Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue

Of Vietnam Identities in Dialogue Edited by Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier Identities in Dialog...

Author: Jane Bradley Winston | Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier

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Of Vietnam Identities in Dialogue

Edited by

Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier

Identities in Dialogue

Edited by Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier

10.1057/9780230107410 - Of Vietnam, Edited by Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-05

Of Vietnam

First published 2001 by PALGRAVE 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0-312-23872-X hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Of Vietnam : identities in dialogue / edited by Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-23872-X 1. Arts, Vietnamese—20th century. 2. Vietnam—In art. 3. Vietnam— In literature. 4. National characteristics in art. 5. National characteristics in literature. 6. East and West in art. 7. Vietnam—Colonization—France— Influence. I. Winston, Jane Bradley. II. Ollier, Leakthina Chau-Pech, 1965NX578.6.V5 035 2001 700'.458—dc21

200121623

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Westchester Book Composition First edition: December 2001 10

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Printed in the United States of America. The transcription of personal names in this book follows country practice, with exceptions made for the name order adopted in publications originally published in English.



OF VIETNAM © Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier, 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

To our mothers, and Kheng Khuot Ortiz.



Lucille McNeely Winston



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Acknowledgments Introduction: Projected Identities/Subversive Practices, Jane Bradley Winston

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After Zigzagging, Linh Dinh

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Rap Music, Nguyen Quoc Chanh

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Culinary Crossings and Disruptive Identities: Contesting Colonial Categories in Everyday Life, Erica J. Peters

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Moving along the Edge of Summer, Phan Huyen Thu

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Cultural Encounters in French Colonial Literature, Patrick Laude

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After Seven Days at a Hotel with T, Phan Nhien Hao

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French Natural in the Vietnamese Highlands: Nostalgia and Erasure in Montagnard Identity, Hjorleifur Jonsson

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Orthotics for Easter, Nguyen Dang Thuong

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A Cross-Cultural Context for Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Writing, Renny Christopher

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Saigon Pull, Linh Dinh

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Welcome to America, Monique T. D.Truong

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C O N T E N T S

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CONTENTS 97

The Rivers Have Not Only Me, Van Cam Hai

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Raindrops on Red Flags: Tran Trong Vu and the Roots of Vietnamese Painting Abroad, Nora A.Taylor

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City Streets 1, Hoang Hung

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Fire, Andrew Lam

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The Postcolonial Cinema of Lam Le: Screens, the Sacred, and the Unhomely in Poussière d’Empire, Panivong Norindr

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A Conversation with Linh Dinh, Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier

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Tran Anh Hung’s Orphan Tales, Michèle Bacholle

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A Worthy Résumé, Y Ban

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A Conversation with Y Ban, Qui-Phiet Tran

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Across Colonial Borders: Patriarchal Constraints and Vietnamese Women in the Novels of Ly Thu Ho, Nathalie Nguyen

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The Sparrows Fly across the Woods, Vo Thi Xuan Ha

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A Conversation with Vo Thi Xuan Ha, Qui-Phiet Tran

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Colonialism and Power in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, Jack A.Yeager

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Morning Light, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud

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Consuming Culture: Linda Lê’s Autofiction, Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier

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Earth Cafeteria, Linh Dinh

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Bibliography Contributors Index

257 267 273



“You Don’t Know This but I Keep Telling You”: Memory and Disavowal in Monique Thuy-Dung Truong’s “Kelly,” Karl Ashoka Britto

Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue was conceived across what scholars including Homi Bhabha and Renato Rosaldo have taught us to recognize as “borders.” It took its first shape three years ago as we talked over dinner after an academic conference where we had met for the first time at our panel on Vietnamese literature. Due to accidents of birth, we both had “over-determined” relations to Vietnam: one came of age in the Vietnam War era; the other’s life trajectory commenced in Asia and was profoundly impacted by that same war and its resolution. From the beginning, our dialogue, which had no choice but to weave itself across the borders between our cultural backgrounds and their respective ideological and imaginary representations of Indochina/Vietnam, amazed and pleased us. From it sprang forth, as we sat and talked, the idea of co-editing a volume on Vietnam, a project that conjoined our journeys for the space of its duration and beyond. Many other individuals and institutions have permitted this volume to become a reality. To all of them, we extend our most profound thanks. We are particularly thankful to our contributors for agreeing to add their voices to this dialogue, for their insights, their thought-provoking work, and their generosity. We are deeply grateful to Linh Dinh and Monique T. D. Truong for their invaluable help with this volume’s creative sections. We extend a heartfelt thanks to our editor, Kristi Long, for giving us free rein to frolic in the borderzones of the academic and the creative. We thank Bowdoin College’s Department of Romance Languages and the Freeman Foundation for funding a trip to Vietnam during summer 2000, and Northwestern University’s French and Italian Department and Comparative Literature Program for funds that allowed us to work together for several days at a particularly crucial juncture. Finally, we warmly acknowledge the support of Sarah Davis Cordova, Jerry Gorman, Françoise Lionnet,Antoinette Sol, Erin and Shannon Winston-Dolan, and Jeffrey Woodbury—colleagues, friends, and family members; our displaced and constantly displacing compagnons de route: we thank you for being.



A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S




Projected Identities/Subversive Practices Jane Bradley Winston

The events of the past two centuries have made “Vietnam” one of the earlytwenty-first century’s most insistent cultural, imaginary, and discursive tableaux. Formerly it represented an object of colonial, personal, familial, cultural, and/or nationalist desire. Walked on, over, and through by some, inhabited and then abandoned, willfully or not, by others, it stands today in individual and collective psyches in France, the United States, Vietnam and its diaspora, as a lost object of desire. As such, it provokes an increasingly loquacious discourse on its subject, as writers, artists, and filmmakers attempt to capture and retrieve, finally and at long last, the essence of their respective objects of desire—Viêt-nam, Vietnam, Indochina. Shaped by these imagined contours, the patterns laid out by this prolix discourse on/of Vietnam reveal that even its most innovative representations continue to be shaped by strategies of division developed in the course of that country’s attempted conquests and defense. They show, that is, that Vietnam continues to be figured as a dividing space between past and present, East and West, colonial and postcolonial eras, natives and the diaspora. Caught in each particular community’s “past,” it remains divided from its peers, fragmented, unable to access the plethora of signifiers, identities, and productions that exists, and that will only be perceived in transcultural, transnational, and translinguistic dialogues. Shaped by this apprehension of our era’s discourse on/of Vietnam, the following introductory essay has two parts. The first provides a partial and cursory look back at the recent history of Vietnam representation. It reflects our view that politically motivated, psychologically performative images of Southeast Asia created and mass-disseminated in France, Vietnam, and the United States from the early French colonial period to beyond the end of the American/Vietnam War continue to shape contemporary discourse on/of Vietnam. To our minds, this apparent debt raises questions concerning the abiding “functionality” of two discursive constructs—“Indochina” and “Vietnam.” Examining their design aims and efficacies, this section asks: created and deployed in times of conquest



I N T RO D U C T I O N

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Projected Identities Emerging as part of the Vietnam War mediascape, the discursive construct “Vietnam” took shape from the 1960s on, as newscasts projected excerpts from presidential talks, military accounts, and antiwar protests, as well as graphic footage from this “first televised war” into U.S. social and private space. Nearly a century earlier, colonial propagandists had made “Indochina” a major presence in the French colonial mediascape by creating and projecting it into the social and cultural sphere in the pages of popular journals, newspapers, colonial expositions, including the famous 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris, late 1930s essays and films designed to elicit support for Colonial Minister Georges Mandel’s plan to bring native troops to France’s defense in World War II, and newspapers and radiocasts endeavoring to maintain a procolonial consensus during the “Indochina conflict.” But if French colonial propagandizing alone identified itself as such, the U.S. deployment of “Vietnam” was no less an effort to shape public opinion to a discernible political aim—sending troops to Vietnam. As Panivong Norindr showed in Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature, re-shaping public opinion implies and performs a reshaping of the collective unconscious (or “imaginary”). In the French case, the discourse of procolonial propaganda helped create a “colonial subject” by reconfiguring the psychic structures of the “subject” of French culture so that exotic/erotic fantasies of Indochina served both as its deep structuring and generative instance and as the object of its desire. It helped embed that subject within a national historical narrative that explained France’s presence in Southeast Asia in terms of its civilizing mission and colonial marriage and establish a divisive and hierarchical psychic relation between that subject and Indochina’s native populations. Articulated around the colonial categories Albert Memmi identified as “the colonizer and the colonized,” it laid itself out across the East/West divide, established an opposition between the colonizing “subject” and colonized “other,” and positioned the former, psychically, in a superior “promontory” position (Mary Louise Pratt’s term) above the latter. By 1983-1984, the interdependence of American identity on “Vietnam” was rendered explicit in a battle between Stanley Karnow’s television series, Vietnam: A Television History, and Accuracy in the Media’s Charlton Heston-narrated Television’s Vietnam:The Real Story. Karnow’s Vietnam identified itself as a response to President Reagan’s declaration, on the heels of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, “It’s time we recognize that ours was a noble cause.” Rather than render the American War noble, it laid out, over a thirteen-week period, a



and war to shape public opinion and electoral practice, (how) do these constructs continue to function in our global and transnational era? Do they continue to attach our desire to discernible objects? If so, which ones and for which purposes? Turning, then, to this present volume, Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue, the second section discusses its “intended” intervention, presents its rich creative and critical pieces, and gestures toward its desired consequences.

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detailed account of Vietnam’s historical oppression, a scathing critique of French colonial rule, a graphic portrait of its violent and bloody repression (including longshots of postcards made from photographs of Vietnamese heads severed during the “pacification”), and a compelling political history establishing Ho Chi Minh as a nationalist, first and foremost, and laying blame for his Communist turn on the U.S. refusal to provide him with the help he requested to fend off postwar France. In response to what it cast as Karnow’s failure to shore up American national identity—as one of its featured experts put it, his series “doesn’t produce anything on the screen that an American can be proud of ”— Television’s Vietnam promised to “correct” the historical record and give an accurate “view of what that war was about, how it was fought, and why we lost it.” This series performed what Karnow had endeavored not to: it reiterated an historical narrative structured around the Cold War categories, communist versus noncommunist, and the “othering” of Ho Chi Minh as a staunch lifelong Communist activist and U.S. enemy. Surviving the end of French colonial Indochina and of the U.S. Vietnam War, “Indochina” and “Vietnam” assumed (/modified their) consumer capitalist aims. By 1958, “Indochina” was being used to silence colonial struggles and enhance, in a neocolonial way, French culture’s niche on the emerging international culture market. That year, René Clément adapted Marguerite Duras’s anticolonial novel, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (The Seawall), to the international screen in a made-in-Thailand, big-budget, Hollywood-style Italian-American coproduction. As its English title, This Angry Age, implies, this film “laundered” (Pierre Bourdieu’s term) the politics out of Duras’s novel by rewriting the specter of anticolonial uprising she left hovering on the horizon as a tale of adolescent rebellion. By the end of the twentieth century, there were signs that, where once 1950s France had incorporated the erotic and exotic signifiers of its fantasized colonial relation to Indochina into its cultural fabric, now U.S. cultural production was ingesting the redoubled “French/Indochina exotic” into its own cultural fabric. For where once “Vietnam” had “rallied us round the flag, boys,” as the once popular song put it, it now beckoned us to enjoy colonial desire vicariously in darkened movie houses, to travel to an exotically Elsewhere Vietnam, and to indulge that most insidiously fatal of American obsessions—food—in upscale restaurants with doubly exotic decor and names such as Indochine and Le Colonial in New York, Philadelphia, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, and Chicago. Capitalizing, willfully or not, on Vietnam’s place in the Western imaginary as a dividing place between East and West, such restaurants promote themselves, and/or are presented by reviewers, as enticing sites of cultural hybridity with luxurious “Eurasian plantation” ambiances and culinary delights ranging from Vietnamese-style vegetables with mustard vinaigrette to coconut crème brûlée. At times, promotions for and reviews of these restaurants clearly reveal their debt to the French colonial imaginary. Some invite U.S. diners to experience and satiate a properly French colonial nostalgia: “Nostalgic for the days when the French filled Saigon and the wind whispered in the palm trees?” asks www.lecolonial.com: “Then this is for you.” Others invite us to rewrite the



INTRODUCTION: PROJECTED IDENTITIES/SUBVERSIVE PRACTICES


American/Vietnam War (which the United States lost) in terms of French colonial Indochina (before France lost it in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu). Relying on an imaginary of Southeast Asia shaped by films like The Lover, these advertisements and reviews regularly ask potential customers to enjoy 1920s Indochina, when they probably mean the grande époque of French dreams, 1930s Indochina. Indeed for a significant sum of money, they invite U.S. diners to displace the American experience and efface both U.S. and French defeats by melding the American experience into the (pre-1954) French colonial. The invitation, in other words, is to erase Vietnam’s victories over both Western nations, forget its hard-fought independence, and indulge oneself in consumer capitalist/neoimperialist pleasures by ingesting the French colonial imaginary and Vietnamese/Franco-Vietnamese cuisines. Found on metromix.com’s millennium guide, this promotion, for instance, gives cause for pause: The atmosphere here will make you feel like one of the characters in “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene’s novel of Vietnam. Upstairs in the bar, ceiling fans churn the air, and the room is furnished with wicker chairs and potted ferns. Unlike the Vietnamese restaurants on Argyle Street, which are run by the generation that survived the Vietnam War and often have American-influenced menus, Le Colonial suggests the period of French colonialism that lasted until 1954. The photographs on the wall are all pre-Dien Bien Phu: rickshaw drivers hauling carts through the streets, peasants plowing paddies behind water buffalo. The dinner menu is all Vietnamese; French influences are evident on the wine list, which has selections from Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Loire valley, Alsace and Champagne. In an interesting sleight of hand, then, Vietnamese-owned establishments are criticized for being americanized, while the inverse claim—that these restaurants are (more) authentic—is left silent. Part of a larger trend, this discourse takes its place in the context of, for instance, the pedicab rides San Diego today offers tourists. Framed by promotions for travel to Vietnam, such online reviews and promotions helped reinforce the recoding of “Vietnam” that led up to the twentyfifth anniversary of the end of the war and was apparently designed to reshape the American subject’s relation of Southeast Asia in ways that would permit it to envisage (ingest) the trade agreement and President Clinton’s trip to Vietnam. Yet this reshaped relation still lays itself out along a hierarchical division, with Vietnam promoted primarily, it seems, as a source of cheap but exotic travel and labor. As recent events in California show, the Vietnamese immigrant community in the United States, too, continues to figure Vietnam along Cold War lines. In Westminster, California, Ho Chi Minh emerged as perhaps the most contested term in this community’s displaced struggle over its historical narrative and identity. As we recall, Truong Van Tran, the owner of “Hi-Tek TV and VCR,” hung a Communist flag and photograph of Ho Chi Minh in his store window.



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If he hoped to “provoke a community dialogue” about the current Vietnamese government, he aroused others in the local Vietnamese community to weeks of anticommunist/anti-Ho Chi Minh demonstrations. Truong may have felt that it was time to reconsider Ho and perhaps reintroduce him into the community’s historical narrative of Vietnam; the demonstrators clearly did not. Captured by Jerry Gorman, photographs of this confrontation are sprinkled throughout this volume. Subversive Practices Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue was conceived as a space in which the crucial and timely dialogue on/of Vietnam, Viêt-nam, Indochina could take place. In this, it took its cue from its earliest discernible origins: the various journeys previously taken by the undergraduate students in a course Jane began teaching in 1997, Representations of Southeast Asia, and in which Leakthina guest lectured in fall 1998. Designed as a forum in which literary and filmic representations from the United States, France, and Vietnam would come into dialogue with one another, this class attracted students with very different personal and cultural backgrounds. As they moved progressively away from their often staunch inaugural positions and toward the borders where dialogue becomes possible, these students confirmed, as if materially, the rich productivity cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo and postcolonial thinker Homi Bhabha attribute to the (cultural) borders. Throughout the quarter, they showed how situating dialogue of/on Vietnam in the “in-between” can and does produce exciting new ways of seeing and thinking. So doing, they confirmed a view Dionys Mascolo put forth in the wake of World War II as that war’s lesson and a possible means of transcending the divisive structures of rational thought alone, which he believed had led to that (and other) world historical catastrophe(s): “It’s what I call a ‘communism of thought’: thinking in common, a commonality of thought. Thinking should be done by everyone together, not by a single person; or as Hölderlin says, only the exchanging of thought between friends is real thought. Individually, he says, we have no thoughts; there is no thought in the solitary state. Thought can be exchanged only in dialogue, oral or written” (Winston, “Autour de la rue Saint Benoît,” 199). Bringing representations by writers, artists, critics, and other culture producers into dialogue across established boundaries, Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue encourages contemporary figurings of Vietnam to move from the nostalgic enclaves of the past, or the stagnant places of a mythological present, into the rich and productive potential of our own historical time. It is designed as a forum in which past informs present, theoretical investigations are read alongside creative works, and cultural productions from Vietnam meet those of the diaspora in their multiple forms: literature, film, art, and social practices. Without abandoning issues of colonialism, conflict, or testimony, it pays particular mind to problematics currently being debated in the domains of postcolonial and gender studies—identity, displacement, language, sexuality, and class. In its organization, Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue endeavors to replicate the





complex and often convoluted journeys of a country and its people. It eschews chronological, historical, and generic ordering, preferring to encourage readers to weave in and out of its varying discourses, locations, and temporalities so as to experience the multiplicity of experiences that make up the fabric of identity. Breaking with the rational logics of linearity, it creates evocative and provocative ruptures and contiguities and invites readers to consider each of its pieces both in its own right and in dialogue with its neighbors. This volume brings scholars of Vietnamese, Vietnamese American, and Vietnamese Francophone literature, colonial and postcolonial studies into dialogue with art historians and anthropologists, and it permits scholarly representations to dialogue with visual art, photography, and creative works and interviews by artists, writers, and poets from Vietnam and its diaspora. In all of its gestures, it expressly rejects and seeks to subvert the exclusionary dynamics of the conversational mode against which Trinh T. Minh-ha warns: “A conversation of ‘us’ with ‘us’ about ‘them’ is a conversation in which ‘them’ is silenced. ‘Them’ always stands on the other side of the hill, naked and speechless, barely present in its absence” (Woman, Native, Other, 67). Critical Dialogues: Exploring Identity (in) Play Not wanting to privilege either, it has been difficult to make the inevitable linear choice and decide whether to discuss “first” this volume’s critical articles or creative pieces. Our ultimate decision to begin with the critical pieces reflects our sense that they provide many terms that will enhance our subsequent engagement with the creative works and their dialogues. Here, we mention only Linh Dinh’s “After Zigzagging,” which opens this volume by foregrounding the movement of crossing and crisscrossing that makes up the postcolonial, global, transnational, and transcultural experiences of displacement, exile, and diaspora and shapes the sense of those inhabiting these eras and experiences that they have access only to translated and mistranslated identities and no alternative, in matters of going home, but to feign return to its evanesced topographies. Erica J. Peters’ “Culinary Crossings and Disruptive Identities: Contesting Colonial Categories in Everyday Life” begins our critical selections by taking us back to early twentieth-century French colonial Indochina and the issue of identity. Eschewing all notion of identity as natural, determined, or chosen at will, Peters follows Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Judith Butler in treating “identity” as the mobile and modulating product of the dialectics between strategies of power and tactics of subversion. As she presents it, identity is constructed by networks of power and domination, but it is also subverted and modified by those it would define and contain, as they pursue the often pleasurable practices of their everyday lives. In Peters’ view, such practices have social transformative potential: modifying the parameters of the identities elaborated in a given network of power and domination, they can and do subvert the social, cultural, and political structures that depend on them. Peters’ nuanced study gives a new twist to a notion prevalent in, for instance, the African American literary tradition—urban liberation. Bringing together in its



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space categories of people that colonialism constructed and sought to maintain as separate, the city provided a venue where everyday practices could reveal the artificiality of constructed boundaries between races and blur the borders between colonial categories. Focusing on one Vietnamese urban class and one of its everyday practices, Peters shows that as urban elites developed a taste and knack for French cuisine, they began to experiment with cultural hybridity; and that as they served meals composed of delicacies from both cultures, they forced their French guests to confront their own identities. Together with the other classes and everyday practices, Peters concludes, such experimentation helped create a fluid complex of modern and anonymous urban identities that destabilized the rigid hierarchies of traditional Vietnamese and French colonial societies. In respect to Peters’ analysis, Patrick Laude’s “Cultural Encounters in French Colonial Literature” examines colonial boundary blurring as if “from the other side.” That is to say, he studies early-twentieth-century French male-authored colonial and exotic novels that appear to grapple symptomatically with the anxieties she claims urban Vietnamese everyday practices including cuisine helped heighten. Laude begins by suggesting that the novels qualified as “exotic” or “colonial” based on whether they approach the colonial “other” in an imaginary or scientific way, in fact form a sole literary genre, the “novel of acculturation.” Focused on a French hero’s “transgressive” espousal of Asian cultural practices, ideas, and perspectives, and on his repudiation of his European roots, these novels textualize the French fear that contact with natives might result not in the success of the “civilizing mission,” but, to the contrary, in their slow slide back down the slippery slope to “savagery.” In these novels, intercultural relations and cultural transgressions are catalyzed and symbolized by the European male’s sexual encounter with an Asian woman, “the Asian Eve.” If their relations regularly lead to the French male’s “going native” and repudiating his Western cultural and spiritual roots, this trend increases when the “Asian Eve” is situated beyond the borders of Vietnam, in the more remote regions of Laos or Cambodia. In all cases, this figure is not constructed as a fully female human being, but as an emblem of Asian culture. Where Peters cautions against reading cultural borrowings as mere collaboration, sycophancy, or attempted assimilation, novels of acculturation suggest that one cannot borrow cultural practices without bringing along their philosophical and epistemological underpinnings. Their intercultural relations often lead to psychic/intellectual change in the colonial subject, thus lending credence to fears that such contact threatens its integrity. Some heroes end up abandoning Christianity for Buddhism, which provides them with a route to what Laude suspects they quested all along—motionless happiness. Rather than describe these intercultural contacts in terms of hybridity or borderzone practices, Laude suspects their spiritual quests depict not real conversions, but displaced European literary and cultural concerns with Nietzsche and fin de siècle decadence. His account of their occasional ecstatic escape from psychic and discursive constraints suggests a range of associations in later French thought—Sartrean Existentialism’s view that consciousness wants nothing more than “to be,” Bataille’s





notion of sovereignty as an ephemeral escape from the shackles of time and rational thought, even some neo-Lacanian feminists’ hope of escaping Symbolic constraints and subject positions. As they stage the encounter between a Western self (predicated on experiences that both affirm and subvert its being) and its “other,” Laude concludes, these novels establish identity as located outside of the self, constantly displaced, and receding. In “French Natural in the Vietnamese Highlands: Nostalgia and Erasure in Montagnard Identity,” Hjorleifur Jonsson shifts our dialogues of identity out of colonial space to the millennium, the Internet, and a world of global ethnoscapes. Jonsson addresses the grounding or rooting of identity, projected identities, and the issue of where/by whom identity is constructed. He treats ethnic identities as relational and contends that the real issue is not what an identity is, in and of itself, but how it is or is not real within a larger system. What is its efficacy in the global imaginary? Jonsson begins where his essay did: with an Internet discussion site, the Vietnam Studies Group, and its debate over “Montagnard,” a term one side held had racist and/or colonial connotations, but that the other believed meant only “people of the mountains.” Suggesting that this apparent acceptance of the “French natural” of the term despite its historical and political implications may reflect a lingering nostalgia for an Elsewhere, Jonsson implies that the psychic structures of the French colonial subject, which Norindr showed to be shaped by fantasies of exotic and erotic Indochina, may be intact nearly a century after Laude’s French males wrote in quest of it and four decades past the end of the Empire. For his part, Jonsson moves the online debate beyond the historically specific, politically particular boundaries and histories of Vietnam so as to ask what Montagnard means and how it functions in the global ethnoscape. A “deterritorialized identity,” he contends, it emerged only with the American War in Vietnam and became real as it became part of the mediascape to which Vietnam belonged. Inquiring into the relation of this identity marker and the process of statemaking, Jonsson suggests that that process’s political economic and cultural aspects can be construed as matters of projecting and grounding particular structures in social life. When these processes were successful, everyday life then reproduced structures that emanated from the state. Jonsson inquires into the translation of this process from the colonial to the global and transnational era. From whence and how are identities now projected? In what are they grounded? Montagnard identity is maintained in exile, he finds, from an exile community in North Carolina. Projected from the Internet, it has primarily virtual links to Vietnam; rather than unreal, however, it is global and linked to other transnational constructs of Vietnam. What is more, it has discernible political efficacy in the global ethnoscape: effectuating the disappearance of the American War and of the kinds of people involved in it, it replaces them with its story of human caring and bonding. As for the Internet debate that provoked his intervention, Jonsson reveals its lesson: refugees and scholars in the West are involved in an “identity politics” that effectuates historical erasures whose political efficacy they would be well advised to consider.



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Remarking on the recent emphatic entry of Vietnamese American writing into the dialogue on Vietnam, Renny Christopher (as if responding to Jonsson), defines this writing’s differences from the Asian American literary tradition in terms of its staunch refusal to erase the history of the War. Christopher opens “A Cross-Cultural Context for Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Writing” by stressing that, unlike most other Asian Americans, Vietnamese Americans came to the United States not as immigrants, but as refugees or children of refugees. If immigrants are concerned with assimilating and building a new life, refugees tend to look back to the past and perceive their presence in the United States as temporary. Having usually been on the war’s losing side, Vietnamese Americans must write into a U.S. context whose mainstream has not accepted the U.S.-South Vietnamese alliance’s defeat. In fact, continuing to erase the alliance itself, it imagines the war as having been between the United States and Vietnam—or, worse still, between the Americans and the Vietnamese. If, as Lisa Lowe has said, immigrants from Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines can achieve political emancipation in the United States only if they forget the wars in Asia and adopt the national historical narrative “disavowing” a U.S. imperial project, Vietnamese American writers, Christopher insists, do not participate in that forgetting. Next, Christopher focuses on the first anthology to bring together writers from all sides of the war—Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue, and Truong Vu’s The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers. Having all participated in the war as soldiers in its three armies, these co-editors designed their anthology as a first step toward reconciliation: revisioning the past, it would permit (other) war participants to realize that, formed by the same war, they had more in common with one another than with those who had not experienced it. Engaging with identities produced in that war, their anthology would rewrite each one’s “other” as a human being. This project involved recuperating silenced and repressed histories and reshaping personal and historical vision through grief. Working to that end, literary contributors aligned with the three warring factions all elaborated tropes of haunting, literal or not, which conjoin their narratives intertextually across historical and cultural divides. In “You Don’t Know This but I Keep Telling You,” Karl Ashoka Britto analyzes Monique Thuy-Dung Truong’s story, “Kelly.” Truong’s story is set in the same state whence, as Hjorleifur Jonsson showed, Montagnard identity is “projected”: North Carolina. In dialogue with Christopher, Britto further shows Truong’s heroine taking a posture prevalent in Vietnamese American fiction: the refusal to disavow. Having grown up in Vietnam amidst projected images of Hollywood’s United States, the girl’s move to the U.S. South forced her to inhabit and fill in the blanks in that image. Coming of age in Boiling Springs, she weaves her identity in relation to its racist, gender, and class-based discriminations and to the “abjected” identity her history teacher’s national historical narrative projects onto her. Silencing the American War in Vietnam, blurring it with World War II, this narrative casts the girl as the Asian “enemy” and her presence in the classroom as one more Asian attack on U.S. territory. Years later, the girl maintains a one-sided correspondence with a woman who was once her





overweight and also marginalized classmate. As she does, Britto concludes, she exposes the dynamics of misrecognition and disavowal that threatened Asian Americans of Truong’s generation. Nora A. Taylor’s “Raindrops on Red Flags: Tran Trong Vu and the Roots of Vietnamese Painting Abroad” shifts our journey once again, moving it from the literary to the artistic realm, from the U.S.-Vietnam axis to that of Vietnam and France. Like Jonsson, Taylor inquires into identity in the age of globalization. Where Jonsson examines Montagnard identity, she asks, “What does it mean to be Vietnamese?,” “What does it mean to be a Vietnamese artist?,” and, more provocatively, “Why and under which pressures do artists feel compelled to subject themselves and their works to such definitions?” Taking exception to Arjun Appadurai’s view that, with local cultural experiences in Southeast Asia now irreversibly outward-looking, the nation no longer holds the significance it did in the postcolonial period, Taylor agrees with Wendy Mee that rather than globalize the identity of the Vietnamese artist or Vietnamese art production, global trends have created “nations” within and outside of Southeast Asia that encourage/constrain Vietnamese artists in Vietnam and abroad to express a “nationalistic” focus in their work. Entering into dialogue with Peters, Taylor holds that the identities of the Vietnamese artist and Vietnamese art are constructed within a network of power—by an international art market and the pressures of a foreign “international” clientele. Recalling Jonsson’s view that Montagnard identity is defined and projected from abroad, she argues that the global age identities of Vietnamese art and the Vietnamese artist are constructed outside of Vietnam in, for instance, exhibits such as the one held in 1991 at Hong Kong’s Plum Blossom Gallery and, perhaps even more, by catalogues that accompany them. Focusing on this event, Taylor shows that rather than based on critical or intellectual criteria, the works featured in this standard-setting, identity-forming, and canonconstructing exhibit were chosen almost by accident. Furthermore, these artists came under international art market pressures that were themselves shaped, it would seem, by nostalgic desire for an Elsewhere ( Jonsson), beautiful images and picturesque scenes (Norindr), encounters with an exotic “other,” or experiences of motionless happiness (Laude). Encouraged and financially compelled to respond to these pressures, Vietnamese artists in Vietnam continue to produce scenes reminiscent of Orientalist paintings by French artists of the early twentiethcentury. Where Christopher notes the ambiguities of Doi Moi-era writing, Taylor shows Doi Moi art constrained, if not by the government, then by the international capitalist art market economy and travel industry. Like Peters, Taylor focuses on practices that challenge or subvert constructed (projected) identities. In her view, the international market identity of Vietnamese art is not conducive to art, for it corresponds not to the desires or yearning of the Vietnamese themselves, but to the desire and nostalgia of foreigners and their relationships to Southeast Asia. Taylor provides an interesting account of the personal and artistic history of Paris-based Tran Trong Vu and examines his artwork’s relation to the writing of his father, the 1950s dissident Tran Dan. Concluding on a less optimistic note than Peters, who sees urban classes creat-



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ing anonymous modern identities, Taylor appears to see no way out of the global art world’s national identities into a more flexible identity that would permit the exiled Vietnamese artist to have his work exhibited—racially or ethnically unmarked—alongside other works of art in Parisian venues. In “The Postcolonial Cinema of Lam Le: Screens, the Sacred, and the Unhomely in Poussière d’Empire,” Panivong Norindr focuses our attention where he contends filmmaker Lam Le works—on the borders; in the inbetween. Like Taylor in the field of art production, Norindr explores the dialectics between Western viewer expectations and demands, and the work of a creative artist born in Vietnam and working in exile in Paris. The tensions Norindr identifies between Le’s diasporic practice and film production in Vietnam are markedly similar to those Taylor finds in the case of Tran Trong Vu. Here, too, Western audiences want beautiful scenes of Vietnam, which was just opening up as a site for filming in the early 1980s, when Le made Poussière d’Empire. Rather than meet spectator expectations, Le works to deceive them by breaking the Cartesian logic that permits American films to narrate apparently seamless stories devoid of ruptures and discontinuities. Norindr’s account of Le’s project suggests intersections with the work of the post-World War II left-wing writers and filmmakers (including Marguerite Duras) who took aim at the bourgeois capitalist and Cartesian rational subject that emerged from the French Revolution. Resonating with Laude’s view that the final transgression in novels of acculturation was spiritual, Norindr contends that Le’s Poussière d’Empire displaces our common understanding of colonialism as a purely spatial praxis to reveal it as (also) a conflict over the sacred. Like Monique ThuyDung Truong’s young heroine, Le grew up in Vietnam amid projected images of/from the West. In France, he appropriates the cinematic forms and techniques he saw projected into Vietnam as a child, including the abstracted images of cartoon characters such as Tintin. Using them to reflect issues that directly bear on Vietnamese society but transcend the East/West divide, he creates what Norindr describes as a hybrid cinematic aesthetic aimed at freeing cinematic technology from its colonial roots and returning a “postcolonial” gaze. Entering into dialogue with Norindr and Taylor, Michèle Bacholle’s “Tran Anh Hung’s Orphan Tales” precludes any attempt to lump artists of Vietnamese origins in exile into one category by elucidating this filmmaker’s very different response, in relation to Lam Le or Tran Trong Vu, to demands and expectations of the international culture market. Like Lam Le, Tran Anh Hung’s work does not conform to the socially and politically didactic aesthetics practiced in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. But as Bacholle shows, his solution to the problems associated with globalization are closer to those Taylor links to art production in Vietnam, and his films have the ambiguous aspect she finds in Doi Moi art. If, like Le, he relies much less on dialogue than on image and montage, his first feature-length film, The Scent of Green Papaya, gives the international spectator what he desires: picturesque, beautiful, serene, and near motionless images of Vietnam. Moreover, if early-century urban elites subverted colonial identities by devising a hybrid cuisine, Tran Anh Hung articulates what he invites the





spectator to read as authentic Vietnamese identity through the everyday practices of traditional Vietnamese cuisine. More broadly, Bacholle demonstrates that Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo combine to articulate a vision of Vietnam’s ongoing journey from colonialism and imperialism to liberation. This developmental journey begins by returning to what we are asked to understand as Vietnam’s authentic cultural roots and culminates in a purging of all Western influence. Bacholle provides compelling evidence that by way of a sustained use of color symbolism, Tran establishes this journey as organic and natural, thus aligning Vietnam with nature in much the same way that colonial categories did. In the early-twentieth century, as Laude showed, French male authors of exotic and colonial fiction constructed female figures as sexualized figures of an entire Asian way of life. At the end of that century, Bacholle shows Tran Anh Hung constructing female figures into a similar function. In fact, she shows, his heroines stand in for a specifically Vietnamese way of life (culture) and for Vietnam itself. Moving from a feminine and maternal Saigon in The Scent to a masculine and paternally marked Ho Chi Minh City in Cyclo, she believes, he endeavors to figure Vietnam moving into what she suggests Deleuze and Guattari might call a rhizomorphic space characterized by multiple lines of potential escape from the oppressive powers of Western capitalism. That these lines of flight must lead back to an authentic past raises this question: from whence (to recall Jonsson) are these identities projected? As if responding to this query, Bacholle recalls that in order to create the poem he wanted to in The Scent of Green Papaya, Tran Anh Hung had to silence the historical and social conflicts of the period—1951-1961. His poem thus effectuates multiple disappearances, including the struggle for independence from colonial France, the internal gender and class struggles, including those around Saigon. In “Across Colonial Borders: Patriarchal Constraints and Vietnamese Women in the Novels of Ly Thu Ho,” Nathalie Nguyen moves us across the gender divide and back three decades to a woman writer of Vietnam’s 1950 immigration to Paris. If Laude showed early-twentieth-century French male authors objectifying the Asian woman and Bacholle has Tran Anh Hung relegating that figure to traditional patriarchal gender roles at the millennium, Nguyen shows that at mid-century, one female writer, Ly Thu Ho, revealed the tragic consequences of those roles for Asian women. On the borders between colonial cultures, Ly Thu Ho sat between Vietnamese female literary generations—the 1920s writers whose groups were surveilled, presses closed, and books banned, and the 1960s angry young writers. Shaped by her years in Vietnam, her writing was also shaped, Nguyen contends, by the French cultural and literary fields in which Ly lived and wrote. Moving to Paris on the heels of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, as women were responding in unprecedented numbers to her appeal to write women’s lives under patriarchy, she wrote novels that, like Beauvoir’s essay, lay out female gender roles (the mother, the daughter, the whore), study their historical mutations, analyze their reproduction, and unmask their consequences. Recalling other women writers of her era, Ly offers, in what Nguyen considers her characteristic nonaggressive fashion, a countermodel—the prosti-



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tute or bar girl. The development of female characters in the loose trilogy Nguyen examines suggests that, in the period of their publication, 1961-1986, as feminism yielded to postcolonial concerns, women’s demands were increasingly subordinated to those of the nation. Jack A. Yeager’s analysis of “Colonialism and Power in Duras’s The Lover” examines the 1984 Goncourt-prize winner not as a French colonial novel but as a Vietnamese Francophone narrative. Rather than use what Sara Suleri calls the static distinction between foreign and native to divide literary production in French from Southeast Asia along colonial lines, Yeager prefers housing them under one rubric so as to demonstrate the mutual attachment, indeed the radical inseparability, of former colonizer and colonized. Yeager reads Duras’s The Lover as a story of racial boundary crossing set in a time of nationalist ferment and unrest, unprecedented colonialist repression, and the reaffirmation of colonialism’s race-based hierarchical orderings. Weaving it into the fabric of Vietnamese Francophone writing and Southeast Asia’s colonial histories, he defines The Lover as a variant of the con-gai tradition, which, as Laude also noted, portrayed a French male’s sexual encounter with an Asian woman and his transgressive adoption of Asian culture. Laude knows of no case of a French female character portrayed as experiencing a similar acculturation: indeed, he remarks, they tend to embody resistance to this process. Whether a symptom of social change from the era of con-gai novels to her own, or of her own cultural power, Duras has her French colon girl not taking on Asian culture, but at least playing with identity in, for instance, her clothing and geographical displacements. Yeager concludes by suggesting that The Lover shows that while France’s so-called colonial marriage did not ever take place, the relations that joined France and Indochina left the former colonizer and colonized tragically bound to one another. Finally, Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier’s “Consuming Culture: Linda Lê’s Autofiction” begins by focusing, as does Laude, on relations between French men and an Asian woman. Rather than an intimate encounter, this meeting takes place on the set of a French literary talk show. It establishes Lê’s position as that of a “métèque écrivant en français” (a dirty foreigner writing in French), a subject located between cultures: rootless in Vietnam, an “évoluée” (an “evolved” native) in French culture—who, recalling the first line in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, is a French citizen born and bred, “almost” (3). Writing into a context in which the one has the habit of speaking for the other (as the talk show host spoke for Lê that evening), Ollier contends, Lê produces narratives we are invited to read as (semi-)autobiographical, such as her short story, “Vinh L.,” which stages a Vietnamese character’s attempt to inscribe his/her own story. Crucially, in this short story, cannibalism figures the act which permits the protagonist to resist assimilation and access a new voice, which is also a new silence. This silence, like Lê’s own talk show silences, destabilizes a Western subject structurally dependent on its “other” to reflect back to it an image of its own design. As it does, it provokes that subject to prattle on and displace itself. In contrast to Ly Thu Ho, alongside whom she published in the 1980s, Lê’s playful and ironic writing thus closes our critical selections by opening onto an





identity play reminiscent of the one Peters found in early-century cuisine. Fittingly, then, in her examination of a text also preoccupied with eating (the other), Ollier’s reading of Lê brings the critical aspect of our journey spiraling back, “almost,” to the place whence it began: the seemingly inescapable yet demonstrably mutating digestive logic that structures the (colonial) subject’s relation to its other. As it does, it also invites us into the present to listen to new voices, to the new identities being played out and configured even as we weave back and forth, in and out of history and discourses. Creative Dialogues: Identities in Play As if one step ahead, the poets and writers featured in this volume actively engage in “Identitywork.” Working against the “fixity in the ideological construction of otherness” on which colonial (/imperialist) discourse relies (Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 66), they subvert established and projected identities, blur categories, interrogate the very fabric of (their) identities, and engage processes that might perhaps create different, more fluid identities. Putting identities in play, and putting the pleasure into their identity play, they create transitory alliances, loosely collective, mutable identities across former colonial categories and their multiple divides. If slave narratives and Third World testimonials permit “the public” to read and “congratulate itself on becoming interested in the colored man,” as Linh Dinh believes, many of these artists assume a markedly more subversive—hence, to “the public,” more threatening—posture: writing “from behind, for, or though” that public, they force it to confront its own identity. In this, they recall Lam Le’s effort to rip the cinematic apparatus from its colonial roots and return a “post-colonial gaze.” If the early-twentiethcentury urban elites Peters explores invited French guests to hybrid culinary feasts that forced them to confront their identities, these artists are ushering in the millennium by setting before us all a creative repast that threatens/promises (to transform). While we would have wished to simply let this play, this putting into question, this mixing up, blurring, and otherwise messing with identities proceed unimpeded by us or by the constraints of rational ordering, we had nonetheless to arrange them one before, one after, the other. In this process, we worked to break our own tendencies to orderings previously learned. Consciously endeavoring to prevent them from coalescing, we jerked away from continuities of time, theme, and place so as to reinstall, over and again, a sense of journey, displacement, and exile, formally. As we also looked for points of contiguity and dialogue, our ordering inevitably came to reflect the idiosyncrasies of our own journeys and interpretations. We positioned the photograph of a woman on a bicycle in front of a Dr. Martens shoe sign, for instance, to reinforce and extend the meanings we found in Linh Dinh’s poem, “After Zigzagging,” and, in so doing, to open this volume by reminding readers that although the poet posed the term “after,” the zigzagging continues. We then set Nguyen Quoc Chanh’s “Rap Music” after that, so that it might resonate as an “after zigzagging” of the younger generation in today’s Vietnam and introduce a note of identity play that



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would segue into, and dialogue with, Erica J. Peter’s critical analysis of identity play in Vietnam nearly a full century earlier. But rather than further explain our choices, we stop now, to welcome you, the reader, into the conversation. As we put (our) identities into dialogue and play, we hope that laughter will rise up from within the prosaic stuff of printed words or rational dialogue. Writers of mid-century France often stressed the subversive power of laughter; Duras, for instance, ended her anticolonial novel The Seawall, with the laughter of poor white oppressed colons and the songs of Vietnamese children rising up together against the colonizer’s rational intellectual, discursive, and colonial orders. Insinuated into the dry and divisive hierarchical structurations of rational thought, laughter, it was believed, like sensuality, pleasure, emotions, madness, and music, could wreak productive havoc. If it is true, as a seventeenth-century Frenchman revered for his funeral oratories believed, that “Reason excludes laughter,” then let us discover together a new form of thought that does not.







Linh Dinh

After zigzagging across an open field, How did I ever learn so many words I can’t pronounce? After hiding under so many beds, How did I ever learn to paraphrase My nose? Eyes? Boils? Scar distribution? And who was it that taught me to rearrange my teeth? In darkness, in privacy, I squat, tabulating My special stink. My breath Has been mistranslated. And yet, I can still kiss its veneer, stroke its vinyl. And yet, just this morning, As I crossed a seven-span bridge, as I Crossed a twelve-span bridge, going both ways, As I crossed and recrossed a hundred-span bridge, A flock of dun-colored pigeons serenaded me. Now I will pretend to lug my thin rump homeward. A Kaf ka, a Jew, a stowaway monkey: “Hello!” Freeze dried, flash frozen.



After Zigzagging


Ho Chi Minh City, July 2000. Photographer: Jerry Gorman


Nguyen Quoc Chanh

Hands steadily spinning. Guarding each number for a chance to shrink into one spot. All things peeled. Unchanging season. Fading paints on furniture. Bottles and scraps of paper not becoming garbage. Accidents remaining at sites. Pores not excreting. Genitals neither generating nor receiving heat. Population growth through test tubes. An old monk chanting with his prayer beads on this play button. A young embittered black man playing rap on that play button. And on my play button a bass rhythm clogged up soggy without transmigration. In the morning the Red Guard sperms are all blind. They are bats facing the wall. They are heads masturbating to the point of impotence. And the squashed little guy is lying and listening to rap.

