
4
Here’s to, in Massumi’s estimation, seeing that my words (and all words) add “(if so
meagerly) to reality.”
5
211
Conclusion Endnotes
1
Yen Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US
Scholarship” Journal of Vietnamese Studies vol 1 number 1-2 (2006): 410-433.
2
Espiritu “Towards a Critical Refugee Study,” p. 426.
3
From Wendy Brown States of Injury p. xii.
4
Brian Massumi Parables for the Virtual 18-19.
5
Brian Massumi Parables for the Virtual 13.
212
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
The aftermath of the Vietnam War/American War (post-1975) not only resulted in the largest moment of Vietnamese bodily dispersal around the world, but also figured a crisis in the affective management of the newly minted unified Vietnamese nation, simultaneously forcing exiled refugees to configure new relations to nation and state, notions of the future, and their own selves as bodies in a new world. My dissertation explores how the cultural production of this era -- from artists in the postwar Vietnamese nation and diaspora -- uses the grammar of affect to indict, excoriate, impugn, lament, remember and reconcile the effects of war.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Vu, Cam Nhung
(author)
Core Title
Regarding Vietnam: affects in Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic literature and film
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
American Studies and Ethnicity
Degree Conferral Date
2010-05
Publication Date
05/05/2010
Defense Date
03/08/2010
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
affect,Asian American studies,comparative literature,cultural studies,ethnic studies,film studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,Vietnamese diaspora
Place Name
USA
(countries),
Vietnam
(countries)
Language
English
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Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Nguyen, Viet T. (
committee chair
), Iwamura, Jane Naomi (
committee member
), Lloyd, David (
committee member
), Norindr, Panivong (
committee member
)
Creator Email
c1101v@yahoo.com,camvu@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3009
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UC173354
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etd-Vu-3685 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-401975 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3009 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-Vu-3685.pdf
Dmrecord
401975
Document Type
Dissertation
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Vu, Cam Nhung
Type
texts
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University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Repository Name
Libraries, University of Southern California
Repository Location
Los Angeles, California
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
affect
Asian American studies
comparative literature
cultural studies
ethnic studies
film studies
Vietnamese diaspora