Translated by Linh Dinh



Rap Music




Erica J. Peters

During the early years of colonialism in Vietnam, from the 1860s through the turn of the century, the French removed all political power from the Vietnamese and destroyed much of their economic power. Giving French administrators both direct and indirect control over the Vietnamese people, the French state undercut traditional Vietnamese institutions and then forced the colonized to navigate inflexible new political and juridical structures. Back in France, politicians proclaimed the virtues of colonialism with idealistic phrases such as “the civilizing mission” and the promise of “assimilation.” But the French government in Vietnam understood that in order to hold onto its illegitimate power it needed more than fine-sounding phrases. To control the population, French administrators divided colonial society along rigid lines; most of all, they discouraged all informal interactions and cooperation between colonizer and colonized, between the French and the Vietnamese. Strict hierarchical divisions were erected so that the Vietnamese would see the French as their masters, not as their equals. Most of the French already saw the Vietnamese as their inferiors, but social divisions also helped reduce the possibility of French people sympathizing with the colonized and seeing them as complex individuals. The French administration thus strove to create a colony of subservient, pacified natives. The colonizers found, however, that they were unable to prevent the Vietnamese from exploring other identities and choices, particularly when the Vietnamese did so by imbuing everyday practices with new meanings. Everyday life in the colony provided an apparently nonpolitical realm where new Vietnamese urban classes created a complex of fluid identities. Whether through consuming, producing, engaging in leisure activities, or caring for those around them, the colonized combined both new and traditional practices and they used those varied practices to express their new ways of seeing themselves in the world.1 Cuisine is an area of everyday life that had the appearance of mere frivolity but that provided an opportunity for Vietnamese people to play with identities and expectations. Upper-class Vietnamese created a hybrid cuisine,



Culinary Crossings and Disruptive Identities: Contesting Colonial Categories in Everyday Life*

Erica J. Peters

serving dishes together that seemed incompatible. They subverted French colonial categories at the same time as they used their control of French practices to gain power over Vietnamese rivals. New food practices disrupted rigid social hierarchies, whether those hierarchies were traditional or imposed by the colonizers. In this essay I do not treat “identity” as a fixed attribute, nor as if it were chosen at will. Identities are constructed within networks of power and domination, so that reshaping the parameters of one’s identity, even slightly, can subvert the structures that rely on an understanding of those parameters for their power.2 This essay tries to show some of the ambiguities of colonial identities as they were lived, rather than as they were imagined by the colonial regime. To highlight these ambiguities, I focus on the concrete details of everyday life, showing how individuals felt pulled in many directions. Colonial cuisine provided an opportunity for Vietnamese people to change some of the social practices associated with being Vietnamese; in doing so they subtly subverted colonialism by breaking down the inflexible social divisions imposed by the French state. I argue that even cultural borrowings from the French and apparent collaboration could be subversive, given the anti-assimilationist expectations of the colonizers. But such subversion also took a toll on the Vietnamese. Those who borrowed French customs had to accept that they were thereby undercutting their own connections to their communities and traditions. As we will see, Vietnamese elites explored European food for pleasure or for personal prestige under the power imbalances of colonialism. But the French in Vietnam misread the double meanings behind adoption of European cuisine: the Vietnamese not only saw food as a realm where they could imitate and flatter their colonizers, but also as an opportunity to comment subtly on how the French themselves were formed by their cuisine. Far from simply serving to underscore French dominance, culinary borrowings allowed individuals to experiment with cultural hybridity and the politics of transgressing both French and Vietnamese expectations. Vietnamese cuisine itself also opened up conflicting Vietnamese identities, constructed in terms of comparative social geography (regional, urban, or national) rather than as a single, coherent model of Vietnamese identity. The geographical divisions of colonialism and a new urban expansion forced the Vietnamese to become increasingly aware of different cuisines within their national community. These variations hinted at both the cultural resources and the regional antagonisms that would come into play as Vietnamese opposition to colonialism developed during the twentieth century. Cross-Cultural Dining Among the Elites Food offered an arena where at first only Vietnamese elites could experiment with and display contingent identities. Under colonialism, some upper-class Vietnamese gradually acquired a taste for Western foods, often as a marker of their wealth or modern ideas. The desire for conspicuous consumption led elite Vietnamese to eat foods imagined as French. They could demonstrate their abil-



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ity to afford expensive imported foods, at the same time as they pleased the colonizing power by acting as if the superiority of French cuisine was recognizable across cultural boundaries. It is important not to mistake cultural borrowing for mere sycophancy and self-serving collaboration. While self-interest obviously played a role, borrowing French food was also a small but politically safe way for the Vietnamese to subvert the legitimacy of French colonialism, which depended on distinctions between different social categories. Despite assimilationist rhetoric back in the metropole, the colonizers in Vietnam did not want the Vietnamese to become more like the French. On the contrary, they complained when Vietnamese people incorporated French practices into their own lives: “The natives . . . seem to have fairly easily adopted some of our ways,” wrote one author, “but they are not improved by this modification of their ancestral customs” (Gosselin 5).3 On one occasion, a high-level French administrator declared that “from a political perspective, any assimilation of the natives which takes place too quickly and too completely is a bad thing.”4 The French community in Vietnam wanted to make sure it was easy to differentiate colonizer from colonized, and cross-cultural adaptations threatened the clarity of that distinction. While the French avoided stating explicitly that they did not want Vietnamese people to taste French cuisine, they reacted with deep ambivalence when they thought of the colonized eating the same food as the colonizers. Most frequently this took the form of French people refusing to eat Vietnamese food, but some of the French also disparaged Vietnamese people who tried French food. In French novels, for instance, Vietnamese characters often revealed their corrupt natures by eating French food. A 1912 novel described the vanity of a Vietnamese woman as she sat down for her first French meal: “She delighted in the foods served, which were completely the opposite of her Vietnamese tastes, and she laughed throughout the whole dinner, knowing that, behind the folding screens, [the household’s] peeping eyes watched as she ate with a fork” (Villemagne 110).5 Newspapers expressed similar criticisms with less subtlety. The report on a municipal banquet in Saigon included this complaint: “Except for the notables, . . . the Vietnamese should have been left home, which would have meant more room for those with a right to be there and fewer losses at the buffet, which was taken by assault by those too aggravating parasites”6 And in their homes French people worried about their servants eating French food: “our cooks . . . claim in a whine to ‘eat rice only,’ but treat themselves to the scraps from our tables.”7 A guidebook tried to reassure its readers: “Of course, [your cook] does not eat the same dishes he serves: all he needs is his rice” (Bouinais and Paulus 285). The issue was not simply the theft of the food, but the blurring of the line between colonizer and colonized. Before the First World War, most lower-class and even middle-class urban Vietnamese had little opportunity to taste European foods. But from the very beginning of colonialism, those upper-class Vietnamese who had helped the colonizers were introduced to French dining during many official banquets. One lesson of these banquets was the high esteem the French had for their own cuisine. In 1886 Dông Khánh, the king of newly colonized Vietnam, served



CULINARY CROSSINGS AND DISRUPTIVE IDENTITIES

Erica J. Peters

prominent French officials a European-style banquet. The French may not have wanted the Vietnamese to become French, but they were pleased that the king had honored them with food they could enjoy.8 Other Vietnamese elites— aware of the multiple audiences in the colony—strove to create more complex practices, practices that might have different meanings for their Vietnamese and French audiences. In 1888 Nguyên Huu Dô, the imperial high commissioner in North Vietnam, gave his own banquet and hired a French caterer to serve his guests a variety of dishes with elaborate French names. The menu included the following dishes, prepared in traditional French styles: Filets de Sole Joinville, Rissoles de Volailles aux Truffes, Filet de Bœuf Richelieu, Poularde à la Montmorency, and Timbales de Cailles Saint-Hubert.9 Since French identity was elaborated in this period through pride in their culinary traditions, the high commissioner played with preconceptions about cultural competence by proposing that wealth and taste mattered more than ethnicity in hosting a fine banquet. Furthermore, the soup course consisted of birds’ nest soup, a traditional Asian delicacy. By choosing to serve the two cuisines within the same meal, Nguyên Huu Dô asserted their commensurability. Through this combination of foods that the French considered incompatible, Nguyên Huu Dô subtly challenged rigid colonial hierarchies of cultural practices and identities. He was conducting a public demonstration of what a hybrid identity might look like, neither Asian nor Western, but claiming authority from both cultures as part of a search for increased political power in the colony.10 Around the same time, a wealthy southern Vietnamese named Do Huu Phuong also gave many French banquets—the engagement party for his daughter was catered by the French Hôtel de l’Univers and had a largely European guest list.11 But by 1900 he had become known for inviting the French to lavish Vietnamese banquets at his home. Instead of trying simply to recreate excellent French cuisine, he began showcasing Vietnamese culinary traditions. According to Pierre Nicolas, a colonial author of a guide to French life in southern Vietnam, Do Huu Phuong prided himself on his reputation for excellent Vietnamese food and served his French guests delicacies such as “a bit of still-born pig (delicious treat),” and “palm-tree worms, grilled to perfection” (Nicolas 151).12 While giving a façade of praise to Do Huu Phuong’s table, Nicolas made sure to mention only dishes that would seem odd to French readers. Nicolas reported dryly that the French guests would try their best with the Vietnamese dishes, but then Do Huu Phuong would take pity on them; after such sessions, the table was cleared of the little bowls, reset in European style, and servers brought out huge steaks for those not satisfied with the previous offerings. Nicolas noted: “It must be said that if people lavish less praise on the familiar steaks, they appreciate them more [than the exotic dishes], and the fine Bordeaux makes one forget the choum-choum [rice wine]” (Nicolas 156). Do Huu Phuong wanted his guests to leave happy and sated; his parties gratified his French guests by making them feel adventurous but also making sure they were fed. His feasts had another consequence, however: they established his mastery of



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both French and Vietnamese cultural practices. Through Nicolas’s sarcasm and double-edged praise, we can read French anxiety about the power of this wealthy Vietnamese man. Do Huu Phuong played with Vietnamese elite identity by going beyond Nguyên Huu Dô and showing that a Vietnamese elite could persuade the French to try Vietnamese food. He also forced the French guests to confront their own identities, their own insistence on eating French food while abroad. After all, Do Huu Phuong was offering them the best Asian cuisine. The colonizers had to question whether it was the excellence of French food or rather their own lack of sophistication and racism that made them reluctant to try new dining experiences. This Vietnamese elite shook up colonial assumptions, playing with his own identity and that of his French guests. Like the grand cross-cultural banquets organized by notables, wedding feasts provided another opportunity for Vietnamese elites to demonstrate their culinary tastes and competencies for a variety of audiences. Throughout the colonial period, the hosts of most Vietnamese weddings served elaborate Vietnamese dishes. In 1908, for instance, one wedding banquet included delicate rice pastries, elaborately spiced vegetable dishes, and piglets roasted until crisp (Dürrwell 8). At a high society wedding of a Vietnamese bride and groom in 1911, however, the father of the bride, Le Phat Thanh, ignored the Vietnamese conventions. After the civil wedding, the European and Vietnamese guests enjoyed an elegant lunch catered by a French grocery emporium; the meal included Œufs Niçoises, Côtelettes d’Agneau Maréchal, and Buisson de Rocher de Meringues Glacés, but not a single Vietnamese dish. That evening this wealthy man offered his guests an even more impressive dinner. According to the society reporter for a French newspaper in Saigon, Le Phat Thanh had arranged a menu “which [the famous French food connoisseur] Brillat-Savarin himself would not have disdained”—again, no foods were mentioned that sounded even slightly Vietnamese.13 Le Phat Thanh dramatically excluded Vietnamese elements from the two grand meals he hosted, snubbing Vietnamese traditions and astounding the French reporter. This father took advantage of his daughter’s very visible wedding to communicate his cultural ambitions to a mixed audience of French and Vietnamese elites. Le Phat Thanh used French cuisine to stake his claim to power within the colonial hierarchy. He rejected older Vietnamese customs, aligning himself with the French against more traditional Vietnamese. At the same time, however, he went further than the colonizers expected, shocking them with his ability to master their cuisine. The colonizers preferred to mock maladroit Vietnamese efforts to emulate the French, as when Governor General Paul Doumer wrote in his memoirs that “despite oneself, one laughs at [their] baroque imitation of our customs” (Doumer 51-52).14 The French would have preferred, as the reporter suggested, to “disdain” the wedding menus. Instead, Le Phat Thanh demanded their respect. Cross-Cultural Dining Among the Rising Middle Class European tastes gradually worked their way from colonial elites to the rising urban middle class. Lacking the power of a Le Phat Thanh, as well as his confi-




Erica J. Peters

dence, these Vietnamese experimented with European foods, playing with them rather than adopting them unreservedly into their meals. French champagnes and wines were generally the first Western elements adopted.15 The Vietnamese varied in their attitudes to these borrowings. In some circles, wine and champagne formed a new standard of hospitality among elites (Doumer 51).16 But some authors used the practice as a symbol of all that was wrong with modern Vietnamese. The poet Trân Tê Xuong mocked Vietnamese who served the colonial administration instead of becoming scholars, saying scornfully that they had made the wise choice: as bureaucrats they now could “drink milk in the morning and champagne at night” (Trân Tê Xuong 170). Similarly, Nguyên Công Hoan deepened his negative portrayal of a wealthy Vietnamese administrator in his novel, Dead End, by having “Representative Lai” drink champagne in preference to Vietnamese rice alcohol (185). Attacking these functionaries directly would have been dangerous, but Trân Tê Xuong and Nguyên Công Hoan presented apparently trivial beverage choices as an index of identity, marking colonial bureaucrats (and others who borrowed elements of Western cuisine) as gluttonous mercenaries who mindlessly betrayed Vietnamese traditions. Champagne, with its resonances of excess and indulgence—even in France— seems an obvious symbol, but why did Trân Tê Xuong choose milk as the other aspect of bureaucratic decadence? The Vietnamese had not drunk cow’s milk before the colonial period. Now, however, seeing the advertisements in the French press extolling the benefits of (imported) milk for French children, some Vietnamese parents began to think their children should also be drinking milk.17 Indeed, under colonialism, ambitious Vietnamese parents urged their children to go much further in adapting to the French regime than the parents had done themselves. The student Nguyên Van Nho was forbidden from chewing betel nuts, because that Vietnamese practice supposedly interfered with the tongue’s ability to pronounce French consonants (Nguyên Van Nho 33).18 Vietnamese children who attended the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat also faced a dining adaptation: regardless of one’s race, breakfast at the most prestigious high school in Saigon consisted of coffee and bread, and not rice soup (Bùi Thanh Van 31). Métisse Blanche, Kim Lefèvre’s memoir of growing up a biracial child in colonial Vietnam, tells of her own experiences being pressured by her aunt to learn to eat with a knife and fork and to chew silently: “Preoccupied with my manners, I no longer knew what I was swallowing. My throat tight, I recalled Vietnamese meals, where eating was a pleasure and not a code” (30). In none of these cases were the children offered a completely European diet. Rather, they were asked to acquire a familiarity with some of the grammar of French food practices, and, just as much, to signal their willingness to sacrifice some aspects of their familial culture.19 Here we see how ethnicity was articulated through class, and new, upwardly mobile identities were carved into a younger generation. One should not dismiss this acculturation and treat it as mere Vietnamese docility toward their dominators. Given that the French did not want Vietnamese elites to be able to master French culinary practices, they certainly did not want middle class Vietnamese children to gain mastery of French culture. Eating French food was part of trying to fulfill unstated French expectations in



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hopes of a possible career in the colonial bureaucracy. The French paradoxically expected Vietnamese applicants to show loyalty by imitating the colonizer and to show conservatism by retaining their own traditions. We can resolve this contradiction by pointing out that the French did not in fact want Vietnamese coworkers. The more Vietnamese children prepared for jobs in the administration, the more jobs would have to be found for them (or, alternatively, justifications for denying them jobs for which they were well qualified). But to employ them would take jobs away from French candidates, and might require French people to work alongside Vietnamese colleagues. While the French Republic held such prospects out as the future for which colonialism prepared, the French living in Vietnam were not eager to arrive at that point (Duong van Giao 403-408). In addition to disrupting the categorical expectations of the colonizers, Vietnamese children who learned to eat French food were also playing with identities along a different vector. Like Le Phat Thanh, they subverted Vietnamese conventions, and they ended up proposing revolutionary new ways of looking at the world. We saw Trân Tê Xuong’s criticism of Vietnamese who became bureaucrats. Other traditionalist writers also attacked those who adopted French ways: in Nam Xuong’s play, Ông Tây An-nam (Mr. French-Vietnamese), the author mocked a Vietnamese person whose French education made him prefer Western ways to the culture (and food) of his parents.20 Even when Vietnamese parents had encouraged their children to become familiar with French culture, they were overwhelmed by the resulting transformations. Where Vietnamese culture emphasized respecting one’s parents, exposure to French culture taught children to disregard tradition. And exposure to French cuisine instructed children that, regardless of one’s parents’ opinion and customs, using a fork was superior to using chopsticks. In 1885, the French government even chose to mark Bastille Day by distributing silverware and other Western products to elementary school students.21Adapting to French food and French culture formed one front in an extended Vietnamese struggle between generations and between modernizing and traditionalist elites. The early elites’ destabilization of the colonizer’s cuisine led gradually to a wider acceptance of French food in Vietnamese life. The urban middle class in Vietnam began experimenting with a more Western cuisine, particularly from around World War I. In those years, unskilled urban laborers were eating mostly rice, while the educated middle class was beginning to eat more and more European foods (Leurence 1).22 Newspaper advertisements provide richly textured evidence of the increase in French food purchases. European alcohol and cigarette companies had advertised in Vietnamese-language newspapers such as Gia Dinh Báo since at least the 1890s. By 1910 Luc Tinh Tân Van included advertisements in Vietnamese for a French bakery that offered “delicacies made in the Parisian manner.”23 In 1915, the “Petite Fermière” brand of canned milk advertised in the pages of Luc Tinh Tân Van. These companies had specially tailored their advertisements to the Vietnamese consumer, indicating a perception of the growing importance of that market. And by 1920, the volume of marketing for European food products had increased dramatically, with advertisements for coffee, French biscuits, Nestlé brand milk, and even French diet pills.24 These tar-




Erica J. Peters

geted advertisements for French food products in the Vietnamese press suggest that a broader Vietnamese market for these products was developing. We must not, however, conclude that the colonizers were enthusiastic about this growing market. Naturally, a few French companies probably were pleased. But most of the French did not appreciate Vietnamese consumption of French products. Since the French community wanted food to act as a marker of difference between themselves and the colonized, they would have preferred for the Vietnamese to maintain a distinct, unchanging, “traditional” diet. By instead creating a hybrid cuisine and borrowing some elements of French food, Vietnamese urbanites divided French opinion. They obstructed French hegemony in the colony by preventing the French from presenting a unified image. Dislocated Dining in the Colony Vietnamese people used French food as part of their own internecine struggles, and to obstruct French attempts to draw strict lines between colonial categories. The Vietnamese also used Asian food to mark out possible identities. Those regional identities would have tremendous consequences later in the twentieth century; even in the early years of colonialism, however, the Vietnamese saw regional cuisine as a marker of difference and were intrigued that there were different ways to be Vietnamese. French ethnographers assumed that there was but one Vietnamese cuisine, which had remained unchanged for centuries: a base of rice, vegetables, and nuoc mam, with more meat and fancier dishes being added for wealthier families.25 French businessmen were more blunt; one manual discussed how cheap it was to hire Vietnamese day-laborers because their food needs were so minimal, consisting of rice “with occasionally some fish, but that is an extra” (Chaffanjon and Métral 3).26 These French writers ignored regional variations mentioned consistently by Vietnamese people, such as coastal/interior, urban/rural, and, in particular, the differences in cuisine between north and south Vietnam. Kim Lefèvre, for instance, noted the distinctive smell of Hanoi’s pho soup, different from that in other regions. She also contrasted urban food with village food, such as the coagulated pig blood eaten with peanuts in her grandfather’s village (Métisse Blanche 21 and 86). A colonial-era Vietnamese joke commented on differences in taste between urban and rural Vietnam, declaring that country fish would bite when the hook was merely baited with worms or crickets, but Saigon fish demanded steak (West 23). The saying revealed Vietnamese excitement and unease over the growing urbanism of the colony, as it mocked on the one hand the starvation conditions in the countryside and on the other the selfimportance of those who moved to the cities. The different regions offered vastly different opportunities. Could people from such varied backgrounds create a shared identity and a Vietnamese nation? That question arose over and over through the twentieth century, as the colonized struggled over how to prioritize independence, democracy, modernization, and communalism. When the Vietnamese notable Michel My left his native Saigon to travel to Hanoi in the early 1920s, he was already fairly cosmopolitan. He ate regularly



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At home, in Cochinchina, if someone wants to indulge in a meal of dog, he hides as if he were doing something wrong. He invites only his closest friends, and holds the feast in the countryside, far from any populated center. [ . . . ] [But in Tonkin] nothing is more natural than to turn into sausages the puppy one caressed the night before. (My 128) At one restaurant, My found himself unable to eat the food on the menu and instead pulled out a bag of mussels he had purchased that day in Haiphong. He thus presented his readers with a contrast between the unappetizing food of inland Hanoi with the fresh food of the coastal area, while at the same time underlining the innovation of rapid travel across the one hundred kilometers separating Hanoi from Haiphong. He and his friends sat down to eat on the terrace of a French hotel, and endured glares from the European customers. “Annamites, here?” (My 42-43) exclaimed one French officer. His friend decided they were mandarins, but an experienced French colonial guessed that only Saigonnais would casually enter a French café. My and his friends calmly drank their iced aperitifs, letting the onlookers “continue to wonder about our origin and our identity” (My 159). My also visited Hanoi’s two finest Chinese restaurants, and declared: “In no way did they compare to Cholon’s grand restaurants. But . . . we came out of nostalgia” (My 171-172). Michel My wrote in French, for a largely if not predominantly French audience; nevertheless, the impression left is that he felt able to experiment with the various cuisines available under colonialism, and assigning him a culinary identity would be far beyond the skills of the French flaneurs who thought they knew him. He was more at home in Hanoi’s Chinese restaurants than in that city’s Vietnamese restaurants, and he drank French alcohol partly to demonstrate (to his readers) that he was more sophisticated than the Frenchmen who were shocked by such a sight. My’s relationship to food and French culture was not typical of people living in the colony—the possibilities open to him because of his wealth and education exceeded those of many French and Chinese in Vietnam, and most Vietnamese people could not even have imagined his experiences. Still, he provides a reminder that for at least some people, colonial cuisine offered a menu of old and new tastes that did not correspond neatly to the diner’s supposed identity. Conclusion The study of everyday practices leads to the conclusion that, in a politically unstable environment, adoptions of new cultural practices are never politically



in Saigon’s French cafés, and had his favorite Chinese restaurants in Cholon. Yet the food in Hanoi perplexed him—ordinary dishes tasted different, the nuoc mam fish condiment available in Hanoi was “indigestible,” and dog meat was sold openly in Hanoi’s marketplace (My 211). Striving for detachment, he compared the cultures:

Erica J. Peters

neutral. French Vietnam was a rapidly changing society where people struggled daily over issues of colonial legitimacy and authority. Under these circumstances, all small-scale cultural adaptations (and sometimes even the absence or refusal of adaptation) could be identity claims. Such claims allow us to add complexity to the binary identities portrayed in overt political statements. Instead of the stark dichotomies of Vietnamese versus French, or Asian versus European, we can see the emergence of more flexible identities, such as class-based or urban identities that were constructed in relation to changing everyday practices. And new subversive identities emerged, as Vietnamese of different backgrounds assessed their strength against the structures of colonial society. I have argued that one way for the Vietnamese to delegitimize colonial authority was to adopt French cultural practices. A French commentator noted that just as the Vietnamese historically had borrowed more from the Chinese as they grew more hostile to Chinese control, so too their cultural borrowings from the French should be read as a growing refusal to be dominated by France (Gosselin 87). Assimilative activities such as the incorporation of French food products into Vietnamese meals were complex political statements. Urban Vietnamese elites used such borrowings to assert their own power against other Vietnamese, but also to heighten anxiety in the French community without overtly challenging the colonizers. By experimenting with French food, Vietnamese elites and the rising middle classes transgressed the imagined divisions between colonizer and colonized and created a new politics of colonial consumption.

Notes * This essay has benefited from comments received on an earlier version from the participants at the conference on “Imperialism and Identity: Remapping the Cultural Politics of Representation,” held at the University of California, Berkeley, February 1998. Research for this article was funded by the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust and the Department of History, University of Chicago. Copyright 2000 Erica J. Peters. 1. For a comparative look at how different everyday practices were articulated against the demands of the French colonial state, see my recent dissertation, Peters, “Negotiating Power.” 2. My investigation of the construction of identities through everyday practices borrows from Judith Butler’s work on the sedimentation of identity and studies of everyday life by Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, James Scott, and Alf Lüdtke. 3. Unless otherwise noted, all translations within text and endnotes are my own. 4. Bulletin of the Chamber of Agriculture of Cochinchina (1898), quoting a letter from the LieutenantGovernor of Cochinchina, where he cited approvingly the above remark, originally made by the Attorney-General of Cochinchina. Minutes from June 23, 1898. For other examples of French people opposing Vietnamese assimilation, see Monet, Qu’est-ce qu’une civilisation?, 101-109, and Nguyên Van Nho, Souvenirs d’un étudiant, 46. 5. See also the description of a decadent Vietnamese woman sipping hot chocolate and eating pâté in Eugène Jung’s Mademoiselle Moustique,12. 6. Le Cochinchinois, January 24, 1889, 3. 7. La France d’Asie, November 7, 1901, 2. 8. Gosselin, L’Empire d’Annam, 245-246, citing General Prudhomme’s recollections of the event. 9. L’Avenir du Tonkin, February 11, 1888, 1. 10. On the history of hybridity as a colonial category, see Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. 11. Do Huu Phuong, the Tong-Doc of Cholon, was an important administrator and had worked



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12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

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with the French since their conquest of southern Vietnam. On his daughter’s engagement, see La Semaine Coloniale (Saigon), September 19, 1896, 2. On Do Huu Phuong’s banquets, see also Doumer, L’Indo-Chine française: Souvenirs, 67. L’Opinion (Saigon), January 27, 1911, 2. Another author remarked that Vietnamese people were starting to drink absinthe, but “only out of snobbism,” not because they liked absinthe’s taste (Diguet, Les Annamites , 21-22). For an example of the integration of champagne into Vietnamese rituals, see the description of a meeting of the Société de Secours Mutuels des Cochinchinois au Tonkin in My, Le Tonkin Pittoresque: “after offering [the visitors] the traditional champagne, M. Thien opened the meeting” (226). By 1922 it was unremarkable that Lê An Du, catering a Vietnamese celebration, served the guests champagne and “exceptional wines” (L’Opinion [Saigon], 24 July 1922, 2). Canned milk had been advertised in the French press since at least the 1880s. In 1915 one company (La Petite Fermière) began to advertise in a Vietnamese newspaper, Luc Tinh Tân Van (News of the Six Provinces, published in Cholon). See Peters, “Negotiating Power,” 163-193. On the perceived importance of the betel nut in Vietnamese culture, see the folk tale “Le Bétel et l’Aréquier,” 175-190. For an analysis of the grammar of French cuisine, see Fischler, L’Homnivore, 32-37. Just returned from France, the title character refuses to speak Vietnamese and calls French cuisine the best in the world (Nam Xuong 294). L’Avenir du Tonkin, July 15, 1885, 2-3. For a discussion of the intergenerational dynamics of Vietnamese radicals, see Tai 52-56. Regarding the introduction of European foods to the new urban classes, see also Nguyên Van Ky, La société vietnamienne face à la modernité, 272, and Lê Thành Khôi, Le Viêt-nam: Histoire et civilisation, 420 and 435. Luc Tinh Tân Van, November 3, 1910, unnumbered page: “Dô mi vi làm theo cách nu công bên Paris.” Luc Tinh Tân Van, January 7, 1915, 8; April 1, 1915, 3; May 6, 1915, 3; and October 20, 1920. See, for instance, Diguet, Annamites, 54 and Langlet, Le Peuple Annamite, 92. In 1913 workers’ diet had not improved, and day-laborers spent no more than ten cents a day on food. (Langlet 98.)







Phan Huyen Thu

Moving along the edge of summer An early moon bends the first third of the month Gaudily fawning vain wild flowers trail the rails of a provincial station On the roof of a forgotten train car The odor of sunlight sleeps deeply Because of an immortal and tuneful ideal a lovelorn cricket trips over a dew drop A lizard warrior clucks its tongue and drinks up the night dreams a thin dream of mosquito wings Stringing up faith a female spider clasps a sack of saturated eggs Having drunk a dream by mistake My wooden lizard sobbed all last night Leading itself along the edge of summer Finding a way to fall. Translated by Linh Dinh



Moving along the Edge of Summer




Patrick Laude

This essay introduces the reader to narrative texts that portray European and Asian cultural relations within the context of the French colonial presence in Southeast Asia. In the first four decades of the twentieth century, French male novelists—not all of them “colons”—regularly wrote about the cultural influence of Southeast Asia on French colonials, whether they be businessmen, military personnel, or colonial civil servants.1 In their writings, the French man’s contact with natives (his colonial “other”) often leads to his adoption of Asian culture and repudiation of Western culture. In order to understand the complexities of this trend, it is important to be aware of the distinction most literary critics of the period drew between “exotic” and “colonial” literature. As defined at that time, “exotic” literature aimed at staging phantasmatic images of the Orient, while “colonial” literature claimed to educate readers by providing them with “reliable” and “realistic” representations of colonial life. Importantly, the theoretical distinction between “exotic” and “colonial” literatures reveals two distinct apprehensions of the “otherness” of native people and cultures. The first involves an imaginary and creative understanding of the other as a representation or symbol of an obscure psychological zone that remains unenlightened by rational self-understanding and self-definition. The second involves a “colonial” envisaging of “otherness” predicated on a “scientific” exploration of native realities; an exploration that is at the core of the colonial enterprise. Crucially, these opposed perspectives may meet up unexpectedly in the domain I will call “acculturation.” Assuming the cultural ways and psychological traits of Asian natives—the process of “going native”—represents, at one and the same time, a psychological and social means of a quest for “scientific” knowledge and a deliberate challenge to Western norms of understanding. It may be underpinned by the motivations and orientations captured in both “exotic” and “colonial” literature, motivated by one of them alone, or motivated by the two orientations in succession. Initial enthusiasm in the civilizing mission may end up in a ques-



Cultural Encounters in French Colonial Literature

Patrick Laude

tioning of the very notion of civilization, for instance, and attempts to “integrate” or “assimilate” the other through knowledge may result in a cultural “disintegration” of a French male character. Indeed, where the French were concerned, the experience of the other that is highlighted by this type of acculturation frequently takes the form of a transgressive acculturation and a repudiation of European civilizational models. Such occurrences highlight a fundamental threat to the French colonial identity, and, beyond it, articulate a profound and powerful challenge to the Weltanschauung of modern Western development. Most frequently, these types of rejection proceed as a result of cognitive, perspectival, psychological, and/or intellectual changes in the French protagonist. In this essay, I focus on three major catalysts of change that recur regularly in the narratives of the four first decades of the twentieth century—sexual interaction with Southeast Asian women, the discovery of nature and pre-industrial lifestyles, and an encounter with forms of Asian religions and spirituality. Asian female characters constitute the literary epitome of “otherness.” The subtle dialectics of attraction and fear involved in their relationship with European male characters recapitulates the ambiguity of the “colonial” acculturation experience. In fact, the colonial enterprise is imbued with representations of masculine domination and subjugation, and the “passivity” of Asian cultures often functions as a most suggestive representation. The industrial revolution and secularization of the social and psychological spheres constitute two emblems of this “masculinity”: industry and technology are determining weapons at the service of the European colonial endeavor, while secularism appears as a “male” emancipation from a divine rule. As such, it represents a philosophical prerequisite for the full manifestation of conquering freedom. The sexual “metaphor” is therefore a powerful matrix of complex ideological meanings: it conveys a sense of civilizational affirmation, epitomized by the “erotic conquest” of the Asian woman, but it may also operate as the catalyst of a shift, the Asian woman becoming the means and symbol of an “uncivilizing” pull. The Southeast Asian Woman From 1900 to 1940, French novels on Southeast Asia were frequently named for their native female characters. Let us mention the examples of Pierre Billotey’s Sao Kéo ou le bonheur immobile (Sao Kéo or the Unmovable Happiness), Roland Meyer’s Saramani, danseuse cambodgienne (Saramani, Cambodian Dancer), Henry Casseville’s Sao, l’amoureuse tranquille (Sao, the Peaceful Lover), Antonin Baudenne and Gaston Starbach’s Sao Tiampa, épouse laotienne (Sao Tiampa, Lao Wife) and Louis-Charles Royer’s Kham la Laotienne (Kham the Lao Woman). As this practice suggests, the literary figure known as the “Asian Eve” played a particularly crucial role in these novels. As mentioned, an intercultural experience lay at the core of most “colonial novels” written during the era of the French Union Indochinoise (1887-1954). The catalyst and narrative symbol of that encounter was a European colonial male’s sexual—and sometimes marital—encounter with a Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Laotian female.



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By sexualizing the native female, these narratives suggest its phantasmatic foundations, cultural allures, ideological implications, and fundamental ambiguities. Indeed, as a narrative and imaginary figure of the colonial context, the Southeast Asian woman introduces, embodies, and recapitulates the entire imaginary realm of otherness. This otherness refers to all the psychological, sexual, and cultural elements situated outside of the sphere of the male character’s inner and social identifications. Consequently, as a female figure and as an Asian character perceived from the narrative and psychological standpoint of a European male protagonist and brought to literary life by a Western male novelist, the “Asian Eve” appears as the half-fascinating, half-threatening catalyst of a crisis of cultural identity. As such, this figure’s appearance may provoke the subversion of European codes and a cultural transgression or, to the contrary, the hardening of a sense of Western identity brought about by the shock of the “other.” Most if not all scenes of initial acquaintance between European male and Asian female characters are placed under the auspices of a fascination for otherness. The intensity and scope of this fascination may vary greatly, from a mere sexual curiosity to a fundamental questioning of European sexual and marital mores. In Albert de Pouvourville’s narratives,2 the encounter between a French man and a Vietnamese woman is set against the backdrop of a profound civilizational divide that can only result in a tragic ending. In his work, the sexual interaction between a European man and a Vietnamese woman tends to be perceived from a quasi-ethnographic perspective. To foster this sense of “scientific” objectivity and to give credit to its “colonial” qualifications, Pouvourville situates the narrative unfolding within the larger context of Vietnamese cultural mores and norms. This setting characterizes an approach that favors a quasiethnographic concept of literature over an imaginary and exotic emphasis. In his short story “Le geste révélateur” [Telling Gesture] (Pouvourville, L’heure silencieuse [Silent Hour]), the tragic encounter between Hoavan, the wife of a mandarin named Dong, and a French character whose identity remains unknown is considered from the standpoint of the Vietnamese woman. The French protagonist’s anonymity registers their liaison’s utter lack of personal meaning. Like her husband, who initially encouraged her involvement with the French colonial society, Hoavan is motivated exclusively by the lure of cultural and erotic curiosity, and the European male character is merely after a sexual adventure.3 Once this curiosity has been fulfilled and the suspicions of the husband have been raised, the resolution comes as sharp as the knife that cuts the hands, ears, and tongue of the Frenchman who played with the marital bond uniting the mandarin and his wife. Hoavan is tied to the bloody remainder of her lover, her lips stuck to his, and they are abandoned to rapids on a raft. Detached and matter-of-fact, the narrative tone is cultivated as a transparent and impartial medium highlighting the cultural chasm between the French amorous badinage and the traditional implacability and extreme rigor of Vietnamese law. Thus, as Pouvourville portrays it in this story, the sexual encounter between the French man and indigenous woman represents the impossibility of a real encounter between their cultural worlds. Indeed this impossibility is suggested in the first pages of this story, when the character Baly (Pouvourville’s alter ego,



CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

Patrick Laude

“the only white man who knows the yellow race” [75]) tries to convince Dong not to encourage his wife’s involvement with French colonials. The fact that this failure of communication and acculturation is set in a narrative context designed to reflect traditional Vietnamese culture’s perspective is significant: it suggests that alterity cannot be integrated by the colonized society without its losing its own identity. In nearly all of the other colonial narratives of this period, the narrative point of view espouses the perceptions and experiences of a European character. Consistently, they portray the encounter of an Asian female and French male as motivated by a different type of curiosity than that which precipitates Hoavan into her French lover’s arms. In all cases, the appearance of an Asian female character appears to the European male protagonist’s inner need. The precise nature of this need varies widely, from a merely sentimental or aesthetic need to a more fundamental one, be it cultural or spiritual. In Sao, l’amoureuse tranquille, for instance, Henry Casseville deals with the commonplace literary motif of the congaie, or Vietnamese concubine, in a manner that highlights the quasi-feudal exchange of “services” that associates his Sergeant Jeanpierre and the young Vietnamese woman, Thi Sao. The French character’s psychological and sentimental unease, which results from his unappealing physical appearance and lack of amorous experience, finds soothing comfort in Thi Sao’s dedication. For her part, the young Vietnamese woman considers the French soldier to be a decent protector capable of supporting her. Initially, however, there is no hint of a genuine cultural curiosity, let alone of a desire for cultural exchange on the part of either character. Although their interaction is generally harmonious, the narrative highlights the cultural gap separating them. Suggestively illustrating the limits of their harmonious association, Casseville describes their first amorous encounter: “Drunk with pleasure, he cried what he had never said previously:— Thi Sao, I love you. She did not understand, but she thought that this one would be the best of her lovers” (Casseville 86). Jeanpierre’s dreams of ideal love are soon deflated: in his absence and out of financial interest, Thi Sao accepts another French officer’s favors. Ultimately, however, this deception permits him to get an insight into a cultural mentality different from his own and to accept this difference as part and parcel of his own experience. The cultural relevance of the novel is undeniable as a reflection of a certain type of colonial rapport de forces and the psychological misperceptions and complications that it entails. This being said, the way in which Casseville introduces his readers into the literary realm of the “temptation of the East” relates more to his character’s weariness in regard to his personal experience of Europe than to an a priori interest in and affinity for Asian cultures and ways of life. Indeed, by the end of the novel, Jeanpierre has severed all contacts with his French milieu and his roots. His renunciation of his birth culture is linked, however, to the remoteness and archaic tranquillity of his military post in Laos, far away from a world that deeply hurt him, rather than to any determining acculturating influence on the part of Thi Sao.4 In the same way, the existential serenity and abandonment to sickness and death into which his cultural choice leads Jeanpierre reflects metaphysical and moral taedium vitae rather than cross-cultural



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transgression. As for the Vietnamese woman, she is too closely integrated into the colonial world in which she has become a conventional figure to be able to serve as a catalyst of transcultural experience. Rather, she appears as an unfathomably distant component of the Confucian Far Eastern tradition or as a docile and hollow character unable to symbolize or help articulate a cultural alternative. When novelists take us beyond the relatively familiar horizon of colonial Vietnam, the “Asian Eve” presents a much more transgressive figure. Indeed, the fascinating image of the Lao and Cambodian woman underpins an entire literature of the Southeast Asian “pioneering frontier.” This literature portrays these women as “exotic” and “wild” in the eyes of Vietnamese characters (Thi Sao, for instance, considers Lao women to be “inferior beings” who do not respect “propriety” and “the thousand rules of politeness”5), and it depicts precisely this “uncivilized” dimension as that which attracts male European exotes. To them, the woman “from beyond Vietnam” appears to be surrounded by a mysterious glow that contrasts both with metropolitan “civilization” and with French colonial mediocrity or turpitude. The feminine aura these novels lend the young Lao woman, the pou sao, responds to what they cast as the European male’s thirst for a new kind of amorous experience. Such is the aspiration of Morgat, the main character of Louis-Charles Royer’s novel Kham la Laotienne, who longs for a “creature who could have, like himself, a more profound, and above all newer, sensibility” (Royer 41). Similarly, Pierre Billotey’s Sao Kéo ou le bonheur immobile opens with an irresistible allure that emanates from an old picture of the mysterious face of a woman. Not immediately identifiable as belonging to any ethnic group or civilization, her face appears to embody the French male protagonist’s dream of absolute exotic difference: “[The picture] showed the strange and very delicate face of a woman, certainly not that of a European, any more than of a Chinese or an Annamite. It was Malay perhaps, or rather Hindu” (Billotey 31). This face’s penetrating aura leads the main character, a young French clerk called Lucien Payel, to the Lao village of Pak-Lay, under the pretext of a search for gold that translates, alchemically, into a search for the inner gold of happiness: “The idea of conquering a treasure contains something mystical in it. It evokes in our heart the oldest legends of mankind. It may be that this remains the only route via which man may penetrate into a world of magic appearances” (Billotey 117). In this alchemical translation, Sao Kéo appears as the “philosophical stone” or the “motionless mover” of the entire work. Like similar figures in other novels, she is drawn in a sharp contrast to European women who, like Payel’s fiancée, Alice, are most often identified with the riches, agitation, useless complications, and illusions of progress of the European lifestyle. If the European woman and the illusory pretexts of superiority associated with her open the way to sentimental and existential disasters, the erotic tableau of the Southeast Asian woman embodies an entire alternative way of being that departs from mental and moral conceits. The attributes with which she is associated, from the harmonious and curvilinear shape of her shoulders and breasts to the dignified simplicity of her garments, which follow her own natural lines, and the deep fragrance of ornamental flowers, serve as the catalysts of their erotic engagement and signifiers of a secession from what is most often implied by the word “civ-



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Patrick Laude

ilization.” They both eroticize the Asian female character and symbolize the erotic encounter between the Asian woman and the French male, which leads, in its turn, to his rejection of all that is implied by the word “civilization.” In addition, the literary type of the “uncivilized” Southeast Asian woman is coextensive with an atmosphere of contemplative repose. Indeed, in Royer’s Kham la Laotienne as in Billotey’s Sao Kéo ou le bonheur immobile and Georges Groslier’s Cambodian novel, Retour à l’argile (Return to Clay), the male character’s perception of such female characters epitomizes the peaceful pace and insouciant ambiance of traditional Southeast Asian life. Some female characters initiate their French lovers into traditional Laotian ways, as does Kham when she refers hers to a time when “we lived . . . without working for taxes, without masters; our whole time being devoted to playing, bathing and making love” (Royer 256). However, the female’s state of contemplative repose can also be understood as an immoral passivity that resists and subverts European authority and activism. In their Sao Tiampa, épouse laotienne, for instance, Baudenne and Strarbach cast the character Vébaud’s Laotian companion as a cunning and dissimulating female whose merely apparent submission masks a resilient secret resistance to her “master.” Moreover, these novels portray all real communication with this variant of the Asian woman as impossible. As in Sao, l’amoureuse tranquille, but in a much more radical and negative way, the French protagonist of Sao Tiampa finds only disillusion in his aspiration to an amorous fusion that would unite him to his lover within the context of a cultural and aesthetic communion. Sao Tiampa cannot share her husband’s aesthetic emotion before the beauty of nature and traditional ways; “the shivering of ecstasy was unknown to her, her horizon remained narrowly limited” (Baudenne 40). The inability of the Asian female character to participate as a subject in the French protagonist’s exotic experience is crucial to our understanding of this literature. It reveals a contradiction inherent to exotic literature and rêverie by showing that both require the native woman to function simultaneously as the object and the subject of her own experience. Indeed, in this literature, the indigenous woman serves both as an element of the cultural decor and as an affective prolongation of the European observer: she must thus be both other and same. Exotic narratives devise two strategies of response to this contradiction. Some reject the native female character into an objective otherness that deprives her of a “soul” or a subjective identity. So doing, they suggest that the pou sao be considered exclusively from a sexual standpoint, and that any desire of cultural communication with her be dismissed. Most of these narratives stage explicitly “philosophical” debates between two European stereotypes—the “romantic” character in search of an exotic sentimental experience, and his “realist” counterpart, who argues for a cynical exploitation of the colonial rapport de forces. In Baudenne and Starbach’s Sao Tiampa, for instance, Torpel adopts this second perspective. An experienced colonial, he cautions the romantic Vébaud against the lures of a dream of communion with Sao Tiampa: “Believe me, the abyss that separates us from these children of the wild is unbridgeable” (Baudenne 77). Thus is the indigenous female reduced to the status of an element of the



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colonial scene. Alternatively, other exotic narratives respond to the contradictory demands on native female characters by “assimilating” them and thus rendering cultural communication possible. Royer’s Kham la Laotienne and Billotey’s Sao Kéo deploy different modalities of this strategy. In the first, Kham is introduced as a “bi-cultural” character whose experience of metropolitan France—where she was discovered by Morgat in a Parisian cabaret—allows her to bridge the cultural gap that could have separated her from her lover. Throughout the story, her dual cultural status provides the catalyst and medium of a cultural transformation for the male character himself. As she accompanies Morgat back to her native land, for instance, Kham undergoes a psychological metamorphosis, which in turn initiates Morgat into the Lao ways he ultimately embraces. In Sao Kéo on the other hand, alterity is more radically negated. Its male lead, Playel, denies the reality of any significant differences that could radically distinguish his Laotian wife from a French woman: “Ethnologists may be right when they classify Laotian people in the yellow race. However, I tend to believe that they are wrong. In any case, I find very little difference between my Sao Kéo and a European woman. She is almost white, my Sao Kéo, she is coquettish and gay, she has an extremely keen intelligence” (Billotey 193-194). The “assimilation” of the Asian woman is also intensified by a rejection of Asian patriarchal practices such as polygamy. As Sao Kéo’s French protagonist, Lucien, insists, “Sao Kéo will remain my only wife. She remains silent about it, but I know that she thanks me for it in her heart” (Billotey 194). By distancing himself from a patriarchal practice that he evaluates negatively, the male protagonist undoubtedly suggests a “civilizing” influence of Europe while at the same time bridging the gap that threatened to separate him from his spouse. In his novel Retour à l’argile, Georges Groslier proposes a totally different interpretation of the cross-cultural experience of Southeast Asian polygamy. In it, “encongayement” is superseded by acculturation or “indigénisation,” with polygamy serving as its sexual emblem. Groslier’s hero, engineer Claude Rollin, is presented as critical of “encongayement,” which was common among military personnel and French colonial administrators, who employed native women as both concubines and servants. From Rollin’s radical perspective, “encongayement” does not involve any real cultural contact between the French man and the Southeast Asian woman, since he engages with her outside of her own psychological and cultural contexts.6 To his mind, only a genuine acculturation—an “indigénisation” in which the European protagonist shares in the cultural life of his partner—can permit a real encounter with the cultural other. Importantly, however, this form of encounter with the native woman involves a process of cultural transgression. Indeed, its general orientation moves in the direction of a “disindividuation” inherent in polygamy itself, in which individuals are supplanted by marital functions. Accordingly, Rollin’s first Cambodian wife, Kâmlang, seems to consider her French husband as a representative of a patriarchal institution that demands her abnegation and disappearance, so to speak, as an individual.7 In these relationships, each person exists only in so far as he or she functions within a holistic cultural and social structure that defines his or her identity. The “disappearance” of the individual does not only occur on the



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Patrick Laude

social level: it is grounded in a metaphysical notion of universality that supersedes individual traits and aspirations. Thus, Claude Rollin interprets the Asian understanding of eroticism as a transcending of the exclusive limitations of the individual: “A hundred other women may replace Kâmlang, for neglecting each woman, Asian wisdom devotes man’s love to woman as such” (Groslier 77). Paradoxically, this holistic and universal perception of eros is apprehended from the perspective of an exotic experience predicated, for the European character, on an individual “adventure.” For the European exote at the center of this transcultural experience, cultural distance is thus the source of an inner tension. This tension appears with a maximal intensity in the domain of erotic practices as the demand for a fundamental modification in the way in which the subject considers that experience. This modification does not simply consist in a suspension of mental and social constructs: it entails his renunciation of discursive thought and abandonment to the immediacy of the present experience. In that experience, then, being is substituted for thinking: “No sentences, no recriminations: the reality of the moment, life so full of itself that thought cannot penetrate it” (Groslier 123). In so far as breaking away from European norms is defined as a repudiation of discourse per se, it is crucial that Rollin consciously strives to distance himself from “love” as post-Romantic Europe defines it—that is, a relationship between a man and a woman founded on an experience of emotional fusion and predicated on the notion of an individual irreplaceableness.8 His choice to live with a native woman therefore amounts to a rejection of a certain type of psychological conditioning; a de facto break from his original psychological structures and cultural codes. This rejection is metaphorically rendered by his act of crushing and throwing away the letter a French woman named Simone, with whom he could have enjoyed marital happiness, sent to him as a token of her love. Groslier’s narrative relies on contrastive counterpoint. Like the alternating love songs of Lao popular culture, he alternates Simone’s written message informing Claude of her husband’s death and, implicitly, her sentimental availability, with the words of a traditional and choral love song. That song elaborates an understanding of human sexuality whose sensual and poetical directness contrasts with the emotional complexities of the European narrative: —Brother, look at the Tonlé’s waters.—Moor the sampan that it carries away.—Look at the water, not at the younger sister! The sampan flows, it is going to disappear. . . . —One, two, three, four, five, your five fingers touch the girl’s breast.—Proudly, you may announce that she has played with you.—She still has traces of your fingers on her breast.—Let her go, you will not lose her. But pay attention to the pirogue that already flows down the stream, over there. (Groslier 182) While his companion Kâmlang “tears the letter up into tiny pieces and nonchalantly throws them away” (182), the song resounds like a call to love and life against the backdrop of a keen awareness of the impermanence of everything.



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The erotic narrative that serves as the major catalyst of acculturation cannot be separated from the overall experience of a transgressive lifestyle. That lifestyle is aptly captured in the subtitle of Billotey’s Sao Kéo—“motionless happiness” (“le bonheur immobile”). This absence of motion, this slowing down of the existential pace, this contemplative stasis is more than a mere hedonistic experience: it is a philosophical statement. The very term “motionless happiness” suggests a critique of the nineteenth-century notion of progress. It thus functions as a synthetic emblem for the two fundamental inclinations characteristic of the transgressive “myth” of Southeast Asia: the primitivist ideal and the general aspiration to metaphysical wisdom. Both inclinations are mediated by the experience of love and sexuality: the Southeast Asian experience points to a prelapsarian and edenic state that is situated under the auspices of a wisdom rooted in a spiritual awareness of the present. As previously mentioned, in these novels the European male’s adoption of Asian ways of life correspond to two distinct orientations that are not mutually exclusive. In some cases, as a hero gradually assimilates traditional values and practices, he may come to assume Asian civilizational principles more broadly. In others, his longing for natural and primordial simplicity as a countermodel to the European concept of progress may lead him to assume Asian cultural practices. Generally, these orientations are associated with different geographical and cultural areas in Southeast Asia. In this literature, the Mekong Delta and the area of Sino-Vietnamese culture in general tend to be preferred sites for experiences of initiation into Asian civilization, whereas the remote and mountainous realm of the Muong and Meos and the faraway lands of Laos and Cambodia are preferred sites for primitivist images and themes. In both “L’homme à la ceinture” (“The Man with the Belt”) and Le maître des sentences (The Master of Maxims) Pouvourville’s narrative of acculturation corresponds to the first of these models. Pouvourville’s hero Baly is a marginal and ambiguous figure belonging both to the French colonial world and to the traditional culture of Annam, the “pacified South” of the Chinese that has become a French protectorate. Although his narrative function varies somewhat in each work in which he figures, it consistently relies on his initiation into the highest spiritual culture of Vietnam. A disciple of the old Luat, a venerable Taoist sage who introduced him to Far Eastern metaphysics, his ambiguity is grounded in his dual status as both an agent of the colonial power and a convert to Asian metaphysics and spirituality. This ambiguity makes him a living symbol of the problematic nature of transcultural experiences in a colonial context. It signals the fear that French people would move culturally “down the ladder” and into the culture of the colonized, while testifying to a measure of doubt or unease concerning the legitimacy and direction of Western ways. Baly’s initiatic experience may be read as a way for the colonizer to refine his understanding of the colonized and develop more effective methods of colonization.9 This cultural strategy is inversely analogous to the approach used by



Nature and Pre-Industrial Lifestyles

Patrick Laude

early-twentieth-century young Asian intellectuals, who understood the acquisition of European knowledge and methods as a means of using the colonizer’s own weapons against him and ultimately liberating oneself from colonial tutelage. In neither case, however, can the adoption of precepts and methods borrowed from the other easily be severed from their philosophical and epistemological underpinnings, if they can be severed at all. The narrative outcome of Baly’s colonial odyssey in the final pages of “L’homme à la ceinture” makes this quite clear. On his retirement from military service at the end of French-Vietnamese hostilities, Baly’s status changes from that of a “saint,”10 a heroic figure imbued with an aura of spiritual and magic invincibleness, to that of a “sage.” A recluse, he lives in a simple wooden house and he meditates on Chinese metaphysics while smoking opium. Clearly, his cultural transformation changes the ways in which Baly perceives France’s colonial presence and relationship with his fellow citizens. One night, he is visited by an anonymous character he later identifies as the younger brother of the two Vietnamese guerilla leaders he killed in battle. That night, however, he gives his visitor shelter even before recognizing him, in the name of the maxims of hospitality that are part and parcel of the Southeast Asian spiritual mores that he has embraced.11 Baly’s traditional behavior marks his latent opposition to the French colonial presence and leads him into open conflict with military and administrative officials, which prompts his expulsion from French colonial Indochina. If Baly’s adoption of Confucian-Taoist principles and a Vietnamese lifestyle alienates him from his own culture, it is not exempt from characteristics and motivations pertaining to a specifically European context. In fact, those characteristics and motivations are highlighted, indeed symbolized, by the only feature that distinguishes his dwelling from a traditional Vietnamese abode—the conspicuous absence of representations of ancestors at the altar: “Alone among the altars raised by the five hundred millions men of the yellow race and of the Confucian tradition, Baly’s ancestral altar was empty” (Pouvourville, Le cinquième bonheur, 199). Isolated as an individual who has chosen to join a family that cannot be fully his, Baly appears to live the lessons of Far Eastern wisdom in the mode of a rêverie that is more akin to the delectations of opium and withdrawn aloofness of a skeptic than to the spiritual ascesis of monks. Indeed, imbued with elitist and Nietzschean undertones, his Taoist retreat exudes the decadent effluvia of taedium vitae and hallucinogenic experimentation. In the end, then, Baly’s conversion to Far Eastern civilization cannot be separated from Europe’s fin de siècle intellectual and aesthetic ambiance. In other words, the “spiritual transgression” that is staged might be less a philosophical “conversion” than a literary and cultural “displacement.” Asian Religions and Spirituality Images of Buddhism proposed by French colonial novels of Southeast Asia of the first four decades of the twentieth century fall into two main categories. In some instances, Buddhism is presented as an unintelligible and decadent religion that obstructs the way to progress. In others, it is portrayed as one of the major foun-



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dations of the ambiance of peace and serenity that suffuses the life of Southeast Asian people. In Baudenne and Starbach’s Sao Tiampa, Buddhist spirituality is so profoundly a philosophical pretext of passivity that it is as if drowned in a general ambiance of abandonment and laziness typified by the expression “su-su.”12 In this novel, Buddhism tends to be identified with psychological and moral themes and undertones that are sometimes directly contrary to its actual spiritual implications. Sao Tiampa’s rural Southeast Asian ambiance evokes feelings of peace and happiness founded on what could be called a “wisdom of the instant”: life must be enjoyed in the present. This Asian carpe diem is grounded in a keen awareness of the precarity of terrestrial experience, indeed of the metaphysical bondage of samsara, the universal and illusory cycles of manifestation predicated on ignorance. The lack of substance of the earthly dream must be acknowledged: the moral fruits of this recognition include one’s abandonment to the rhythms and demands of nature, a smiling and debonair passivity, and a heightened sense of gratitude for the smallest gifts of life. In most cases, the distance separating religious practices from their original intent registers a process of passive decay. In Sao Tiampa, the protagonist Vébaud’s contacts with Buddhist monks are for the most part disappointing. These religious figures only reproduce and perpetuate their traditional heritage without really understanding it. In fact, the Buddha’s teachings are reduced to rudiments of morality and ritual practices devoid of mystical depth and intellectual penetration.13 Both Billotey’s and Groslier’s novels contrast sharply with this image of Buddhism. In Retour à l’argile, Groslier depicts an old monk whose harmonious and well-rounded humanity, coupled with his profound familiarity with Buddhist civilization and traditional scriptures, breaks from the colonial stereotypes of Buddhist passivity, ignorance, and laziness. Billotey’s Sao Kéo also presents Buddhist contemplatives in a positive light: they are the spokesmen of a wisdom that unveils the illusory character of desire. Learning from them, Lucien becomes aware of the fundamental source of suffering—the passionate thirst, tanha, that constantly projects its own objects upon the horizon of its fundamental insubstantiality.14 The point of existence is precisely to come out of this infernal and indefinite cycle of desire, a point the head of the local monastery points out to the young French protagonist.15 Ambiguity lies at the heart of this vision, however. While the old monk appears as the embodiment of the “motionless happiness” that characterizes traditional life, this happiness is hardly considered in its profoundly spiritual dimension, in its nirvanic substance. Rather, it is envisaged by way of some of its cultural and social consequences. As it is, the monk comes to represent Asian “happiness” independently of any Buddhist ascesis or renunciation and of any rigorous doctrinal landmark. Motionlessness thus appears as a virtue in and of itself, whereas its Buddhist significance can in fact hardly be separated from its content and its end—spiritual release from bondage. Similarly, the Buddhist experience of spiritual extinction is also presented in terms that equate it with passivity and laziness, whereas it constitutes in fact the summit of vigilance and inner activity (vipassanâ ).



CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

Patrick Laude

Ultimately, Groslier and Billotey envisage Buddhist contemplatives from within the perspective of their own respective ideological metaphors: the elementary nature of clay, on one hand, and the motionlessness of simple happiness, on the other. In doing so, they create literary representations of Buddhism that amputate the spiritual substance of its doctrine by assimilating it tangentially into values and attitudes that are not necessarily representative of its own vision, or which are at the very least presented with maximal ambiguity. In Baudenne and Starbach’s Sao Tiampa, to the contrary, the approach to Buddhism is more closely akin to a genuinely religious and spiritual perspective. Consistently, to my knowledge, this is the only French colonial narrative of the early twentieth century in which one finds a succinct but relevant summary of Buddhist doctrine.16 Moreover, the central character experiences a particular affinity with the contemplative ambiance of Buddhist monasteries. Their architecture, the profound resounding of bells, and the interiorizing effect of ritual psalmody magnetically attract the young Frenchman, who perceives in them “the shivering foliage of the Bô tree” (Baudenne 71). And yet, these forms are themselves the vehicles of a feeling of decrepitude and decay. As perceived by the character Vébaud, Buddhist decadence can be read in the archeological character of most of its present treasures.17 It survives itself in the form of ruins, like a cultural landscape that has become undecipherable. The least of paradoxes is actually not that this abandonment, this desertion, testifies in a certain sense to the Buddhist principle of universal impermanence.18 Beyond this aesthetic perception, Vébaud reads the traces of a degeneracy of Buddhism in the weaknesses of the doctrinal knowledge and spiritual intelligence of the monks with whom he interacts. The narrator refers to these monks as to the “priests of a religion they do not know” and compared to “painters who draw episodes devoid of meaning” (70). Far from providing the French male character with the supreme compensation that he was seeking, Buddhism and its contemplative values thus become identified with the atmosphere of mindless passivity that penetrates, in Vébaud’s eyes, all forms of cultural and human landscape of Southeast Asia. Clearly, then, the adventure of “transculturation” manifests itself on a variety of levels and in a wide spectrum of registers. Beyond their aspect of exotic alterity and their colonial exploitation as “scientific” objects, Vietnamese and Indochinese cultures function as catalysts of European self-representations. In the fragmented and multifaceted universe of narrative representation, Southeast Asia appears as a phantasmatic universe that reflects the tensions and contradictory aspirations of a European vision that has no principle of cohesiveness other than its will for expansive power and individualistic claims of happiness. Colonialism and primitivist idealism are two sides of one cultural unease. The aspirations and claims they highlight can only be expressed in and through a multiform experience that embraces all instances of “motionless happiness” and “return to clay.” Indeed, European cultural identity seems to be predicated on this unending series of experiences that paradoxically affirm and subvert its very being. Thus can the cultural encounter with Asia be primarily interpreted as an encounter of the colonial subject with his own moving shadow.



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Notes 1. Let us note that French female characters are never portrayed—to my knowledge—as experiencing a similar “acculturation.” They actually tend to embody a “resistance” to this process. See for example Jeanne Leuba’s novel L’aile de feu (Paris: Plon, 1920). 2. Among the “colonial” writers who shaped the literary milieu of the Union Indochinoise, Albert de Pouvourville is one of the most original and complex. His literary output falls into four main categories. His political corpus formulates strategic analyses and recommendations concerning French policies in Southeast Asia. His metaphysical and mystagogic work includes both French translations of traditional texts and studies of initiatic organizations. He also wrote essays pertaining to “scientific Orientalism” and composed of a series of narrative and poetic texts that constitute the literary “crystallization” of his experience in Asia. Among the latter, L’Annam sanglant (Paris: Michaud, 1898), Le cinquième Bonheur (Paris: Michaud, 1911) and L’heure silencieuse (Paris: Editions du Nouveau Monde, 1923). 3. “if Dong is not ambitious, he is curious; he thinks that it may be useful to know what the French are doing at home” (Pouvourville 74), and “ . . . Hoavan stealthily and swiftly sneaks into the white house in which she found not happiness but the satisfaction of all her curiosities” (75). Unless otherwise noted, all translations within text and endnotes are my own. Page numbers refer to the original French texts. 4. Thi Sao considers herself superior to Lao women and would make fun of their “uncivilized” ways. Jeanpierre is more respectful of their customs and manner of being: “She had the sensation of meeting people from another era; she used a single word to refer to them: savages. She would have liked to make fun of them, but Jeanpierre quieted her down” (Casseville 189). 5. “Laos, I know well, very pretty. You see there very wild women. . . . Their noisy exteriorizations had shocked the Annamite who is respectful of propriety and submitted to a thousand rules of politeness. These women, who were going bare breast, were inferior beings in her eyes” (Casseville 100). 6. “We could not know these women because we introduced them into our modernized houses, separated them from their own ambience and treated them as we were used to treat at home a woman who does not displease us. . . . Now a question is raised: what about meeting these women in their milieu, in their context, among their hereditary occupations and treating them as they are used to being treated, what would prevent us from approaching them closer?” (Groslier 64-65). 7. “She does not exist by herself: she is Claude’s double. . . . The spontaneity, vigilance and dexterity that she displays in this capacity prove that her mother and all her ancestors, and all the ancestors of all the Asian women who are breathing at this very hour, served in the same way—from century to century—their spouses and their lovers, may they be princes or vassals” (Groslier 73). 8. “As for me, I want to be sheltered from love” (Groslier 181). 9. Baly addresses his fellow French officers in the following terms: “Chinese knowledge is one; its precepts all flow from a same source; and who can tell that, by intelligently applying one of those, you will not pacify your region. . . . You have to raise your soul to the level of an understanding of your enemies, who are in the last analysis less against you than they are other than you” (Pouvourville, Le maître des sentences, 96). 10. “The danger had vanished: farewell to the saint. . . . Baly was a sage” (Pouvourville, Le cinquième bonheur, 192-193). 11. “Our rites demand that we welcome the visitor without asking who he is, where he comes from or where he is going. My young brother may therefore rest and comfortably smoke before leaving or, if he is tired, sleep here for the night and leave tomorrow. I am not curious to know what is of no interest to me; my only concern is to act in conformity with traditions” (Pouvourville, Le cinquième bonheur, 212). 12. This daily expression could be satisfactorily rendered by the American popular expression “take it easy!” 13. “The Master’s serene philosophy was drowned in the opacity of these brains. A spark of vivifying morality still shone through the accumulation of meaningless practices and ineffective rites. They remained deaf to the words of the Enlightened one, to his divine teachings that the young man strived to outline” (Baudenne 69).

Patrick Laude

14. “I pity all these men and women who are tormented by desires that nothing can satisfy, since their very realization can only be disappointing. For I know, henceforth, that happiness is not in agitation nor in motion” (Billotey 191). 15. “—Why are you so agitated? Even if you were to find what you are looking for, would you be more advanced? It is so easy to live happily!” (Billotey 176). 16. “There, Çakya Mouni, his forehead marked with a heavenly seal, saw the deceiving illusions that compose the weft of existences appear and then dissipate, there was revealed to him the symbol of gigantic hecatombs veiled in the splendors of Flora. While he perceived, in the shade of the Bô tree, attachment and desire as the source of worldly miseries, an infinite compassion seized him and he opened up to staggering mankind the quietude of Nirvana” (Baudenne 95). 17. “Time revealed its work everywhere. Sanctuaries were half-open, disjointed, had fallen under the invasion of plants, were lost under the entanglement of liana and roots, easy and perpetual preys for showers and storms” (Baudenne 72). 18. “The impassible god covered with rushes smiled imperturbably before the lamentable decay of his cult, perhaps satisfied to see that so many ruins were affirming the inanity of our human agitation” (Baudenne 72).



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I slept for seven days at a hotel with T When I woke up I was a different person I wanted to make money and I wanted to be a male bird I wanted T to dive deep into my gullet but she only swam back and forth like a fish inside my mouth vault full of saliva When I lay on T’s body I thought I was paddling a boat on sand ELA NAVE VA the sun was burning and our feet were buried among worn out symbols Ah, the sun is only a red stub dying Next to this woman I knew about hidden destruction Like a person drinking endless cheap liquor or an exhausted ropewalker who cannot sit down normally I just cut the rope There are too many things I cannot explain the world is too small and conflicts are too great I live alone near Hollywood a nameless person among the faceless I fight time and boredom with bouts of lovemaking After seven days I walked out of the hotel with T a bird in the sky suddenly grew tired



After Seven Days at a Hotel With T

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and dropped on my head like a rotten fruit T said: it’s nothing, only a case of mistaken identity we need to go eat The End.





Ho Chi Minh City, July 2000. Photographer: Jerry Gorman


Hjorleifur Jonsson

For the highlanders, man and society are embedded in nature and dependent upon cosmic forces. In the highlanders’ green milieu of forested mountains, sweeping, undulating plateaus, and valleys through which brown rivers flow, each ethnic group over time worked out its adaptation to nature and shaped its society so that its members could survive, reproduce, and readapt to whatever changes man, nature, and the cosmic forces might impinge on it. This evolutionary process resulted in some socialstructural differences, but at the same time, adaptation to the mountain country created among them physical and ideational bonds that have given rise to a common culture, a highlander world. —Gerald C. Hickey, Shattered World Virtual Debate For roughly three weeks during late October and early November 1999, a number of scholars with an interest in Vietnam took a stand for or against the term “Montagnard,” in reference to the indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands. This debate took place in the virtual space of an Internet discussion site, the Vietnam Studies Group. The debate is interesting for a number of reasons, among them the term itself, and the fact that the issue was not of interest to Vietnamese ethnologists. Montagnard is a foreigners’ term, and the debate was foreign in more ways than one. The issues of the virtual debate are pertinent for an examination of how particular realities are projected onto Vietnam as an object of discourse, realities that may not have any resonance within the country. The issue was raised with a query about possible readings on Montagnards for an American college class on ethnic conflict. This query set in motion an academic conflict about identities and ethnic labeling. The first reply was from a scholar who sent in a thirty-five-item bibliography on the subject, but asked



French Natural in The Vietnamese Highlands: Nostalgia and Erasure in Montagnard Identity*

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that the term itself, “with all of its accumulated racist, colonialist, and pejorative associations,” be dropped. In response to that, one of the early participants in this debate wrote in to say: “I can see nothing wrong with the word. It simply means people who live in the mountains. I am unaware of any racist or pejorative associations.” The debate had taken off, and during the following weeks various people sent in their comments over e-mail. Some argued that the term was appropriate and that the complaints were merely posturings of the politically correct. Others maintained that the term was tied to particular imaginings of the French colonial administration, and that the use of the term tended to naturalize the colonial mentality and its social categories. It does not seem that there was any resolution to this debate; people sent in their opinions on the matter and within three weeks the issue had died down. In the virtual space of the Internet, Vietnam served as a site for statements about categories of identity in part because of all the accumulated associations of “Vietnam.” Colonial history and fantasy, the American War,1 and the position of Vietnam as a postcolonial socialist state are all involved in the imagery associated with the country and with the hinterland ethnic minority populations that some insist are properly to be called Montagnard. There are various commonalities among highland populations regarding agricultural adaptation, social life, and worldview, particularly when viewed in contrast to the agricultural, social, and cultural patterns associated with lowland peoples. The commonalities among the indigenous populations of the Central Highlands of Vietnam that the term “Montagnard” supposedly draws on do not set these peoples apart from the hinterland populations of the adjacent regions of Cambodia and Laos. But in contrast to the imagery attached to the highland peoples of Vietnam, there is no indication that outsiders prefer the French term “Montagnard” for highlanders in the neighboring countries that also belonged to Indochina. A recent report on Cambodia by Minority Rights Group International2 uses the term Khmer Loeu (“upper” Khmer) to refer to highland minorities, while only a few years earlier I never once heard this term. When I did research in Ratanakiri Province in 1992, the minority populations were collectively referred to as Chonchiat (nationalities, ethnic groups). During the early part of the twentieth century, it appears that the generic Cambodian term was Phnong (savages).3 In Laos, where previously the term Kha (savages, slaves) was the general reference to highland peoples, a three-part distinction among ethnic groups by altitude has become commonplace. The reality of this categorization is promoted for instance on a banknote with female representatives of each of these kinds of people, a Lao woman representing Lao Lum (“low” Lao), a Kammu woman Lao Theung (“mid” Lao), and a Hmong woman Lao Sung (“high” Lao).4 One obvious characteristic of these new designations for minority populations in Laos and Cambodia is that their reference is the modern nation-state. There are various parallels elsewhere to this process of nationalizing difference, such as in the Turkish designation of Kurds as “Mountain Turks” during the 1930s.5 In Thailand since the 1980s, there has been an effort to move away from



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Chaokhao (mountain people, which has derogatory connotations of savagery and insurgency) and toward Chao Thai Phukhao (Mountain Thai, Thai mountain people), Chon klum noi (minorities), and Chon phao (ethnic peoples, tribes). The contemporary Vietnamese designation for highland ethnic minorities is most commonly dan toc (nationalities, ethnic group[s]) and dan toc thieu so or dan toc it nguoi (small/minority ethnic groups). While the term does not explicitly define ethnic minority populations as Vietnamese of a particular kind, analogous to the recent terminology in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, both the national majority and national space are implicit in this local Vietnamese term. Montagnard, which “simply means people who live in the mountains,” appears to refer exclusively to the indigenous populations of the Central Highlands of Vietnam. It does not seem to be applied to the ethnic minority peoples of the north, such as Yao (Dao), Hmong, Tai, and Nung. The French term “Montagnard” was used interchangeably with the Chinese term Man (barbarians [of the south]) and the French terms for “ethnic groups” and “savage tribes” in publications on highlanders of the north (then Tonkin) around the turn of the twentieth century,6 whereas the Vietnamese term Moi (savages) was common in references to peoples of the Central Highlands.7 The reason Montagnard is associated with the Central Highlands is then not some difference in language use, ethnography, or topography that restricted the use of the term to that region. Rather than being a matter of local history or ethnography, the routinization8 of this reference to the peoples of the Central Highlands is primarily the result of a particular historical moment within a global ethnoscape. The moment in question is the American War in Vietnam, within which Montagnard or more commonly Yard(s) was one of the kinds of people that the American forces encountered and dealt with. By the time the American forces fighting the feared global spread of communism replaced the French colonial effort to hold on to Indochina, the highland peoples of the north had fallen outside the colonial cause and its classification of peoples by joining the nationalist and anticolonial army.9 This is why there are no Montagnards in the north. Among the other kinds of people that the American forces registered, and that thus became real globally through the mediascape to which the war belonged, was “VC” (Viet Cong), although to my knowledge this term has not been treated like an ethnic reference after the war. As with the highlanders in the north, VC identity was political, which suggests that anti-communism may have contributed to the implied naturalness of Montagnard identity. The term Montagnard, then, carries various associations to the American War in Vietnam without making the slightest reference to the war, to the American forces, or even at all to Vietnam. The power of the term lies then less in its overt reference than in the particular disappearances that it brings about. It seems to me that the assumed naturalism of the French term, that “it simply means people of the mountains,” is what makes this term so appealing to some parties in the debate that surfaced briefly over e-mail. The attraction of this “French natural” is that it serves to erase complicated entanglements of place, identity, politics, and history. Montagnard conjures up a population natu-



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rally associated with a particular landscape, socially and culturally separate from the Vietnam that has been tainted by warfare and politics. In contrast to the troubling image of post-Indochine Vietnam, Montagnard indexes the apolitical connotations of nature and traditional culture. The resonance of this reference to a population in a natural condition is then most likely a lingering nostalgia about an Elsewhere, a refuge from the complications of identity and politics in the modern world in general and those associated with Vietnam in particular. This interpretation suggests a peculiar reality, as Montagnard exclusively implies an aspect of Vietnam between roughly 1965 and 1975, and the timelessness of the concept itself is quite significant. The term erases the contingency of the definitions of “kinds of people” that are specific to the war. I suggest that this simultaneous process of erasure and naturalization through the term “Montagnard” is not only about the peoples of the Central Highlands, but equally about the war and Vietnam. One of the contributions to the debate conducted over e-mail, sent in as a defense of the continued use of the term “Montagnard,” is suggestive of such processes of erasure of both the war and Vietnam. Through a discourse that concerns kinship imagery, bravery, and human caring and camaraderie, the statement carefully avoids mentioning the implied common enemy, the contemporary authorities of Vietnam: I would venture to suggest, based on my own experiences, that Montagnard is used in an affectionate and praiseworthy manner by the vast majority of us who lived with and fought with these brave people we consider our brothers and sisters, the gentle and caring people many of us call “Yards” for short. (www.lib.washington.edu/southeastasia/vsg/mont1. html) Montagnard or Yard, then, indexes one of two parties in a story of human bonding and care during a period of unspecified hardship. The other side in the debate about the term was approaching ethnic labels from a perspective that was comparative, analytical, and concerned with the political and historical dimensions to particular designations of identity. The premises of the two sides were too far apart to allow for any productive argumentation, and it seems that the participants left the debate with largely the same ideas as they had brought to it in the beginning. Sites of Nostalgia and Social Engineering The notion of global ethnoscapes that I brought up in the previous section comes from the writings of Arjun Appadurai. He proposes this term to address the modern situation of population migrations and a global flow of imagery that have fundamentally upset the assumed isomorphism of place, identity, and people.10 The label “Montagnard” is an ideal example of such dynamics of deterritorialized identities, since it was originally a projection of the French colonial enterprise, and then was routinized in the context of the American War in Viet-



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The term “Montagnard” is pronounced “mountain-yard” as one word and is French for “mountain dweller” or “mountain people.” The term “Dega” is how Montagnards in Vietnam refer to themselves. In their folklore, De and Ga were the first Montagnards in Indochina, Adam and Eve to us. (www.montagnards.org) The identities of Dega and montagnards.org are sustained by people who for all practical purposes are Montagnards. They perceive themselves as Montagnards and are known as such, and/or as Yards. The context of their identity is the American War, and it is reproduced in exile from Vietnam, particularly in North Carolina, where they are affiliated with missionaries and members of the American Special Forces that were stationed in the Central Highlands. This identity-in-exile is reproduced through the new technologies of the Internet. The rooting of Montagnard identity is within a translocal space that refers to Vietnam, but equally draws on the French colonial construct of Indochina, leaving unmentioned the American space from which the projections come. This creative spatial combination is complemented by a multiple temporality. The introductory statement on the homepage from which I quoted flows among mythical time, French colonial time, the unmentioned narrow time-span of the American War, and the modern and somewhat timeless framework of Internet communications technologies. I do not want to trivialize Montagnard identity by saying that it only exists in cyberspace. It is a real identity to the extent that people use it, both Montagnards themselves and others interacting with them as such. But I do want to qualify Montagnard by stating, in light of the above, that this identity has primarily virtual links to Vietnam. This does not make Montagnard or Dega identities unreal; it simply locates them as global identities among various other transnational constructions of Vietnam. The local and the global are intertwined in multiple ways, and the histories involved in the production of localities and local identities are informed by global dynamics that they again contribute to. Wendy Mee’s analysis of the imagery of Internet discussions among Malaysians, partly in a global context, provides a useful qualification for the tendency to overestimate the reality of Internet-based understandings of the world: While information technology can be used to extend a sense of presence across a global arena, it is doubtful whether Internet affiliations can by themselves undermine that sense of place—or nation—that develops through interactions with national institutions and systems of government, education, language and culture. A formative influence here is the sense of difference which is a legacy of the historical experiences of colonialism



nam. The term “Montagnard,” as an identity, has no contemporary resonance within Vietnam, but it has a reality on the Internet. On the World Wide Web, montagnards.org have a home, and Montagnard identity is projected from there, with a reference to the Central Highlands of Vietnam, through a biblical analogy and set within a French colonial context:

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Montagnard identity was the last in a series of identities that French colonials projected upon the indigenous minorities of the Central Highlands of Vietnam. In his work, Oscar Salemink12 has traced the intended political manipulations of the various French projections of identity on the local populations in this region and the way in which the final one, Montagnard, was subsequently adopted by the American Special Forces. Initially, the French did not imagine the populations of the Central Highlands as an administrative collectivity, and both missionaries and adventurers made connections with individual leaders through whom they attempted to reach and/or control larger populations. Some of the early attempts at colonial control involved the projection of ethnic identities through the codification of customary laws and the establishment of ceremonies in which leaders of highland populations swore allegiance to the French. In much the same way, Dutch colonial authorities established themselves in hinterland communities within the colony that became Indonesia, as did the British in Burma.13 The practice of governing through particular notions of identity, even if the identities in question may not have any local precursor, contributes to the reality of such identities once people’s actions reproduce these notions as social projects. As Davydd Greenwood has argued for the case of Spain, identities that assume an ethnic or a national reference are not intrinsically more or less real than others that draw on administrative entities like provinces or regions.14 For Vietnam, examples of the former include Sedang or Jarai, and of the latter such French terms as “Pemsien” and “Montagnard.” The two latter terms are both French constructions for the populations of the Central Highlands. While the e-mail debate shows that Montagnard is assumed to somehow naturally refer to the Central Highlanders, no such claims have been made for Pemsien in recent times. Pemsien is an administrative creation, from the colonial administrative entity PMSI, Pays Montagnards du Sud-Indochinois.15 Just as the colonial project brought out such novel collective identities, it also contributed to a general ethnicization of social life among the people who became minorities. This process is common to many colonial situations, as well as to other settings where categories of regional/ethnic identity are central to the allocation of rights and duties.16 The issue then is not whether some identities are natural and others the creations of particular political interests. Rather, the important issues concern the styles in which such identities are imagined17 and the social ramifications of these constructs, which can change in various ways over time and invite many conflicting politics.18 An identity maintained in exile, such as contemporary Montagnard identity, is one of many possible variations on the alignments of place, people, and identity, and this exile status is one of many transformations in the identities attached to the populations indigenous to the Central Highlands of Vietnam. During the e-mail debate among the Vietnam Studies Group, I suggested that the supposedly neutral term “Montagnard” had rather persistent derogatory



and reaffirmed by a global political economy which insert a hierarchy of difference in our post-colonial world.11

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There can be no doubt that the lowland, urban civilization penetrated to the highland world very imperfectly and at a very slow rate. This was as true of other things as it was of Christianity. The feudal system as a political, economic, and social system, and as an instrument of justice failed to catch in its toils most of the mountain regions and those it did reach it only partially influenced. The resistance of the Corsican and Sardinian mountains to lowland influence has often been noted and further evidence could be found in Lunigiana. . . . This observation could be confirmed anywhere where the population is so inadequate, thinly distributed, and widely dispersed as to prevent the establishment of the state, dominant languages, and important civilizations.19 Describing the way mountain people were perceived by their lowland neighbors, Braudel provides further examples of perceptions that have many parallels in Southeast Asia. He summarizes his account in the following way: The picture . . . quickly turns to caricature. The mountain dweller is apt to be the laughing stock of the superior inhabitants of the towns and plains. He is suspected, feared, and mocked. In the Ardeche, as late as 1850, the people from the montagne would come down to the plain for special occasions. They would arrive riding on harnessed mules, wearing grand ceremonial costumes, the women bedecked with dangling gold chains. The costumes themselves differed from those of the plain, although both were regional, and their archaic stiffness provoked the mirth of the village coquettes. The lowland peasant had nothing but sarcasm for the rude fellow from the highlands, and marriages between their families were rare.20 Studies of European ambivalence about the countryside and its peoples provide a firm reference to counter assumptions about one-dimensional understandings of place-identities.21 It is not my intention to suggest that the category of “mountain people” has a single reference, but it seems to me that the European connotations of the term were not fundamentally transformed when this appellation was projected upon the “uncivilized” hinterland populations living in the backwoods of French Indochina. At the time when Montagnard came into general use for Central Highlanders, between the 1930s and the 1950s,22 the highland peoples of Europe had been transformed from rustics to nationals. After that transformation, they came to be seen as the last outpost of traditional national culture, increasingly manifest in museums.



connotations equivalent to “hick” in its European context, a notion that several participants found questionable. In his monumental work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, historian Fernand Braudel provides a description that with little modification could be applied to the long run of history in Southeast Asia:

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Because of the different politics of nation-building in Europe and colonial management in Indochina, the outcomes would have differed even if Montagnard had more or less the same reference in the two settings. Various notions of racial character informed efforts at administration, labor control, and other aspects of colonial rule.23 In the context of the Central Highlands, there were repeated debates concerning dimensions of control and extraction in the region. One side in this debate argued that “economic colonization of the Highlands would be in the best interest of the Montagnards, who would simply ‘vanish’ as a race if they did not give up their ‘backward and harmful’ agricultural practice of shifting cultivation, and start working on the rubber plantations.”24 This view is not specific to Indochina or French colonialism, it has many parallels in approaches to “Indian” populations in the United States, and is informed by then current notions of races and evolution.25 The other side in the earlytwentieth-century French debates on policy and practice in the Central Highlands favored contacts between the French and the Montagnards to the exclusion of the ethnic Vietnamese. To strengthen the hold of the French on Indochina, the strategic Central Highlands were to be made into a “friendly” military base in hostile surroundings, in case there was a Vietnamese insurrection in the plains, or an attack from abroad. In the process, France would fulfill its civilizing mission by protecting the autochtonous populations, respecting their cultures and encouraging their gradual development.26 In the Central Highlands as in Dutch Bali, the colonial interest in protecting local peoples and their cultures followed violent episodes of suppressing local autonomy and local rebellions against colonial rule.27 This protectionist view formed a part of colonial discourses on how most efficiently to manage the colonized populations. In the contemporary postcolonial setting it may seem that “Montagnard” is a transparent term that “simply means people who live in the mountains.” In the colonial context of its French use, it was as politicized and as tied to strategies of rule as other administrative terms, such as the tripartite division of Annam, Cochinchine, and Tonkin. As Christopher Goscha has shown, Annam once had significant political resonance, that was only later replaced by the notion of “Vietnam.”28 This issue of shifting spatial and political configurations in French Indochina is erased with the notion of Montagnards as somehow naturally of Vietnamese space. My examination of the reality of the term Montagnard offers neither an affirmation nor a dismissal of the concept as an identity. It is as valid as any other notion of who people are once it gets rooted in social life through practices of livelihood, culture, administration, and/or the allocation of rights and duties within larger political frameworks of intergroup relations. Ethnic identities are relational; the issue is not of Montagnard identity in and of itself but of how this identity is or is not real within a larger system of identities, roles, and relationships.



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The possibility remains that Montagnard identity, like Pemsien, is simply a colonialera construction that obfuscates the more fundamental reality of the “highlander world” that Hickey portrays,29 and which I quoted at the beginning of this article. He describes this highlander world as a product of centuries of adaptations to a particular environment, and in many ways independent of the comings and goings of lowland kingdoms. There are various continuities within the Southeast Asian region regarding the identities of hinterland populations. They are in general lowlanders’ appellations for people who stand outside the state, and the terms have various associations with “savagery.” The Lao and Thai term Kha (slave) is one such example, and the Vietnamese term Moi (savage) is another. The term Batak from Sumatra is of this sort, as is Dayak from Borneo, Toraja from Sulawesi, and Igorot from the Philippines. Some of these terms are now standard ethnic labels, and as such they attest to processes of routinization whereby the perspective of the lowland state becomes the implied reference concerning the identities of peoples outside the realms of state rule. In general, these lowlander terms for hinterland (backwoods, upstream, mountain, and/or forest) populations carry connotations of servitude and/or savagery, and they implicitly define lowland peoples as the unmarked reference point for both normalcy and civilization. Some of the lowland terminology for hinterland peoples suggests that “global ethnoscapes” are not a specifically modern phenomenon, and that the notion is equally applicable to the precolonial period. A Cham inscription dated to 1170 CE records the victories of a twelfth-century king, noting that he had defeated “the Khmer, Vietnamese, Randaiy, Mada, and other Mlecchas.”30 In the context of the e-mail debate about Montagnard, this is an interesting passage, since it shows the Cham appropriation of a Sanskrit term for “savages,” Mleccha, being applied to the hinterland populations of what are now the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The historian O. W. Wolters describes how the use of this term fit a “Hindu world” within which rulers in the Southeast Asian region viewed themselves and their environs. It was from the imagery of this Hindu world that they drew terms to describe the peoples unfit for their domains, the “wild savages who lived in the forests.”31 Cham inscriptions also use the Sanskrit term Kiratas (mountain people) in reference to hinterland populations.32 The reference of the two Sanskrit terms, “mountain people” and “savages,” is similar to the more local terms for highland peoples elsewhere in the region, and these similarities draw on rather uniform projects of state-making and the categorization of peoples and identities that these projects entailed. The making of states in Southeast Asia was both a political economic project of structuring production, trade, and expropriation, and a cultural project, involving conceptual workings concerning the logics of power and inequality and a categorization of kinds of people. Both aspects of this process can be thought of as matters of projecting and grounding particular structures in social life. To the extent that these projects were successful, everyday life then reproduced the structures that emanated from the state. These state-projects relate to



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the reproduction of highlander worlds in a fundamental way, in that shifting cultivation in the forested hinterlands was beyond state control. The focus of the state was to exploit areas fit for intensive cultivation, which in this region was primarily irrigated rice farming. While the various states in this region maintained policies of expanding the areas suited to wet-rice farming, they did not extend the reach of their taxation or labor recruitment to settlements of shifting cultivators (swidden, or “slash and burn” farmers). This ecological limit to the reach of the state is manifest equally in mainland and island Southeast Asia, and in southern China.33 Given this ecological limit to the state’s project, it is possible to view upland populations as simply beyond the state’s reach,34 and thus outposts of traditional ways of life that predate the state.35 Contrary to these views, I want to suggest that uplander identities and ecological adaptations are entangled with processes of state-making, and that they are most profitably viewed in the context of the kinds of structurings of peoples and places that involve this large region over long runs of history. That is, in approaching questions of Montagnard identity, it may be useful to look beyond the historically specific and politically particular boundaries and histories of Vietnam, and toward more regional understandings. The distinction between “tribal” and “peasant” populations is a standard reference in the ethnography of Southeast Asia. Rather than taking this distinction as indicating separate and independent adaptations to the environment, I propose viewing them as aspects of the structuration of the region as a whole. My notion of structure is derived from Braudel.36 In his discussion of long and short runs of history, Braudel defines structure as an organization, a coherent and fairly fixed series of relationships between realities and social masses. . . . Some structures, because of their long life, become stable elements for an infinite number of generations: they get in the way of history, hinder its flow, and in hindering it shape it. . . . Spatial models are the charts upon which social reality is projected . . . they are truly models for all the different movements of time . . . and for all the categories of social life.37 I suggest that the upland-lowland divide is one of the structures of the long run of regional history in Southeast Asia. As states were formed and their rulers proceeded to promote the expansion of wet-rice cultivation, they made wet-rice cultivators subjects of the state and by default dry-rice cultivators became nonsubjects and stood outside the state. As the practices of states were routinized, their rulers promoted spatial understandings that defined the court as the center of the civilized world, and they assigned identities to individuals and groups in terms of their relationship to the court and its religious establishments. Drawing on Confucian and Hindu worlds, rulers placed themselves, their subjects, and their non-subjects within a global ethnoscape of that time. The reproduction of these state structures of places, peoples, and identities resulted in a bifurcation of the natural environment into the civilized, cleared lowlands, and the savage,



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forested hinterlands. Categorizations of kinds of people were then projected onto this regional space in terms of how people related to the courts.38 As people engaged with the state, or averted all dealings with its agents, their identities became informed by their particular place within an ecologically and socially bifurcated region. The adaptation of highland populations was then not to the natural environment as such, but to an environment that had been prefigured by the politics of identities and social relations in terms of cultural and political economic dimensions of the state. As with the projection of identities over the Internet, identities produced within this precolonial framework became real as people acted on them and as they became grounded in the practices and politics of everyday life. There are various cases of highlanders maintaining a position of non-subject clients of the state, such as through payments of tribute. The position of the “King of Fire” in the Central Highlands is of this sort,39 and there are many analogous cases of contracts involving titles to particular highland leaders in return for services from elsewhere in the region. Such deals were sometimes made in the context of threats of raids on upland settlements for provisions and/or people. But such deals were sometimes struck for mutual benefit of trade, and a part of the motivation to enter such contracts may have been the enhanced status of upland leaders who anchored their otherwise tenuous power in dealings with the state. Yao populations in southern China are Yao because of a particular framework of interactions with the state. This framework defines them as beyond the state, and free to farm and migrate in the forested hinterlands as long as they do not interfere with matters in the lowlands. As in contracts made between the northern Thai court of Chiangmai and populations of Lua’ (Lawa), such engagements offer benefits to highland leaders and ground particular social identities in the everyday life of these hinterland populations. Both Yao and Lua’ identities, which were reproduced through dealings with courts that offered partial autonomy to these non-subject clients, are now ethnic identities within nationstates.40 The precolonial notion of hinterland peoples, both through ethnic labels and a generic category of “savages,” was part of the state’s civilizational discourse. Uplanders could become lowlanders by relocating and changing their agricultural and religious practices.41 At the same time, rulers sometimes feared that their subjects might abandon them and “disappear” into the forest, changing their identity from subjects to forest people. In this way, nature provided a proxy for complex and shifting kinds of social relations and identities. The shape of state control and spatial practices changed during the colonial period, and the incorporation of Moi-cum-Montagnards is one aspect of this larger process. In precolonial times, state control in Southeast Asia was largely confined to the cleared lowlands. The political incorporation of forests and the people living there is a legacy of the colonial period. “Forest people” have been transformed from savage outsiders to variously incorporated minority populations,42 and the roots of Montagnard identity lie in this transformation rather than in the mountains that the term ostensibly refers to. I have argued that the term “Montagnard” affected the disappearance of both Vietnam and the American War. My discussion of this identity is not intended



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to place the nation-state or the war center stage. Rather, I have sought to draw attention to translocal frameworks of identity and the long run of regional history in order to highlight the circumstantial character of individual identities. In light of the above discussion, the suggestion that Montagnard “simply means people who live in the mountains” can be placed among other “phantasmatic” constructions of Indochina.43 It suggests a virtual reality of transparent concepts uncorrupted by the shifting terrain of history that has local, national, and transnational dimensions, through narratives of camaraderie that obliterate the immediacy of Vietnam, minority status, warfare, and exile. That may be the whole point. Ethnologists and other Vietnamese, who lived through the American War and its consequences, have participated in the restructuring of the country as a unified nation-state for a quarter of a century. To them, this supposedly neutral reference to a category of Vietnam’s peoples that assumes the disappearance of the country was a non-issue, as was the debate on the term. The e-mail debate did not change anyone’s mind on the issue of Montagnards, it simply spelled out the extent to which scholars, refugees, and others in the “West” are caught up in identity politics of a particular kind. Notes * My work draws on research among hinterland ethnic minority peoples in Thailand (1990, 199294), Cambodia (1992), and Vietnam (1996). In Vietnam, I worked for ANZDEC, Ltd., and in Cambodia for Health Unlimited. My work in Thailand was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Nordic Institute for Asian Studies, the Walter F. Vella Scholarship Fund, and the Graduate School of Cornell University. I thank Nora Taylor for her encouragement, and O. W. Wolters, David Marr, Richard A. O’Connor, Nicola Tannenbaum, Sander van der Leeuw, Anne Brydon, Jean Michaud, and the editors for various helpful comments on the case. Responsibility for the final version rests with me alone. I draw on remarks sent in to the Vietnam Studies Group e-mail discussion site. In quoting from these discussions, I leave individual commentators anonymous as my concern is with perspectives on the issue of Montagnard identity and not with who sent them in. I hope the participants in this debate accept my way of dealing with the matter of authorship. 1. The “American War” is the Vietnamese reference to what Americans know as the “Vietnam War.” The reason for using the Vietnamese term is that the war in Vietnam started earlier, against the French. The American War was the most important context for the widespread currency (and thus, the assumed naturalness) of the term “Montagnard.” 2. Minority Rights Group International, Minorities in Cambodia. 3. See, for instance, Smith, The Blood Hunters (chapter 2). According to a 1992 survey by the Department of Ethnic Minorities in Cambodia, Phnong is now a recognized ethnic group, as is Stieng, a term that formerly was a similar gloss for hinterland peoples. For the ethnic statistics of this survey, see Kampe, “Introduction: Indigenous Peoples of Southeast Asia.” 4. For a discussion of this categorization and a photograph of the banknote, see Trankell, “The Minor Part of the Nation: Politics of Ethnicity in Laos.” 5. See Kirisci, “Minority/Majority Discourse.” 6. See, for example, Bonifacy, “Contes Populaires des Mans du Tonkin;” Bonifacy,“Les groupes ethniques du bassin de la Rivière Claire;” Diguet, Les Montagnards du Tonkin; and Girard, “Les tribus sauvages du Haut Tonkin. Mans et Meos. Notes anthropométrique et ethnographiques.” It is perhaps an overstatement on my part that the terms were interchangeable, but this range in terminology contrasts sharply with the uniform use of Moi in reference to the peoples of the Central Highlands (see note 8). In recent works, Michaud has used “Montagnard” in reference to the upland populations of north Vietnam. Citing Diguet’s Les Montagnards du Tonkin, he



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7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

maintains that those who restrict the term to the Central Highlands are “oblivious of the more ancient and general use the French have made of the word since at least the 1890s” (McKinnon and Michaud “Montagnard Domain in the South-East Asian Massif,” 6). Henri Maître’s Les Jungles Moi is the best-known reference. The following statement from a French colonial official is instructive: “The half-civilized races who inhabit the mountains and uplands of Indo-China are known by different names by their neighbors. The Birmans call them ‘Karens’, the Laotians ‘Kha’, the Cambodians ‘Stieng’ or Pnong’, the Annamites, ‘Man’ or ‘Moi’. ‘Moi’, which can be translated by ‘savage’, is perhaps the most convenient label for the whole complex of these primitive folk” (Baudesson, Indo-China and Its Primitive Peoples, 3). I use the terms “routinize” (v) and “routinization” (n) in relation to identities such as Montagnard as socially constructed and historically particular. Vietnamese, French, and American ideas about the identity of the peoples of the Central Highlands have influenced how the latter fit within a larger social landscape (as Moi, Montagnard, Yard, etc.). Attributions of identity within situations of inequality provide in each case a particular set of options and constraints regarding who people are. These attributions are specific to the expectations and political frameworks of particular hegemonic positions. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to changes in the externally attributed identity of the peoples of the Central Highlands. Certain terms gain currency at particular points in time, become routine references, as particular politics of defining identities and social relations become prominent. The routinization of a particular identity is simultaneously the establishment of a particular perspective on social reality as dominant. The more people (outsiders and insiders) act in terms of an identity, the less it is viewed as contingent. In this way, identities become “real” through routinization. For a discussion, see MacAlister, “Mountain Minorities and the Viet Minh.” While some uplanders of the north were affiliated with the French in the early 1950s, the term “Montagnard” did not become prominent for peoples of that area. The term became attached to the peoples of the Central Highlands, and this terminology is what the American forces later reproduced. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. See also Gupta and Ferguson, eds., Culture, Power, Place for a discussion of these issues. Mee, “National Difference and Global Citizenship,” 252. See Salemink, “Mois and Maquis;” Salemink, “Primitive Partisans;” and Salemink, “Ethnography as Martial Art.” See Hickey, Sons of the Mountains; Hickey, Kingdom in the Morning Mist; Salemink, “Mois and Maquis;” and Salemink, “Primitive Partisans.” For the case of Indonesia, see Kahn, Constituting the Minangkabau; and Schrauwers, “Returning to the ‘Origin.’” For Burma, see Smith, Burma (chapter 3). See Greenwood, “Castilians, Basques, and Andalusians.” The term “Pemsien” was the idea of an anthropologist, Jacques Dournes, who maintained that it “had no political connotations,” (Salemink, “Ethnography as Martial Art,” 307). Another French anthropologist, Georges Condominas, used the term “proto-Indochinese” (“protoIndochinoise”) in reference to the “very ancient stock” (“le stock humain culturellement plus archaïque”) of contemporary cultures in the hinterlands from Burma to Vietnam (Condominas, “The Mnong Gar of Central Vietnam,” 17). The “Indochina” of the term is from the reference to mainland Southeast Asia as “la péninsule indochinoise,” that conflates the colony with the larger territory. Condominas has recently reiterated that proto-Indochinese is a neutral term (“un terme neutre”) in contrast to the more common but very pejorative Moi, Kha, and Phnong (“Moi, Kha [ou Xa] et Phnong, termes extrêmement péjoratifs”) (Condominas, “Les peuples d’Indochine,” 16). It is worth noting that once upland leaders started attempting pan-uplander organization in the French colonial context, they too used acronyms and the language of racial categories to refer to themselves, though with important differences. One example is Bajaraka, from the ethnic terms Bahnar, Jarai, Rhade, and Koho, and the other is FULRO, that translates as the “United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races. See Hickey, Free in the Forest. The term “ethnicization” refers, in this context, to a shift from general labels for upland peoples (such as Moi, Man, Montagnard) to narrower ethnic labels (such as Jarai and Bahnar). To some extent, this shift was informed by the “census-mentality” prevalent during the colonial period (see Hirschman, “The Meaning and Measurement of Ethnicity in Malaysia”). For a discussion concerning West Africa that offers many parallels to the multi-stranded identity politics of twentieth-century Vietnam, see Lentz, “Colonial Constructions and African Initiatives.” See also



Hjorleifur Jonsson

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

IN THE


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Greenwood, “Castilians, Basques, and Andalusians,” for an insightful discussion of historical shifts in identity politics. Anderson, Imagined Communities, is a much-cited source for the argument that the shape of social life draws in important ways on specific imaginings of community, which were fundamentally altered with nationalism. See Warren, Indigenous Movements and their Critics. Among other things, Warren’s study serves as a valuable check on the top-down model in Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of King Philip II, 38. For accounts of Southeast Asia, see Burling, Hill Farms and Padi Fields; Keyes, The Golden Peninsula; and O.W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 46. See Caro-Baroja, “The city and the country.” For these dates, see Hickey, Sons of the Mountains, 3; and Salemink, “Ethnography as Martial Art.” The French designation for what is now the Central Highlands changed from “Pays Moi” to “Pays Montagnard du Sud-Indochinois” in 1948 (Salemink, Mois and Maquis, 264). See Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (chapter 4). Salemink, “Mois and Maquis,” 255. See Lewis, Neither Wolf Nor Dog (chapter 1). Salemink, “Mois and Maquis,” 256. For Bali, see Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise (chapter 2). See Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nationalism. See Hickey, “Some Aspects of Hill Tribe Life in Vietnam;” Hickey, Sons of the Mountains; and Hickey, Shattered World. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains, 2. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region, 110. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains, 83. See Dove, “The Agroecological Mythology of the Javanese and the Political Economy of Indonesia;” Jonsson, “Forest Products and Peoples;” and Jonsson, “Yao Minority Identity and the Location of Difference in the South China Borderlands.” For this view, see Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe (220). See Peter and Sally Kunstadter, “Population Movements and Environmental Changes in the Hills of Northern Thailand.” See Braudel, On History. Braudel, On History, 31 and 52. See Jonsson, “Cultural Priorities and Projects;” and Jonsson, “Yao Minority Identity.” The “King of Fire” is a title granted to a highland leader, and implies tributary relations with the courts of Vietnam and Cambodia. There were also “King of Water” and “King of Wind.” To the French colonials, these titles provided a support for the claim that the highland area was within the Vietnamese and Cambodian domains that they had taken over. The historical reality of the titles and the implied relations were more tenuous than what the French understood. See Dournes, Pötao; Hickey, Sons of the Mountains, 136-143; and Salemink, “The King of Fire and Vietnamese Ethnic Policy in the Central Highlands.” See Jonsson, “Yao Minority Identity.” See Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma. See Jonsson, “Cultural Priorities.” See Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina.



FRENCH NATURAL




Nguyen Dang Thuong

With a body sewn up just last night assembled with a pig’s heart a cow’s lungs nylon hair fake teeth & hands from a corpse of a white serial killer & facial skin grafted from a buttock & limbs of pink plastic bones & flesh & an all-seeing eye my brain is a computer chip I design programs of lasting happiness for the future I look back at my life O it is so new so gorgeous so perfect I’m grateful O danke schön herr doktor frankenstön Translated by Linh Dinh



Orthotics for Easter




Renny Christopher

And now, many years after the end of the war, many Americans are still discussing, pondering over the Vietnam War, with nearly 7,000 books published on this topic. This shows that the American people are a responsible nation, seriously trying to draw lessons from past experience in order to formulate a better path for the future. The war has brought the two nations closer, and the day will come, I hope, when the American people will agree that an end to the Vietnam War was indeed a victory for both nations. —Luu Doan Huynh [I]n Vietnam, . . . the term for “culture” itself, van hoa, may be translated literally into English as “the change which literature (and art) brings about.” —Greg Lockhart and Monique Lockhart

In the last few years, a publishing sea change has occurred. For the twenty-five years after the end of the war and the reunification of Viet Nam as the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam (SRV), thousands of books by Euro-American writers on the American War in Vietnam appeared. Now, Vietnamese and Vietnamese American writers are being published in unprecedented numbers. For the first time, Euro-American readers and the younger generations of Vietnamese Americans who do not read Vietnamese fluently, if at all, have access to a transnational perspective on the war.1 Works from contemporary Viet Nam are available to English-language readers thanks to anthologies including John Balaban and Nguyen Qui Duc’s Vietnam: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, Linh Dinh’s Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam, the fiction by Duong Thu Huong and Nguyen Huy Thiep, two controversial writers in Viet Nam (the SRV), and the ongoing series of publications of contemporary Vietnamese works in translation by the University of Massachusetts and Curbstone Presses.2 At the same time, Vietnamese American writers have gained recognition with



A Cross-Cultural Context for Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Writing

Renny Christopher

the publication of volumes such as Nguyen Qui Duc’s Where the Ashes Are, Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh’s South Wind Changing, De Tran, Andrew Lam, and Hai Dai Nguyen’s Once Upon a Dream:The Vietnamese American Experience, the 1997 issue of Viet Nam Forum, titled Not a War: American Vietnamese Fiction, Poetry and Essays, Barbara Tran, Monique Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi’s Watermark:Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, Yung Krall’s Thousand Tears Falling, Andrew Pham’s Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, and Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, the first Vietnamese American novel to come out from a mainstream publisher. These works are contributing to the growth of Vietnamese American literature as a subset of the larger field of Asian American literature.3 By adding their voices to the ongoing American discussion of the war in Viet Nam, of the contemporary world situation, and of the contemporary domestic situation called multiculturalism, these Vietnamese and Vietnamese American writers are helping to produce a multiply crosscultural discourse. This discourse will greatly enrich the often too narrow American discourse on these issues and influence future literary production by Euro-American and Vietnamese American writers.4 The Asian American literary tradition does not provide an automatic and easy fit for Vietnamese American writers. That literary tradition was produced largely by immigrant writers who came to the United States voluntarily (though sometimes driven by hardships in the home country), looking to make a permanent life in the new country. Most Vietnamese American writers, however, came to this country as refugees or the children of refugees. Until recently, most Asian American literature was produced by Chinese American and Japanese American writers (with notable exceptions even in the early generations, such as the Korean American Younghill Kang) and focused on the problems of assimilation. Refugees, however, are often not concerned with assimilation into the new country. They came to it not necessarily because of its own allure, but to escape often life-threatening circumstances, usually political or military, in the home country. Unlike immigrants, refugees perceive themselves as temporary residents in the new country waiting for the opportunity to return home. For all Vietnamese American writers, at least those of the current generations, the war and the particularity of the refugee experience loom large. Having come to the United States as refugees, the first generation of writers has been focused almost exclusively on the past, on Viet Nam, rather than on making new lives in America. The politics of their situation are complicated. The parents of this younger generation of writers were on the losing side: they were supporters of the Republic of Viet Nam (RVN), the U.S. ally. Yet, these writers must write into a U.S. context in which the mainstream has never really accepted the fact that the U.S.-RVN alliance lost the war.5 As literary critic Lisa Lowe notes of the historical experiences of Asian Americans, for them, experiencing “political emancipation” in the United States requires the negation of a history of social relations that publicly racialized groups . . . as “nonwhites ineligible for citizenship.” For Asian immigrants from Vietnam, Korea, or the Philippines, this negation involves “forget-



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However, the new English-language and translated works by Vietnamese Americans do not participate in that negation and disavowal. Rather, they demand that the United States remember that the war was not only an American one, and that whatever it may have done to America, it did far more to Viet Nam and the Viet Kieu.6 This Vietnamese American writers’ project—their demand that one remember the true conditions and results of the war—is reinforced by the increased availability of SRV works in translation in the United States, and by the normalization of U.S.-SRV relations. For the first time, the newly translated works allow for a cross-cultural analysis of contemporary writing on both sides of the Pacific Ocean and of the diaspora’s effect on Vietnamese American literary production. The relative openness in communication between the SRV and the U.S. has given a younger generation of Vietnamese American writers access to works from contemporary Viet Nam. Some are making trips to Viet Nam; Andrew Pham, for instance, chronicles his journey back to the “home” country in Catfish and Mandala. For the first time, then, the younger generation of Vietnamese American writers has access to transpacific influences: literary and cultural traditions from both countries. If the anthology projects that have been appearing all have a cross-cultural emphasis, none is more emphatically cross-cultural than Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue, and Truong Vu’s The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers. This politically explosive and culturally revealing anthology brings together works of writers from three sides of the war—Euro-Americans, Vietnamese Americans who fought for the Republic of Viet Nam, and Vietnamese who fought for the National Liberation Front and Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. No previous publication had attempted such a presentation of still-warring factions.7 The Other Side of Heaven brings together an important collection of works. Addressing similar topics from these different points of view, they reveal commonalities, differences, and shades of variation in response to similar events. All contest the reflexive, under-examined U.S. view that the war is only “about” America and Americans. This extraordinary collection deserves a place in the emerging canon of Viet Nam War literature as a central source for the study of the literary production around that war. From its pages, an image of the contemporary grounds of understanding and misunderstanding and a context for future writing emerge. Many of its writers recognize the ways in which their positions are intertwined transnationally and transculturally.8 This anthology and other publications should provide, over time, important contexts for further writing in a transpacific, multinational, multi-ethnic context. In the following pages, I will focus on the common aspects of the personal experiences represented in its stories and the cultural differences that emerge from a close examination of the three groups of writers it represents—Euro-American, Vietnamese American, and Vietnamese.



ting” the history of war in Asia and adopting the national historical narrative that disavows the existence of an American imperial project. (Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 27)

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Renny Christopher

Wayne Karlin highlights the unusual nature of The Other Side of Heaven in his introduction: “This book was born out of the meeting of two people who, if they had met two decades previously, would have tried to kill each other” (xi).9 The two people were Karlin, a Euro-American veteran of the war, and Le Minh Khue, a woman who had worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the war and is now a writer in the SRV. Karlin and Khue met at a writers’ conference under more peaceful circumstances than they might have during the war. They decided to create the anthology, Karlin writes, as “a work of reconciliation that came from a mutual recognition of pain and loss” (xiii). Realizing that there was a third side to the story as well, Karlin and Khue sought out Truong Hong Son (whose pen name is Truong Vu), a veteran of the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) and a Vietnamese American, to serve as the third editor. To a large extent, The Other Side of Heaven is about re-shaping vision through grief. Indeed, grief is perhaps the one constant theme represented in every piece in the anthology. Karlin alludes to grief’s power to change individuals’ perceptions of one another in his introduction when he describes the coming together of U.S. and SRV writers at the conference at the William Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Their friendship was fueled by the intensity of emotion that occurs when people who had looked at each other, first, as personifications of their most basic fears and hatreds, and, later, as figures who populated whatever mythological niches the war had settled into in their minds—suddenly became human beings to each other. . . . The juxtaposition of that realization with the realization of how much we liked each other, how much we had in common, how terrible it would have been if we’d succeeded in killing each other, brought us to moments of what I can only describe as a grief so intense that it changed us so we could never again see each other—or ourselves— in the same way. (xi) The Other Side of Heaven undertakes a “re-visioning”: it works toward the recognition that as participants in the same war, albeit in different ways, the former enemies have more in common with one another than they have with those who did not experience the war—non-veteran Americans and younger Vietnamese, for instance. It shares this recognition of commonality between former enemies, this sense of having been formed in the same conflict, with the “literature of return” by U.S. veterans who traveled to Viet Nam in the 1980s and 1990s.10 As Karlin writes, this anthology’s goal was “to open in our readers’ hearts the recognition that had opened in our own” (xiii).11 The works by American, Viet Kieu, and SRV writers show startling similarities and significant differences. At least in the stories chosen for this anthology, writers tend to be aligned transculturally, in respect to their side in the war. Thus, similarities between Euro-American and Viet Kieu writers, who were on the losing side of the war, set them apart from SRV writers, who were on the



The Other Side of Heaven

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winning side. Of these Euro-American and Viet Kieu similarities, the most significant is found in the emotional reactions of characters, who are often consumed by a sense of loss, or who are angry, bitter, and full of hatred. Viet Kieu writer Nguyen Xuan Hoang’s significantly titled story, “The Autobiography of a Useless Person,” for instance, is narrated by a man whose father was a Vietnamese sailor and whose mother, half English and half Chinese was nonetheless, he writes, “very Vietnamese” (237). His family has always been troubled. Its members have always dealt with each other with “reserve and coldness” (240). Disaster befalls them during the French war: the family’s eldest daughter is raped by a Vietnamese soldier collaborating with the French, and the eldest brother, a Viet Minh soldier, thereafter kills his sister’s rapist. A soldier with a desk job during the American War, the narrator does not see his eldest brother again until 1975, when Eldest Brother enters Saigon with the victorious army. After that victory, the narrator is sent to a re-education camp along with his younger brother. If the narrator eventually escapes to America, last he hears, Eldest Brother has shot himself after visiting the younger brother, still in the re-education camp, on his deathbed. As Hoang’s narrator tells us, he had been consumed by hatred as a child: “I believed I hated my whole family, with the exception of my mother. To hate wasn’t difficult” (237). Now, he explains “[a]s for myself, once I became an adult, I realized that one cannot survive without loving and relying on others” (239). After this realization and during his life in exile in the United States, the narrator is filled with emptiness and a sense of premature age. “Life in America is full of comfort” (224), he says. Yet, when he remembers the best time of his life—the years spent in Central Viet Nam with his father, he recalls having felt old even then: “Now, forty years later, I am just as old as I was then” (244). His life has become frozen in time, partly due to his tumultuous, culturally dislocated childhood and partly as a result of exile, which prevents him from reconciling with his childhood heritage. A second story by a Viet Kieu writer, Tran Vu’s “The House Behind the Temple of Literature,” is caught up in fantasies of punishment and pain. The narrator of this elliptical story explains that she has returned to her parents’ home in the North and that, while they ignore her existence, her crippled father and grandfather regularly beat and punish the adopted daughter who has taken her place in the family. Only at the end of the story does she reveal that she and the adopted daughter are one and the same, and that the father and grandfather are punishing her for being a traitor. In her words, “I am Nhai who returned home after the change of power and informed against my adopted father and grandfather until they were too broken even to beg for mercy” (94). This story expresses regret and a sense of guilt that is so overwhelming as to produce a split and dissociation on the level of the narrator, who presents herself to the reader as a different character for the greater part of the story. Tran Vu’s story shares with that of his fellow Viet Kieu writer Nguyen Xuan Hoang’s a paralysis rooted in the inability to move out of the past. Both of their narrators are anchored in the past in such a way as to be deprived of a sense of the present or of a viable future. Their feeling that their lives have come to an end although




Renny Christopher

they still remain alive, yet without living a real life, is shared by a large number of U.S. veteran writers (and not only those represented in this anthology). In many Euro-American stories, characters are gripped not just by bitterness, but by anger. They enact a sort of American masculinity that expresses itself through violence. Robert Stone’s “Helping,” Andre Dubus’s “Dressed Like Summer Leaves,” Philip Caputo’s “A Soldier’s Burial,” and Thom Jones’s “The Pugilist at Rest” portray Euro-American male veterans who, unable to get over their war experiences, inhabit a universe in which they are not only unable to realize “that one cannot survive without loving and relying on others” (239), but are also consumed by a will to violence that keeps them permanently removed from their fellow humans. If the Viet Kieu in these stories are in a state of physical exile, the Euro-American veterans are in a state of psychic exile. The title of Stone’s story, “Helping” is bitterly ironic: Elliot, the main character, a counselor at a state hospital, is incapable of helping either his clients or himself. A Viet Nam veteran, Elliot has a disturbing counseling session with Blankenship. A petty criminal, Blankenship pretends to be a veteran, then breaks his eighteen months of sobriety to go on a bender during which he loads his shotgun and imagines shooting various people. His dominant emotion is rage, a symptom of the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome from which he suffers but that he does not acknowledge. Elliot has managed to bury his rage and end his excessive drinking in order to create the outward form of a decent life. His rage manifests itself constantly, however, within the confines of his “decent life.” It does so, for instance, when Elliot expresses his resentment of his co-worker, the psychiatrist Dr. Sayyid. He snaps to his secretary: “That fucking little zip couldn’t give you a decent haircut” (98). Elliot’s useless rage moves no one but himself; even the secretary fails to react, because “[sh]e was used to him” (98). Expressed through bigotry, his hatred’s true target is himself. During a conversation with his wife, he thinks “that if it had not been for her he might not have survived. There could be no forgiveness for that” (110). Elliot cannot forgive his wife for causing him to survive because of his overwhelming, though submerged and largely unacknowledged, wish to die. Clearly, he feels that his life has already ended, although he continues to live, and this feeling impels him toward suicide. If Elliot shares the feeling that his life ended during the war with the narrator of “The Autobiography of a Useless Person,” his suicidal impulse is unique to the Euro-American writers. Guilt and self-hatred are transnational responses represented in stories by Euro-American and Vietnamese writers. Thom Jones’s “The Pugilist at Rest” and Xuan Thieu’s “Please Don’t Knock on my Door” focus on the aftermath of killing. The Pugilist feels guilt related to his own actions in the war: “There was a reservoir of malice, poison, and vicious sadism in my soul, and it poured forth freely in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. . . . I committed unspeakable crimes and got medals for it” (132). As he sees it, the war has done nothing more than reveal his secret self. It did not create in him a personality capable of committing atrocities; rather, it provided an opportunity for the worst aspects of his own American masculine identity, that “reservoir of malice, poison, and vicious sadism” in his own soul, to play themselves out. He is, after all,



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I became a very timid individual. I became introspective. I wondered what had made me act the way I had acted. Why had I killed my fellowmen in the war, without any feeling of remorse, or regret? And when the war was over, why did I continue to drink and swagger around and get into fist fights? Why did I like to dish out pain, and why did I take positive delight in the suffering of others? Was I insane? Was it too much testosterone? (133) The Pugilist’s story makes it clear that the cause of his violence is not biological (“too much testosterone”), but cultural. Jones’s Pugilist is not a Pugilist, that is, but a pugilist, in the sense that he has been taught by a masculinist culture that his violent, brutal behavior is “natural” for a man, and this ideology leads him to commit atrocities that later trouble his conscience. In this light, his physical head injury then deprives him of his “masculinity” and permits him to feel the guilt that will eventually permit him to recognize the barbarity of his former, violent, “masculine” self. As it is portrayed in this story, guilt thus serves a productive function. In this anthology, Xuan Thieu’s “Please Don’t Knock on the Door” immediately follows “The Pugilist at Rest” and offers a different sort of meditation on killing. Its first line announces: “In fact, Hao was not as crazy as the bad kids in the K42 housing project made him out to be” (137). Like the Pugilist, Hao suffers from a mental imbalance caused by his war experiences. In his case, however, he has chosen to kill or not to kill judiciously. He has killed in the name of a cause he believed in, and he is haunted, but not destroyed, by the memory of that killing. He is destroyed, however, when the army refuses to validate the justice of his decision not to kill a falsely accused “informer.” This story, then, validates the exercise of individual conscience. Hao is the one betrayed when his superiors override his (correct) judgment. He says, “I was afraid of death if it was meaningless and absurd, but I wasn’t afraid to sacrifice myself for some purpose” (151). For most of his career, he had a purpose (unlike the Pugilist, whose only purpose was destruction for its own sake, thinly veiled by the idea of “revenge” for the death of a friend). Ironically, it is only when Hao recognizes the truth of a situation and decides not to carry out an execution that his purpose is lost. Despite all the killing he has been assigned to do, Hao has kept his moral compass by acting not for his own advantage, but with a higher purpose in mind. In the presence of a woman accused of being an informer, he admits, he was tempted to rape and then strangle her. “If I had done that, it would have been to my advantage. I would have satisfied myself and achieved something. Plus, I wouldn’t have had to worry about the consequences. But I would have lost something important. I would have lost myself” (150). By not acting out of lust, greed, or a will to violence for its own sake, by trusting his own conscience rather than the decisions of his superiors (in deciding not to execute this



a boxer, and, at least in this story, that occupation figures the glorification of violence for its own sake. After the Pugilist receives a head injury in a boxing match and starts suffering blackouts, he changes:

Renny Christopher

woman), Hao brings about his own official downfall. He has retained something more important, however: himself, his honor, and his vision of rightness. For that reason alone, he is not “as crazy as the bad kids. . . . made him out to be” (137). Thus in the dialogue between these two stories of killing and its aftermath— Thom Jones’s “The Pugilist at Rest” and Xuan Thieu’s “Please Don’t Knock on my Door”—an intricate fabric of moral order, conscience, guilt, and the idea of justice is woven. It complicates any discussion of the conduct of the war far beyond the simplistic “hawkish” and “dovish” positions which U.S. discourse has rarely transcended. Clearly, the Pugilist has much to learn from Hao. For their part, writers from contemporary Viet Nam (SRV) do not share the bitterness and anger of Viet Kieu and Euro-American writers. Their lack of anger and bitterness is not due to political restriction or adherence to an imposed style. Their works are not works of socialist realism. Rather, they are writing under the policy of Doi Moi, “renovation,” officially announced to the writers’ union meeting in 1987 at which Secretary General Nguyen Van Linh proclaimed that writers should “[s]peak the truth. . . . No matter what happens, Comrades, don’t curb your pen” (Dinh xii).12 Under this policy, it became possible for writers to openly criticize their society without being branded as dissidents. Writers have still gotten into trouble with the government for outspokenness (Duong Thu Huong served a 7-month house arrest in 1991, for example), but the literary productions now coming out of the SRV are often critical of the government and of society. The situation in the SRV is complicated. Symptomatically, Linh Dinh has described Huong and Le Minh Khue, the co-editor of The Other Side of Heaven, as dissident writers who paint “bleak portraits of a backward, rundown and corrupt society” (Dinh xiv). Where Khue is concerned, however, Dinh has also expressed the opposite view, calling her a “Writers Association Puppet.”13 As for Khue herself, a member of the Writers’ Association and of the Party, she considers her writing, both that which is critical and that which focuses on “hope and strength,” to be patriotic. Her works are best-sellers in Viet Nam.14 Her position thus illustrates the climate in which SRV writers currently work. Despite the risks, writers, Khue and Huong foremost among them, have been willing to publish a vision that values telling the truth as they see it over conformity and safety. The Other Side of Heaven thus presents many U.S. readers with their first view of the “other side.” That view might be surprising for many who know only the official U.S. story and the mild, yet orthodox, divergence from it represented by such Euro-American writers as Tim O’Brien. Although the SRV stories in this anthology are often characterized by despair and an inconsolable sense of loss, they are also characterized by a longing for, and sometimes an acting out of, reconciliation with former enemies, former friends, with themselves, even when those gestures of reconciliation are imperfect or incomplete. This same longing is present in a story by one Viet Kieu writer, Nguyen Mong Giac, “The Slope of Life.” In this story, two veterans from the same hometown—one of the ARVN and one of the PAVN15—meet after the war. Both are disabled: one has been blinded, the other is missing a leg. They compare hardships. Both of these men are somewhat bitter, and their attempted reconciliation is incomplete, but



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their desire for reconciliation is palpable. Perhaps because the author is himself Viet Kieu, someone unreconciled within his own life suspended in the state of being a refugee—caught between the loss faced in the past and an undefined future—the lack of reconciliation in the story is inevitable. The SRV writers’ protagonists may be despairing, even insane, but they are seldom angry or consumed by a will to violence. Rather, protagonists in Bao Ninh’s “Wandering Souls,” Nguyen Quang Thieu’s “Two Village Women,” Le Luu’s “The Rucksack,” and Xuan Thieu’s “Please Don’t Knock on My Door,” tend to experience an unending sense of loss and to be haunted by the past. Haunting The most striking similarities among the three groups of writers represented in The Other Side of Heaven emerge around the notion of haunting. In fact, the trope of haunting, literal and figurative, forms an intertextual link joining many writers in this anthology and a transcultural bridge within some of their stories. If one section of the anthology is titled “Hauntings,” the incidents of haunting are not confined to that section. In her epilogue, Gloria Emerson writes, “I have never been back to Vietnam because I am afraid of the ghosts I might conjure” (402). She continues: “In the South during the war there were so many capricious spirits and phantoms, fortune tellers and astrologers, so many superstitions, that the macabre seemed only what you might expect” (402). Emerson describes superstitions of Vietnamese and American soldiers and tells of a statue that, she says “had supernatural powers” (402). Consistent with the fact that Emerson does not write “supposedly had,” many of the stories in this anthology, by Vietnamese and American writers alike, encourage us to take the presence of ghosts literally. In her article “American Stories of Cultural Haunting,” Kathleen Brogan identifies a trend in contemporary “ethnic” American literature: the presence of ghosts. These ghosts serve a different function than those in traditional gothic narratives: working toward “the recuperation of a people’s history” (Brogan 150), they register “a widespread concern with questions of ethnic identity and cultural transmission” (151). While the ghosts in narratives of U.S. Viet Nam veterans don’t serve to establish an ethnic identity, they do help recuperate the repressed history of individual veterans and the repressed cultural memory of U.S. participation in the war. These ghost stories do not move, however, as Brogan’s stories of cultural haunting do, “from bad to good forms of haunting” (Brogan 153). Rather, the haunting in American narratives of Vietnam remains bad; the ghosts, angry. In this they contrast sharply with the SRV narratives, in which ghosts fulfill a quite different function and in which haunting can be good, or productive. Some SRV stories feature literal ghosts, others imaginary ghosts, and still others locate haunting within the remains of the dead. One such story is Wayne Karlin’s “Point Lookout,” which brings America and Viet Nam together on the archaeological remains of a massacre. This story’s war veteran, Brian, is an archaeologist investigating the evidence of a massacre of Confederate soldiers in




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Maryland during the U.S. Civil War. Relying on “photos and articles about My Lai . . . as one of his modern references,” he aligns the American and Vietnamese Civil Wars (298). Brian is trying to reconstruct both the historical past and his own past as a war veteran, while his wife, Mary, a nurse, wants to destroy the past in order to escape from it. The archaeological site in question, Point Lookout, is said to be haunted. If stared at long enough, one photograph of that Point seems to yield the image of a Confederate soldier, “[h]is face angry. His eyes accusing. Nothing went away” (297). At the same time, Mary recalls the story of an Amerasian orphan who has run away to hide in the woods, like vets “in Oregon or Washington, leftovers from the war, things that would not go away” (297). In her mind, this Amerasian “girl seemed somehow connected to the ache of loss she felt, she and her husband entwined in a curse whose elaborate intricacies wearied her” (297). Clearly, the legacy of the war haunts Brian and Mary, who interprets that haunting as a curse that manifested itself, she believes, in her recent miscarriage. But war is also an ongoing presence in their lives. It saturates their world in the form of the presence of survivors of other wars and victims of the undeclared race war at home. Its presence gives rise to another form of haunting: while working in the emergency room, Mary recalls her husband’s stories of the war in Viet Nam as if they were her own—“At what point,” she wonders, “had their memories leaked together?” (295). The notion that memories can take on an independent, disembodied existence and haunt other people is more explicit still in Robert Stone’s “Helping.” As we recall, Stone’s protagonist Elliot is a counselor and a veteran; his client, Blankenship, is a non-veteran who pretends to be a veteran. One day, Blankenship relates a recurring dream that is so authentic that it disturbs Elliot, making him realize that “[it] made no difference whether you had been there, after all. The dreams had crossed the ocean. They were in the air” (99). The ghosts haunting the stories by Euro-American writers tend to be angry, frightening, and threatening, as they are in Larry Heinemann’s “Paco’s Dreams.” Sole survivor of his platoon, Paco is haunted by the ghosts of its other members. These ghosts narrate Heinemann’s story in a kind of collective voice that refers to itself as “we.” These ghosts tell us that Paco “has never asked, Why me? It is we—the ghosts, the dead—who ask, Why him?” (204). In their bitterness and jealousy over his survival, they visit and give him nightmares. These ghosts haunt Paco quite literally; nor can we as readers doubt their authenticity, for they narrate the story. Heinemann’s story provides a direct counterpoint to the ghost story that precedes it in the anthology: SRV writer Ngo Tu Lap’s “Waiting for a Friend.” Also narrated by a ghost, “Waiting for a Friend” tells of another sole survivor of an otherwise completely wiped out squad. In this case, however, the ghosts of that squad do not haunt the surviving Ha. Instead, Ha returns to the site of their deaths every year to remember them on the anniversary of their deaths. He brings “paper tokens: hand grenades, uniforms, nine canteens” to burn for them (203). These ghosts do not resent his survival. Rather, they are waiting for him to join them, “[w]aiting, but still hoping he will forget and go on living” (203).



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Unlike Heinemann’s, Lap’s ghosts do not manifest themselves: “If you hear anyone ever say he has seen us, you will know he is lying. Like time, we have no visual manifestation” (202). If not at rest, Lap’s ghosts ware not troubled, either. “In reality, the past has no hold on my emotions, even though I can’t forget it,” the ghost narrator says (202). Lap’s is an odd ghost story, in that no one is haunted by ghosts. It is almost as if the ghost narrator wants to free the living from the haunting in their own minds. Unlike the American ghosts that haunt Paco and refuse to let him forget them, these Vietnamese (communist) ghosts want their surviving comrade to forget them, to turn his face away from death and toward life, away from the past and the war and toward the present and peace. Their impulse is generous: they prefer that their living comrade go on with his life rather than return each year to burn remembrances to them. Symbolically, the story represents a desire to move on from the long, long war, to leave it behind and participate in the making of a new world. The major difference between Lap’s and Heinemann’s ghosts is that Lap’s ghosts accept their deaths and Ha’s survival as simply accidental. There is no use in asking Why me? or Why him? They also know that death is only a matter of time. “But sooner or later Ha will rejoin his squad for—in this world—no one can live forever” (203). In contrast, Heinemann’s ghosts do not accept the accident of their deaths and Paco’s survival. They want to argue with fate rather than to accept it and to punish the accidental survivor. The American ghosts voice the American belief that an individual should be able to control his environment, circumstances, and destiny. If he can’t control them, he becomes angry, as are Heinemann’s ghosts. The Vietnamese ghosts realize that war is a larger force than any individual, and that the individual can control nothing but his own behavior and his responses to forces larger than himself. Thus, the Vietnamese ghosts in Lap’s story choose to love rather than to torment their surviving comrade. Excerpted from his novel The Sorrow of War, Bao Ninh’s “Wandering Souls” offers quite a different story of a former soldier haunted by ghosts of dead comrades. Originally published in the SRV, this story’s main character, Kien, is a writer and former member of a military team assigned to identify MIAs, who now writes in an attempt to remake his own life by recording the stories of the dead: Kien had perhaps watched more killings and seen more corpses than any contemporary writer. . . . Kien’s deaths had more shapes, colors and reality of atmosphere than anyone else’s war stories. Kien’s soldiers’ stories came from beyond the grave and told of their lives beyond death. (17) Kien’s stories are themselves ghostlike. The head of the MIA team said to him, “If you can’t identify [the MIAs] by name we’ll be burdened by their deaths for the rest of our lives” (18). Viewed in this light, Kien’s writing of the stories of the dead is a metaphorical attempt to call them by name, so that the living will not be haunted by them. Unlike Lap, Ninh suggests that the way to avoid being haunted by the dead is not to forget them, but to remember them




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in detail: “To Kien dead soldiers were fuzzier, yet sometimes more significant than the living” (18). For him, it is only by recognizing their significance that the living can reconcile with the past and recapture their “lost youth, before the sorrow of war” (16). If SRV writers’ ghosts are vindictive, their stories also have a moral dimension that is absent from Heinemann’s or Lap’s. Le Minh Khue’s “Tony D,” for instance, tells of a father and son, thieving and dishonest misers, who despise their fellow humans and distrust one another. Both are constantly caching dishonestly acquired goods. One day, the son Than brings home what he believes is the ultimate score—a bag containing the bones of a U.S. soldier whose eroded dogtag now reads only “Tony D.” Convinced that he can sell these bones for a small fortune, Than takes them home to his own father’s house. The ghost of Tony D, the black American soldier whose bones these are, begins to haunt them. Another day, Than takes the bones away to make his deal. He comes back with a sack of money, which he hides from his father, Thien, who later searches for the sack hoping to steal some of the money. Although Thien is unable to find the sack, when Than returns, he finds it missing from its hiding place. After Than forces his father to cut off his finger to shore up his oath that it was not he who stole the money, neighbors who Thien shuns and considers beasts come to the father’s aid and take him to the hospital. It is only much later, long after his son has abandoned him and after neither has found the money, that the father comes to realize that it was in fact the ghost of Tony D who had stolen the money. In this story, the ghost seems to be a manifestation of the bad consciences of father and son, both of whom are so completely without honor that they are willing to betray even each other. At the same time, however, the ghost also represents the war. Indeed, the image of the skeleton crouching in the rafters, laughing, is a well-known literary figure of war. In this case, the war is the ghost responsible for the deprivation that drives father and son to such corruption. And that ghost will not go away until it is acknowledged, prayed to, and thus brought to peace.16 In “Tony D,” the ghost is closely connected to the remains of an American MIA.17 In his brilliantly satiric story, “The Billion Dollar Skeleton,” Phan Huy Duong, a Viet Kieu who moved to France in 1965 and writes in French, uses the remains of U.S. MIAs to a different effect. His protagonist, Richard Steel, an “American Billionaire,” goes to Viet Nam to recover the remains of his son, a pilot who had been shot down in 1972. Steel’s way of conducting his search is unique: he offers a reward for every skeleton brought to him. He budgets a billion dollars for this enterprise. Because “[t]he GNP of this country is $164 per head,” he offers $164 per skeleton, no questions asked. “I don’t investigate, I don’t negotiate, I act. I buy,” he says (224). People bring Steel thousands of skeletons, all of which undergo forensic examination to determine whether or not they are the remains of his son. The bones pile up. “Never in human memory had so many human bones been piled up by the square meter. Men women children old people Viets Laos Khmers Thais Koreans Australians New Zealan-



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ders French black white red yellow brown Australopithecus, and . . . even a few Americans” (226). On the last day of Steel’s endeavor, an old man brings him a piece of jewelry which he recognizes as having belonged to his son. The old man says he will give Steel his son’s body on the condition that he cremate all of the bones he had collected and spread them over Viet Nam. After Steel does so, he goes to the old man’s village. There, the old man says, “Our dead have finally been returned to their ancestors. The dead belong where men build civilizations” (229). Thus, Phan Huy Duong encourages us to understand that an action requested by an old Vietnamese man and carried out by an American brings a reconciliation with the war. Next, the old man tells Steel his son’s story. According to him, after Steel’s son was shot down, the old man gave him shelter. After having lived a while with the old man’s family, he tried to escape and was killed by villagers. He also says that before leaving, Steel’s son had left his daughter pregnant. Thus it is that at the old man’s house, Steel meets his own blue-eyed Amerasian grandson. This story concludes as Steel replaces his son’s remains with those of an Amerasian unknown soldier. Returning his son’s remains to the old man, he buries the unknown soldier as his own son. This symbolic exchange, in which Steel gives his son to the old Vietnamese man and takes as his own the remains of an Amerasian Vietnamese man, completes the reconciliation he began. The war was the fact of the Vietnamese and the Americans; only by symbolically adopting one other can their common past—the war—be reconciled and their two cultures healed. “The Billion Dollar Skeleton” ends with this paragraph: [Steel] brought the unknown soldier’s skeleton back to the United States. He buried it with great pomp and circumstance in the family plot next to his wife’s grave. He married [a Vietnamese] woman. They had many children. And they lived happily ever after. Among their vast progeny were many learned people, famous women and men of letters, beloved citizens. One of them became the first woman president of the United States. (230) The fairy-tale aspect of this ending may be read ironically. Thus, the story, which has been fantasy all along, ends with a vision of the future that diverges radically from that which actually exists. In other words, Duong shows a vision of something better, which, in the current world, can exist only in fairy tales. What Duong shows is that the only hope for reconciliation is in hybridity, or cultural fusion. Only by way of complete exchange does peace come—by exchanging both the bones of the dead and the genes of the living to produce hybrid children. By establishing the future president of the United States as an Amerasian woman, herself the product of an epiphany undergone by America’s richest man, Duong buries both the ghosts of the past and the threats of the future. In this sense, his story stands as a microcosm for the project of The Other Side of Heaven. The Other Side of Heaven opens up the possibility of developing new per-




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spectives and more sophisticated views concerning the commonalities and differences in American and Vietnamese perspectives on the war and the post-war future. It suggests that the remarkably univocal post-war discourse in this country might finally begin to change in ways that will produce more nuanced cultural understanding and more sophisticated literary productions. Until recently, both sides of the U.S. political spectrum, from those writing against the war to those insisting the United States won it, were united in an unspoken, unacknowledged way: all assumed that the war had been primarily, even exclusively, “about” America and Americans. The Other Side of Heaven effectively and eloquently contests that assumption. Its appearance suggests that perhaps, at long last, U.S. readers and writers’ preoccupations might be shifted to include a view that has even greater power to account for the war’s effects and aftermath by including all of the perspectives of the conflict. Notes 1. Since 1975, there has been a flourishing Vietnamese-language press in the United States. Works by exile writers previously published in Vietnamese, including Tran Dieu Hang and Tran Vu, are also beginning to appear in translation in English. 2. Le Minh Khue’s The Stars,The Earth,The River is the first in Curbstone Press’ Voices from Vietnam Series; Ho Anh Thai’s Behind the Red Mist is the second. 3. Vietnamese American literature has been published since the 1960s, but it has been obscure and hard to find. It was not regularly studied as a part of Asian American literature until the mid1990s. For a discussion of earlier works of Vietnamese American literature, see Christopher, The Viet Nam War/The American War. 4. Influence travels in the other direction as well. The growing availability of Viet Kieu works in the SRV and exchange programs like that of the William Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts, which brings SRV writers to the United States to meet with U.S. writers, are also influencing literary production and thought in the SRV. 5. Worse than that—most Americans conceive not of an alliance between the United States and one Vietnamese faction in a civil war, but rather of the war as having pitted “the United States” against “Viet Nam,” or “the Vietnamese.” 6. A note on terminology: “Viet Kieu” refers to Vietnamese living in exile. It could be rendered “Vietnamese diaspora.” Vietnamese names are arranged in the sequence—family name-middle name-given name. It is standard practice in Viet Nam to refer to people by given name, since there are relatively few family names. In this article, I follow Vietnamese practice for Vietnamese names and American practice for Americanized names. Some Vietnamese Americans have reversed the order of their names as an assimilationist move; others have retained the Vietnamese practice; and yet others use different practices in different situations. This is the case with the young writer and editor Luu Truong Khoi, who signs his name that way—Vietnamese Style— to his edited publication Watermark, but goes by Khoi Luu—the Americanized version of his name—in his daily life and correspondence. 7. In 1997 University of Massachusetts Press published a second anthology bringing together writers from all three sides of the war. Edited by Kevin Bowen and Bruce Weigl, it is called Writing Between the Lines: An Anthology on War & its Social Consequences. 8. By “transnationally,” I mean across the “borders” between the two nations, Viet Nam and the United States (including Vietnamese Americans); by “transculturally,” I mean across different cultural groups, specifically Euro- and African Americans and Vietnamese Americans. 9. All further references to this anthology are included parenthetically in the text by the page number. 10. For an extended discussion of the “literature of return,” see the conclusion to Christopher, The Viet Nam War/The American War. Interestingly, writers of a new genre, the “narratives of return” by younger Vietnamese American writers, often record a different reaction when they “return” to a country they left as very young children—an often mixed and occasionally bitter reaction



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to their discovering of themselves as more American than Vietnamese. For examples of this trend, see the works by Andrew Pham and Nguyen Qui Duc. The Other Side of Heaven has never been published in Viet Nam. According to Karlin, “[t]he problem was and still is the inclusion of the Viet Kieu writers. The hard-liners both in that community . . . and in Vietnam each regard the inclusion of the other as unacceptable. In spite of that, the anthology was reviewed and written about very positively in many newspapers and magazines in Vietnam” (personal communication). Another anthology put together by Karlin did appear in Viet Nam. It contained American short stories translated into Vietnamese and includes many of the writers (other than the Viet Kieu) who appeared in The Other Side of Heaven. Titled Contemporary American Fiction, it was, according to Karlin, very popular in Viet Nam, where it is currently in its third edition. At the same time in this country, The Other Side of Heaven is a growing presence in college curricula. It was recently adopted for a course at the Air Force academy, and a veterans’ day symposium on the anthology was held at Eastern Connecticut State University in November 2000. Proceeds from the book go to support a medical clinic in Hue (Karlin, personal communication). For a fuller discussion of the issue of “renovation” and how it has affected SRV writers, see Greg Lockhart’s introduction to Nguyen Huy Thiep’s The General Retires and Other Stories, and the articles by Hue-Tam Ho Tai and Peter Zinoman. Personal (e-mail) communication, Karlin, April 21, 1997. Personal communication, Karlin. ARVN is the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam and PAVN is the People’s Army of Viet Nam, that is, the Hanoi Army. I am indebted to discussions with Karlin for this last idea about “Tony D.” The common American insistence during the 1980s and 1990s was that American MIAs were alive and being held in barbaric Southeast Asian prisons. Promoted in such media as the Rambo films, it was one of the most racist expressions brought to bear against the Vietnamese in the United States. For a cogent discussion of the issue and the way it was parlayed into U.S. propaganda, see H. Bruce Franklin, MIA or Mythmaking in America. In the SRV, the MIA issue is looked at quite differently. There, people know the remains of American MIAs are scattered throughout the countryside and mingled with those of the more than 200,000 Vietnamese MIAs from the war.







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Across a narrow lake from my house in the center of Hanoi is a hideouslooking hotel named Saigon Pull. Built four years ago, it features a floating disco, a tinseled, strobe-lit barge, which blares loud music until 3 o’clock each morning. Although I tried jamming wads of rolled-up newspaper into my ears, the monotonous thump, thump, thump still filtered through. Once I even tried bandaging the top half of my head. But this floating disco is not just a nuisance, but a windfall. It is where my only daughter, Lai, works as a hostess. She brings home, on average, $15 a night, half the monthly wage of your average teacher. With this income I no longer have to leave the house. Before Lai became a hostess, my family survived on what I could make from selling Zippo lighters, supplemented by my tiny pension. I had several designs for my Zippo lighters. My favorite one read: “WHEN I DIE BURY ME UPSIDE DOWN SO THE WORLD CAN KISS MY ASS.” It can be translated as: “WHEN I DIE BURY ME UPSIDE DOWN SO THE WORLD CAN KISS MY ASS.” I would sit on the sidewalk across the street from the Metropole Hotel, in front of a hand towel arrayed with six Zippo lighters. (There were dozens more in my satchel.) It was prudent not to show too many at one time. That way, they became rare. I would sell each for five, maybe six dollars. Once, a strangely emotional man, with tears in his eyes, paid me twenty dollars although I only asked for ten. I would also carve, for a small, negotiable fee, a tropical scene, someone’s name, or a simple greeting in French or English onto any solid surface with my penknife. Look at this cheap plastic pen, for example: see the fruit-laden coconut tree, the sun sinking into the ocean, and above it, “Good Night, My Love!” Now I stay home all day to take care of my three-year-old grandson, Tuan. There are only three of us in my family: me, Lai, and Tuan. Tuan is a big-boned and precocious child. Already he can recite the alphabet,



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forward and backward, and count to a hundred. I have taught him a few fancy words. Once, when my neighbor, Mr. Truong, was over for a beer, I said: “Tuan, tell Mr. Truong what’s inside the body?” Tuan looked at me blankly. I nudged: “You know, the tiny little things no one can see.” He still didn’t get it. I gave him a hint: “GGGGGGGGGG! GGGGGGGGGGGGG!” “Germs?” “See,” I looked at Mr. Truong, “he already knows the word ‘germs’!” Mr. Truong was laughing convulsively. His one good eye narrowed into a slit slithering up towards the top of his nose. His mouth nearly slid off his face: “This kid speaks excellent Vietnamese!” Encouraged, I pointed to a photograph on the wall: “And who’s that?” “Uncle Ho!” “And what about Uncle Ho?” “Uncle Ho loves children!” After Mr. Truong left, I thought of how glad I was that Mr. Truong seemed to genuinely like my grandson and had never made an off-color remark about Tuan in my presence. Well, almost never. One time, after seeing Tuan kick a rubber ball across the floor, he raised his hands in the air and yelled: “Pele!” It is true that Mr. Truong likes to make a lot of far-fetched comparisons. He said that Hanoi is becoming more and more like New York. (He has never been anywhere near New York. Indeed, never outside of Vietnam.) He calls Lai “a famous actress” and me “the general.” He said: “You look just like Vo Nguyen Giap.” An absurd comparison, preposterous. As is clear in every photograph, and I’ve even met the great man once, with a photograph in my wallet to prove it. General Giap has a round, well-marbled, toad-like face, while yours truly’s is gaunt, meatless, with eyes that bug out just a little. I have a bushy moustache, and General Giap does not. Although General Giap’s nose is mashed, beaten down, smoothed over, it does retain its full complement of accessories, while yours truly’s, I’m sorry to say, excusez-moi, is missing a nostril. Furthermore, everyone knows that Vo Nguyen Giap is only 4'9", one of the shortest men in the universe, and I was, swear to god, a very tall guy. Perhaps Mr. Truong is implying that in my current abbreviated version, I’m about the size of Vo Nguyen Giap. I’ve already decided that Tuan would never be sent to school. Why subject him to other children’s cruelty? I’ve talked to Lai about this. After she quits what she’s doing—Lai’s already 25—she can open a beauty salon. We’ll call it “Paris By Night.” Plucked eyebrows, perms, and nails. Tuan can help out at the shop when he’s old enough and be a beautician when he’s fully grown. Each night, just before bed, I would rub egg-yolk into Tuan’s hair to straighten it out. I didn’t know if it would work, but it was worth a try. I’ve also been telling him to pinch his flaring nostrils, massaging them, to get them to rise up. “Do it twenty times, Tuan.” “But why, Grandpa?”



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“Because it’s good for your nose!” At the end of each nose session, I would give Tuan a generous handful of M & M’s. Imported stuff, very expensive. Mrs. Buoi, the pudding vendor down the street, told me that the American singer, Michel Jason, soaks his body in a bathtub of fresh milk every day to achieve a light complexion. Condensed milk doesn’t work, she added. A nha que ignoramus, Mrs. Buoi should stick to peddling pudding and stop dishing out advice on the latest advances in science and cosmetics. Besides, even a pint of milk costs well over a dollar. There’s no way I’m spending all of Lai’s earnings on fresh milk. I had thought of getting a pint of milk and dabbing Tuan, just the crucial spots, maybe just the tops of his hands and the front of his face, with a hand towel. But if I apply this treatment unevenly, he’ll end up looking all mottled, like a tree frog or a Napalm victim. It’s not worth the risk, is what I say. But who am I to brand Mrs. Buoi a nha que ignoramus? What pomposity! I should scratch the scars on my face until they bleed to atone for such a statement! Show me a Vietnamese, even the most au courant, c’est moi included, who isn’t a generation, at most two, removed from being a nha que ignoramus? For all I know, you yourself are a nha que ignoramus. Perhaps, just this morning, you were standing ankle-deep in mud, planting rice seedlings with your ass aimed skyward? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. So what if you have never eaten M & M’s or bought a roll of toilet paper in your life? You should be proud to be au naturel, parlez-vous français? like a heron or a water buffalo. You should be proud to be the heir to a million folk poems no one can remember. You should be proud to be a repository of occult knowledge city slickers like me are clueless about. (Like Mr. Truong said, Hanoi is becoming more and more like New York, less and less like the rest of Vietnam.) If I look at you the wrong way, you can cause a bag of nails or a live duck to appear in my poor stomach. Because you stand in the sun all day, planting rice seedlings with your ass aimed skyward, you are robust, slightly crazed, and darkcomplexioned. You know, from experience, that skin color is not constant, but variable. What is skin pigment but germs that can be bleached with the right chemical? When I first suggested the beauty salon idea to Lai, she seemed deeply ambivalent, even afraid. When something’s troubling her, Lai’s lips would jut out a little, as if she’s getting ready to kiss someone she does not really want to kiss. She would also tilt her head back and blink her eyes rapidly. A jolie laide, my Lai is. I reassured her: “Don’t worry, don’t worry, I promise to never show up at your shop.” “What are you talking about?!” She protested, tilting her head back and blinking rapidly. “Oh, come on: it’s a beauty salon! Why would people want to see a monster in a beauty salon?” It is true that the new generation has very little tolerance for ugliness, for whatever is unglamorous, maimed, unphotogenic. All reminders of the war embarrass them. The war itself embarrasses them. It was a huge aberration,



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they’ve decided. (And they’re right, of course, but then they blame people like me for having participated in it, as if we had any choice in the matter.) They see the cash-friendly Americans on the street and cannot imagine why we ever fought them. Each night, not being able to sleep, I would lie in the dark inside the mosquito netting next to my grandson and remember incidents from my generic, yet harrowing life. Only now, at the age of 53, have I achieved boredom, a kind of peace, if not happiness. I would think of my wife, of our four nights together. Some men are destined for many nights of love. I was destined for four. Flesh on flesh is a lifetime memory, they say. Each night was different. In many ways, I was lucky that The Uyen, the wife I barely knew, was two-years-dead by the time I returned from the war. I was damaged goods, useless, a nuisance. Or I would think of my brief glimpses of Hue, the only city aside from Hanoi I have ever been in; or the b.s. I fed the pretty reporter from Quan Doi Nhan Dan, about commandeering an ARVN tank and plowing it into their own bunker—“You should have heard them scream, Miss”; or the time we discovered an upturned American truck in a ravine, its driver already dead, and found, to our delight, canned ham and peaches in its cargo; or the time I stepped on an American soldier but did not shoot him, and how it bothered me for weeks afterwards; or the cache of whiskey my battalion found in an overrun ARVN base camp . . . During my first month in the field, I saw what I thought were human entrails dangling from a tree branch above head level. All pink and gray and dripping blood. It frightened me so much I actually threw up. When I told the other soldiers about this, they all laughed: “It was a snake, you idiot!” Lai would not usually be home until after eight in the morning. Foreign men and Viet Kieu like to sleep late, she told me. And most of them like to talk a little after they wake up, she added, even if they have to pay a little extra. Naturally, I never ask Lai about her work, although sometimes she tells me things. We have an agreement that she can never receive a man inside the house. (With Tuan here, it would not be moral.) Once, however, a Viet Kieu showed up on one of Lai’s nights off and insisted, begged, to be let in. Although the young man was very drunk, he was neither rude nor belligerent. After a little conference between Lai and me, we decided, what the heck, let the sorry bastard in. “Thank you, Uncle, I really appreciate this,” the Viet Kieu said to me in a thick Quang Ngai accent, bowing like a yo-yo with his meaty hands clasped together in front of his chest. “It’s not New Year yet, stop kowtowing!” “Thank you, Uncle!” “Just treat us like family!” So there we were, all four of us, sleeping on two beds in the one room of my house. The Viet Kieu, fully dressed, was clutching Lai as if she was the last inner tube left bobbing on the South China Sea. Great whites were swimming beneath the bed. He babbled on about his life as a solid waste specialist in Miami and left before sunrise.



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After the Viet Kieu left, Tuan, the little booger, said: “Was that my father?” Although the Saigon Pull is literally only a stone’s throw from my house, it takes Lai fifteen minutes to ride around the lake on her Dream motorcycle. I always know she is coming from Mr. Truong’s Pekinese bitch’s frantic barking. She always brings something from the market, sweet rice with Chinese sausage, baguettes with pate, or vermicelli with grilled meatballs. Occasionally she would also bring home foreign newspapers or magazines taken from the hotel. Although I enjoy looking at all the photographs in these publications, even the most banal—the layout of a bathroom in a soap advertisement, for example, or the head of a hairy deer over a fireplace—what attract me most are the images of disaster: a race car bursting into flame; a riot; someone in handcuffs. . . . It is reassuring to see people in other countries suffer, in their own house, so to speak, because the foreigners who are here now, in 1995, do not suffer. On the front page of last week’s Bangkok Post was a picture of a man in a red beret, khaki pants, and white T-shirt, aiming, with one muscular arm, a Bulgarian SA-93 at the face of another man lying on the ground, naked but for a pair of green socks. I have seen war but I have never seen such a tidy tableau of warfare. I had no idea which country this was in. But since both men were black, maybe somewhere in Africa. The naked man was clutching his crotch with one hand and trying to ward off the inevitable with his other. One of the socks was dangling from his foot. To the side, five teenagers hid behind a wall, with one cautiously peering out to witness this spectacle. I have seen only one black man close up in my life. It was in a forest near Pleiku. We had ambushed an American patrol and were combing the area to scavenge weapons from the corpses before the helicopters came. I stepped over a fallen log onto something soft. Something moaned underfoot. It was a rather smallish black man, bleeding but conscious, his left arm missing. I can still see this man’s face today: he had these odd little bumps on his lower cheeks and a ragged goatee. I stared at this man’s eyes staring back at me. No one else was near. I kept on walking. When Tuan was born, I immediately thought of this black man I didn’t kill. A karmic joke: since you liked the first one so much, here!, have another one. I laughed so hard at the hospital they all thought I had gone mad. But it did bother me for weeks afterward—the fact that I didn’t, couldn’t, shoot this soldier. What kind of a soldier am I if I cannot finish off my enemy? But then I would return, over and over, to that face, a face showing neither fear nor defiance, with its little odd bumps on the lower cheeks and a sparse goatee. If anything, he seemed embarrassed. It was as if he had just woken up and was surprised to find me standing over him. A rather feminine response, I concluded, to be embarrassed after you have been violated. It was because he was caught in a compromising position, most definitely, but then so was I. It was as if I had walked into a latrine without knocking and found him squatting over the cement hole. “Excuse me, Sir.” But what was either one of us doing in a mosquito-infested indigo forest on such an unbelievably hot summer afternoon anyway? He with his left arm missing and covered with mud? And me with both of my legs about to be blown away forever?



SAIGON PULL






Protest in front of Truong Van Tran’s video store, Westminster, California, March 1999. Photographer: Jerry Gorman.

Monique T. D. Truong

In 1882, the United States enacted its first set of federal immigration laws, under which the following were considered “undesirable aliens” and were denied entrance into the land of liberty: any convict, lunatic, idiot or any person unable to take care of himself without becoming a public charge, prostitutes and Chinese “coolies.”

A nice strong November wind is blowing, and I am on the top deck of a ferry heading for Ellis Island, catching each powerful gust with arms open wide. I love the cold when I am warm, safe under layers of clothing, wool and high-tech fabrics, hats and gloves. Nothing exposed except my cheeks, nose, and forehead. It is like my affection for the rain and thunder when I am sitting inside looking out at the heavy drops washing down the windows. That layer of glass, that roof, those four walls, they are the physical embodiment of the things that I crave: safety, security, shelter, and home. I have lived in New York City for nine years, and I have resisted this excursion, stubbornly. For three of those years, I had even worked in a high-rise bordering on Battery Park, and from that building’s black glass windows I could see Ellis Island, its red-roofed buildings, the outline of each window trimmed in white, floating on the water, blue and shimmering, and still I would not go. I resisted it for the same reasons that I have always steered clear of amusement parks, churches, New Year’s Eve parties: destinations, all contrived and orchestrated to engender an overarching, predetermined set of responses. Each place is a story that has already been written. I just have to fill in the blanks with my name and I shall be amused. I shall worship and join in the celebration. That is the promise and the guarantee. It is a simple enough set-up but it is the follow-through, my follow-through, that is always complicated. I enter into these one-size-fits-all narratives and never seem to arrive at the right ending. Each morning, five days a week, I rode the 1 and the 9 subway line to work,



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to the southernmost tip of Manhattan, to the very last stop just before the trains screeched around a bend and headed back uptown. It’s a train filled with office workers and tourists. Oil and water. No mistaking one from the other. The last stop brings you to the Staten Island Ferry, but the office workers don’t come here for Staten Island. They are headed for Wall Street and the World Trade Center. The tourists don’t come here for Staten Island, either. They exit here in order to catch a ferry for the two other islands, Liberty and Ellis. They are going to see where the promise of America is housed and museumed, and their anticipation, their excitement, courses through the subway tunnels faster than the trains. A curious thing happened each morning on the 1 and the 9, an uncontrolled study in human behavior, generous and welcoming in one moment and harsh and close-lipped in another. The regulars, the besuited and briefcased, know that in order to exit the 1 and the 9 at its last stop, you have to be in the first five cars of the train. Otherwise, the doors won’t open. If you are in the sixth car or farther back when the train pulls into the station, you won’t even see the platform nor the flickering gray of the station’s fluorescent lights. Your car is trapped in the tunnel, and this last stop is, for you, no stop at all. Those of us who have traveled this route before are confident that we have boarded the right car, know that it will pull us into the station, that we will disembark. Our learned behavior had long ago morphed into an animal-like instinct. We are confident, smug, reading the morning papers. Our eyes rise from the pages, every now and then, to reflect our annoyance at the tourists who shoot bewildered, wild looks at each other. A frantic deliberation about what to do. The New York City Transit Authority, in a quintessential New York City hard-scrabble move, tinged with a bit of sadistic ill will, has opted to deal with the tourists by having the train conductors announce the five-car-or-else rule over the train’s intercom system. At about the third-to-last stop, the conductor goes on the air “live” and inevitably chaos ensues. Usually, the intercom system breaks up the conductor’s message into indecipherable vocal spurts: “Last stop . . . five cars . . . exit. You must . . . forward . . . exit.” The pauses are filled in by the pops and hums of static, high-pitched feedback, background voices, which make it sound as if the conductor is at a raucous party and has, in a drunken flight of fancy, decided to suddenly change the rules of subway ridership, to implement a new, ad hoc decree with no regard for past procedures. Even when the message falls from the speakers in one continuous stream, tension crowds into each car. It took me a while to realize that it did not matter whether the words themselves were actually being communicated and understood. Something more potent was at work. While each conductor’s voice was inherently different in tone and pitch, they all had over the years managed to develop, in their delivery of this message, the unmistakable cadence of panic, the kind of inflamed rhythms that can start riots and rampages. And, this was what every tourist hears—a frenetic, clarion call. This is when it all begins to happen. Those tourists who understand English and who can understand the message



WELCOME

Monique T. D.Truong

(the first does not guarantee the second) scan the car they are in, try to find signs that will tell them what numbered car they have boarded. We, the office workers, of course, know that such helpful signs do not exist. There are numbers near each set of doors but they are tricksters, counterfeiters, numerical con men who offer a false way out. They refer to the numerical order of the doors and have no correlation to the order of the subway car you are in. By now, the train has pulled into the second-to-last stop and valuable time is being wasted. As the tourists try to quell the queasiness brought on by the sudden realization that they have entered into this journey with inadequate information, are now woefully unprepared, that they have unknowingly thrown their bodies and their fate, a bouncing ball onto a moving roulette wheel, they begin to look at their fellow riders hoping that one of us would make eye contact with them. This is when the process of selection begins, haphazard and subjective. The easy observation is that we, the office workers, tend to help those who are most like us. The middle-aged, white men of corporate America will most often lend their deep voices, like firm handshakes, to their vacationing counterparts, temporarily out of uniform but still exuding the smell of starch and drycleaning fluid. They shepherd about their wives and children, and their authority and protectiveness resonates with those who consider themselves equally charged. The women, diverse in age and race, who hold jobs within the ranks of the “support staff,” that thinly veiled diminutive, a euphemism for servitude without glory, they the secretaries, receptionists, and accounting clerks most often smile at groups of women traveling together or escorting groups of young children. Their assurance that these tourists are in the right car is followed by friendly chit chat of the kind that usually does not thrive in the subways of New York. The younger women, lawyers, bankers, MBAs just shy of vice-presidency clout, the ones who wear the expensive suits and prefer leather flats to white running shoes for their daily commute, are the slowest to lend a hand. They fall somewhere between authority and subservience and are uncomfortable identifying with either. So, they remain silent, watching the connections being made, the crisscrossing webs of identification. I am silent as well but not for the same reasons. In this human drama, the harder, more incisive observation is that the selection process is mutual. A social contract to be entered into by both parties. The tourists also must choose. They first must choose to acknowledge that they are in a state of want, acknowledge that they are in need, and then they must choose which person on this crowded train they will share this bit of vulnerability with. In a moment like this, tourists from Cincinnati, Rotterdam or Osaka, all look for America—sure-footed, certifiable, blue-ribboned, All-Americans. They bring this profile with them tucked into their pockets for easy access, and they pull it out and match it up with a face, a designated American, every time they have to ask for directions, ask what time it is, or ask whether they are in the right subway car.



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Moving beneath the streets of this city in a silvery encapsulation of this country, some of us just do not fit the profile. Young African American men are rarely asked, rarely given the authoritative wherewithal no matter whether they are dressed in a suit or a maintenance man’s uniform. Elderly women are rarely asked. The blind are rarely asked. I too am rarely asked, but not for the same reasons. At first, I thought maybe they were unsure of whether I was a tourist or an office worker. But, then I would catch a glimpse of myself in one of the subway car windows, a thick slab of glass etched with translucent graffiti. The woman staring back had all the identifiers in place, hair pulled back in a sensible bun, little pearl earrings, a suit simple in its cut and appearance but that costs more than most people’s monthly rent, and an oversized leather briefcase that is an unmistakable talisman of corporate America. Then, I thought maybe they were unsure of whether I could speak English. So, each day as the train pulled into the third-to-last stop, I would make it a point to ruffle the pages of my New York Times, shaking loose the Business section, making exaggerated creases in the Arts & Leisure, waving my red flag of literacy, as it were, to no avail. Then, I just sat silent; resentful and wistful of these tourists who were on the last leg of their journey to an America, so mythical and precious that it must be kept offshore, with water dividing, a moat to keep it safe. Like all things fragile and overwrought, this America has to be propped up by willing hands. I would offer mine, but I have learned that so few have wanted to take them. I swore I would never go. Ellis, the portal, and Liberty, the muse. I saw them each day floating just off in the distance, a ferry ride from this city that I live in, this country that I hang onto and stubbornly call my home. Well, maybe, I’d go if someone paid me, I said to myself, ruefully adopting that capitalist line in the sand, over which everything is a possibility. Well, now someone has paid me because, of course, this is America, a line in the sand over which everything is possible but is often not. I have been paid to take this ferry, to journey to Ellis Island and to tell you what I have seen. I want you to know that the sun is shining, its light skips over the water’s surface, setting off a thousand floating flashbulbs. The seagulls are keeping speed with the ferry, flying above our heads, showing off their white undersides. Manhattan and its cluster of glittered buildings is retreating from view. My fellow tourists have all settled on the other end of the ferry; all that weight shifting to one end surprisingly does not tip our vessel. I want you to know that as I stand facing the cold November winds I know that the American journey has nothing to do with this ferry, the water below, nor those islands coming nearer. The journey that tells you about the America that we share is the one that is hardly celebrated, the subterranean, the improvised, the luck of the draw. Ellis Island as it stands before us now, with its $170 million worth of corporate and individual donations, is far from that. Money changes history. That is its prerogative. You can take this ferry ride because it is



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Monique T. D.Truong

Author’s note: This essay was commissioned for a radio documentary entitled “Liberty and Ellis,” produced by Regine Beyer and Helen Thorington of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. The documentary aired on selected NPR stations nationwide on July 4, 2000. The commissioning of this work was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.



beautiful, majestic, and you can disembark and tour the grounds and buildings, but remember that the one that I’ve told you about, the daily ride on the 1 and the 9, that journey is not just a metaphor.

Karl Ashoka Britto

How do Vietnamese American authors attempt to write against a national narrative in which their histories have no place? What links may be traced between their textual production and the tensions produced by their presence within a nation anxious to rewrite “Vietnam” as an exclusively American experience? In the following essay, I will explore these questions through an examination of Monique Thuy-Dung Truong’s “Kelly,” a short story that takes the form of a letter written by a Vietnamese American woman who spent 4 years of her childhood in the town of Boiling Spring, North Carolina. My analysis will focus both on the place of history within the narrative, and on the status of Thuy Mai’s letter as an epistolary text linking together two individuals with very different relationships to their shared past. How might this narrative be read as a reflection upon the problem of representing Vietnamese history in post-1975 America? What can the nature of the bond between Thuy Mai and her addressee tell us about the different ways in which histories may be remembered—or disavowed? History and Forgetting Addressed to the white American named in the story’s title, Thuy Mai’s letter looks back to the period following her arrival in Boiling Spring “in the deep of summer in 1975” (Truong 42). For the narrator, this “place that had not changed since the Civil War” remains the site of painful memories, a town lacerated by intersecting currents of racial, sexual, and class-based discrimination (42; repeated on 45). Her letter is framed as an act of ritualized remembrance, one that strips away the picturesque gentility of Boiling Spring’s bucolic landscape: Dear Kelly— I am writing to say you and I are still entwined in a childhood we would rather forget. A childhood we would rather let lie underneath the



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The “bond” referred to by Thuy Mai is one of a shared history of ostracism arising from each girl’s difference from a culturally determined ideal of American femininity, an ideal exemplified by the “girls with pretty hair all tied up in ribbons . . . the Beths and the Susans [who] wore pink and never bulged and buckled out of their shirt plackets” (41-42). True femininity, they learn, is swathed in ribbons and lace, and reflects the kind of thin, glossy beauty found in “a shampoo commercial on T.V.” Boiling Spring, moreover, is a community in which “women were white or they weren’t at all” (46; 43). Held against the standards of these regulatory norms, Kelly and Thuy Mai are cast as “the fat girl and the freak” (41), objects of their peers’ loathing and ridicule. “Entwined” in their abjection, they embody the otherness that must be kept at the margins of the birthday tea parties where the Beths, Susans, and Jennifers celebrate the exclusionary boundaries that define their own sense of belonging.1 In many ways, “Kelly” stands apart from the themes and issues that often characterize Asian American literature: in Truong’s story, we find no intergenerational family conflict, no clear expression of a particularly Asian American identity, no articulation of ongoing ties to Asian history or cultural practices.2 Thuy Mai’s past in Viet Nam is mentioned only once in her letter, in a passage that describes the shock of her family’s arrival in the American South: You see, I was lost because my parents were lost in a place that they had never heard of and had never planned to be. The United States, you understand, is a place marked by New York City on the Atlantic side, with a middle filled in by Chicago and The Alamo, and then Los Angeles is on the Pacific closing it all in. The United States for those who have been educated by the flicker of Hollywood is a very short book. No one in Saigon bothered to read the footnotes; they were too busy looking at the pictures. Boiling Spring, North Carolina is a footnote that I wished to God my parents had read before setting forth to this place that had not changed since the Civil War. (41-42) The passage is striking both for the ironic humor of its portrayal of an American landscape seen through the distorted lens of Hollywood’s exported fantasies, and for the complete lack of nostalgia with which it evokes the country Thuy Mai has had to leave behind. In her letter, Viet Nam does not appear as the original site of a lost cultural or historical past; instead, the only memories associated with her homeland are of cinematic “lessons” reflecting an imagined America. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Thuy Mai’s narrative of displacement is the absence of any explicit mention of the historical events that pushed her



leaves of the white oaks that stand guard around Boiling Spring’s town square. It has been four years since I’ve written to remind you of our bond. . . . I’ll tell our story from the beginning less [sic] we forget and let all that pain slip underneath the leaves of the white oaks. (41)

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family out of Viet Nam and into the unread footnote of Boiling Spring. “Kelly” does not seek to recount the horrors of war, nor is it a story designed to feed what Thomas A. DuBois has called “the American fascination for refugee escape narratives” (5). This is not to say that history plays no role in Thuy Mai’s searing depiction of the American South and “its fine and hospitable families” (42); indeed, historical traces appear throughout the text, from repeated references to the American Civil War to the naming of Amerigo Vespucci as the subject of the library book over which Thuy Mai and Kelly meet. On a more explicit level, historical narratives play a crucial role in a passage that recalls the perils of an elementary school classroom: Kelly, remember how Mrs. Hammerick talked about Veterans [sic] Day? How about the Day of Infamy when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor? . . . You have to know that all the while she was teaching us history she was telling, with her language for the deaf, blind and dumb; she was telling all the boys in our class that I was Pearl and my last name was Harbor. (42) In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe offers a compelling reading of this scene as one in which Thuy Mai is subject to “simultaneous indictment and silencing . . . within a classroom regulated by an American nationalist projection of the Asian as enemy.” Mrs. Hammerick’s racist and nationalist gaze registers Thuy Mai’s foreign body as a marker of undifferentiated Asian otherness, resulting in what Lowe describes as “a conflation of the Viet Cong and the Japanese that naturalizes American neocolonialism in Vietnam through the appeal to a nationalist historical narrative about World War II” (Lowe 55; emphasis in original).3 The patriotic remembering of the bombing of Pearl Harbor serves to construct a nationalist historical frame within which the moral ambiguities of more recent American military conflicts may safely be contained; at the same time, it enables Mrs. Hammerick to suggest that the presence of the Vietnamese immigrant student in her classroom should be understood as another Asian attack on American territory. Thuy Mai’s retrospective understanding of this pedagogical gesture—one that pulls her identity back into a history that is simultaneously brought forward to redefine her current status—is expressed in simple but powerful terms: “Pearl Harbor was not just in 1941 but in 1975.” Confronted with Mrs. Hammerick’s menacing pedagogy, Thuy Mai is gripped with terror. “I was scared of her like no dark corners could ever scare me,” she recalls, describing the fear that “throbbed and throbbed” in her stomach and grew out of her awareness of the xenophobic violence lurking behind her teacher’s stirring evocation of “the glory of the good old Red, White and Blue.” Thuy Mai senses that she has no more place in Mrs. Hammerick’s classroom than she does in her teacher’s historical narrative of American national identity: “I knew, Kelly, that she wanted to take me outside and whip my behind with that paddle with Boiling Spring Elementary School printed on it in black letters” (42). Hers is the foreign body that must be held apart, taken “outside” where it belongs, and beaten into its proper role as the vanquished Asian enemy.4



YOU DON’T KNOW THIS

Karl Ashoka Britto

Mrs. Hammerick’s lesson constructs Thuy Mai as an alien invader even as it “forgets,” or fails to acknowledge, America’s participation in the shared history that has displaced the latter from Saigon to Boiling Spring. This pedagogy of omission manages to teach a history that remains unspoken, and to resignify her student’s Vietnamese identity without ever having named it as such. On one level, Thuy Mai’s letter seems to reflect this discursive lack, insofar as it draws no explicit links between her presence in Boiling Spring and the historical events that led to her family’s exile and resettlement. At the same time, however, the larger historical context within which Thuy Mai’s narrative unfolds is clearly suggested, both through her mention of Saigon and through the specificity with which she situates her arrival in the summer of 1975—a period during which tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees found themselves in the United States following the fall of South Viet Nam. This historical backdrop emerges obliquely, unwritten yet legible to readers attentive to the significance of such textual details. In a fundamental sense, the narrative impact of Truong’s story arises precisely from this tension between history and forgetting, from the unsettled interplay between recognition and erasure. This crucial aspect of the text cannot be fully grasped without a closer analysis of the relationship between Thuy Mai and her addressee. For if we, as “Kelly”’s readers, recognize the history behind Thuy Mai’s story, the same may not be true for her own reader—Kelly herself. In the following section, I will turn to the epistolary bond linking these two characters in order to examine the complex ways in which their shared history remains trapped within a structure of memory and repudiation that echoes the pedagogical dynamic described above. The Burden of Memory In her analysis of “Kelly,” Lowe describes the relationship between Thuy Mai and her addressee as one which allows for the production of a field of memory in which the fear and pain of childhood is offset by the pleasures afforded by the epistolary bond: . . . . Truong’s story is an epistolary fiction addressed to one of the narrator’s few friends within that classroom, a white female student named Kelly. Although the classroom is remembered as a site of pain, the retrospective renarration of that pain, not as individually suffered, but as a shared topos between writer and addressee, is in contrast a source of new pleasure and a differently discovered sense of community. (55) According to Lowe, it is the “intersubjective relationality between the narrator and Kelly” that emerges as a crucial form of opposition to the oppressive pedagogy of Mrs. Hammerick, as well as to the cultural codes that exclude Asian and overweight bodies from the realm of normative American femininity. In response to the “distinct, yet overlapping dynamics of power and powerlessness” that seek



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to reduce Kelly and Thuy Mai to the fat girl and the freak, the girls “form courageous bridges across distinct lines of opportunity and restriction” (55). While attentive to the complexity of Truong’s portrayal of Boiling Spring’s uneven social landscape, this analysis does not account for the many ways in which the text troubles precisely the sense of “intersubjective relationality” upon which such a celebratory reading depends. Portraying the girls’ friendship as a bond of solidarity forged in Mrs. Hammerick’s classroom,5 Lowe minimizes the extent to which Thuy Mai distinguishes between the terror she experienced as the object of her teacher’s racist anger and the awkwardness felt by the overweight Kelly: I don’t think you ever knew the anger that lay underneath that beehive of Mrs. Hammerick. Kelly, you only knew that she liked the Beths and the Susans cause they wore pink and never bulged and buckled out of their shirt plackets. I was scared of her like no dark corners could ever scare me. (42) When the girls first meet in the library, moreover, Thuy Mai seems no less shattered by Kelly’s racist gaze than by that of Mrs. Hammerick. The young Vietnamese immigrant is reduced—just as she was in the classroom—to a racially marked body whose meaning is resignified, and whose history is overwritten by a narrative that robs her of any proper subjectivity: . . . . I saw your brown eyes staring at me and I knew you thought I should be smelling up that place like I was trash on a ninety degree day. It would take years to figure it all out. When people like you looked at me and my yellow skin, you didn’t see color you saw dirt, and I was a walking pile of it confronting you between the library aisles. You know, I dropped my eyes and then pretended to look for them around my feet. (43) Facing Kelly’s staring eyes, the narrator drops her own in a gesture that is rendered curiously literal through the language of her retrospective account. The passage evokes a disturbing sense of loss and bodily disintegration, foregrounded through the image of Thuy Mai’s Asian eyes, markers of difference so racially overdetermined that they seem to signify on their own, severed from any context by the force of Kelly’s gaze. Elsewhere in the story, Thuy Mai comments on the fascination her eyes seem to hold for the children of a poor family who invite her into their home: “I think they were watching my eyes to see if I could open them up any wider than they were already.” To the extent that the relationship between Thuy Mai and Kelly does evolve over the course of the story, a turning point may be located during the birthday party at which both girls find themselves exiled to the kitchen and excluded from their classmate Jennifer’s tea party. The narrator recalls this scene of shared humiliation as one that alters the dynamics of Kelly’s gaze; significantly, the shift is marked by yet another reference to Thuy Mai’s




Karl Ashoka Britto

eyes: “Kelly, that was when you stopped looking at my eyes waiting for them to do something they could never do.” If this moment can be read as one of identification that pushes Kelly toward a recognition of Thuy Mai as something other than the embodiment of racial otherness, it also calls into question the notion of the girls’ intersubjective relationality as a bridge forged out of opposition or active resistance to forms of discrimination. As the narrator portrays the scene, the bond appears less courageous than contingent, and whatever comfort the connection may afford is overwhelmed by the pain of exclusion from Jennifer’s world of privilege and frilly luxury: “I never felt as much longing, it hurts even more than the sight of blooming daffodils now, as when I saw her bed with its yellow and white lace” (46).6 In considering the nature of the girls’ friendship, my intent is not to deny its transgressive status within the context of Boiling Spring, nor to minimize its impact on the young narrator. However fragile their past connection may be, it is clearly important enough for Thuy Mai to continue writing to Kelly years after leaving Boiling Spring. But just as their childhood relationship is more ambivalent than Lowe’s analysis would acknowledge, so too are the dynamics underlying their subsequent epistolary bond more complex and troubling. Indeed, I would argue that Truong’s story is devastating in large part because of the gap between our expectations of the epistolary genre as one which highlights intersubjective communication and exchange, and the experience of reading a letter that subverts those expectations through repeated references to the one-sidedness of the relationship. Far from offering “a source of new pleasure and a differently discovered sense of community” (Lowe, Immigrant Acts 55), the letter underscores the burden of memory and the fundamental lack of communication between writer and addressee. Within the first three paragraphs of her letter, Thuy Mai refers no less than 5 times to memory and/or forgetting, explicitly positioning herself as the bearer of a painful history that she and Kelly “would rather let lie under the leaves of the white oaks that stand guard around Boiling Spring’s town square.” Even as she acknowledges the extent to which she participates in this desire to forget, the narrator proceeds with her act of remembrance, which is quickly situated within an ongoing series of letters: “It has been four years since I have written to remind you of our bond. Have you noticed that each of these letters has been written in the sweet and early days of spring?” (41). The letter makes no indication that this work of memory is a shared process. No response from Kelly is ever mentioned; on the contrary, Thuy Mai’s narrative contains a number of asides that emphasize both the ambivalence of the girls’ relationship, as noted above, and the adult narrator’s frustration at her continued but fruitless attempts to engage her former friend in a conversation about their past. In the most striking of these comments, Thuy Mai expresses her sense that Kelly has turned away from her and the past she represents: “Sometimes, I feel like I’m the only one left talking and writing about us. Sometimes, I know you’re wearing some pretty dark glasses hoping that I won’t recognize that you were the fat girl and that I was your friend” (43).7 The scene of acknowledgement and recognition that occurs at the birthday



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party includes a moment where the gaze between Kelly and Thuy Mai is mutually, if briefly, sustained. In the encounter imagined in the passage above, that gaze has been severed, but now it is not Thuy Mai who drops her eyes; rather, it is Kelly who hides her own behind “pretty dark glasses” and hopes not to be recognized. Clearly, Truong’s story calls for an analysis open not only to the potential solidarity between the girls, but also to the peculiar and shifting dynamics of their relationship. In the final section of this essay, I will read “Kelly” differently, attempting to understand more fully the ambivalence of the childhood friendship as well as the unequally borne burden of memory that haunts the text’s one-sided epistolary form. The Fat Girl and the Freak In “Encounters with the Racial Shadow,” the second chapter of Reading Asian American Literature, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong considers the motif of the double as it functions in a number of Asian American literary texts. Her discussion offers an intriguing series of observations, and provides the framework for a reconsideration of the relationship around which Truong constructs her story. Although the double has been analyzed extensively in critical studies of canonical Euro-American literature, Wong argues that the insights offered by this scholarship are “inadequate for bringing out the distinctness of instances of the double in Asian American literature” (78). The point, she contends, is not to reject traditional analyses, which tend to focus on such psychological processes as repression and projection, but rather to understand how these processes might be shaped by the particular sociohistorical circumstances of Asian American writers. “Despite widespread disagreement on many other theoretical issues,” Wong writes, “students of the double are remarkably consistent on one point: the central role of psychological ‘disowning’ in the formation of the double” (82; italics in original). With its emphasis upon the charged and ambiguous relationship between the self and its repudiated shadow, between sameness and difference, a concept of the double that centers around disowning allows for the consideration of a greater variety of textual manifestations than would be possible within the context of a more restrictive definition.8 In the case of Asian American and other minority texts, however, the uncovering of psychological disowning cannot in itself account for the full range of circumstances underlying the formation of literary doubles. As Wong points out, the very terms around which analyses of canonical doubles are constructed may signify quite differently for readers and writers of minority literatures: . . . . for a marginalized group, the terms that figure so prominently in existing scholarship, such as “personality,” “the civilized self,” or “antisocial tendencies,” have never been neutral or unmarked. American minorities have never had the power to define their own “personality” or the full freedom to participate in the “society” or “civilization” in which they find themselves.




Karl Ashoka Britto

The psychological dynamics at work in the relationship between the marginalized subject and its disowned double are complicated by sociohistorical factors that must be addressed in any attempt to answer what Wong terms “the crucial question: ‘Precisely what, in any specific version of the double, has been disowned, and why?’” (85; italics in original). The double cannot be understood simply as a literary device that gives external form to an internal conflict between the self and its own repressed, “antisocial” otherness; indeed, the very categories that would allow for such a reading must be interrogated. Wong’s discussion, which focuses on Chinese American and Japanese American literature,9 situates the dynamic of disowning within an understanding of the process of becoming “American.” The tension between the Asian American self and its double, she argues, turns around a disproportionate awareness of unequal levels of assimilation to the dominant culture. Pursuing this idea, Wong reads the disturbing relationship between the narrator of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and the quiet Chinese girl she torments as an instance of Asian American doubling: In her conscious mind, she considers herself more assimilated than her victim. . . . But of course Maxine’s sense of superiority is imaginary. . . . However scrupulously she insists on her difference, the larger society will not bother to distinguish between the two . . . she will never be accepted as a member of the dominant group. Being of Chinese descent, she will always be Other. . . . The quiet girl represents that residue of racial difference, which dooms Chinese Americans to a position of inferiority in a racist society. (89) Wong’s analysis highlights race as the crucial element that is projected onto the repudiated double: the quiet girl functions as a despised “racial shadow” precisely because she embodies an irreducible corporeal difference from white American standards. This difference, which marks both girls, must be repudiated by the narrator as that which throws into question her personal narrative of successful assimilation. How might this discussion of the double in Asian American literature illuminate a reading of Truong’s Vietnamese American text? What are the particular sociohistorical circumstances that could inform an analysis that designates Kelly and Thuy Mai’s peculiar bond as a manifestation of the relationship between a self and its repudiated double? Can the theoretical model of the “racial shadow” be applied usefully to a text about a Vietnamese immigrant and a white American? Strictly speaking, the response to this last question must be negative; it is, after all, the racial difference between the girls that sets the terms for their initial encounter. But what if we were to think of racism in a more abstract fashion, as a discourse that assigns privileged or devalued attributes to individuals based upon “corporeal significations [that] supposedly speak a truth which the body inherently means” (Weigman 4)? Without wishing to claim that the childhood experiences of Thuy Mai and Kelly are in any way identical, I would argue that



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Truong’s story invites us to consider the “fat girl and the freak” as occupying analogous positions within an oppressive system that relegates them both, as “deviant” bodies, to the realm of the abject. It is precisely this shared corporeal deviation that draws the girls together in Boiling Spring: to use Thuy Mai’s own language, she and Kelly are “entwined,” twisted together like a doubled thread. Following the lines of Wong’s discussion, I would further claim that the subsequent epistolary bond between the two characters may be read as a variation upon the self-double relationship in which Thuy Mai writes from the place of the disowned double.10 She is the freak who refuses to remain silent but whose voice is ignored by the erstwhile friend who now prefers to hide—or so Thuy Mai imagines—behind her pretty dark glasses. Although the knowing gaze of the freak still carries an unnerving force that threatens to unmask the former fat girl, it would seem that Kelly has been able to assimilate successfully, precisely because the corporeal difference that marked her as a child was not fixed or immutable. Over the years, she has been able to reform her “deviant” body, and in so doing, to bury her painful history “underneath the leaves of the white oaks” (41). This buried history, however, rests uneasily; the ghost of the past can only be contained through a willful act of forgetting, a refusal to recognize her double’s repeated calls to memory. If Kelly has been able to create a present in which her past is forgotten, Thuy Mai is unable to abandon their shared history: “you and I are still entwined,” she writes, “in a childhood we would rather forget” (41). The temporal structure of her letter, in which she shifts back and forth from childhood to the moment of writing, reflects her ongoing negotiation with the past and occasionally produces odd turns of phrase: “You see, didn’t you, that I was yellow . . .” (43). The narrator’s body, unlike that of her former friend, remains the “deviant” site upon which histories have been and will continue to be written; confronted with racist and nationalist discourses that seek to name her and to resignify her past, Thuy Mai has no option but to perform the painful, ongoing work of memory. Even when that work is repudiated, each letter that she sends bears a history that she has written, and closes with a name that she has signed herself. The preceding analysis opens the way for an understanding of Truong’s story not only as a work of Asian American literature, but as a specifically Vietnamese American text. Considered in light of the sociohistorical circumstances of the displaced Vietnamese population, Kelly’s disavowal of the girls’ past emerges as one manifestation of a far more widespread dynamic, and may be read as a different version of Mrs. Hammerick’s “forgetting” of the shared history that brought Thuy Mai into her classroom. In her discussion of texts produced by Vietnamese refugee writers, Renny Christopher comments upon the difficulties these authors face as they seek to alter the terms of Euro-American perspectives and historical narratives: One way Vietnamese refugee works attempt this project is in their insistence on the intertwining of the shared past and shared future destinies of Viet Nam and America. While Euro-Americans tend to see the Viet Nam




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When Vietnamese American authors are allowed to participate in the construction of American cultural memory, Truong remarks in an essay on Vietnamese American literature, their texts run the risk of being transformed into “fragments of American popular culture and in the process [being] codified . . . into a definitive Vietnamese American perspective of the Vietnamese Conflict” (“Vietnamese American Literature” 237). “Kelly” offers no such perspective, and provides no definitive story of war and escape that could be folded into an American national narrative. Instead, the text exposes the dynamics of misrecognition and disavowal that threaten Vietnamese Americans of Truong’s generation. In the wake of Mrs. Hammerick’s violence and despite Kelly’s continued silence, Thuy Mai will tell her story again and again, even as she offers her reader no comforting sense of definitive knowledge: “You don’t know this,” she writes, “but I keep telling you that the summer of 1975 was earth shattering” (42). Notes 1. My use of the term “abjection” is informed by Judith Butler’s discussion, in Bodies That Matter, of the materialization of regulatory norms: “The abject designates here precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject” (3). 2. For an historical overview of these and other themes in Asian American literature, see Elaine H. Kim’s groundbreaking volume, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. For a number of reasons, both pragmatic and personal, Kim chose not to include Vietnamese American literature in this work; for the purposes of her study, she defined Asian American literature as “published creative writings in English by Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino descent” (xi). While acknowledging the usefulness of Kim’s analyses, Truong has argued that some of her claims about Asian American literature—particularly those that depend upon a chronological narrative of “implicitly positive progression” toward Asian American literary self-representation—need to be rethought in light of writings by and about newer Asian American ethnic groups (“The reception of Robert Olin Butler” 79). 3. As Renny Christopher points out in The Viet Nam War/The American War, such troubling conflations frequently arise in American discussions of the war in Viet Nam: “the 1940s rhetoric of race war in the Pacific is often dropped whole onto the war in Viet Nam, contributing to the obscuring of the specific realities of Viet Nam by replacing them with a generic U.S. racism directed toward all Asians” (5). 4. The institutional link between pedagogy and violence is clearly reflected in the instrument of this potential punishment: the paddle that threatens violent contact not only with a piece of wood, but also with the name of the school, the very inscription of pedagogical authority. With each blow, the black letters strike the errant student, rewriting her identity in accordance with an institutionally sanctioned narrative. 5. Oddly, Lowe mis-cites Truong’s story in support of her argument that the classroom functions as the original space out of which the girls’ friendship emerges, and from which the shared topos of remembered pain is drawn: “The narrator writes: ‘I guess it was Mrs. Hammerick’s books that brought you and me together . . . ’” (Immigrant Acts 55). The original text of the passage in question reads somewhat differently, and makes no reference to Mrs. Hammerick: “But I guess it was her books that brought you and me together.” In the context of the letter, the antecedent of the



War as being “about” America, Vietnamese refugee writers show it to be “about” both Viet Nam and America, together. . . . Their goal is to explain the shared history to a U.S. audience from the point of view of the Vietnamese. So far, the U.S. audience has not been very good at listening. (36-37; italics added)11

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

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possessive pronoun “her” seems not to be Thuy Mai’s teacher but her mother, “who ha[s] her head in books” and takes her daughter to the library where she and Kelly meet (43). The miscitation appears both in Lowe’s Immigrant Acts chapter and in an earlier version published as an essay in The Ethnic Canon (63). Given the racial distinctions that structure life in Boiling Spring, the colors evoked in this passage may reflect another form of longing on the part of the young Thuy Mai, who identifies herself as “yellow” and as having “yellow skin” elsewhere in the story (43). On a symbolic level, the “yellow and white lace” of Jennifer’s bed can be read not only as an image of racial integration, but also as one that recuperates yellowness from the abject realm represented by the pile of dirt mentioned in the passage discussed above. Writing about “Kelly,” Truong herself has emphasized the lack of clear reciprocity in the epistolary relationship: “I attempt to insinuate that Kelly is a hesitant if not unwilling participant in this remembering ritual. . . . I hope the reader can imagine, through the narrative ellipsis, that Kelly is no longer the fat girl but whoever is writing to her is still the freak” (“Notes to ‘Dear Kelly’” 48). Examples of more restrictive definitions of literary doubles include those that would require an eerie or uncanny element and those that include only narratives featuring exact replicas of the sort found in Poe’s “William Wilson” (Wong 83-84). The authors figuring most prominently in Wong’s analysis are Maxine Hong Kingston, Monica Sone, Lonny Kaneko, Ashley Sheun Dunn, and David Henry Hwang. While it may seem odd to consider the narrator of Truong’s story the double rather than the self, this sort of unusual “variant of the racial shadow” (a variant in which the double is not “seen solely from the outside”) may be found elsewhere in Asian American literature, as Wong points out in her discussion of David Henry Hwang’s 1979 play FOB (108). James W. Tollefson makes a similar point in a discussion of Indochinese refugees and American memory, noting “America’s refusal to listen” and “America’s ability to ignore Southeast Asians” (275).







Van Cam Hai

Vietnamese rivers are often contemplative cloud levels of memories slurp the sad grass a mouthful of blue river on the body convulsed with laughter bomb craters reflect back at the sun from high above a tongue wanders her language is a tireless light spread evenly, in spite of the sleepwalking rain, the roof of a church, a pier, a dry log like death leaning against your porch my pain does not have a flowering or fruit-bearing season night barks at a face with countless pimples a rose holds a gun my heart a flame-blowing tube a time when words fall asleep drunk next to the wood-burning stove a hand spits out a well-chewed death expression my brother’s previous life a blind tv still I watch till the end of the card game a cigarette burns a naked body a car collapses on its knees having won the eternity prize even if someone does howl a dirge tomorrow O my scent don’t you borrow from a deficit To the rivers is added a little sister’s waist filled with the self-confidence to seduce the map of the world. Translated by Linh Dinh



The Rivers Have Not Only Me





Protest in front of Bowers Museum of Cultural Art during the Vietnamese art exhibit “A Winding River,” Santa Ana, California, June 1999. Photographer: Jerry Gorman.


Nora A. Taylor

Recent arguments concerning the influence of globalization and postnationalism in Southeast Asia have concluded that local cultural expressions are now irreversibly outward-looking and that the nation no longer holds the significance that it did in a postcolonial world.1 In light of the recent developments in artistic production in Vietnam, however, I would agree with Wendy Mee and others that, to the contrary, the influx of global trends has in some ways created “nations” within and outside of Southeast Asia.2 This is certainly true of painting in Vietnam, which increasingly has been used as a tool for expressing national identity. As foreigners pour into Vietnam to buy art, Vietnamese artists are increasingly putting the nation onto the canvas—or at least what passes as that nation in the eyes of foreigners. But as artists within Vietnam use art as a vehicle for iterating self-consciousness, Vietnamese artists abroad challenge their account of Vietnamese identity and argue that the nation extends itself beyond the borders of Vietnam. As they see it, to be Vietnamese is not merely to live in Vietnam, if it is even that: it is also to be part of a more global expression of Vietnameseness that is not confined to the borders of Vietnam, the country, but rather is part of a new and freer definition of Vietnamese identity. These artists insist that only when they are abroad can they truly be themselves and truly be Vietnamese. But what does this mean? Vietnamese painters abroad, and one in particular, Tran Trong Vu, are responding to Vietnam’s participation in the global market by redefining what it means to be Vietnamese. They vocalize the anxieties and historical crises that have accompanied the Vietnamese identity of their countrymen. Vu, in particular, has chosen to speak up and speak out about the burden of being Vietnamese both within Vietnam and in France, where he lives. While his fellow painters in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City insert waterfalls, lotus ponds, and beautiful women into their works as a way to both appear more “Vietnamese” and contradict the State’s view of the nation as comprised of women bearing arms and farmers in the fields, Vu is creating installations that include toilets



Raindrops on Red Flags:Tran Trong Vu and the Roots of Vietnamese Painting Abroad

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and sheets of rain. His works are about what it means to be Asian and Vietnamese in a global world. But are his works any more or less Vietnamese than theirs? And why do artists feel compelled to subject their work to such definitions?

In recent years, the international art market has seen an influx of art works from Vietnam. Exhibitions in galleries in New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore, along with museum exhibits in California, Australia, and Japan, as well as highly profiled auctions of twentieth-century Vietnamese paintings at Sotheby’s and Christie’s have clearly placed contemporary Vietnamese painters on the map of the art world. As a result of the increase in prices and the attention that Vietnamese artists have received since international art collectors began to take notice of them, artists in Vietnam have come to illustrate the economic and social benefits of the governmental renovation policy known as Doi Moi. Made official in 1986, this policy opened the Vietnamese economy to the world market and gave incentives to individual entrepreneurs to start businesses and challenge the state monopoly on the production of goods. Doi Moi policies also led to loosened governmental control over artistic and cultural modes of production. Often attributed to Doi Moi policies, Vietnamese art’s current prosperity is presented in brochures and catalogues aimed at the international art collecting community as marking a decisive step toward freedom of expression and democracy in Vietnam. However, the kind of art produced under Doi Moi is less a barometer of any political change taking place in Vietnam than it is an indication of the establishment of a capitalist art market economy in that country. Aware of the cash potential of appealing to foreign buyers, Vietnamese artists have been painting subjects that depict a view of Vietnam attractive to non-Vietnamese. Reminiscent of the Orientalist traditions of colonial painters in Indochina in the earlier part of the twentieth century, recent artists have been proliferating romantic views of Hanoi, women in Ao Dai,3 scenes of the countryside, local fruit and architecture, and other such so-called native themes in the name of “Vietnamese” painting. As I have pointed out elsewhere, these imaginings of Vietnam through the medium of paint legitimate Vietnam as an “exotic” Asian travel destination, which outsiders are invited to perceive as permanently located in a romantic idealized past that no longer exists in the eyes of the Vietnamese themselves.4 While the foreign clientele has been shaping the kind of art that is produced in Vietnam for the past decade, art critics and art historians in Vietnam are reluctant to judge artists as having “sold out” to the international art market. Instead, art historical writings coming out of Vietnam continue to see the evolution of Vietnamese painting as an indication of the strengthening of a national identity. Perpetuating the ideologies of the anticolonial movement of the 1940s, which saw art as a tool for expressing Vietnamese independence, contemporary art historians continue to assess Vietnamese art on the basis of its ability to portray that which is Vietnamese about Vietnamese art. Albeit some-



The Vietnamese Art Market

Nora A.Taylor

what vague, Vietnameseness is loosely defined in art as an expression of the purportedly “beautiful” characteristics of the country: landscapes and women being its most popular manifestations.5 This is not to say that there is no critical assessment of current developments in art in Hanoi on the part of contemporary art historians. But that city’s art historians and artists alike are hesitant to impose a negative or cynical tone to the situation lest they jinx the welcome economic boom that art has afforded it. For them, the association of art and identity is a way of securing strong ties between artists, art historians, and the political establishment, while also ensuring that artists reap all the economic benefits from the international interests. Because they are no longer part of the art community within Vietnam, Vietnamese artists living abroad, on the other hand, do not feel obliged to conform to this association of scenic beauty and Vietnamese identity. Indeed, although their relation to the market is very much tied to the interest in Vietnamese painting by foreigners to Vietnam, they respond to it quite differently. In this essay, I will examine the ways in which Vietnamese artists abroad, and painter Tran Trong Vu in particular, are challenging the ways in which the notion of Vietnamese identity has been defined in Vietnam by artists and art historians. Going against the commercial nature of art produced for the foreign market in Vietnam, these artists abroad are joining other Southeast Asian artists in the diaspora in finding a voice through non-object art.6 Tran Trong Vu Born in Hanoi in 1962, Tran Trong Vu graduated first in his class at the Hanoi School of Fine Arts in 1987. In 1989, he received a scholarship to study painting at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he has stayed ever since. Vu was among the select few young Hanoi artists to participate in the first major exhibition of post-Doi Moi painting outside of Vietnam at the Plum Blossoms gallery in Hong Kong in 1991.7 This exposure gave him visibility in the international art scene and earned him immediate popularity among collectors and art critics in Hong Kong. While he welcomed the income from the sales of his paintings, his response to his popularity was different from his fellow Hanoi painters. In fact, Vu had left Vietnam in part to escape attention. His father, one of the most well-known dissident writers from the 1950s, had been blacklisted from the Writers Association Publishing House. Having inherited his father’s reclusiveness, Vu did not move to France to earn an international reputation as a painter. He left to free himself of his father’s burden of silence. Dubbed a young star of the Hanoi art scene shortly after arriving in Paris, he felt more uncomfortable than proud. Weary of his government’s reaction to citizens receiving international acclaim, he did not always welcome the attention. During years of economic and political isolation, Vietnam did not encourage artists to stray from state-sponsored art programs. Artists were to receive recognition internally from the governing body of art associations. Artists who appeared to emphasize their individual talents outside of state-sponsored institutions were not looked upon kindly. Art was part of the collective spirit rather than an orig-



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inal enterprise. Nonetheless, Vu’s shyness and quiet nature only made his works more desirable. In putting together its 1991 exhibition, Plum Blossoms, a gallery specializing in contemporary Chinese art (among other things), capitalized on Vietnam’s relative seclusion from the art world and chose artists who seemed to go against the grain of Socialist Realist art—art, that is, that served the ideologies of the state in glorifying workers and peasants. Accompanied by an elaborate hardcover catalogue, the exhibition was an instant success. For years following the exhibition, collectors of Vietnamese art came to Hanoi and to Ho Chi Minh City looking for works by the artists featured in the catalogue, the first effort to assemble a portrait of Vietnam’s top painters and the only guide available to potential clients of Vietnamese art. In retrospect, this catalogue’s repercussions were not always positive. The artists featured in it were instantly favored by the international community, sometimes for no other reason than the fact that they had been included in the show. And yet, as Stephen McGuinness, Director of Plum Blossoms acknowledged, some artists appeared in the show quite serendipitously, often because of a recommendation by a Vietnamese contact. As he admitted, the selection process was not as intellectually or critically informed as it would have been had there been more Vietnamese art works on the market: “I was really operating in the dark and relied heavily on my Vietnamese informant’s ‘taste,’ connections or preferences.”8 At the same time, however, the Plum Blossoms catalogue also had unexpectedly positive consequences. It single-handedly introduced a new kind of Vietnamese painting to the international public, and the sales for Vietnamese art have risen astronomically ever since. It set the standards and established itself as a necessary step for Vietnamese painters’ entry into the art world. It nonetheless remains interesting that a catalogue put together by a Hong Kong gallery, rather than anything printed in Vietnam, has come to represent a guide to “Vietnamese Art.” Its provenance demonstrates the complexities of who sets the standards for authenticating art and proves the degree to which, in this case at least, the foreign community places trust in foreign institutions rather than in any Vietnamese standard. Vu’s inclusion in the Plum Blossoms exhibition certainly enabled him to sell his paintings at a high price early in his career. But the fact that he lived outside of Vietnam also gave him a disadvantage over his co-exhibitors. After the U.S. embargo was lifted in 1994, foreigners poured into Vietnam to buy art. Art galleries popped up throughout Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and artists sold works for ever higher prices faster than they could make them. No one was going to France to look for Vietnamese art. Ironically, the only way Vu could sell his work was if he shipped it home to be exhibited in one of the new Hanoi galleries.9 The art world in Vietnam is very much connected to the influx of foreign tourists into the country. This connection has been viewed critically by Vu and other Vietnamese artists living outside of Vietnam who feel that artists in Vietnam are catering to these “tourists” in ways that seem incompatible with the kinds of artistic exchanges in which other artists in the world are engaged. Vu’s paintings from that period appealed to foreigners primarily because of their subject matter. He painted scenes with single or dual figures engaged in



RAINDROPS

Nora A.Taylor

simple activities that make up daily life in Hanoi: a woman selling flowers, a street acrobat, a man sitting on a stool sipping tea. Although his figures rarely smiled, but instead looked lonely or melancholy, his paintings were colorful and appeared cheerful. Jeffrey Hantover called his work “alluring, mysterious and colorful” (Uncorked Soul 185). The theme of the loneliness of city life had already been captured by the artist Bui Xuan Phai (1923-1988), who worked during the colonial period and struggled thereafter to earn a living as an artist in a period when food was scarce, let alone art supplies. Posthumously, after Doi Moi, Phai became one of the international community’s most sought-after painters. As one Hanoi art critic explained, “The best selling artist in Vietnam today is a dead one.”10 In a previous paper, I have argued that Bui Xuan Phai paintings of desolate street scenes appeal to an international audience because they capture a Vietnam that in their view no longer exists.11 In an ironic shift of cultural values, the foreign community in Hanoi has begun to display signs of “nostalgia” for the city’s past, a past that does not include them because it refers to a time when there were no foreigners in Hanoi. But it is a past that has been imagined only by them, for Vietnamese feel no sentimental longing for the years between colonialism and the present. In contrast to the nostalgic relation to the past entertained by the French, especially, which Panivong Norindr describes as nostalgia for the colony, this nostalgia for the wartime years or for an imaginary past is located in no real historical time.12 Vu’s paintings coincide with those sentiments of longing for a preindustrial or precommunist Vietnam expressed by foreigners. Western viewers locate themselves in these paintings and recognize the residues of colonialism in their images of houses with shutters or of bicycles going by. But trapped in a romanticized view of Vietnam that refers only to the memory of the pain caused by foreigners, these viewers forget what the city of Hanoi means to the locals. They disregard the fact that artists may be genuinely feeling pain or anguish in a way that does not refer to outsiders at all. In fact, Vu and others have repeatedly referred to their own “feelings” and their own personal views of the world around them. So doing, they are referring to the present, not to some remote past that exists in the eyes of Westerners. Artists painting after Doi Moi in the late 1980s were attractive to foreigners in another way. They seemed to capture a “new” Vietnam; a Vietnam that was not about Communism, but that reflected an individual spirit and a yearning for a sense of belonging to the outside world. It was not uncommon to hear artists refer to themselves as the Vietnamese Van Goghs and the Hanoi Picassos. Many of these young artists caught the attention of a foreign clientele because their works looked “foreign” but, at the same time, had a Vietnamese flavor. I was once told that Vietnamese painting “looks French but feels Vietnamese.”13 Although Vu’s works seemed to fit into this category of Vietnamese art made to look French, and although his works appealed to their clientele’s “nostalgia” for the past, it is crucial to remember that Vu created these works not in Vietnam, but while he was living in France. As a result, they can be interpreted much more literally than his buyers assumed. Perhaps they conveyed nostalgia because they captured Vu’s own longing for his homeland. Perhaps they looked



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“French” because he may have been unconsciously influenced by French painting since moving to France. What collectors of his works failed to recognize or seemed to ignore was the fact that Vu was already attempting at this time to depart from the ways in which Vietnameseness had been defined in Vietnam in relation to art. Paradoxically, they were buying works of art that seemed to epitomize Vietnam from an artist who was consciously rejecting his background. Captivated by stories of starving artists and repressed genius, buyers of Vietnamese art often delude themselves into thinking that the artists whose works they are buying are trapped by their fate and unaware of the world outside of Vietnam.14 They don’t seem to understand the degree to which artists in Vietnam are both in control of their destinies and able to manipulate the market to their advantage. If the client wants lonely streets, then artists are happy to paint them. Money is a very big draw for artists in Vietnam right now: it would be misleading to suggest that every work produced by artists today is the result of the unleashing of repressed creativity. As a result of the increased popularity of Vietnamese art in international salesrooms, Vu began to change his style and find his own way. He spent a few years experimenting with three-dimensional installations before finally finding a voice in early 1997. The catalyst for the definitive change in his work was his father’s death that January. As he returned to Hanoi to tend to his father’s funeral, Vu was interrogated at the airport for several hours before being released. This encounter was crucial to the trajectory his art has taken over the past three years. It was then that he realized that the anguish that his father had suffered forty years earlier would not disappear with his death. Vu suddenly realized that it was his destiny to speak out for his father and not let his father’s spirit die with his body. He spent most of his time in Hanoi looking through his father’s papers and the unpublished works that lay hidden under his bed in his home in Hanoi. Much to his surprise, he discovered not only that his father had written far more than he had suspected, but that he had been a visual artist, too. Vu found dozens of drawings and sketches by his father of which he had had no prior knowledge. Learning more about his father inspired Vu to carry his father’s quest for truth in art into his own work. Tran Dan’s Raindrops Vu is the youngest son of the writer Tran Dan, who had had a promising career as a young man. He started publishing poems at the age of nineteen, and by thirty he had published a major novel: Nguoi nguoi lop lop (People, People, Wave, Wave). In 1948 he joined the army and the Communist Party. He remained a militant Party member until the winter of 1955-56, when he published a poem in the journal Giai Pham. That journal was subsequently banned, and the writers who contributed to it were denied access to official resources for writers. Punished more severely still, Tran Dan was sent to jail several times for refusing to confess his “errors” in portraying a negative image of the Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu and for writing the word Nguoi (man/person) with a capital N in his poem “Nhat Dinh Thang” (Certain Victory). Tran Dan has been at



RAINDROPS

Nora A.Taylor

the center of so much controversy that his political life has been well documented by Western scholars. He is less well known in Vietnam today among young writers who have not seen his writing in print, as it was banned forty years ago, before many of them were born.15 If Tran Dan’s dissidence has been the subject of numerous studies, his influence on his son is less well known. And yet, Vu’s works are in many ways the visual manifestations of his father’s writings; he has become his father’s vocal or “visual” cords. Vu’s debt to his father is most evident in the installation that he made for a 1999 exhibit in Germany. In this installation, “La Chambre Pluviale” (The Rain Room), Vu hung from the ceiling sheets of transparent plastic on which he painted black lines simulating raindrops. Heavy and dark, the drops blur any view through them, like the monsoon rains that pour onto Hanoi in July. Vu placed these drops in such a way that it is impossible for the viewer to escape them. Installed like a labyrinth, they force the viewer to push them aside as he or she walks through the piece. They are as annoying as heavy rain can be at times. In addition, his piece includes freestanding toilets, chairs, and rolls of toilet paper, sometimes painted onto the plastic. The toilet seats are open and the bowls are covered in plastic. Uninviting to the viewer, they are designed to look as though they are backed up and have flooded parts of the floor. Vu describes this piece as intimately connected to Vietnamese behavior. “For Vietnamese people in Vietnam today,” he says, “the western style toilet is a status symbol. It is the first thing that people install in their house when they build it to show that they are modern people.”16 Anybody who has witnessed the construction boom in Hanoi these days knows what Vu is talking about. On some of that city’s streets, porcelain toilet bowls are sold by the ton. Over the past 10 years, private houses have gone up by the thousands and local inhabitants are not shy about displaying their allegiance to modern conveniences. New home owners eagerly seek hot water heaters, refrigerators, washing machines, and electric ovens to replace the lack of sanitary conditions, communal gas stoves, ice racks, and public baths that had been part of most people’s lives in the urban housing complexes since the colonial period. But while modern Hanoians have gladly embraced these lifestyle improvements, Vu’s more cynical attitude is consistent with his concern for people’s values. Vu questions this rush toward modernity when it seems to encourage Western consumerism. Similarly, he feels that artists in Vietnam are too easily swayed by the art market and do not seem to be able to think for themselves. Like his father, who wrote poetry as a way of warning his fellow countrymen not to follow ideology blindly, Vu’s installation both warns against consumerism and makes a wry comment about the kind of material objects Vietnamese have grown attached to. His toilets purvey the irony of modernization. They show signs of modernity in that they improve public sanitation, but they are also processors of junk; they flush out trash. Displaying them, Vu is telling his fellow Vietnamese that they are not just buying modern objects, they are also purchasing receptacles for sewage. The rain in Vu’s piece also purveys heavy symbolic meaning in the context of Vietnam alone. Rain is naturally prevalent throughout the country in all its



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Figure 1. Tran Trong Vu, “La Chambre Pluviale,” Installation (Photo: Courtesy of the artist)]


Nora A.Taylor

forms. From the light mists of the “dust rain” during Hanoi winters to the heavy downpours of the Saigon rainy season, rain is both benevolent and cruel, welcome and miserable. During the 1950s adoption of Soviet-style Socialist Realism, rain was written into literature with an optimistic slant. “After the rain, comes the sun,” was a common adage uttered to counter the tendency to be melancholy during the rainy seasons. Tran Dan sprinkled his poems with references to rain or water on a regular basis. Even the title of his most famous novel, Nguoi nguoi lop lop, conjures a sense of people washing up to shore like wave upon wave of corpses in floods. But his most remarkable and controversial reference was the one contained in the last few lines of his poem “Nhat Dinh Thang”: “I go out. I see no street. No house. Only raindrops on red flags.”17 In official criticism of his work, it was suggested that Tran Dan’s image of raindrops on red flags was too negative. Clearly, Tran Dan’s red flags allude to the Communist Party banners flown during the national liberation movement. To see nothing on those flags but the falling rain was to deny their other significance—bright heroism; flags of victory. It was thus tantamount to blasphemy.18 These few lines earned Tran Dan international attention as an anticommunist and cost him his career. Today, however, his son Vu and Vu’s wife, who is writing a thesis on her father-in-law’s work, contend that his intent had not been political. As they see it, to read these lines of his as anti-communist was to deny his sense of imagery and his poetry’s pictorial qualities. If Tran Dan’s powerful lines were seen as counterrevolutionary, they are also very graphic. He draws attention to the image itself and enables us to picture the rain and the flags very clearly. Vu tries to recapture precisely this image in his own work: the sheets of rain in his “La Chambre Pluviale” pay homage to the rain his father saw falling on red flags. They, too, tell the tale of Hanoi as a place where suffering and pain make one lonely and sad. By indicating that when he goes out Tran Dan sees nothing but rain falling, his poem signals to the reader that when man confronts nature, he confronts his own fate. As he sees it, in the battle against nature, man loses. Vu captured this sadness by turning sheets of rain into tears in one of the panels comprising his work, “Document Intime” (Intimate Document). In it, Vu painted a portrait of Tran Dan and inserted the lines “J’appartiens au parti des larmes” (I belong to the party of tears), the sentence that his father had uttered when asked to identify his political allegiance. Like his father, Vu fights against complacency. He also fights the silence his father had to endure for so long after his incarceration. In another series of works entitled “Lampes aveugles” (Blind Lamps), he explicitly addresses the issue of censorship, going so far as to write the word “censure” (censorship) directly onto the canvas. Written over the mouth of one figure and the eyes of another, this word illustrates the fact that censorship is not just a silencing mechanism, but a blinding one as well. It makes the point, that is, that vocal artists are not the only ones censored, visual artists are censored as well; that if censorship kills speech, it also kills vision. The figure Vu shows being censored in this work is a generic Asian who appears in other pieces of his multipaneled works. Vu created this figure, which he calls a “smiling Asian,” to represent the European



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Figure 2. Tran Trong Vu, “Document Intime,” oil on canvas panel series. Photographer: Nora A. Taylor.



Figure 3. Tran Trong Vu, “Document Intime,” oil on canvas panel series. Photographer: Nora A. Taylor.


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stereotype of Asians as constantly smiling. His use of this figure recalls the painting by the Thai artist Chatchai Puipia, “Siamese Smile,” which mocked the tourism campaign that portrayed his country as the “Land of Smiles.”19 Vu’s smiling Asian is designed to deter any personal interpretation of his work. Creating it, Vu makes a critical statement on the European view that Asians “look alike,” critiques the lumping together of all Asian art in a single category, and comments on the way in which outsiders are classified based on racial categories. His critique refers us to his own situation: an Asian in Europe, he is classified as Asian and thus non-European, in spite of the fact that he is no longer a citizen of his homeland. The concept of censorship and silence is obviously a very personal one for Vu considering the lifelong struggle his father endured as a banned writer in Vietnam. Tran Dan was essentially in exile in his own country. Now his son, literally in exile, is at last able to speak out against those injustices. And yet, he can only do so (or chooses to do so) in very abstract ways. Like his father, Vu did not seek a voice: rather, he left Vietnam in search of anonymity. Like Bui Xuan Phai, who said that a painter paints not to speak but to remain silent, Vu and his father chose to remain silent. But the art market attention to young Vietnamese artists has made Vu reflect on what it means to be a Vietnamese artist. The fact that he sought a more generic backdrop for his career by going to France also offered him a chance to look at Vietnam from the outside and comment on the generic “Asian” artist that the Western art-collecting community has been eagerly seeking in a postcolonial form of Orientalism. Vu’s “Intimate Document” is a parody of the ambiguous role that the Vietnamese artist in exile is obliged to play. On one hand, he is exposed to the world, his very personal visions, laid out on the canvas for strangers to purchase like a souvenir. On the other, he remains anonymous; just a stereotypical “Asian” like any other, he is prey to the whims of trends depending on whether Vietnam or Asia is the fashion of the day. Importantly, then, the word “document” that appears in Vu’s title also refers to the French word “document,” or identity papers, which alludes to both resident alien cards in France and to the notion of a passport that is meaningless when one is not ethnically French in France. This is precisely the situation Vu confronted when, en route to Vietnam for his father’s funeral, he was detained at the airport. He may hold French identity papers, but he is in effect a-national. If he is by law Vietnamese when on Vietnamese territory, because he lives in France, Hanoi painters and his Hanoi friends no longer consider him to be one of them.20 Conclusion Vu’s particular position in the Vietnamese art world says much about issues of identity and the role the art market plays in conferring ethnic or national labels on artists and their works. In Vietnam, artists pay less attention to their identities as “Vietnamese artists” than do the state or the increasingly influential art galleries. The nation is considered an important axis of identity by artists working within standards applied since the 1950s by governing arts organizations in



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Nora A.Taylor

Vietnam. To many artists in Vietnam, to be a Vietnamese artist means painting a view of Vietnam that is beautiful and relevant to the way in which the state wishes to see itself. This remains true in spite of the Doi Moi policy and the state’s loosening of control over cultural production. Opening the art market to the international gallery and museum world has persuaded artists that in the interest of earning a proper living from painting, they should continue to paint “Vietnamese” themes in order to please the tastes of outsiders looking for a romantic and idealized view of Vietnam. Where does this put an artist such as Tran Trong Vu, who not only no longer lives in Vietnam, but who is the son of a writer once jailed for his artistic integrity, for questioning the whole concept of a “national identity” in art? Are Tran Trong Vu and his father’s views any less “Vietnamese” than those of their compatriots, who paint Vietnamese scenery or Vietnamese themes? What exactly is a Vietnamese theme? Tran Dan’s poetry captures the rain that falls on Hanoi streets with stunning simplicity and accuracy. Who hasn’t seen raindrops fall on red flags in Hanoi? Vu paints images of smiling Asians gagged and blindfolded. Isn’t this a political reality not just in Vietnam but also in Indonesia, China, and Singapore? Does Vu need to be considered an “outsider” because he chooses to discuss an aspect of Vietnamese life that his compatriots do not? The fact that the art market has also contributed to placing ethnic labels on art by emphasizing the nationality and origin of particular painters and their works illustrates how difficult it is for artists to negotiate identity markers and avoid stereotyping even in a so-called global world. This is why Vu’s work is an important example of how identity gets played out in the art world. As a Vietnamese artist outside of Vietnam who is expressing his conflict with these issues, Vu points to the ways in which the label “Vietnamese” has been placed on Vietnamese painting in Vietnam in ways that have rarely if ever been questioned by that nation’s own citizens. So doing, it reveals that rather than a fixed concept, Vietnameseness has been negotiated and renegotiated depending on its context, as this paper aimed to demonstrate. My use of the word “roots” in the subtitle of this paper was designed to open this discussion of Vietnamese living abroad as creating art that both originates in the “homeland” of Vietnam and critiques the way in which Vietnamese art abroad has been seen as linked to Vietnam. Arjun Appadurai has written extensively about this problem of Asians abroad and their contribution to globalization in his analysis of the ways in which the world has become a smaller place and nations are reimagined in ways that negate difference.21 Current scholarly views on globalization notwithstanding, however, the art world has not turned global. In it, the dominant view finds the centerperiphery paradigm still operative: hence, Vietnamese artists must by definition refer back to the homeland. For this reason, Vu’s recent works do not sell nearly as well as those by his colleagues in Vietnam. Contrary to the French decision to include French citizens of Chinese descent in their pavilion at the Venice Biennale, most collectors and gallery owners, and indeed the general public, will continue to view those artists as Chinese. Indeed if the French commissioners decided to include those artists as a gesture for the sake of multiculturalism, they



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nonetheless still needed to emphasize the ethnic origin of those artists in order to make their point. To be a Vietnamese artist in France, then, requires first negotiating the terms by which one’s identity is defined within Vietnam and then considering that identity’s implications within France. No global identity is available to these artists. Regardless of the critique of the concept of national identity and the way in which it gets played out in Vietnam, a Vietnamese artist in France has no other “roots.” Rather, like Vu, s/he remains resolutely subjected to national definitions within the global art world. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. See Wendy Mee, “National Difference and Global Citizenship.” The Vietnamese women’s national dress consisting of a long tunic worn over trousers. See Nora Taylor, “‘Pho’ Phai and Faux Phais.” For a discussion on the concept of national identity in Vietnamese, see Nora Taylor, “The Artist and the State.” See Grant Kester, “The Art of Listening (and of Being Heard).” See Jeffrey Hantover, Uncorked Soul. Personal communication, 1995. In referring to galleries in Vietnam, I cite Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City by name as separate places rather than the generic “Vietnamese galleries,” because Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have two different markets and clientele. Neither city constitutes a “center.” Both cities have thriving galleries with different artists exhibiting in them. This is analogous to New York and Los Angeles for example, rather than Paris or London, which are their nation’s “centers” for the arts. Personal communication, Nguyen Quan, January 1993. See Nora Taylor, “‘Pho’ Phais and Faux Phai.” See Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina. For an interesting analysis of tourism and the nostalgia for the war, see Laurel Kennedy and Wendy Williams, “Re-Presenting Vietnam.” Anonymous art buyer, Hanoi, 1993. The title of the Plum Blossoms exhibit is an example of this. “Uncorked Soul” implies that artists have been bottled up and can’t wait to get “out.” But things are not what they appear to these outsiders. Many artists in Vietnam have never been “bottled” up. The creative constraints placed on artists were not as severe as some galleries have suggested. See Georges Boudarel, Cent fleurs éclosent dans la nuit du Vietnam; Neil Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam; and Tran Anh-Thuan, “Certain de vaincre de Tran Dan.” Conversation with Tran Trong Vu, June 1999. My translation of: “Toi buoc di. Khong thay pho. Khong thay nha. Chi thay mua sa tren mau co do.” Similarly, Bui Xuan Phai paintings of rainy Hanoi streets had been viewed as too sad for the general mood of socialist nation building and not sunny enough for the country that the party was promoting. See Apinan Poshyananda, “Roaring Tigers, Desperate Dragons in Transition.” For an interesting analysis of Vietnamese nationals living in France, see Gisèle Bousquet, Beyond the Bamboo Hedge. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large.



RAINDROPS




Hoang Hung

Mad storm. Umbrella tornado. Blue lid. Screaming glass. Sidewalk skirt. Junk amenities. Piled ogled. Cross lips. Soul-less. A split second. Mini hair ass vague. Take pants off, curse. A roasted chicken a roasted chicken. Mad storm. Yellow dance. Trashed. Conked out. Mad storm. Flowing mob. Water gagged. Hair tossed. Forever darkened earth. Find, die, go. Mad storm. Yanking hand away. Brain pang. Wide-eyed inmate returns to wrong century. Dripping dew wets eternally skinny form.




City Streets 1





Protest in front of Bowers Museum of Cultural Art during the exhibit of Vietnamese painting “A Winding River,” Santa Ana, California, June 1999. Photographer: Jerry Gorman.


Andrew Lam

Mister Cao’s Oolong tea from Guangdong was wasted that woeful Thanksgiving morning, special tea though it was, it was nevertheless sipped wearily. As usual we sat at our corner table at the Golden Phoenix, Mister Cao’s restaurant, chatting animatedly when Mister Huy ran in as if chased by a ghost. “Undone, absolutely undone,” he yelled and waved the San Jose Mercury News expressively above his bald head. “Mister Bac has committed self-immolation.” “Self-immolation?” I mumbled and the words vibrated in my throat, swirled between my ears, reigniting that terrifying flame of long ago. The flame blossomed quickly, a restless, transparent bird of paradise in whose pistil serenely sat a Buddhist monk. “Self-immolation!” I repeated the words again, the meanings sank in finally while the flame soared and wavered and the monk fell backward, his charred body went into a brief spasm or two and then was perfectly still. “Oh God!” I said. “No!” Mister Cao in the meanwhile had stood up and snatched the newspaper from Mister Huy’s hand as if the two of them were engaged in some desultory septanarian game of relay. “Are you joking?” he yelled loudly. Heads turned. His three waiters in their red jackets and black bow ties paused in their tracks, their trays balancing precariously on industrious fingers. The restaurant, too, fell into a temporary hushed murmur, all eyes trained on us. “How can this be?” he asked. “I just had lunch with him here last Monday!” Mister Huy shook his head and sighed. “Read, read,” he said urgently, he was almost out of breath, tiny beads of perspiration glistened from his age-spotted forehead. “Mister Bac went all the way to Washington, D.C., to do it.” What immediately struck me were not the words themselves but the two photographs that accompanied the article. One, the larger, was a blurry image of a figure on fire, a human torch swirling in a fiery circle on a landing of the Capitol Building, his face lifted skyward, arms raised above his head as if waiting for a benediction from the heavens. The smaller was the photo of Nguyen Hoai Bac’s driver’s license, the one I readily recognized: Old Silver Eagle, pub-



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Late Wednesday afternoon a man doused himself in gasoline, marched up the steps of the Capitol Building and, upon reaching the first landing, lit a match. John Learner, a tourist from North Dakota, managed to capture a photo (see far right) of the self-immolator who was later identified by the police as Bac Hoai Nguyen, 65, a Vietnamese American, and the editor and publisher of a Vietnamese language magazine in San Jose, California. According to his youngest daughter, Theresa Nguyen, 21, a senior at Georgetown University, Mister Nguyen did not give any indication as to what he was about to do. “He said he came to visit me since I couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving,” she reported through tears. “Then this morning he borrowed my Georgetown U. sweatshirt and my car keys. He said he wanted to go for a walk around the monuments but he never came home.” The article went on to say that Mister Bac had left a suicide note, which the paper translated and printed as a side-bar. So at the urging of my friends, I skipped the rest of the reporting and read our friend’s last words and testimony: “Letter to the people of the free world, Communism has ruined my country. My homeland is in shambles. I am tormented by thoughts of my people living in despair under the cruel communist regime. I cannot sleep at night thinking about their suffering. I close my eyes and all I see are boat people drowning in the South China Sea and dissidents languishing in horrid prison conditions. Human rights violations in Vietnam are among the worst in the world. I denounce its re-education camps, its malaria-infested New Economic Zones and its continuing arrests of clergymen and intellectuals without due process. I have lived a full life. I have been blessed with comforts and a supportive family. But considering the plight of my people, I cannot be so selfish as to live the remains of my days in peace. My conscience demands that I must act and offer myself completely to the cause of my country. May my insignificant body serve as a little flame that shines in the darkness that has befallen my country. May my death reveal to the civilized world the evil of the communist ideology and godless demons who continue to drink the blood of my people. I wish you all a healthy, peaceful and prosperous life. Good-bye, Nguyen Hoai Bac.”



lisher of the Vietnam Forever, smiling with mischievous eyes to the camera. As I studied the two disparate photos—life versus death—I heard Mister Cao say rather impatiently, “Out loud, Thang, read it out loud, you’re the professor.” Thus, on that decrepit morning, with the oolong’s bittersweet aftertaste tea lingering on my palate and a gathering crowd, I heard myself recite in English what turned out to be my oldest and dearest friend’s unexpected obituary.

Andrew Lam

Mister Bac’s words hung in the air long after I finished reading them, and they left me strangely parched and utterly exhausted. I took a deep breath. Exhaled. Took another. Exhaled even slower. But this calming exercise learned from my long dead father to combat my childhood bouts with asthma, had the opposite effect that day. For instead of calmness I, after more than a dozen years or so since I quit smoking, imagined a cigarette smoldering between my lips. I could almost feel its smoky residues warming my variegated lungs. For some time now a salty beam of sunlight had come slanting through the opaque glass window and lit our Formica-topped table, highlighting our sorrowful and ruined faces. Mister Cao, for instance, was struggling to keep from sobbing, his long and deeply wrinkled face a contorted map of pain while Mister Huy, in the manner of a hurt child, was intermittently wiping his teary eyes with the back of his hands. A profound sadness welled up from deep inside me too, and I had to close my eyes. I heard a child’s cry, a woman’s shrill laughter, men’s low bantering and speculating voices. I smelled that complex aroma of pho soup, its beef broth spiced in star anise combined with the terrific smell of freshly roasted coffee to scent and pilfer the air. Everything was the same that morning, yet everything had changed. When I opened my eyes again and looked at Mister Bac’s chair I saw an unspeakable void, and it forced me to look away, out the window, to the busy sun-drenched thoroughfare of Santa Clara smeared now with my own tears. Old Silver Eagle, poor soul, was really gone! When I think of him, “the first” is always what comes to mind: The first to start a newspaper in exile, right in the Guam refugee camp as a matter of fact, with Vietnamese-type sets he had brought along while escaping Saigon. The first to organize an anti-communist rally in San Jose, the first to put together cultural shows and Tet festivals at the Santa Clara fairgrounds, and, as it turned out, the first (and only) to commit self-immolation in America to protest Vietnamese communism. A restless spirit, Mister Bac always pleaded and urged many to “do something for our homeland” if not “for future generations.” Have we, he often asked, forgotten the past? Who among us hadn’t suffered under communist hands? Are we so afraid, so near to the grave, to speak up? Imagine then four old men in black pajamas sitting inside a flimsy bamboo cage on Vietnamese-owned Lion Plaza at the end of Tully Road protesting Hanoi’s unjustifiable arrests of clergymen and dissidents back home. The cage was so flimsy that my adorable 7-year-old granddaughter, Kimmy, could break out with ease, and her equally adorable 4-year-old brother, Aaron, could squeeze through without touching the bars. Still, for 4 straight days and 3 consecutive nights, with the South Vietnamese flags—gold with their three blood-red horizontal stripes— flapping heroically in the summer wind about us, we starved. Shoppers walked by, waved hello, and children giggled as they stared at the strange sight. We would talk to anyone regarding the decrepit state of Vietnam, the cruelty of life lived under communist oppression, and so on. Young supporters stood by and passed out literature on the subject, and a few shoppers even posed with us for photographs.



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Still, as far as hunger strikes go, it ranked no doubt among the Rolls Royces. After all, how many re-education prisoners back home had Old Cao’s cellular phone so that he could instruct his restaurant staff ? And it is very doubtful that real re-education camp prisoners were provided with sleeping bags and pillows by caring relatives (Trang, my sweet loving wife, scented mine with her trademark “Toujours Moi” perfume to remind me that this old goat had something to come home to). Last but not least, how many have a cardiologist, my youngest son, to be exact, with whom and whose family my wife and I now live, to come out and monitor their heart rates and blood pressures daily? True, each time, without fail, Tinh chastised our act of protest as “pure folly” and “most unhealthy,” and we had to each promise him that it would end soon. When we made the front page of the San Jose Mercury News on the fourth morning, indeed, the hunger protest mercifully ended. Or so we thought. How would we know that Old Silver Eagle would carry it out to its fiery and bitter end? That afternoon we saw at the Golden Phoenix a procession of mourners. Old friends and acquaintances, strangers who heard the news, all dropped in by the dozens to express their shock and dismay and sadness. But this procession of mourners trickled down and ended when Miss Sally Bernstein from the Mercury News came striding in. There was something in her coloring, I suppose—the bright blond hair that gleamed in the sunlight, painted red lips, piercing blue eyes, a confident stride—that turned heads. She moved, that is to say, the way a hungry shark would among a school of frightened tunas. Miss Sally smiled and greeted each one of us by shaking our hands. She was terribly sorry about “Mister Nguyen,” but since his family was too upset to talk to the press, would we? She was doing a follow-up, “a local angle,” as it were, to the story of his fiery demise and was told that we were his closest friends, so would we care to shed some light on the matter? Certainly, we answered. Of course, we said. Mister Cao played host. He promptly ordered another cup of tea, some dry squid, and, as the mood caught him, a bottle of Courvoisier cognac and snifters for anyone who wanted to join him in commemorating Mister Bac. Then we proceeded to tell her about his background, his life, and, above all, how he lived his life a hero and died a martyr. Miss Sally diligently took notes, saying “Uh huh, uh huh,” and “yes, yes,” but the heroic sense of Mister Bac was not exactly what interested her, alas. Five minutes or so into it she raised her pen and stopped us. “I have to say, Americans don’t understand this form of protest at all,” said Miss Sally. What she was after, therefore, was his motive or, perhaps, motives. “For instance, the publisher of the Saigon Today suggested that Mister Bac Nguyen was facing bankruptcy due to the lack of readership and advertisements. That Mister Bac Nguyen committed suicide out of desperation and deep depression of losing his paper. I checked it out this morning, and he did file for bankruptcy last week. Can anyone here, uhm, speak about this?” What the American reporter heard next was a collective groan. I, for one,



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Andrew Lam

never liked that owner of Saigon Today, a young upstart computer engineer with lots of money to throw around (his rag of a magazine, by the way, is full of gossip and lewd-looking Vietnamese starlets), but his attack on Mister Bac’s good name less than a day after his fiery demise was insulting to the bone. Though unplanned, it was as if Miss Sally’s question galvanized our thoughts and feelings. “Motives? But there’s only one,” intoned Mister Huy with all seriousness. Once a judge in the municipal court in Saigon, he could be imposing when necessary, and he certainly rose to the occasion. “He lived for Vietnam, and he died for Vietnam. What else is there to know? Why go digging for things that do not exist?” “Agreed. Agreed,” added Mister Cao, “a hero and a role model.” My turn, and I, drawing inspiration from the old days when still lecturing in Saigon on Vietnamese history, one full of heroes, told her that I knew nothing about the bankruptcy, that Mister Bac never mentioned it, not to me, not to Mister Cao nor Mister Huy. When we saw him last, I said, which was only a week earlier, we shook hands and promised to meet as usual here at the Phoenix, and he was as calm as a frozen lake in winter. I told her that I knew no one more dedicated to the cause of human rights in Vietnam than our recently departed comrade. He lived fighting for freedom and justice for Vietnam, so why shouldn’t he die calling attention to the same causes? After all, who among us didn’t suffer under communism? Mister Huy lost his wife when they fled on boat in ’79 to Thailand. Mister Cao lost his brother to a Vietcong’s bullet in ’67. And Mister Bac’s parents were executed as landowners in Hanoi. And last but not least, me. I lost my first son, Tuyen, who never made it past his twentieth birthday in ‘74, a year before the war ended, and ended badly for us all. And as far as I was concerned Mister Bac spoke his heart and mind through his letter that the Mercury itself published. The Vietnamese exile community, I said, owes him an enormous debt for his selflessness and should commemorate his passing. The American media, I further told her, has always been biased for the North and against the South. But it should see Mister Bac in a heroic light for once, for this would be how we in the Little Saigons scattered in the fifty or so countries across the globe will undoubtedly see him when news of his fiery exit reaches their collective ear and effectively turns him into the ultimate kind of martyr—someone, that is to say, who self-immolates in the name of patriotism. “Well spoken,” Mister Huy said. “Bravo,” Mister Cao said and applauded. Miss Sally knitted her brows, bit the lower lip and gave the impression of a half pout. “I’m sorry,” she announced obliquely, “I do have materials about his accomplishments. But if you don’t mind I’d still like to have some sense of his state of mind. I mean, do you think the way he committed suicide characteristic of who he was?” “Not suicide, not suicide,” Mister Huy corrected her testily. He tapped his teacup on the table top repeatedly, imagining it, perhaps, a gavel. “You mean sacrifice. Sa-cri-fice. Mister Bac was a martyr. He sacrificed his life for Vietnam.” Miss Sally nodded wearily, perhaps finding the point trivial. She was about to



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ask another question when Mister Cao, irked by her expression, stood up, raised his cognac, his eyes glazed over, his voice lamenting as he spoke in Vietnamese. “Brother Bac,” he said, “let me drink to your bravery regardless of what others say or think. You are a shining example to our community and our country.” Mister Cao joined him. The two began to address Mister Bac’s ghost directly and ignored Miss Sally altogether. Their voices grew sadder and more plaintive with each toast. “Brother Bac, may your ghost return to Vietnam and haunt all those bastards in Hanoi in their sleep.” “Brother Bac, come back and witness this tragedy. You’re not even buried yet, and people are already slandering your name. So much for gratitude for all you’ve done over the years.” And on and on. Miss Sally, I must say, looked both confused and embarrassed. She intermittently scratched the nape of her neck and smoothed her hair as she watched. Even if she expected resistance with her line of questioning, I doubt that she was entirely prepared for what must appear to her a Vietnamese mass seance. Then it was my turn. Perhaps I wanted to show one up on them. Perhaps that was why I said it. I stood and ceremoniously raised my snifter to Mister Bac, and in a low, solemn, pained voice, I said: “Brother, don’t be surprised if I follow your brave footsteps. We’ll show the Americans and not to mention the younger generation what old men are capable of.” But before I drank the cognac both Mister Cao and Mister Huy made such an impression that I knew I had misspoken. Miss Sally, true to her profession, immediately asked both of them what I just said and Mister Huy promptly translated. She looked at me then with great interest: “Is it true, sir, that you’re also considering committing self-immolation?” “Well, no, I mean, I might,” I stammered, but the conviction with which I addressed Old Silver Eagle’s spirit had escaped me. Inwardly I began to fret that I would be quoted in the paper and about what the consequences of that quote could mean. I could see my wife’s disapproving face and I couldn’t bear it. Still, it was too late, the words were launched, the act done. “If I think it necessary, that is, if it brings changes to Vietnam, I would do it,” I added. “Oh, I see” said Miss Sally, disappointed. “Forgive me, but if you, his closest friend, couldn’t be sure that your death could bring changes to Vietnam nor, for that matter, was necessary, then how can you argue so adamantly on the behalf of Mister Bac Nguyen?” I didn’t manage an answer, for at that moment Mister Cao decided to save me from Miss Sally. He rose and started to sing the South Vietnamese national anthem with verve. I could almost see him as the captain wearing his paratrooper’s uniform and red beret, a young panther way back when. His face was red, his voice deep and strong, and it managed to startle everyone once more. Oh citizens! Let’s rise up the day of liberation is here! With a single resolve



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Personally I’d rather have gone on answering Miss Sally’s questions and false perception so as to defend myself and, if possible, challenge some of her dark notions regarding Old Silver Eagle. But thanks to Mister Cao, I wasn’t given much of a choice. In respect for the anthem, I, too, stood up and joined my friends in song until half of the customers and even the three well-trained waiters with black bow ties joined in. Miss Sally shrank a little in her chair. Journalists have to dig deep, I know, but digging deep with us old men only came up with bent spades and broken shovels. The drama, however, did not end as a stalemate, as I’d hoped. If there was anyone to spoil it all for us it was, I regret to report, my son, Tinh, known to our community as Doctor Tony Tran, the cardiologist. Tinh’s presence changed everything. We should have gone home, he and I, but old Huy, drunk now, decided to introduce him—“Doctor Tony Tran, so successful but too bad married”—to Miss Sally, who immediately latched onto my son like a leech to a farmer’s leg. She had questions regarding Mister Bac’s death, his state of mind, and so on, and was wondering if Tony wouldn’t mind answering them. Tinh glanced at me, then flashed his apologetic smile and said, “Actually, we’re kind of in a hurry. My wife and mother have been cooking all day. And the kids are wondering when grandpapa is coming home. It’s Thanksgiving, you know.” To encourage his good sense, I began to gather my hat and scarf but Miss Sally did not give up. “Just one question, please, it’s important,” she said, and before Tinh agreed to it, she asked anyway: “Even among the Vietnamese I interviewed, opinions varied. Some people said that it’s an act of madness, others said that it’s heroic. Your father said it’s an ultimate act of bravery. In fact, he said that he would consider committing this act himself if he deems it necessary.” The vixen! Oh, how my heart jumped. I nearly dropped my hat. Absentmindedly, I fumbled through my sportjacket’s empty pockets as if looking for a pack of cigarettes, or perhaps a gun, either to commit suicide or murder. “He said what?” I heard Tinh say presently. A dark color came over his handsome face and instead of helping me up, he grabbed another chair and sat himself down. “Well, Sally, you know what,” he said, pretending to look at his watch, “I do have a few minutes to spare.” “Oh, thank you,” Miss Sally said, beaming. “And would you say something about his state of mind as well?” I cleared my throat. “I thought we were late,” I said, but no one listened. “Let me preface it by saying that I do not support any sort of protest that can do oneself physical harm, including, of course, hunger strikes,” my son said to the reporter. “I’ve been thinking about Mister Nguyen’s death since I heard the



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news. Personally I have always respected him for his work. But to live fighting for something is different than to die in its name, especially when it was absolutely uncalled for.” “As to his state of mind, I wonder. . . . A newspaper man like him, why would he do it on an afternoon before Thanksgiving? It’s one of the loneliest days in D.C. Had he been of sound mind, Mister Nguyen would have remembered that the media and Congress and their staff were already gone, that Capitol Hill was but an empty structure. I hate to be so cynical about this—but you can’t protest like this twice. So, not that he should have, but why not do it on a Monday morning and waylay that fat, high candidate for a triple bypass Speaker of the House what’s his name on his way to lunch? Surely that would call the attention of the front page of all the major newspapers across the country, not to mention television coverage, say CNN and commentaries in the opinion editorial pages of the Washington Post and New York Times. If he intended to call the world’s attention to the cause of Vietnam, really, why shy away from the world at the very end?” It took all my strength to hold my tongue. My son was venting his anger at me, that was obvious, but must Mister Bac’s name be dragged down the mud in the process? What to do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. To fight him in front of Miss Sally and at the Golden Phoenix was to convey to the public discordance within my family. So I sat and marveled instead at my growing resentment of America—how she snatches immigrant and refugee children from their parent’s bosoms and turns them into sophisticated, razor-tongued strangers. On our way home we were very, very quiet. Tinh drove calmly, his right index finger dancing back and forth in vivacious arcs above the leather-bound steering wheel while Vivaldi’s Four Seasons followed one another in their inevitable succession. I noted his hands then, strong but ordinary, and wondered how many sternums they had cracked, and how many tender hearts they had massaged and mended, and how many had they failed altogether? The more beautiful the music, the more I found being in his car unbearable. “Well,” I said, “I hope you’re happy. Tomorrow our community will think our family a miserable lot.” Tinh turned to me and feigned surprise, “Sorry, father. I don’t quite understand what you mean.” “Well, let me put it this way: If you don’t watch your mouth, you won’t have any Vietnamese clients left. Our people will boycott your office for what you said to that newspaper woman today. They’ll wave flags in front of your clinic and call you a communist sympathizer, that’s what I’m saying.” My son sighed deeply, but when he spoke his voice had a tinge of sarcasm: “Do you mean to suggest that my Vietnamese patients would rather stay home and suffer coronary blockages, arrhythmias and strokes simply because I disagreed with you? Let me ask you this, father: how many doctors in their right mind would prescribe self-immolation as a healthy form of venting one’s anger and frustration against history?” “Oh, don’t pretend to be so naive,” I said, matching venom with venom.



FIRE

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“You’re not the only cardiologist in town even with your good reputation, a reputation which, I might add, is about to be smeared. You know our community. Gossips abound, fingers are pointed from mere speculation. Tomorrow we’ll be a laughing stock. I can see Miss Sally’s writing up that wretched article right now as we speak: ‘Son disagrees with Father over fiery protest: Generational rift in Vietnamese community.’” Tinh heaved a weary sigh and shook his head lightly—he has that particular way of disapproving someone without ever saying a word, a trait inherited, surely, from his recalcitrant mother. “Father, I simply questioned whether it was worth dying for something you believe in instead of living and fighting for it. It’s a question of logic. I concede that I may have sounded disrespectful but. . . .” But before he could finish his sentence, I slapped the polished wooden dashboard in front of me and the popping noise it made startled us both. I couldn’t help it, my anger boiled over. “Please! No more. No more of this logic. I don’t want to hear any damn logic. My best friend just died, and my son called him a lunatic in public, how am I to take it? How am I going to show my face at the Golden Phoenix now that my son has derided the dead?” My son said nothing except heaving yet another sigh my way and silence was restored. But as soon as we came to a quiet neighborhood, he parked the Jaguar to the side rather abruptly, then reached for the Mercury News in the backseat. “Listen, father,” he said as he unfolded the paper, his voice rising, “let’s get it off our chests, shall we, before we go home for a family dinner?” I said nothing, a little surprised that he stopped the car in the middle of nowhere. “Good,” he said, monitoring me. “For one thing, don’t damn logic, I beg you. Passion without logic can lead you astray. I did not call Uncle Bac a lunatic, and you know it, but I’m afraid the rest of the world might think so. Listen to this, this is what the tourist who took the photo said: ‘At first I thought it was a flag-burning protest. Only when I zoomed my camera did I realize that it was some guy on fire. It’s madness!’” Tinh looked at me rather triumphantly. I felt myself at that moment like an unfortunate, helpless old man, someone caught in a Confucian tragedy where son lectures father. “It is absolute madness, father,” he said, his voice rising admonishingly. “If that tourist wasn’t there, Uncle Bac’s story would have been on page 5 with two paragraphs at most, if that. Father, you know what I think? I think ultimately he’s selfish, suffering from an incurable martyr complex, and that it robbed him of his common sense. Did he do his daughter Theresa any favor? Or his suffering wife? And is that what you want, father, to be ‘some guy on fire’? Do you seriously want to be remembered by Kimmy and Aaron that way? Do you want to die so that you don’t have to go on hurting from what was robbed from you, from us?” We looked at each other then. He had spoken one sentence too many and he knew it. How ironic—my son argued for logic, but what erupted from underneath that cool, polished demeanor was the deep sorrow we shared. His eyes swelled now with tears, and his voice was all choked up as the last sentence spilled out of him to stab at my heart. A dam broke then. I saw again Tuyen’s coffin being lowered into the ground,



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saw his handsome smiling face peering out of a black-and-white photo in the wooden altar behind white daffodils as if trying to speak to the living. I saw, too, burnt paper offerings at my son’s newly covered grave and incense smoke billowing against a gray sky, and my wife’s crouching form in her white mourning ao dai dress as she wept, and my youngest son hugging himself from grief. I began to itch all over. I couldn’t stand being inside that luxury car any longer. I felt parched and heated. Before I knew it, I had opened the door and climbed out. “What are you doing?” Tinh asked. “It’s freezing out. Father! Father?” I said nothing. I started walking. A few steps and I felt a gentle grip at my elbow and turned to see my son looking at me, bewildered, his breath a wafting cloud between us. “Please, Ba,” he said in a very different tone of voice now, the kind that he used to speak to me when he was young; that is to say, intimate, and without rancor. “Ba, please, come back inside. I’m sorry. Really, I went too far just now, I know, it’s just that. . . . Oh, never mind. Please Ba, Huyen and Mother have been cooking all day and the children are waiting.” But I said in my stern, determined voice. “Look, you go home first. I just need a good walk.” My son studied my face for a second or two and, seeing determination there, relented. He took off his overcoat and draped it over my shoulders. And I did not refuse his kindness. I put my arms through its sleeves and then began walking. For several blocks he trailed me in his car, driving as slow as a turtle and was honked at repeatedly by drivers who zoomed angrily past him. To put an end to his pious pursuit, I turned into a one-way street, away from the direction of our house. I kept moving. The streets opened themselves to me as if onto an entirely new landscape. What was vaguely familiar from the view of a moving car or bus turned once more foreign on foot. Tree branches hung over the sidewalk, their leaves rustling in the wind. And an odor of burning wood from someone’s fireplace reached my nostrils and I was momentarily seized with an inexplicable sense of longing and nostalgia. At a neighborhood grocery store, I purchased my first pack of cigarettes in many, many years and a fluid lighter. I leaned against a tree and smoked. The taste? Disgusting. Or should I say, wonderfully disgusting? Like an old lover’s kiss. The smoke burned the membrane in the back of my throat, seared my lungs, and my body convulsed. I coughed, spat, felt deliciously guilty for breaking my vow to my wife, but it was, after all, an emergency. When I was done with my first, I lit yet another. By the third, it felt as if I had never given up. How I missed the way the plumes escaped from my mouth and nostrils, and into the ether. I resumed walking. Twilight, and the world—leaves, walls, roofs, grass, windows, barren trees, and parked cars—bathed once more in that violent radiance of dusk. I didn’t know where I was going. Night fell and I kept moving. In my unsettled mind, I saw Mister Bac as in a newsreel, swirling in slow motion, cocooned



FIRE

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in a flickering fire and kept thinking: Did he scream? How painful was it? Did he cry for help? Or did he die like Thich Quang Duc, that holy monk of 1963, muted and silent and ethereal as the statue of an orator? My son’s question plagued me. Where should love for country end and where should common sense begin? Could I pour gasoline on myself and light a match? Should I? Why should I? I could see myself running into a burning building to save my grandchildren without thinking twice, but I am not so unsophisticated as to dismiss my son’s logic, nor to be unaware that what I did in San Jose or Washington, D.C., carried very little weight, if any, in Hanoi. Still, if I knew for sure that my death could bring freedom for my people, I should do so gladly. But how could I ever be sure? I couldn’t, despite what I told that wretched Miss Sally. A car approached. Its bright headlights woke me from my torments. I squinted and thought for a second that it was my son coming back for me, but it passed by without slowing. When it was gone, I felt so disappointed that I nearly wept. I stared longingly down toward where it had come from but all I saw was an empty, dimly lit street that stretched endlessly toward an indecipherable darkness, and I suddenly thought of the remaining years that lay ahead of me without Mister Bac, his activism, his passion, and sighed deeply. What surprised me most then, what I didn’t dare think about until that moment, was that, along with the sadness, there was something else, too—a feeling hidden inside a turbulent sea that only made itself whole when I was entirely alone and very lost. I do not wish to say it, but I suppose I must. It was a sense of relief. For along with sadness this was what I was thinking: No more hunger strikes, no more talking to the press and no more shaking fists in the air and waving flags and banners and posing for the photographers in black pajamas. From now on, without Old Silver Eagle, I would just sit at home and tell to my grandchildren fairy tales with sad endings and the adventures of my youth. I felt so ashamed and exasperated at this strange, selfish feeling that it actually caused me to stop walking. I literally couldn’t move. I stood like that in the middle of nowhere for a long time until I heard what sounded like flapping wings. I turned. A piece of newspaper, caught in a tiny whirlwind, danced hauntingly before me. For almost half a minute, it glided up and down, down and up, graceful and elegant as a winged ballerina. A flock of dead maple leaves accompanied it, and the sounds of their rustling were most melodic to my ears. Finally the twirling ended, and the paper came to rest against a metal wire fence where it flapped like some snared wounded bird. I found myself overcome with an inexplicable desire to set it free. But instead of picking it up, I childishly squatted down next to it and, like a crazed arsonist, took out my lighter and lit its corner with my lighter. The fire caught by the second try and fanned out, a brilliant, mysterious flower undulating in the night. I reached out then to the flame, not knowing what I was doing exactly, seeking, perhaps, to still my mind or find solace from the cold, perhaps, to find communion with all the beloved dead. But to my surprise, my hand retracted instinctively at the first searing. An explosion occurred inside my head and cleared it. I saw that holy monk once more falling backward, I saw fiery napalm



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that lit the night sky. I saw burned buildings and heard the screams of children, and I felt as if my blood had somehow turned into lava, and my heart but melted ore. I started weeping. I saw myself in all my contradictions: I hate those who caused my son’s death, but I love my family more; I will never be free from the landscape of my earliest desires, yet as old as I was, I had no desire to give myself absolutely to that tumultuous past, even if it continues to rule me. I could never forget; yet how I yearn to be free from it. This was it, wasn’t it, what it is like to choose life, to be in the world? I stared into the flickering fire, mesmerized. This thing, this mysterious thing of terrifying beauty, had devoured my best friend but it would not, could not, in the end, devour me. Fire, contained, it hints of elegance, engines our world, out of control, it engulfs cities, souls, flesh. It creates. It attracts. And it destroys. The flame flickered and died before me, the crackling paper was now but an ultra-thin, fragile skin, the color of night. At my clumsy touch, it crumbled into bits and fragments and scattered, all of it, in the wind. Gone. For some reason, I found this utterly, inexplicably astonishing, awesome beyond the power of words. I stared into the dark, and I found myself laughing. How tenuous everything was; yet, how extraordinary. I took a deep breath. I looked about. I struggled to my feet, my joints aching. My seared fingers throbbed painfully but I ignored the pain. It seemed that I had entered an elegant neighborhood where I had never been before. Satellite dishes sat on tiled rooftops, unknown trees and shrubs wavered under a starry sky. I felt like a stranger in a strange land, a thief in the night. I began to look into the lighted houses and saw that the holiday had begun. A well-dressed couple in one house was busy at the dining table and at one point the man stood behind his wife and hugged her waist while hiding his face in the rich bloom of her reddish brown hair, and this quickened my heart. In the next house, eight or nine people sat around a dining table, their wine glasses raised as they listened intently as a thin old woman with a shock of white hair in a blue blouse standing behind a large roasted turkey at the far end of the table sang, her arms outstretched. When she was done, the family applauded then raised their glasses merrily. I thought of Trang, my wife, her elegant perfume, her kind and worried face. A whiff of roasted meat reached me, and I salivated. I inhaled deeply, my stomach growled. I exhaled. I felt hunger pangs. I felt strangely invigorated. So I moved on. I kept moving. Far in the distance, to the east, underneath the rising moon, I saw the round silhouettes of the rolling knolls, and I realized my bearings at last. And, as I walked, the night began to change. It became liquidy and alive, kinder somehow, and the lawns of these elegant homes seemed to bathe in some mysterious silvery-blue hue. The wind sang softly in my ears and I kept moving, like some wayward pilgrim slouching slowly toward home.



FIRE




Panivong Norindr

If any of the jargon of our times—postmodernity, postcoloniality, postfeminism—has any meaning at all, it does not lie in the popular use of the “post” to indicate sequentiality—after-feminism; or polarity—antimodernism. These terms that insistently gesture toward the beyond, only embody its restless and revisionary energy if they transform the present into an expanded and ex-centric site of experience and empowerment. —Homi Bhabha

The Screen as a Liminal Space for Experimentation “I always considered the screen, the projected image as a border. To be on the border is richer than to be at the center, in the middle” (Guislain, “Entretien,” 30).1 “To come back to Journey to the Occident, in the first two parts of the trilogy, I worked on the border, the outward bounds of things, the non-said, the off” (Lardeau and Philippon 20). These words, spoken by the Vietnamese filmmaker Lam Le in 1983, to describe both the liminal space and intellectual location from which he conceived his film, Poussière d’Empire (Dust of Empire), and the type of conceptual images he was imagining, seem to announce the seminal (if at times hermetic) work of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, who made the concept of border fashionable and “uncircumventable” in literary and cultural studies. But how do Lam Le’s formal preoccupations converge with the concerns of postcolonial theory and inscribe themselves on the filmic image? Is the border an intervening space that can be inhabited? And if so, is it a space of intervention? How can a screen, a projected image be a type of boundary? What would this boundary separate, mediate, or translate? What is the “in-between” site from which he writes and directs? This essay will attempt to address these issues using as a critical intertext, Lam Le’s first and only feature-length film, Poussière d’Empire. First shown at the 1983 Venice Film Festival, Poussière d’Empire, a film cowrit-



The Postcolonial Cinema Of Lam Le: Screens, the Sacred, and the Unhomely In Poussière D’Empire

Panivong Norindr

ten and directed by Lam Le, has not received the same critical and popular attention enjoyed by films such as Euzhan Palcy’s Rue Cases nègres (Sugar Cane Alley), winner of the Lion d’Or for first feature film (against which Poussière d’Empire competed unsuccessfully in Venice),2 or Tran Anh Hung’s L’Odeur de la papaye verte (The Scent of Green Papaya). In these pages, I will suggest possible reasons for its critical oversight and delineate, at the same time, filmic strategies used by the filmmaker to address some key issues that not only go to the heart of current debates in postcolonial studies but interrogate the complex links between film, theater, and painting as well.3 His film may also give us insights into what Homi Bhabha has called “the unhomely,”4 “a paradigmatic colonial and postcolonial condition” (9). Lam Le’s film, Poussière d’Empire, is a compelling but difficult and challenging film. It resists our effort to summarize it succinctly, although the filmmaker attempts to do so by providing the following synopsis: A Vietnamese maquisard, a survivor of a battle [against the French], tries to send a message to his wife to inform her that he is alive. It consists of four verses from the “Chinh Phu Ngam” or Complaint of the fighter’s wife, a masterpiece in the Vietnamese literary canon. The action takes place in the 1950s. The [French colonial] Empire is on the wane. A missionary, accompanied by a colonial army sergeant, delude themselves about a possible dialogue between colonizer and colonized. Trapped in a cabana invaded by water, and encircled by resistance fighters, they spend their last nightmarish night. Without knowing it, they delay and prevent the message from reaching its destination. Twenty years later, Vietnam is emerging from another war, against another Empire. In the liberated country, the maquisard’s message finally reaches his daughter. With peace having been achieved, does the message still have a meaning? (Le, “Synopsis”) One point of entry (“piste d’accès”) into this film is, admittedly, the peregrination of the message. The popular press has been quick to seize upon this “toehold” to try to make sense of Lam Le’s film. The message consists of four Vietnamese verses drawn from an eighteenth-century poem entitled “le Chant de la femme du combattant” (Song of the Woman Warrior): Que ne puis-je raccourcir les distances avec un baton magique. Ou comme cette immortelle, changer un chale en pont Faut-il que je sois transformé en pierre, Ou que je n’ai plus de larmes en montant à la tour?5 The film imaginatively chronicles the ways in which this message is passed from one protagonist to the other, from one medium (oral and written) to the other, across geographical and temporal divides. L. A. Weekly film editor (now film critic for the Chicago Herald Tribune), Michael Wilmington, however, reduces the film’s significance and impact to this commonly used narrative device:



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One of literature’s—and the movies’—oldest plot gimmicks is the object (money, earrings, evening clothes) that passes from hand to hand, drawing all recipients together in a sometimes tragic web. Here, the object is a letter sent by a wounded Vietnamese soldier to his wife—and its tortuous 20-year progress from the jungle to Saigon to Paris and back again. . . . One hates to damn a film with the seemingly faint praise of “interesting”—but that’s what this one is: interesting. I liked it almost despite myself. (10) Why did this film register merely an “interesting” on this critic’s scale?6 Why did it fail to interpellate him and others in France who voiced the same type of incomprehension: A double, triple, quadruple story, a story with a hundred faces, which the Vietnamese filmmaker Lam Le attempted to restitute in a filmic form. Mission impossible: Lam Le, it is obvious, has too much to say—in too many ways—to be satisfied with tracing with images the framework of a traditional screenplay. Hence, the hybrid result. Poussière d’Empire, a ruptured, disorganized, wobbly, wavering narrative, does not resemble anything known.7 For this critic the film’s greatest flaws are its hybridity, incoherence, lack of unity, its “disorganized,” wobbly (or unsound), wavering “ruptured narrative.” I contend, on the contrary, that it is precisely these ruptures in rhythm and tone, and in the diegesis, that constitute the film’s originality and, paradoxically, its filmic “coherence,” a coherence that has very little to do with the one mandated by classical Hollywood cinema. These narrative and temporal discontinuities are emblematic of a new filmic aesthetic, a type of writing/filming that attempts to reconcile both the political and the poetic, without falling into a predictable didactic manicheism. It is these so-called ruptures that need to be examined more closely. Poussière d’Empire is indeed organized into two distinct parts. The violent onscreen deaths of the French stars Dominique Sanda and Jean-François Stévenin signal the end of the first part and the beginning of the second. Their deaths did not leave French critics indifferent: “Because of its division into two distinct parts—a scission called forth by the screenplay that nevertheless breaks the tone and coherence of the film [sic]. One deplores it all the more since the second part is much more attractive than the first one” (S.M., Première). The disappearance of the two stars midway through the film was indeed a gamble since it risked alienating a public eager to follow their adventures to the end of the film. It could have also jeopardized or, at the very least, hindered the film’s distribution in France. Lam Le was unwilling to compromise because, for him, “this way of making Sanda disappear” is “a cultural act in itself” (Cinématographe 30), a bold and empowering cultural gesture invested with a strong sense of aesthetic commitment that liberates him from the constraints of constructing a filmic narrative modeled after Hollywood cinema. His aim was to “break this



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If the film is not a complete success, in spite of the beautiful sequences that punctuate the entire second part—where one returns to classic narrative forms, carefully staged, illuminated and directed—it is mainly due to the rupture in tone that distinguishes it from the first part, dealt with in a symbolic mode that willfully rejects realism, in order to present the factual situation at the beginning of the story, made all the more concrete by the title, which suggests the disintegration of a doomed colonial empire. One must say on this point that the characters portrayed by Dominique Sanda and Jean-François Stévenin, who supposedly embody the forces used by colonialism to establish its authority—religion and the army—appear rather schematic, in both their conception and behavior. The seduction exerted by the so-called beautiful sequences is indeed fathomable because they seem to conform perfectly to these critics’ expectations of an exotic “elsewhere,” a nation not seen on film since the fall of Saigon in 1975, that was finally opening up in 1983 to international film crews from the West. It is important to stress the specific historical context of the time. Poussière d’Empire, in fact, paved the way for such films as Régis Wargnier’s Indochine (1992), Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Lover (1992), Pierre Schoendorffer’s Dien Bien Phu (1992), and Tran Anh Hung’s Cyclo (1995), also all shot on location. So even though Lam Le seems to satisfy these critics’ longing and desire for “realism,” in the form of traveling shots through the exotic Vietnamese countryside, via rickshaw, bus, and bicycle, his purpose is not to return “to classic narrative forms, carefully staged, illuminated and directed,” as Maurin believed, but to elicit a different type of filmic response, an interrogating gaze. In fact, he mixes and includes other types of “realistic” but jarring sequences such as the extraordinary long shot of the startlingly new white and blue Air France jumbo jet, taxiing on the runway of Saigon airport, in contrastive juxtaposition with the dismembered and fading carcasses of dozens of American planes and helicopters, remnants of the Vietnam War. The historical erupts onto the filmic fiction in yet another uncanny fashion. This time, Lam Le chose a fixed shot of an old radio broadcasting momentous events in the numerous conflicts that opposed the Vietnamese people to the West: the voice of Mendès-France at the Geneva Peace Conference of 1954; that of an announcer giving the day’s summary of the Paris Peace Conference during the Nixon era; and that of another reporting the fall of Saigon in 1975. Temporality is condensed in that very short sequence lasting perhaps two minutes. It is as if time elapsed could be both heard and seen on the screen (furniture changes according to the fashion of the time). This



Cartesian logic that produces this American way of filming and narrating a story, without discontinuity, without rupture. Following others, I give it a try. We’ll see if it works” (Cinématographe 30). For me it worked, but this privileging of discontinuities and ruptures, at the heart of Lam Le’s original filmic aesthetic, did not get the support of critics like François Maurin, who writes for the French Communist daily, L’Humanité:


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I remember that when I studied for my Bachelor of Science in mathematics, the only thing that I found fascinating and in which I earned honors, was differential calculus. It is the calculation of very small notions of time, of molecules of time that can make everything topple over. Likewise, I want to break this Cartesian logic that gives to cinema this American narrative, without discontinuities, without rupture. (Cinématographe 30) The second part of Poussière d’Empire is indeed “more seductive” because it is easier to follow and because it seems to espouse what these critics recognize as part of a well-known cinematic grammar, with a well-structured plot that unfolds rapidly: in forty-five minutes, it covers a period of more than twenty years, whereas the first part of the film lasts thirty-five minutes and covers only a twenty-four-hour period, a pace critics like Maurin find excruciatingly slow. If the characters played by Sanda and Stévenin appear “schematic,” it is precisely what Lam Le wanted them to be: conceived as colonial archetypes, signs, ideograms, without psychological depth, the nun and colonial soldier symbolize colonial rule. His greatest fear was to paint psychological portraits: “What I do is purely conceptual. I don’t want to fall into the trap of psychological films. A choreography, a way of conceptualizing that allows the extraction of all realism must be achieved” (Amiel). In numerous interviews, he repeatedly reiterated this desire to “extract realism” and ground his film in “abstraction”: “I did not want any psychological relationship between the two of them. They must be like stuffed crabs with a hard outward appearance, and inside, packed, packed with signs and concepts signifying the Occident, and more precisely, the evangelizing Occident” (Riou 14).8 If, as implied earlier, mathematics help shape Lam Le’s work, he also draws on the rational elegance he found in the study of mathematics to write his screenplay: “I was completely seduced by the ‘abstract’ quality of the work. That is the legacy of mathematics. To formulate a hypothesis, find the theorem, then the most elegant way to reach the objective” (Ostria V). And this rational sensibility also prepared him for the task of translating the screenplay into visual form. Poussière d’Empire was painstakingly drawn scene by scene into a complete storyboard: “With this, I begin to give form and work on the scenography” (Ostria V). The storyboard bore, in epigraph, the following quotation from Gaston Bachelard’s Poétique de l’espace (The Poetics of Space): “The image is a plant that needs the earth, the sky, substance and form” (71). I will examine Bachelard’s phrase later in this essay. Here, I want to insist on the multifaced artistic filiations Lam Le brings to the film. He is not only an accomplished storyboard artist, he is a gifted painter who has worked very diligently to perfect his craft. He enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but found that, after the events of May ‘68, it lacked rigor. He spent another year in Spain, copying the old Masters at the Prado Museum in Madrid, learning the basic rules of “discipline”9 and “com-



temporal shortcut was undoubtedly inspired by his early studies in mathematics and, particularly, of differential calculus:

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position,” and developing an affinity for more conceptual painters like Tàpies. But he soon realized that painting lacked one crucial dimension, that of time. Conceptual painting also brought him to a dead end since he believed that it failed to convey “emotions” and was incapable of translating specific cultural concerns: “The only way for me to make a movie that is a little bit abstract and formal, while still affecting people, is to convey an emotion . . . something I myself experienced very intensely” (Ostria V). But conceptual painting influenced by the work of Tapiès and Titus Carmel found its artistic release in the “interior design of the cabana” (Ostria V). Lam Le’s visual culture, however, is not solely motivated by high art. He also draws his inspiration from more popular cultural forms such as the comic strip, the “bande dessinée,” and cartoon characters in the Tintin and Spirou series, which left an indelible trace on the imaginary of the child living in Vietnam: We learned about the Occident in Tintin, just like young westerners learned about the Far East in The Blue Lotus. It was an appeal to dream, travel, and at the same time, an initiation to the world of signs. The Tintin story plates are filled with very suggestive, abstract signs, repeated frames, changes in color that herald events to come, without broadcasting them. It is just like films made by Sternberg or Lang, who were the most accomplished drawers [“dessinateurs”] among filmmakers. (Riou 14) The same force of abstraction in the framing, design, and color changes pervades Poussière d’Empire. It is also literally inscribed in the filmic image as a kind of cinematic homage to Hergé, the creator of the Tintin series, who died while the film was being produced. Tintin makes a cameo appearance in the sequence of the New Year’s Eve celebration on the ship, a sequence inspired by The Blue Lotus. Of all influences on Lam Le’s filmic aesthetic, however, the greatest remains the theater: In a way, theater is closer to me than cinema because it takes you more rapidly to the realm of the abstract. A theater scene is for me something very abstract. The protagonists on stage are not made of flesh or bones. They are ideas in movement. Initially, my protagonists are always ideas or concepts, which the actor must incarnate body and soul. Because actors have their own private life, their own emotions, they never completely succeed in translating my ideas. I must therefore invent a way of directing them, to make them as close as embodied ideas. That is why I asked, for example, Sanda to play a left-handed person in the movie. It is not simply a symbolic gesture, I wanted her to be clumsy to break this smoothly run thing that is pure cinema. At the casting level, when I look for actors for a movie, I draw on stage actors. Because I like very much this hiatus, this rift in the acting of a stage actor who is playing in a movie. Unlike the movie actor, the stage actor is unable to define a period of time, a notion of time. (Guislain, “Entretien,” 31)



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I detest speaking to actors about the psychology of a character, his past or future, or the way he eats. I don’t find it very useful, and, on the contrary, I think it is the worst method. I simply asked Dominique Sanda to read Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, which I find perfect for my film. I told her: “Read this, it will give you more insights into me and my work than if I spoke to you about the character. (Lardeau and Philippon 19) Once again, the work of Bachelard figures prominently in Lam Le’s conceptualization of the film. But why is La Poétique de l’espace perfect for, or in keeping with the spirit of, his film? “Nativist” critics, intent on debunking the “bad faith” of politically committed Third World artists, may well object that Bachelard is a Western critic, a criteria often evoked for preemptive and, I will add, “unjustified” dismissal. Lam Le is rather elliptic as to the reasons for his fascination with Bachelard’s phenomenological philosophy. Other than using his work as a possible point of entry into the realms of the personal and the professional as he suggested above, nowhere does he spell out its “true” meaning, a strategy obviously consistent with his privileging of the “non-said.” One of the only clues he offers is the epigraph adorning the storyboard: “The image is a plant that needs the earth and the sky, substance and form,” which, in an uncanny fashion, both evokes the traditional Vietnamese belief system and summarizes the “drive” of the entire film. Although the filmmaker does not elaborate on the film’s meaning in interviews or in writing, he forces us to interrogate its cross-cultural resonances by confronting us with defamiliarizing images of the encounter between East and West, through signs and symbols that bear their distinctive cultural specificity, but also conjure up the possibility of being read “otherwise.” Lam Le’s film, in fact, does not begin with shots of the Vietnamese landscape, or of Sanda and Stévenin on the “initiation path,” but with the opening credits praised by critics for its “dazzling technical mastery” (Gaillac-Morgue): A paintbrush traces in gold the Chinese ideogram for the universe, made up of a square and a circle, with the dark universe as its backdrop. This sign dissolves into space as a fiery galactic explosion hurls a meteorite toward our blue earth. On entering earth’s atmosphere, it disintegrates into dust particles. Using continuity editing, this dust falls on earth as “leaflets” dropped from a French military propaganda airplane. In a later sequence, we will come to realize that the cosmic dust has also left its trace on earth in an oddly shaped “pierre” (stone), the famous “pierre d’attente” (stone of waiting) in the shape of a woman waiting, which has become a beloved subject in traditional Vietnamese literature.



Poussière d’Empire’s main protagonists are “abstract ideas in movement” that actors must embody without bringing with them their emotional and cultural baggage. Once again, Lam Le emphasizes concepts such as “hiatus,” “rift,” “break,” words that reveal his discontinuous approach to cinema via the mediation of theater.10 This is also one reason why he refuses to direct his actors in the traditional fashion, preferring to suggest rather obliquely his intentions:

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This magnificent opening sequence, with a haunting score performed by a chorus of voices accompanied only by a drum, not only lends visual substance to Bachelard’s words, but also announces Lam Le’s hybrid aesthetic, one that deploys “Western” cinematic form and technics (such as the special effects) to reflect on issues that have a direct bearing on Vietnamese society, and that also transcend the East/West divide. If Vietnamese cosmography is, from the very beginning, inscribed on the filmic image, Lam Le aims to interrogate the “sacred,” “the Christian message”—in his words, “work on the sacred, on the Christian message” (Cahier B). For him, the Bible is “the greatest screenplay in the world,” and he draws from it selectively. Thus, when the soldier and the nun are first seen on screen, they are making their way to a remote Vietnamese village on a mission to evangelize the native inhabitants. The difficult terrain forces them to abandon their car and continue on foot. But they must first negotiate the stark and jagged edges of a mountain before finding a more auspicious environment. The filmmaker wanted Dominique Sanda to go down the mountain “like Christ in Galilee. I wanted her to be like Galilee, like a desert nation” (Cahier B). But because there are no mountains in the delta region of South Vietnam, and because they would not have received the government’s authorization to shoot in North Vietnam because it is too poor, they had to film the sequence in a quarry. Lam Le’s filmic form, however, is not only influenced by “events” in the Bible, it also draws its inspiration from German expressionist cinema, and more specifically, F. W. Murnau’s classic 1922 silent film, Nosferatu: This initiatory path that Dominique Sanda and Jean-François Stevenin must take was largely inspired by the bridge that leads to the vampire’s castle in Murnau’s Nosferatu. She descends the mountain to find vegetation, then Vietnamese civilization that is signified by a Chinese-style painterly stylization, by this isolated cabana, flooded at times, that I sought for months and found only on the eve of the first day of shooting. But I wanted to stylize, in the extreme, Vietnamese landscape because stylization is at the basis of the way I conceived the film. (Cahiers du Cinéma) The painterly quality of his vision is clearly made evident in this exquisite minimalist shot of the isolated cabana that signifies, for Lam Le, a Vietnam emptied of all the exotic ornateness foregounded in more recent films films on Indochina such as Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Lover, and Tran Anh Hung’s L’Odeur de la papaye verte. Lam Le’s “work on the sacred” finds its most compelling expression in the long sequence filmed entirely in the cabana of the carpenter, on a stage set built in a Paris studio. The symbols of French colonial domination, the nun and the soldier, are trapped by rising water in the house—a mere “cabana”—of a Vietnamese carpenter, encircled by Vietminh forces. They literally get bogged down while attempting to penetrate and colonize Vietnamese space. For many critics, the symbolism of this situation is too forced (“The symbolism is [too] facile,” writes Vincent Amiel) or too caricatural or schematic (“forget the caricatural or



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schematic aspect of some of the protagonists and situations” [G.P.]) to be an effective way of portraying this encounter or addressing issues of greater historical significance. This would be true only if you oppose and privilege “fullydeveloped characters with psychological depth” to “caricatures,” or conventional representation to more “schematic” or “analytical” depiction. As we have seen earlier, Lam Le purposely created this visual and aural disjunction in order to both parody and break with a more conventional type of cinema that favors psychological babble over more metaphorical forms of character signification. One of the most fascinating and remarkable aspects of Lam Le’s work, however, lies in the way he displaces our common understanding of colonization as “a purely spatial praxis” (as Lucien Lefebvre would have put it), a struggle for power over the governing of space and territory, transforming it into a conflict over the “sacred,” which was one of the most effective ways in colonizing the imaginary of the people of Vietnam. This contestation over the sacred is made manifest in many imaginative ways in the filmic image, in the ambivalent signs that saturate the space invested by the nun and the soldier who fail to recognize their “sacred natures,” and hence, read them “otherwise.” The issue of “reading the signs” was, in fact, made very explicit early on in Poussière d’Empire, impressed into the dialogue between the nun and the soldier who, after surveying the difficult landscape and assessing the potential dangers it poses, exclaims: “We have surveyed the terrain, we will return,” to which the nun answers: “There will be no tomorrow. In life, there are signs that must be read at the right moment.” This question of being able to read the signs at the proper moment underlies Lam Le’s interrogation on the conflict over space and the sacred. But is the spectator, like our two protagonists, capable of reading these “signs”? Let us examine an exemplary sequence, that of the carpenter working. This scene offers spectators many visual and aural signs: the distinctive noise of a wood plane working a piece of wood, the wood shavings littering the floor, a medium close-up of a hand working a chisel in what appears to be the finishing touch on a small wooden box. Some of these scenes are filmed with a transparent veil in front of the camera.11 The first unobstructed and clear camera shot of that carpenter’s space shows the Vietnamese man sanding the box down with sandpaper. This short sequence, rather banal in the subject it treats, is designed to suggest more than to reveal. All the visual clues given (i.e. the sight and sound of the tools of a distinctive trade, the finished object, and so on) make the spectator deduce that the Vietnamese man is a “carpenter.” This sequence is literally shrouded in mystery. By filming through a transparent screen made of cloth, Lam Le creates a mysterious atmosphere by veiling the spectator’s vision. He literally shrouds Vietnamese space, giving it an aura of immateriality and mystery. This veiling, in effect, mystifies the spectator, posing at the same time a very simple enigma, one whose elucidation will be delayed to reinforce the cultural divide and the potentially fatal incomprehension of the nun and soldier. That enigma is: what function does this box play in the filmic narrative? Many intervening sequences later, we witnessed a “mysterious ritual”: The carpenter lines the same box with a white paper adorned with a silver square at its center, care-




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fully transfers what appears to be dust from another box, covers it with yet another piece of paper, and writes, in Chinese character,12 the ideogram signifying “War Star” (Etoile guerrière). He then takes some dirt from the dirt floor and sprinkles it on the paper. He finally places the closed box in one of the drawers in the armoire. As we shall see, the armoire, or more precisely, its plane surface (and hence, not its content), becomes the site of the nun’s desire and covetousness. Equally mysterious is the strange “ritual” performed by the nun in the same space, and at the same moment (the montage and cross-cutting of these independent actions highlight and reinforce their symmetrical interplay). After she enters the house, she immediately takes the measure of the carpenter’s home by pacing it. The scene is also shot from behind a veil. Upon discovering the armoire behind another cloth screen, she exclaims: “That is exactly what I need.” But the object she covets remains ambiguous since, at the precise moment she says these words, she also touches one of the dividing screens. She then estimates the size of the “armoire” by stretching her arms, tracing in space a crosslike gesture. And in spite of the carpenter’s wish that they not touch his armoire, she forcefully requisitions it, stating (with sly civility): “It is not meant to bother him.” As the sequence unfolds, other visual clues such as the PathéBaby camera projector, the film strip being rewound, the hand-cranked electric generator, the projector light bulb being replaced, and the makeshift screen to be tied down on the plane surface of the armoire, make clear that what appeared to be the nun’s mysterious ritual at the beginning of the sequence was simply her attempt to gauge the space necessary to allow a film to be projected in the carpenter’s cabana. It is difficult to imagine that the process of evangelization could be carried out successfully through the medium of cinema. But this is precisely the absurdity of the nun’s steadfast faith in her mission and, implicitly, in the cinema, that Lam Le depicts in Poussière d’Empire. In fact, the nun believes that she can rely on the force of the cinematic image projected onto the screen to communicate, paradoxically, God’s words. Later on, as they are encircled by Vietnamese maquisards during an offensive against the French, the nun says somewhat absurdly that the villagers too “would like to hear the word of Christ.” The disjunctive irony is self-evident here since the film she wanted to show to the villagers is The Passion of Christ, a silent-era, black-and-white Pathé film that relies on intertitles (printed words inserted into the body of the film) to convey spatial and temporal coordinates. One such intertitle announces, for instance, the “arrival of Joseph and Marie in Bethlehem.” As the presence of the village translator makes obvious, the villagers do not read or understand French. If linguistic utterances are indeed a barrier to communication, the nun nevertheless knows that the Vietnamese are predisposed to her evangelizing mission and conversion. They believe in the sacred nature of the elements (Earth, Sky, Fire, Iron, and so on), a belief that coexists unproblematically with their acceptance of the magical, the superstitious in their everyday life13—“people, here, are ready to hear the divine voice; the spirits, the wandering souls, they only ask to be initiated” intones the nun. But, as Emmanuel Levinas has written, “without their sig-



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nification drawn from ethics, theological concepts remain empty and formal frames” (Ethique et infini 1). Although the Pathé film succeeds in making visible (“showing”) a series of “biblical” events, it will fail to communicate the lessons of the gospel because it is completely disengaged from the daily reality and concerns of the Vietnamese population subjugated by French colonial power. The filmmaker is also quick to undermine the seriousness of the event/spectacle by providing jarring commentaries by a jovial and irrespectful Sergeant Tamisier, who supplements the absence of “words” by singing, “He was born the Holy Child,” throwing his voice like a ventriloquist to give Mary or Joseph a voice, or providing off-the-cuff commentaries such as “Mary who found grace with Jesus, you will bear a son,” to the nun’s silent amusement, displacing at the same time her role as God’s mediator. The force of the image is further undermined by the filmic narrative itself, through a metonymic displacement: The nun arranges the trinkets of her devotion at the same time the spectators get glimpses of images of The Passion. The spatial proximity of the filmic images and the trinkets she will hawk to the villagers—medallions, crosses, effigies and images of Jesus and Marie, piously arranged according to types and sizes—further trivializes her mission. But, ultimately, the filmmaker’s focus is not so much on these images of devotion or on those projected on the screen, but on the process of investing/occupying “sacred” Vietnamese space, desacralizing it by transforming the carpenter’s “home” and workshop into a vulgar screening room or cinema. As Western objects of devotion—the nun’s Christian trinkets but also the equipment required to show a movie, including the manual portable electric generator, Pathé-Baby projector, film, and makeshift “screen”—fill the carpenter’s house/workshop, the initial clutter and partitioning of that space with screens and hung drapings all but disappears. In this way, Western order and rationality invests and reorders Vietnamese space. But this achieved order is broken as one of the armoire drawers opens and tears the makeshift screen, which provokes the furor of the sergeant, who discovers that the carpenter “collects dust.” Indeed he does. But this is not any type of dust, but the ashes of dead Vietnamese maquisards. The armoire is a memorializing vessel, a repository for the dead and their memory. The cabana, then, is not simply what it appears to be, both the carpenter’s workshop and house; it is, by extension, also a sacred resting place, a “mausoleum.” And at the end of the first part of Poussière d’Empire, we also discover that the dirt floor hides the entrance to a tunnel, probably a reference to the Cu Chi tunnels begun during the Indochinese War and still in use during the Vietnam War, from which Vietnamese maquisards emerge, undetected by the French platoon sent to rescue the trapped nun and soldier. Hence the house/workshop/mausoleum is also an invisible site of resistance to French colonialism. Lam Le questions very vigorously the complicity of cinema and religion in the French colonizing project and its legacy. He does so by concentrating on the image of the dividing “screen” that transfigures itself into a “shroud.” This screen/shroud used at the beginning of the sequence to “embody” the nun is used, later on, to wrap the body of a dead Vietnamese maquisard. The “content” has changed, but the “form” is still the same. Lam Le exploits cinemati-




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cally the duality of the screen/shroud as a metaphor to signal a transfer of power and knowledge. If Christian images of the sacred dot the Vietnamese cultural landscape, as the legacy-trace of French colonialism, the native can also appropriate these image to interrogate their sacrilegious presence. Poussière d’Empire, then, is also a meditation on Lam Le’s own work as a Vietnamese film director living in France and using a technology first introduced and imposed by French colonialism on his people. He endeavors to free that technology from its “colonial roots” in order to return a different type of gaze, a postcolonial gaze. The torn screen is symbolic of the “insuturables déchirements” (non-suturable tearings) that can never be mended. It thus demonstrates, at the same time, the failure of cinema as a colonizing apparatus. We now stand on firmer ground and in a better position to understand what Lam Le so enigmatically called the image, a type of boundary. For this auteur works on the relations between different artistic languages—cinema, theater, painting—in an attempt to redefine and extend oral and written Vietnamese tradition into previously uncharted territory. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the Third World, like his fellow exiled compatriot filmmaker Tran Anh Hung, who is much less eager to evoke such incendiary images, he does not want to evacuate history in his filmic project by repressing or relegating offscreen, the painful traumatic events that suture the history of France and Vietnam. Lam Le demands a cinema of rupture, one that refuses to emulate Hollywood cinema and wrestles with more immediate cultural conflicts over the inevitable blurring of cultural identity as younger generations (of filmmakers) inevitably assimilate into the mainstream. Toward a Postcolonial Cinema In a testament to the increasingly complex position occupied by auteurs like himself, Lam Le is reluctant to affiliate his work with the more openly militant Third Cinema, even though his work has been assimilated to that “movement.” There are, undoubtedly, aesthetic and theoretical convergences. But at the same time, his filmic aesthetic cannot be subsumed under that category. He is uneasy with some Third Cinema. Lam Le’s cinema also does not conform to the aesthetic practiced in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.14 Constrained by a lack of funding and technological “backwardness” (in the early 1980s, the only color laboratory in the country was improvised by transforming two black-and-white ones), Vietnamese cinema is also too didactic. It is reduced to expounding a social and political thesis, in order to demonstrate two basic and inextricably linked themes: “the independence of the people and its identity.” Moreover, it relies too much on dialogue, which is in stark contrast to Lam Le’s view that cinema exists solely as ‘image’ (“cinema exists only as image” [Le Morvan]). Vietnamese cinema also privileges long-take rather than montage. In fact, the Vietnamese do not consider Lam Le’s way of filming to be appropriate “Vietnamese cinema”: “The Vietnamese authorities know me since my first film: Rencontre des nuages et du dragon (Encounter Between the Clouds and the Dragon), which I was only able to show to cinema professionals, during private



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screenings, because it was regarded as “non-Socialist cinema, incapable of being understood by the people” (Interim and Seguret 12-13). For a Third World filmmaker living and working in the First World, the only tenable position may be the ethical-aesthetic positioning advocated, albeit in another context, by French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose work aimed at “seeing inwardness from the outside.” Lam Le’s cinematic aesthetic engagement seems to illustrate this desire to “se(e) inwardness from the outside.” But as cinematic technology penetrates and becomes more widely available in Third World nations of Asia and Africa, Vietnam included, Lam Le fears that it will cut down on the number and quality of more experimental filmmaking. Third World cinema, eager to emulate Western models, simply undermines its own original ways of constructing a film narrative. The undeniable pressure to imitate and conform to Western cinematic models will lead to a uniformization in the different cinematic languages, an irreparable loss. This type of warning should be taken seriously and heeded if the radical innovations introduced by Lam Le’s postcolonial cinema, which successfully resists the mimetic impulse and invents a new cinematic grammar, are to remain vibrant. But how is cinema, a typically Western mode of expression, able to express the specificity of other cultural traditions? The strategies deployed by Lam Le and outlined above suggest the ways in which Poussière d’Empire is one such luminous example. This may be seen as a utopian and idealistic achievement, especially in light of the very real financial constraints on filmmakers today. But, as Lam Le suggests, one must work through and with these technical and production constraints. In fact, the elements that escape the director’s control may ultimately define his “style” or écriture: It is at the very moment when you use the technologically and intellectually deficient resources of a nation that you convey its truth. I am very attached to the notion of bricolage in a film, because it adds a dimension that no one else could bring, except oneself. It is at that moment that I tell myself that I sign the film because constraints forged each shot. With millions more for Poussière d’Empire, I would not have done better than this, and neither would I have wanted to. (Lardeau and Philippon 20)15 But he certainly does not want to be taken as a model, adding that: “I am deeply suspicious of people like me . . . there are many examples of Third World filmmakers who return home as colonizer” (Boujut 32). It is my hope that the issue of “being on or working the border,” introduced at the beginning of this essay, should, by now, be less obscure. Lam Le is literally a “Smuggler between two worlds” (Passeur entre deux mondes), as the late Cahiers du Cinéma critic, Serge Daney, called him. He has interrogated and examined the complex stakes in the encounter between France and Vietnam, translating them into a new cinematographic language16 that is also “an insurgent act of cultural translation” (Bhabha 7). He is, then, not simply the “only bridge—fragile footbridge” (Seguret 13) between the new Vietnamese cinema and French cinema,17 between Communist Vietnam and the exiled Vietnamese diasporic




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community living in the West, the sacred and the profane, but, more importantly, he has established himself as an important postcolonial auteur whose film is a major contribution to our understanding and theorization of the postcolonial condition.



Notes 1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations within text and endnotes are my own. Parenthetical references refer to the original text in French. 2. The same year, Arnaud Sélignac’s Dream one, Euzhan Palcy’s Rue Cases nègres, and Léos Carax’s Boys and Girls, all first feature films, were also produced. 3. For him, cinema is “total art,” a privileged medium because it is “an art that synthesizes, allows the playful experimentation with the notion of time, while not neglecting sound, crucial in our time” (Leclère). 4. “The unhomely moment relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence” (Bhabha 11). 5. “Why can I not shorten distances with a magic wand. Or as this immortal, change a shawl into a bridge Must I be transformoed into stone Or that I no longer have tears as I climb the tower?” (editor’s translation). 6. We note that, for this critic, the first part of the film, which takes place in the Mekong Delta, is simply described as “the jungle,” an interesting if inaccurate misreading since there are no scenes set in the jungle (but a tracking shot through lush irrigating canals and rivers). It is a revealing conflation made by a critic who was expecting yet another Hollywood Vietnam War movie. 7. He adds: “Being at the same time an historical chronicle, a popular tale, and an analysis of exile, this film wants to combine, in the same movement, collective destinies and individual trajectories” (F.G.). 8. The selection of Sanda, a well-known French actress, a winner of the Best Female Performance at Cannes, is not fortuitous, since he wanted someone who knew very little about Vietnam but whose sensibility and acting competence would fit perfectly what he had in mind. 9. “In Madrid, I acquired a sense of discipline by copying Las Meninas dozens of time” (Forestier). 10. Lam Le speaks eloquently of the intellectual conjuncture and formative years in the arts from which his work emerged: “It was a moment when painting and plastic arts had discovered the second dimension, that is to say, the investment of space. Even architecture had become urbanism. I was busy going to the theater, working on stage design, fascinated and at the same time disappointed by the extent to which the use of space remained rudimentary. Until the day when I saw Ronconi’s Orlando Furioso and Mnouchkine’s 89. Then, with a few friends, we founded l’Atelier de l’Epée de Bois, to stage collective shows where I worked as stage designer [“scénographe”], actor, and co-author. At the same time, I gave up my studies at the Ecole des BeauxArts, where the notion of discipline had been swept away by post-May ’68 ideas, and where I felt that I was doing everything, which meant not doing anything at all” (Riou). 11. “These beautiful transparent effects through these fabrics . . . create an immaterial atmosphere” (Gervais 43). Also see Fanon, on the significance of the “veil.” 12. The use of Chinese character instead of the romanized alphabet, the quoc ngu, introduced by Christian missionaries, and the basis of contemporary Vietnamese written language, is already a form of cultural resistance. 13. Lam Le describes it in this way: “Traditional Vietnamese beliefs betray a predisposition to Catholic conversion (as well as to communism: the red color, for example, brings good fortune . . . ). From this perspective, Vietnam was a logical choice toward the evangelization of China. Religion and magic are part of daily life, and, are very easily reconciled. . . . Overall, Vietnam, which was subjected to the influence of Confucian China rather than Buddhist India, is the nation in this part of the world where the notion of the sacred is the most inveterate, where superstitions, beliefs and magic, the most widespread. All the natural elements (Earth, Sky, Fire, Iron . . . ) are considered to be of a divine origin and organized according to a logic of balance, harmony and stability. Hence, the importance of numbers, invested with religious symbols of verticality (manifest in the architecture of pagodas), but also the importance of the dissemination of images, as in all of Asia” (Interim and Seguret 13).

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14. Lam Le paints a fascinating portrait of Vietnamese cinema in the early 1980s: “Cinema constitutes the only source of information coming from abroad. The Vietnamese produce only fifteen fiction films a year (in peace time . . . ). Cinema is, however, enormously popular among the Vietnamese people, but they only get to see the E series dregs from the Soviet Union or other Eastern Block nations. The technical difficulties are considerable, and [Vietnamese] filmmakers rely entirely on East German technical expertise. When East Germany changed all of its film stock for color ones, the Vietnamese were also forced to work with color, and, to that end, they transformed two black and white laboratories to obtain a color one. They are discovering the zoom which we have neglected for the past fifteen years. They also do not understand why Rencontre . . . uses so much montage: they work very little with montage, preferring instead the sequence shot. Their cinema falls within the province of total bricolage. They only have one or two auteurs” (Interim and Seguret 13). 15. Lam Le tells this revealing anecdote: “For the scene of the storm, we needed to make all the wires, ropes, fabric used in the set move, and it was our trainees, our light people, who pulled in every which direction, with sewing thread: it involved everyone, and no one was available to do the light. It was very good to have been forced to do this. For me, cinema is above all a human enterprise. I am not a careerist. I am in search of an absolute other” (Lardeau and Philippon 20). 16. Lam Le’s quest is to find a cinematic language capable of inscribing the “différance” of Vietnamese culture without falling into an exoticizing gaze (to which Tran Anh Hung has succumbed), while, at the same time, rendering visually the force of the colonial encounter. For many critics, and Lam Le included, the violence of this encounter has been explored forcefully by French director Pierre Schoendorffer in his 1965 film, La 317e Section. Lam Le’s film can nevertheless be seen as an imaginative response to Schoendorffer’s film. 17. Although many critics have commented that the first part of Poussière d’Empire is a parody of the French colonial cinema of the 1950s, this view fails to acknowledge other important sources for Lam Le’s cinema aesthetic, the radical role theater and painting have played in the construction of his film narrative. My purpose, then, was to shift our attention away from an unpromising cinematic filiation, to a discussion of the impact of theater and painting on his conception of the encounter and the ways in which it is rendered spatially and inscribed in his film.







Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier

Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier: Linh, you have been living in Ho Chi Minh City for a year and a half now, and this is your third trip back since you left Vietnam in 1975. How is Ho Chi Minh City different from where you lived in the United States, and do you consider this city home? Linh Dinh: Yes, this is more home than Philadelphia. I don’t have to apologize for being here. I might get harassed on the street, but I know that this is my city. In the States, I always felt apologetic. I always felt like I was walking through someone’s living room to go to the bathroom. I always felt like I was a squatter. Maybe that was a very extreme attitude. I hope most Asian Americans and immigrants don’t feel the same way I do because that is a very uncomfortable way to live. Maybe that’s just my hypersensitivity, but in Philadelphia, people were always asking me, “Where are you from?” It’s such a standard question when they see you. When people say, “Where are you from?” what they really mean is, “What are you doing here?” Here, they might ask the same question but I don’t care. At the same time, Ho Chi Minh City isn’t quite home either. When I walk down the street people know immediately that I’m not a regular citizen. They think I’m Taiwanese, or at the least a Viet Kieu, an overseas Vietnamese. They can tell immediately, there’s no hiding it. LO: How can they tell? LD: Perhaps because I look a little different, I wear this goatee, cut my hair this way, and my face is kind of round. I don’t know what they look at, but my face is different, the color of my skin is a little lighter, and the way I stand or sit is different. My body language gives it away. LO: Do you still feel somewhat like a tourist even though you’ve lived here for a year and a half now?



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LD: Yes, there’s still a lot to be discovered and it’s good to be on the outside. . . . . LO: I see that you have the Lonely Planet Guide to Vietnam on your bookshelf. . . . .

LO: Do you still have recourse to it once in a while? LD: When I visit the different towns, yes! It’s a good book. It’s the best book of its kind. . . . I didn’t bring a lot of books back. People bring books to me when they come to visit. So that’s strange too: I’m cut off from that source. I was always buying books back in the States and now I can’t buy them. I have to download things off the Web, but there isn’t much there. So I was trying to feed myself strictly on Vietnamese literature, but I got a little tired of that. LO: You said you’re perceived as a foreigner both in the U.S. and in Vietnam and you’re made to feel like a foreigner in both countries. How is one experience different from the other? To that effect, let me also read these verses by Saint Victor and ask you to comment on them: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner. He to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong. But he is perfect to whom every land is a foreign land.” LD: Well, that’s a very stoic attitude. By Saint Victor’s definition, I’m perfect already. I feel alien to the very house I grew up in. Although I’m a native born, I’m perceived as a foreigner, so I can assume the privileges of an ugly American if I want to. It’s very ironic. A foreigner is superior here, unlike in the U.S., where a foreigner is leveled down to the lowest social level. Unless you’re a white European, of course, then you’re elevated. . . . You might be an Indian doctor or a Chinese scientist, it doesn’t matter what level of education you have, how much money you make, you’re still seen as a social inferior. A white workingclass person can insult you at any time, can laugh at you, and feels entitled to do that. Here it’s the reverse. Whether I want to or not, I enjoy certain privileges here because I’m perceived as a foreigner. Just by returning to Vietnam, I became a bigger man. In a literal sense also. LO: What was your experience growing up in the United States? LD: Well I moved so much: Washington, Oregon, California, Virginia. In San Jose, my school was mostly Mexican, in Virginia it was mostly white. I never really saw a pattern because I moved all the time. But I lived in Philadelphia long enough to examine my life more closely. There is a funny illusion. You think that assimilation is a gradual process: you learn English, meet people, learn American history, learn baseball, learn football, and you’re gradually allowed in. So



LD: Yes, I bought that last year and still have it. . . . .

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when you reach a dead-end, you’re in shock. You realize, finally, that you’re never going to be allowed totally in.

LD: I don’t know, the glass wall, whatever. I came to the States when I was eleven so my embrace of American culture was an organic thing. But it was also a half-deliberate thing because you always want to belong. Any kid wants to belong. For example, I happened to like baseball. I watched it on TV because I liked it, not necessarily because I wanted to be an American. I also liked Speed Racer, and that was Japanese. I liked what I liked. So I did all these things organically. My assimilation was organic, but twenty-five years later, people still ask me where I’m from, and are still surprised that I’m American. Then, you realize you can’t go any further, and it’s a shock when you realize you will always be on the outside, permanently. There are hundreds of incidences I can tell you about. It gets so tedious to talk about this. I used to think I didn’t want to talk about race any more. It’s such a sordid topic, but I have no choice. I walked into an Italian market in Philly. I liked to shop in the Italian Market because they had all sorts of things I wanted and I walked into the store and this guy said, “Hey, I shot this guy in Hiroshima.” What are you going to do? Laugh and say, “Hey, you missed!”? You don’t expect that but you hear that shit all the time and it always comes at you at the most unexpected moment. . . . You look at Black culture, and I’ve always been curious about the Black response to all of this, and you see all this anger coming out. It’s getting more out of control actually, but you can see where it’s coming from, and it’s very sad and it’s very unfortunate. LO: With all these problems and difficulties, why do you feel you will eventually have to go back to the U.S. as you told me the other day? LD: Because of my future as a writer, I need to be there. My writer friends are there. I need to be closer to books and journals, just to function as a writer. In the long run, I need to be back in the U.S. My home is in the English language. Also, I’m not a citizen of Vietnam, I’m just a guest here. I don’t have a lot of the legal rights here, and I wouldn’t want to be a citizen of Vietnam under this government. If the laws were different, that might be a possibility. But I have to be practical. There are a lot of disadvantages to being a Vietnamese citizen. As an American citizen, I have all these advantages. Just traveling, you know. It’s very hard to get a visa as a Vietnamese citizen, to go to certain countries. So, for practical reasons, I’ll remain an American citizen. I see the flip side to Vietnam. This country is very badly run. It’s a mess. The wages are absurd and there’s a lot of sadness, a lot of anger, but that’s a whole different set of problems. The only Vietnamese Americans who come back here to live permanently are old people. They come back to die. And the ones who are in trouble with the law. If you’ve killed somebody then you come back to Vietnam.



LO: The cultural glass ceiling?

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LD: I think one of the misconceptions I had was that people related to each other better here. All superficial observations, I mean you can see how people live here: they live in close quarters and the neighbors know each other, they have time to talk, the conversation can drag on for three hours, so I thought people had more patience with each other, they liked each other better, sense of family, sense of community, all that shit. But I was also a little skeptical. I didn’t believe it fully. In the States, I didn’t know my neighbors. I hardly knew anyone. I had to go to the bar. I knew my friends at the bar but the people around me I didn’t know. But here, you see people chatting and talking. But after living here a while, I can see that people aren’t quite that social. They might talk, but there’s a lot of animosity, there’s a lot of mistrust, there’s a lot of underhandedness, you know. LO: What do you think it’s caused by? LD: Several things: maybe just human nature, maybe people are like that anyway, they just happen to be physically close to each other, but not psychologically close to each other. One thing I’ve noticed is that haggling is a very bad custom. You’re always trying to get over the next person. You’re always haggling. In the States, you’re not worried about being cheated when you go to the supermarket, but here you’re always worrying about being ripped off when you buy anything. So this mind game that’s being played, haggling, haggling, corrupts people. But on the other hand, there’s a conversation. In the States, you buy things and you don’t even talk to the person. But here, they play mind games with each other. And over what? Five cents? Two cents? And there’s a lot of distrust of the government, because this government is so dishonest, what they say and what they do, and the school system is all screwed up, so dishonesty trickles down from above. The citizens here have all these complaints. They know they’re being screwed. They know that when they send their kids to school, they have to bribe the teachers, they know when the cops stop them on the street, it isn’t because of what they did wrong, but to shake them down for money. They know it’s not right. They complain about it all the time. LO: What other common themes and concerns have you noticed in your everyday conversation with people here? LD: There’s the perception that any country outside of Vietnam is fantastic, and this has to be the dump of the universe. And many of the Vietnamese Americans who return play up to this conception: a guy could be flipping hamburgers in the U.S., but here he’s a hotshot. It’s a joke, a stereotype, but it’s a very common stereotype. And you must remember that only a short time ago, there was this hysteria to get out, the boat people, so the psychology of getting out is still there, it would be a dream come true for many people. People would ask



LO: What were your conceptions of Vietnam before you came and lived here, and how have they changed?

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me: “you must know somebody, I have a beautiful daughter.” It’s pitiful, but who can blame them? There’s a seamstress in my neighborhood. She makes fairly decent money. She’s twenty-three and has a boyfriend here, but her mother wants to hook her up with some guy from Germany. This is pure fantasy. The mother is adamant about not letting her go out with this boyfriend. But what is she going to find in Germany? You hear the most horrible stories too: like the Taiwanese who come here to get married. There are these middlemen to hook them up. A Taiwanese pays a fee to a middleman, about $10,000, and the middleman goes to a village, finds a girl, then brings her back to Saigon. (The farther you go the cheaper they are. Sometimes a girl can be had for as little as $500.) Sometimes a girl will accept the money then disappear, or she will go to Taiwan and freak out because she thinks her husband’s some hotshot and he’s bagging groceries in a grocery store. You hear all kinds of stories about the Taiwanese here. The Vietnamese press loves to pick on them. They are the new ugly foreigners in Vietnam. LO: The other day we also mentioned that we both noticed how young the Vietnamese population is, many of them born after or just a few years before 1975. Is the Vietnam War, or rather the American War, as it is called here, still part of the Vietnamese consciousness? What do they think about Americans now? LD: The kids who were born after 1975 aren’t interested in the war. They don’t want to hear about it. What they have been taught about the war is confusing: Vietnam fought America, and now the Americans are here, and everyone’s kissing America’s ass, so what’s the message? They don’t know what to believe. In school they heard criticism of capitalism and now they see on television how rich the capitalist countries are. They can tell just by watching the soccer matches from England or Italy. The stadiums are beautiful, the spectators are well-dressed. I’ve heard people say, as they’re watching a foreign soccer match on TV, “Wow, look at how beautiful that grass is!” And the Party officials are sending their kids to America to study at the most expensive schools. It’s the government that is being hypocritical. If the war was fought against capitalism, against America, then why are they acting this way now? And if it wasn’t fought against that, then they should have left South Vietnam the way it was, because the South Vietnamese didn’t sell out the way they’re selling out now. This government is selling whole chunks of land to the Taiwanese at ridiculous prices, kicking people off the land. So they are selling out to foreign companies worse than the South Vietnamese ever did. What was the war fought over? It doesn’t make any sense. LO: What is the level of animosity between South and North Vietnamese? LD: It’s very muted. This house for instance is South Vietnamese, next house over is North Vietnamese. After 1975, many horrible things happened. The North Vietnamese moved in and took over houses and just shoved their former occupants to new economic zones. People do remember. This house doesn’t



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LO: In your introduction in The Literary Review’s special issue on Vietnamese literature,1 you wrote about government’s censorship, its monopoly on publishing, and the “climate of intimidation” that exists here in Vietnam, which greatly stunt literary production, reducing it to rather sterile and sentimental accounts of the Vietnamese reality. Are you conscious of this censorship in your own writing? LD: I don’t have to worry about it because I don’t publish here. LO: Since you don’t write under the same constraints as Vietnamese writers, do you then feel an obligation, a responsibility (which can also be regarded as a constraint) to expose and depict a different set of realities than what has been depicted so far? LD: I feel challenged to capture some of this reality. Although I know much less than someone who’s lived here his whole life, I can perhaps see things a local wouldn’t see. I have a fresh eye because I’m coming in from the outside. I also have a basis for comparison because I’ve lived elsewhere. But I’m not a complete outsider. I was born here, after all. Sometimes you read an American account of the war and you can see how excited the writer is. He is almost gleeful. The most horrible things become mere spectacles to a true outsider. Like you said, I’m not handicapped by the censorship affecting the local writers. I tell my writer friends here that Vietnamese literature, as published in Vietnam, does not reflect Vietnamese society. I tell them that the Vietnam War is better depicted by American writers than by Vietnamese writers. The Americans are more blunt, more candid, more honest. “They’ve stolen our topic!” I tell them. LO: Are you aware of any difference between your writing when you were in the U.S. and here? LD: I think my writing reflects my personality. I’ve always been somewhat belligerent in my writing. Where it comes from, I’m not so worried about. This place certainly didn’t produce that. I came here with that personality already formed, and I don’t think I’m being reactionary to this place at all. My writing is fairly constant in its tone and its concerns. But it’s odd for me, because here I don’t speak English hardly at all, maybe once every three months. In Philadelphia, I would go to the bar and hear conversations. So that dialogue, I don’t hear. I’m not sure how that affects my writing. I suspect that it is making me a little bit more tentative at times because I have to think more about my English. But there’s a trade-off: I’m exposed to all these themes and issues that I wouldn’t be exposed to in the U.S. Because I feel more integrated here, more in touch with people, my writing has become less claustrophobic. My set of concerns is becoming wider. And I’m less angry here. I’m not saying that anger is a bad



speak to that house but they don’t fight each other. There’s a lot of old history. . . .

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ingredient in writing, but I can see that anger is less of a driving force in my work here. Anger fed me for a while, and now it is something else that is feeding me. . . .

LD: Curiosity, more of a curiosity. Like I said, I’ve gained a composure here that I didn’t have. Maybe that’s bad, maybe I should be breeding that anger, that edge. But there’s a distortion in anger, and it can also get a little tiresome, although entertaining to a degree. . . . LO: How has feeding on Vietnamese literature influenced your own writing? LD: It certainly has. There are a lot of writers I didn’t know too well and a lot of incidental things in the newspapers, the crime stories in the police newspaper, for example, things you only get by living in a place. LO: You write poetry and also short stories. What are the differences between writing poetry and fiction? LD: I have different intentions with poetry and fiction. In fiction, I am more aware of an audience. It’s much more social to me in that I want many people to read it and I want to be clear and accessible. I also want to drag in as much as possible of my surroundings. It’s a friendlier act. Because fiction forces me to be more curious about other people’s lives, I become more moral somehow. I’m a nicer guy because I have to pay more attention to what other people are thinking. When you have a character talk in a piece of fiction, you don’t want him to sound like you, so you become a better listener and you try to understand why people do what they do. I’m also aware that when I write about Vietnamese or Vietnamese Americans, I’m also writing for an outside audience (non-Vietnamese or non-Vietnamese Americans). I have a responsibility towards how I depict my so-called community. But I’m not too worried about it because my ultimate responsibility is to be true to my own experience. Let’s say if I write about an Asian guy, a Vietnamese guy, let’s say he doesn’t come off too well, let’s say there’s something wrong with him, I’m not going to worry about it as long as I’m not creating a caricature, a distortion. If an Asian American reader decides that one of my characters is making “us Asians” look bad, I’m not going to worry about it. But I have to avoid the traditional pitfalls, the stereotypes. As long as I’m not pandering to anyone, I have nothing to worry about. I suppose you can create social situations which are not true to life as it is lived right now, but can serve as models for the future. That may be something constructive to do, but I haven’t done it, maybe later. . . . Whereas in poetry, I couldn’t care less. I’m after something elusive and I have to track it down. That’s all I care about. I have a couple of friends I send the poems to. The more people read them, the better I feel, of course, I’m not indifferent to that, but as I’m writing a poem, I couldn’t care less.



LO: What is feeding you here?

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LD: That’s up to him. That’s not his responsibility as a writer, it’s his responsibility as a citizen. If that’s what he wants to do, that’s on top of his responsibility as a writer. If he wants to be an activist, that’s his choice, but he doesn’t have to be. As a writer, if you can clarify anything whatsoever, you’ve done a great service. If you can shine a light in any way, that’s enough. Let’s take the race issue: if a reader can come away from a poem or a story with a deeper understanding of race, then the writer has done his job. But he has to be very honest. You can’t just look out for your own community and distort the truth. I know my racial allegiance, so that’s a kind of racism right there. I know I’m partial to Asian people, I have to admit that. I can’t pretend I’m color-blind so I can’t demand that the rest of the population be color-blind or claim that my writing is color-blind. The most I can ask for is that people respect each other’s basic dignity and don’t interfere. LO: In the introduction to The Literary Review you also wrote: “The ability to write, and to publish, away from Big Brother’s shadow comes at a price, however. An overseas Vietnamese writer is someone working in isolation. He’s cut off from what should be his main audience: the reading public in Vietnam.” At the same time, you also mentioned that to write in Vietnam, for you, is to write in isolation, away from your peers. . . . LD: The Vietnamese American writers I mentioned write in Vietnamese, but they’re cut off from Vietnam, and in Vietnam, I’m cut off from America. I still publish in the States. I send all my stuff back. I publish poems in magazines but I can’t see these magazines. It’s odd to go for months without speaking English. I cannot buy the newest books and I have no idea of what’s happening in the writing community. I wrote to poet Ron Silliman: “If I could take a train to New York in the morning and return to Saigon by evening, I’d be a happy man.” I live in a police state but I’m not persecuted here, they leave me alone. I mean, they look at my e-mail, I know that, and I can’t have books sent to me here, but I’m not persecuted. I would like to publish here just to feel more involved, but they won’t publish my poems here. . . . LO: Why? LD: They just don’t publish overseas Vietnamese writers. My friends here have been trying to get me published. They tell the editors “he’s not an overseas Vietnamese writer, he’s an American writer,” but these editors don’t buy it. They’re afraid they will get in trouble if they publish me. A poem of mine was included in Best American Poetry 2000, so some of my friends here were trying to get it published. There were three different translations floating around, but they were all rejected. One editor told me through an intermediary that he couldn’t publish the poem because it wasn’t clear which army the injured soldier in the poem belonged to. I felt like sending him a snide note, “Tell me



LO: What is the writer’s social and political responsibility?

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which army you want him to belong to, and I’ll put the right uniform on him!” LO: So do you consider yourself an American writer?

LO: Why an American writer and not an Asian American or a Vietnamese American writer? LD: I used to get really angry when I was referred to as anything but an American writer. When someone called me a Vietnamese writer, I would get pissed off, and I didn’t want to be called a Vietnamese American writer, either. Of course, I am Vietnamese American, but I want to be an American writer. First of all, I write in English, period. So I’m an American writer, period. I don’t want to be pushed out. I mean you would never introduce someone as a Jewish writer or a Jewish American writer, or an Italian American writer, you wouldn’t do that. . . . Thematically, there’s a lot of things that I deal with that other Asian American writers deal with. So it is helpful as a term. I mean I use that term, too. I see race affinity, too. I used to pretend I didn’t see that, but that’s just dishonest. Look, I check my baseball scores and I look at the Japanese guys and see how they’re doing. I gravitate toward them, I notice these things so, of course, an Asian American reader would want to see what the Asian American writers are doing. It’s common human narcissism. You want to see yourself in everything. But in general conversation, I will insist on being called “an American writer.” LO: These are very complex issues: in “naming” your identity, you’re limiting yourself, fixing yourself as one thing or another. In the publishing industry, for instance, as an Asian American, you’re limited to writing on certain subject matter, the Asian American experience, the successful tales of acculturation, and so on. But at the same time, as you said before, you can’t ever (or not yet) be perceived as simply an “American.” People will still ask you, “Where are you from?” LD: Maybe what I’m trying to say is, I want both. I want to be a homeboy and a cosmopolitan. Clayton Eshleman was the first person to publish me, in his magazine Sulfur. It was an avant-garde magazine, and I’m proud to be associated with that group of poets. But when I was translated into Vietnamese a few years ago, I was happy about that also. I feel an emotional need to belong to the Vietnamese writing community. And I also pay attention to Asian American writers, so I guess I want everything. LO: Now, let me turn to your work as editor and translator. You’ve translated poems and short stories from Vietnamese into English. What criteria do you take into account in the selection process? LD: I translate what I like. It’s not done systematically and I make hardly any money from it. I just have to be confident that these pieces can be published and



LD: Yes.

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LO: So again, there’s a burden of responsibility in introducing something from here that is worth the world standard. . . . LD: That’s only natural because English is the international language and Vietnamese writers are very eager to go beyond their own boundaries, to present themselves to the rest of the world. LO: What are some of the challenges involved in translating from Vietnamese to English? LD: Whenever you translate from A to B, you better be a good writer in the B language. If you translate from Vietnamese to English, your Vietnamese can be relatively weak but your English has to be strong. If your Vietnamese is perfect but your English is weak, you’re in trouble. If you translate a Vietnamese poem into an English poem, you better know how to write an English poem. LO: How about cultural translation? LD: Of course, there are things that won’t translate, but I don’t worry about that. You use footnotes. I just want to make sure it reads well as an English poem. But I don’t want to make it sound as if it was written in English, either. For example, if a weird metaphor is used, keep that metaphor. Where Vietnamese syntax is different than English syntax, don’t streamline it into English. I am not trying to present an exotic poem, but I want to show that it is something that wasn’t composed in the American context. It was written somewhere else and that’s the attraction of reading literature in translation. It should feel foreign. When I edited Night, Again, one of the characters in a story said “your mother’s fart” in Vietnamese. The translator said that no one would say that in English so she wanted to change it to “damn you.” But I said “no,” leave it as “your mother’s fart,” because that will give people a window into the Vietnamese psychology. Notes 1. “Vietnamese Poetry and Fiction,” guest-edited by Linh Dinh, The Literary Review 43.2 (Winter 2000).



that American readers will find them interesting. As a translator, I’m also an editor. I feel responsible as a presenter of Vietnamese literature. So the question becomes, “Will the reader conclude that this is as good as anything out there and not some second-rate, third-rate Third World product?”



Ho Chi Minh City, July 2000. Photographer: Jerry Gorman.

Michèle Bacholle

With two short films and three feature films, Tran Anh Hung is now an established director.1 Focusing on his first two feature films—The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo—this essay will demonstrate that while they may at first appear self-sufficient and rather unrelated, these films in fact complement and complete one another. If, like all of Tran’s films, both revisit the homeland he left in 1975—Vietnam—they also work through the same fundamental problematic: Vietnam’s (cultural) fatherlessness. Represented by the figure of the orphan, this problematic is embodied by the films’ respective leads: Mùi in The Scent of Green Papaya and the cyclo-driver, referred to as “Cyclo,” in the film of that name. In The Scent of Green Papaya, Tran presents, by way of Mùi’s development from the young peasant who left her village to work as a servant into an accomplished young woman, a feminine solution to the problem of fatherlessness. In Cyclo he presents, in Cyclo’s Ho Chi Minh City experiences, a masculine one. Reading these films as two parts of one journey, this essay will show that these characters’ journeys trace what Tran Anh Hung invites us to read as Vietnam’s journey from servitude to self-assertion and liberation, and the challenges of modern life, its poverty, and its crime. Together, then, this essay will show that The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo provide what we might construe as a comprehensive vision of the ways in which Vietnam and its people might resolve their problem of fatherlessness and move into a brighter future. I have chosen to elucidate this journey by following Tran’s symbolic use of color. I will show that Tran uses the symbol of a papaya’s maturation from green (xanh in Vietnamese) to yellow in The Scent of Green Papaya to illustrate Mùi’s development, while in Cyclo, he has Cyclo move from an early association with yellow to an association with blue (also xanh in Vietnamese) to underscore not only that character’s redemption, but Vietnam’s as well.



Tran Anh Hung’s Orphan Tales

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Dedicated to Tran’s mother, The Scent of Green Papaya opens a window onto the world of women in 1951 and 1961 Saigon. More specifically, it focuses on the domestic world of a well-off family whose mother owns a fabric shop and is the breadwinner and whose father revels in idleness before disappearing with their savings. This film extols the beauty and gentleness of feminine and maternal gestures. Shot in studio with few characters and fewer extras, it is characterized by slow movements, few words, and many sounds (birds singing, light music), all of which contribute to its general sense of isolation, calm, and peacefulness. If Vietnam was in turmoil both in 1951, when it was still a French colony, and 1961, when the United States was supporting the Diem regime and sending in more troops, The Scent of Green Papaya is set in a past undisturbed by—as if sheltered from—historical events. Tran said that he wanted to give his film an impression of freshness (Cross 35). He achieved this effect with an abundance of rain, water, and of the plants that are present in almost every shot, but especially through Mùi’s radiant smiles and innocent gestures, and the use of two colors: green and yellow.2 In the space between this film’s two parts—1951 and 1961—an evolution occurs. Tran uses color to figure that evolution symbolically: green dominates the 1951 scenes; yellow those of 1961. Green is omnipresent in the first half of the film: in the plants, food, objects, and Mùi’s clothes. As the film opens, Mùi wears green clothes; by its end, she is clothed in yellow. Where the younger Mùi’s green clothing is linked to immaturity and lack of self-confidence—we see her arriving in town for the first time and hesitantly looking for her way in the dark, the older Mùi’s yellow clothes are aligned with her maturity and selfconfidence. Indeed, at the film’s end, she is seated, wears a bright yellow tunic, looks directly at the camera lens, and reads a poem with her hand resting calmly on her pregnant belly. Tran reinforces this symbolism with a parallel use of color around a photograph on the family altar of the masters’ deceased little daughter, Tó, whose place in the family Mùi comes very close to occupying in the end. In the first half of the film (Mùi in 1951), Tó’s photograph is surrounded by green flowers on the left and yellow fruit on the right; in the second half (Mùi in 1961), only the yellow fruit remain.3 In the decade between these two images of Tó’s photograph on the altar, Mùi leaves the family to work for an unmarried young pianist and composer, Khuyên, who has started teaching her to read. Moreover, the association of both Mùi and the photograph with the colors green and then yellow is further reinforced on the level of decor: when Mùi leaves the family, she leaves a predominantly green room, after being temporarily hidden to the spectator’s eyes by a yellow shutter. At Khuyên’s house, the space is clearly delimited. In that house, in fact, each character has his/her own space: Mùi has the kitchen and her own room, which Khuyên never enters; he has the living room, which she enters only as a shadowlike servant to clean or bring his meals. Between their respective spaces, there stretches a yellow corridor. One crucial day, as Mùi applies to her own lips red lipstick she found in



The Scent of Green Papaya: A Mythical Past and a Nation to Be Born

Michèle Bacholle

Khuyên’s bedroom, the camera moves from her lips to Khuyên, who stands watching her. As she flees to her own part of the house, Khuyên follows her for the first time through the yellow corridor. A pivotal scene in the movie, this is a decisive moment in their lives: both now know how the other feels. From its title on, The Scent of Green Papaya links Mùi to the papaya. The original title, Mùi Du Dú Xanh, offers a play on the word Mùi; the Vietnamese word for scent also names the heroine. Although in his interview with Alice Cross, Tran said that there is nothing really deep about the connection (Cross 35), it is tempting to compare this title “Mùi of the Green Papaya” with the title of some of Chrétien de Troyes’s novels, such as, for instance, Yvain: the Knight of the Lion, and Lancelot: the Knight of the Cart. On this reading, the papaya is Mùi’s attribute as the lion is Yvain’s and the cart Lancelot’s. Mùi and the papaya are further linked in a kitchen scene: as she prepares the papaya for eating, she opens it, strokes the seeds inside, tenderly takes one between her thumb and forefinger, and then sets it softly down on a bed of greens. This film links the symbol of the papaya seed to Mùi’s intellectual development. In the first text she reads, she finds these words: “In my garden there’s a papaya tree. The papayas hang in bunches. The ripe papayas have a pale, yellow color.” In the context of this film, however, the image of a sole papaya seed softly laid down on what looks like a nest suggests that her maturation and serenity are due not to her progress in reading and writing alone, but also to an inner happiness resulting from the fact that she is pregnant with Khuyên’s child. Moreover, the viewer is invited to read Mùi’s and the papaya’s maturation as a figure for the maturation of the nation: its pregnancy, as it were, with the nation’s future and next generations. Historically, Vietnam was a nation in gestation in 1951-1961, a nation as yet unborn but with infinite possibilities. The Scent of Green Papaya’s final camera movement appears to emphasize these possibilities as it sweeps up and away from Mùi’s pregnant belly and onto a statue that seems to protect her. So doing, it appears to gesture toward a promising, uplifting future not only for her, but for Vietnam as well. Cyclo: A Hyper-Realist Present and a Nation Stepping into Adulthood After he finished The Scent of Green Papaya, Tran said: “My goal was to impregnate [the spectator] with a certain kind of rhythm. Now, however, I have the feeling I need to shake people to the bones. I would like to make a film where they go out physically fatigued” (Chua 8). The result is Cyclo, a film whose violence recalls that of birth and whose pains echo those of growing up and coming of age, and whose main character, the pedicab driver known only as Cyclo, figures both Mùi’s son and the post-1975 generation in an independent Vietnam. Cyclo completes The Scent of Green Papaya by showing, through its main protagonist, how younger generations can diverge from an honest path and fall victim to the attraction of Western ways—drugs and easy money (dollars), which too often go hand in hand with corruption and crime. In it, The Scent of Green



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Papaya’s mythical, feminine Saigon gives way to hyper-realist, masculine Ho Chi Minh City, its busy streets, Western neon signs, and business transactions in dollars. Here again, the central character is orphaned: Cyclo’s mother died in childbirth; his father was killed the previous year in a cyclo accident, leaving his son the main provider for the remaining family members. His father’s death, his lack of guidance, the difficulty he has making ends meet, and governmental agencies’ failure to provide ambitious young people like him money to start their own businesses, combine to set Cyclo on a dangerous path. Eventually, however, he rejects the life of crime, which Tran invites us to read as Western ways—or, in the symbolism of this film, the ways of the adoptive father—and reconnects with the Vietnamese cultural traditions (of his own deceased father). Thus the film traces Cyclo’s journey, which begins with his gradual descent into the dark underworld of crime and is followed by his orphic anabasis (ascent back to light). As in The Scent of Green Papaya, the protagonist’s trajectory is figured symbolically on the level of color: in this case, his ascent’s climax is figured as a bath of blue paint. Dedicated to Tran’s father (and to Serge G.), Cyclo is set in a masculine world (cyclos and criminals) where women are most often mere commodities. It is set in a world of daily survival in an impoverished, uncompromising, and violent society where illegality and corruption prevail. Its violence is expressed by swift camera movements, deafening street sounds, jerky, syncopated music, and changing, blinking lights. As Tran remarked, “In The Scent of Green Papaya the camera touches lightly [effleure], in Cyclo it strikes [percute]” (Dinh 12).4 In the former, Mùi improved her condition by learning to read and write; in the latter, the theft of Cyclo’s pedicab leads him into increasingly serious criminal missions.5 His elder sister gets entangled in a parallel, if unrelated, chain of dramatic events (prostitution with fetishists, and rape).6 As Cyclo’s missions drag him deeper into crime, he receives a wake-up call. It comes in the guise of another pedicab driver who is run over by a truck and killed, as Cyclo’s father had been, and whose bloody body lands on Cyclo. During a night following this traumatic scene, Cyclo goes to sleep only to waken with a start, shouting “Father!” As he then contemplates his own hands, he utters these words in voice-over: You died a second time to save me. This morning I feel strangely calm as if I am living in your body, in your silhouette, your walk, your gestures. These bony fingers, this rough hand, is it yours or mine? I feel your muscles flex in my arm. This skin, it’s yours, burnt, toughened, defying the heat, the cold, the years. These veins you called them the path of life. Now I understand. Thus is Cyclo’s contact with his father, honesty, and traditions, re-established. In the next scene, he looks at and crumples a ten-dollar bill, a gesture that signals his determination to stop working for the city crimeworld’s boss lady. His attempt is temporarily delayed, however, by the woman’s son, who has covered himself in yellow paint. Cyclo’s completion of The Scent of Green Papaya is symbolized by colors,7




Michèle Bacholle

which are used differently, however, in this film. A clear movement from yellow to blue marks two simultaneous events: the death of the boss lady’s retarded son and Cyclo’s rebirth. But from the first scene, the color blue bathes the entire film. That scene figures a man behind Cyclo wearing a blue shirt, a man in a blue surgeon mask, and a blue truck; after it, the crossroads where Cyclo’s father died is said to be called Hang Xanh (“blue store”), other of his fellow cyclos are seen eating from blue containers, the little sister’s tunic has blue flowers, Cyclo’s bicycle is blue with blue armrests, Cyclo is forced to drink diluted bleach through a blue funnel, the boss lady’s tunic and robe are blue, the shutters of Cholon houses are blue, blue lights are in the nightclub, on the streets with neon lights, and in the hideout. Moreover, because many scenes take place at dusk or dawn, Cyclo’s T-shirt often takes on a blue hue. Blue marks Cyclo as heir to traditions and honesty, for despite the fact that he diverges from his path briefly, he is soon called (back) by his father and experiences a revelation. In contrast, the color yellow is aligned with the boss lady’s son, who combines, symbolically, his own retardation and his mother’s corruption. Thus, Tran’s use of color shows the retarded son and Cyclo embodying two alternatives for the Vietnamese people and youth: one might give in to Western ways and risk one’s soul, or one might renew contact with what we are invited to read as traditional Vietnamese cultural ways. By saturating his film with blue, Tran makes it clear where he stands. Tran Anh Hung brings his protagonists together in one pivotal scene: the “bath of blue paint.” While Cyclo is heavily intoxicated with drugs and alcohol, the character called the Poet, the boss lady’s right arm and the man who led Cyclo’s sister to prostitution, gets drunk and sets his own apartment on fire. As he does so, the boss lady’s son sits on the street. He is surrounded by people preparing for Tet in the blue ambiance of neon lights and by children who, to play a prank on him, place firecrackers on a small fire truck in front of him. The small explosion startles the mentally handicapped boy, who lurches into the middle of the street, right into the path of the real fire truck rushing to the Poet’s apartment. Simultaneously, the boss lady and the sister arrive on the scene of the accident. The son is covered with blood, at which his mother wonders: “Why do you love paint so much? Where did you find this color? Our family doesn’t use it.” Cutting to the Poet’s apartment, the camera shows his clothes catching fire and dollars flying up in the flames. Cutting then to the apartment across the street, Cyclo opens a bucket of blue paint. As a blue light blinks, he smears the paint on his face, spills it on the floor, and rolls over and over in it.8 As he then puts a plastic bag over his face, the camera does a close-up of his mouth as he stops breathing. Tearing the plastic away, however, he fires into the aquarium, puts a goldfish in his mouth, and plays with it. The next morning, one of the crimeworld figures, called simply the Knife, wakes him up and says: “Mr. Lullaby should have rocked you, but someone up there spared you.” Is that someone the boss lady who embraces Cyclo, still smeared with blue paint, confusing him with her dead son and crying for him?—“My little one. . . . He’s dead.” Or is it his deceased father? Or could it be a divine power who intervened on that day of Tet? Significantly, this triple



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scene (Cyclo-son-Poet) takes place on the night of Tet, when, by tradition, one cleanses oneself, one’s conscience, and one’s life. Consistently, this night of Tet figures the end of Cyclo’s misfortunes and those of his family, and the dawn of a new and honest life. In this Tet scene, Tran figures Vietnam cleansing itself of the corrupt Western influences, embodied by the burning dollar bills and the Poet’s death. With that episode, he suggests that for Vietnam, the future lies in the reconnection with the past and with traditional cultural and family values. In this sense, it is also significant that the new year being celebrated in his film’s Tet is identified as that of the Pig, for what counts for Pigs is tradition, family, and honor. With the new year of the Pig, Cyclo sets off on a path where honesty and family prevail.9 In The Scent of Green Papaya, the two colors—xanh and yellow—illustrate Mùi’s maturation.10 In Cyclo, they represent the end of one cycle and the beginning of a new one: the yellow-painted young man dies while the one doused in blue—also xanh in Vietnamese—is brought (back) to life. The blue paint episode marks the completion of Cyclo’s initiation and the redemption of his soul—“someone up there spared you.” Now a grown man, he can return to his life and occupation. As the film ends, the family that was for a short while dissociated is reunited. Even the cat that had disappeared when the father died is back: “Yesterday the cat came back. We thought he was dead. He’s even more handsome than before. So handsome, nobody recognized him. I remember my father right before he died.” The return of the cat, a figure associated with the father, suggests that all the misfortunes that rained down on Cyclo and his family were the result of his own failure to remember his father and to respect and abide by his traditional values. His dream about his dead father set him on the path to introspection, recovery and redemption. Not surprisingly, then, in the film’s last sequence, the epilogue, the camera sweeps over buildings, a Western hotel, tennis courts, and the streets, and then focuses on Cyclo transporting his whole family in his bicycle rickshaw and moving off to the top right-hand corner of the screen, where they get lost in the crowd. This last shot sums up the path that Cyclo’s life took: first to the left (sinistra, where bad things happen) and down into the world of criminals, and then, by the end, up toward a brighter future.11 Vietnam’s Journey from The Scent Of Green Papaya to Cyclo Between The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, as between Mùi and Cyclo, about thirty-four years have passed. In that time, Vietnam won another war, and the two parts of the country were reunified. Now, as the misadventures and mishaps of Cyclo and his sister12 suggest, Vietnam must deal with a Western-type market-oriented economy that is plagued by crime and corruption. Through its protagonist’s final liberation and re-birth, Tran Anh Hung’s second feature film offers suggestions, if not a solution, for the ways Vietnam might work toward its future: by remaining true to its traditions and by reconciling with them the demands of progress and the new economy.13 The film’s title insists on this particularity: Cyclo-cycle. As Tran once said: “I want to present, through the cycles




Michèle Bacholle

of [Cyclo’s] life, the difficulty that people have living in Vietnam today” (Chua 8). The brighter new tomorrow toward which Tran Anh Hung points Vietnam at the end of Cyclo is figured in the guise of rhizomatic networks. As theorized by postmodernists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the rhizome provides lines of flight via which one can escape the territorializing and oppressive powers of capitalism. If the streets of Ho Chi Minh City function as a rhizome that enables Cyclo to escape the police and eventually the criminal dollar-ruled underworld, the film Cyclo itself constitutes a line of flight from the closed space of The Scent of Green Papaya and pursues the liberation already initiated by Mùi. Cyclo, that is, is a rhizomorphic growth of The Scent of Green Papaya. A postmodern film in a postcolonial city, Cyclo is characterized by a rhizomorphic explosion that leads to a final openness. For its part, the Tet finale stages three simultaneous scenes or, to use another Deleuze and Guattarian term, plateaus.14 Moving seamlessly from one scene to the other, Cyclo eventually pursues a unique line of flight, figured both by Cyclo and his family in his bicycle rickshaw and by a child overlooking Ho Chi Minh City. Within the film, numerous rhizomes are traced around scenes or objects that, through cross-references, create semantic, rhizomatic networks. Cyclo, for instance, transforms the Scent of Green Papaya scene in which Mùi opens a papaya to look at what lays inside. It desacralizes it on two occasions: in one scene, the entangled lines and round shapes of the betel palm flower are stained by the Poet’s nosebleed;15 in the other, a foot fetishist cuts the sister’s black stocking open and uncovers her toes. Mùi’s innocent gesture has become a gesture of weird sex.16 Rhizomes also emerge from elements including photographs (suffused with duty and honor, Tó’s photograph was placed on the ancestors’ altar, whereas in Cyclo the Poet’s photograph at age 5 is abandoned among papaya skins17 and eventually stolen by pick-pockets), basins, balconies, songs and poems, animals, paint, blood,18 and finally the color blue. All of these elements build lines of flight. Some of these lines intersect in a move toward liberation, toward deterritorialization, which, according to Deleuze and Guattari, leads to becoming-animal and eventually to becoming-imperceptible. Most importantly, Cyclo’s own trajectory takes him through the process of becoming-animal. Tran Anh Hung marks this trajectory explicitly: as we recall, he has Cyclo put the tail of a small lizard in his mouth and leave it partly out as it continues to move.19 After shooting at the aquarium, he picks up a goldfish and puts it halfway in his mouth.20 Finally, in the blue paint scene in which the goldfish is stuck in the paint on his hair and everything is blurred into blue, Cyclo “becomesimperceptible” in a film dominated by shades of blue. Rather than an end, his “becoming-imperceptible” marks a beginning and a rebirth. Coming amid the Tet celebration, it reveals Cyclo to have been cleansed and “redeemed” on that New Year. Children embody the bright tomorrow toward which Cyclo points. In fact, they appear throughout the film, thus creating another rhizome, another line of flight. They are on the roof, in Cholon, in the countryside in the same posture as the Poet and the sister, on the night of Tet around the boss lady’s son, in the singing class, overlooking the city, and playing music in the final scene. Even



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when the credits unfold, we still hear and see them playing. In the course of the film, the children are transformed: they begin voiceless, eyes closed, in the country; by the end, they are assuming voice—indeed, singing—and the gaze of one of them embraces the city. These are the children or grandchildren of Mùi, of the Vietnam of the 1950s and 1960s; and these children are distilled and resumed in the sole figure of Cyclo, whom we witness being initiated into adulthood at the age of eighteen, the age of maturity. Through this figure, Cyclo depicts a country that is, in some respects and despite a long history, still young, because it is newly independent. Like Cyclo, Tran implies, it has now to fend for itself and struggle with crime, corruption, poverty, and other political and social flails, but, rich with its traditions (as Cyclo with his father), it is able to move forward and step into adulthood. Thus, if at first The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo seem to be highly contrasted films, a closer examination reveals their complementarity: home/streets, inside/outside, isolation/crowdedness, feminine/masculine, peacefulness/violence, slowness/swiftness, good/evil. Contrary to appearances, these films have more in common than they do contrasting elements, albeit on a deeper level. Tran confided to journalist Tony Rayns: “I hope and think Cyclo will be different from Green Papaya, but there will be a lot of cinematic continuities between the two films” (Rayns 20). As it turns out, the continuities are more than just cinematic, they are thematic as well. Both are tales of innocence and (quasi) orphans. Both deal with the problematic of Vietnam’s and the Vietnamese people’s fatherlessness, and both relate an initiation journey in which the orphaned child tries to find its way. Each character sets out on a journey on his or her own, then comes to a halt in a period of suspended time where initiation takes place and finally departs with his or her family, a complete and responsible man or woman.21 Movement thus occurs from an unknown, unveiled past to a present where progress is achieved, toward a brighter, more elevated future. Vietnam has also traced that movement, progressing from centuries of occupation (Chinese, then French, Japanese, and American) to a struggling but transitory present, toward a hopeful future.22 These films are not just about Mùi and Cyclo but about Vietnam itself, and their messages are conveyed in color. Green is the color of duckweeds, leaves, and water; yellow represents the earth. For the Vietnamese, the union of yellow and green, earth and water, symbolizes the fatherland, or rather the “ancestors’ land” (tô quôc).23 If the green and yellow of Western values (dollars and urine, or waste) have entered their world, like Cyclo, the Vietnamese have to come to terms with them and integrate them without losing sight of their own path. The upward camera movement, at the end of both The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, denotes the “elevation” of Mùi and Cyclo, their victory over earthly hardships and the uplifting of their souls. With the victory of blue—a color associated with the sky, endless horizons and possibilities—that upward movement shows Vietnam the way to a brighter tomorrow.




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Notes 1. His short films are The Married Woman of Nam Xuong in 1989 and The Stone of Waiting in 1991; his feature-length films are The Scent of Green Papaya in 1993, Cyclo in 1995, and A la verticale de l’été in 2000. 2. For an interpretation of colors in The Scent of Green Papaya, see my article “Camille et Mùi ou Du Vietnam dans Indochine et L’Odeur de la papaye verte.” 3. The spectator is invited to compare, and even associate, Mùi and Tó through a scene in which their faces appear successively. 4. Unless otherwise noted, all translations within text and notes are my own. 5. These crimes include spoiling tons of rice with water, setting a warehouse on fire, transporting drugs hidden under pigs’ skins, and killing—a mission that he does not carry out. 6. The entanglement of their two descents is symbolized by the transition between his arson scene and her foot fetishist scene. Back in the hideout after setting the warehouse on fire, Cyclo plunges his face smeared with soil and larvae into the aquarium. The brim of the aquarium, made of vertical sinuous lines (with the head of Cyclo on the left and the goldfish and plants on the right), dissolves into the body of the sister standing in front of the foot fetishist. 7. Western influence also challenges traditional values via colors: green of dollars has replaced green of plants, and yellow of urine and mental retardation (the boss lady’s son) has superseded yellow of maturity (ripe papaya/Mùi). 8. In the original script, the son coated himself in blue, and Cyclo in yellow. In the film, the two colors have been reversed. 9. Léopold Cadière notes that the word for house, nhà, seems to be the same as the Chinese gia, a word the ideogram of which is made of the sign for roof over the sign for pig. House (family) and pig are then closely related. 10. Blue is also present in this film, but to a much lesser extent: the shutters are blue in Khuyên’s house and his fiancée wears a blue dress. 11. Tran does not necessarily see an optimistic closure to both his films: “Maybe the significance is, now that she [Mùi] is pregnant, she is going to lose that freshness and become like the mother we saw at the beginning of the film. Let’s just say that I left little signs around to indicate that a pessimistic ending might be justified” (Cross 36). Such a statement is contradicted by the film itself where Mùi’s freshness remains intact as she marvels at her baby kicking and where the camera moves up to the statue. About Cyclo’s future, Tran said: “He resumes his job. He dodges in and out of traffic. The path of his journey is far from clear” (Dinh). Here too, his pessimism can be explained by the fact that making Cyclo made him grasp how the country he left at thirteen has now become foreign to him. Cyclo’s final image, with a child embracing the horizon and children playing music, definitely grants the film an optimistic ending—in spite of the tourist hotel and tennis courts that are now part of the landscape. The final view of and vision for the country do belong to its children. 12. The relationship between the sister and the Poet parallels that of Mùi and Khuyên. It is based on (male) power. A crucial difference voids the parallelism, however: respect. Khuyên respects Mùi and helps her improve her fate whereas the Poet just uses the sister. If Mùi was at first a mere commodity, passed on from one master to the next, by the end she has asserted her individuality and she has a voice of her own. As long as she is under the Poet’s thumb, the sister remains a commodity. 13. This conciliation of traditions and (post)modern demands, of Orient and Occident, is represented in Cyclo’s “bath of blue paint” scene. That (Western) moment of deterritorialization— which we will see shortly—coincides with (Oriental) Tet. We should not overlook those places where Buddhist tradition informs these films. Buddha is present in different ways in The Scent of Green Papaya: in Khuyên’s drawings, the resemblance between Mùi’s and Buddha’s faces is uncanny; when Mùi looks at the papaya seed, it is as if she were holding the world between her fingers; finally, at the end of the film, the camera moves up from Mùi and her child to a statue that may be one of Buddha. A central element in Buddhist faith is cyclical time and reincarnations. The retarded son and Cyclo’s father “reincarnate” into Cyclo—the former dies on the night that Cyclo is reborn; the latter “dies a second time to save [him].” Cyclicity is important in Cyclo: while the slaughterhouse is full of dead pigs, the year of the Pig is about to start; firecrackers set on a toy fire truck explode and trigger the son’s death, run over by a real fire truck; the cat that had disappeared when the father died reappears at the end; Cyclo has problems delin-

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16. 17. 18.

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eating where his father stops and where he himself starts. Finally, as far as colors are concerned, the end of Cyclo marks the beginning of a new cycle: xanh (green of the papaya/Mùi)—yellow (of the papaya/Mùi and of the retarded son)—xanh (blue of Cyclo). “We call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 22). These three scenes communicate with each other through “micro-cracks”—here, for instance, the fire truck. The Poet’s nosebleeds occur on three very significant occasions: right before the Poet sees the fetishist force the sister to drink and and then to urinate in a basin; when he opens the betel palm flower; and after he “gave” the sister to the businessman. Do they betray humanity in him, or, on the contrary, his inhumanity? The three nosebleeds also foreshadow the sister’s defloration (three customers). In Cyclo, both episodes illustrate the constant threat to innocence. In The Scent of Green Papaya, we never see the papaya being eaten; in Cyclo, ripe papayas are devoured. Both in The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, red intrudes in the xanh-yellow pattern. In the former, red, as the color of papaya’s ripe flesh, is the color of love and passion, the scenes in which Mùi wears a bright red tunic or red lipstick are scenes of (unconscious) seduction; in the latter, red is mostly linked to blood, to society’s violence (killings, squaring of accounts, rape). In both films, however, red intervenes between the two other colors: Mùi’s green clothes/red lipstick/yellow tunic, and yellow/red/blue paint. These two specific occurrences of red may represent the blood that usually accompanies birth, in this case Mùi’s and Cyclo’s “(re)births.” Given that Cyclo is eighteen years old and that the action takes place in January 1995 (the year of the Pig started on January 31, 1995), he was born in 1976 or 1977, in the year of the Dragon or the Snake—both animals represented with their tongues out. This “fish-face” recalls the nickname that children give the retarded son and his mother’s words: “you’re my little fish.” The fish is another illustration of these two young men’s shared path. Two important scenes dealing with the family and present in the script were cut out of the film. In sequence 65 in the script, the grandfather and younger sister prepare a chicken to offer the ancestors for Tet, in the penultimate scene (sequence 76), Cyclo bows before the altar and addresses his father: “I still haven’t been able to fulfill the wish that you expressed before you died. For that, I ask you to forgive me. Until recently, I always felt that you were somewhere beside me to guide me, to keep me away from misfortunes. But now I know that I’ve lost you, really lost you. And I can only rely on myself to take care of myself and the family. May your spirit protect us all, grandfather, big sister, little sister, and me, your son Kiên” (Tran and Trémolet 126-127). Both these scenes make clearer the resurgence of family values at the end of the film. Since it occurs right before the Tet events and Cyclo’s redemption, Tran could very well have retained sequence 65. Sequence 76, however, emphasizes the definitive loss of the father (“really lost you”) and overshadows the preservation of his spirit’s guidance that is clearly present in the film through the reference to the cat’s return. When asked by Jean-Marie Dinh if culture will prevail again once Vietnam’s present mutation is over, Tran replied that the frenzy toward consumption was only a passing stage. I would like to thank Dang Anh Tuan for providing me with this information, and for creating a website on Vietnam, the text of which is in green, yellow, and blue on a black background: www.limsi.fr/Recherche/CIG/ivietnam.html







Y Ban

Thuong, Mrs. Tam’s youngest son, born in 1972, was enrolled in a course that prepared students for their overseas study. When it came to filling out the questions about his father in his curriculum vitae, he asked his mother: “Mother, I want to give as much information as I can about Father’s military service during the Quang Tri Offensive. Americans nowadays are very openminded. Who knows if they won’t sympathize with us and help me somewhat when seeing the résumé of a young man whose father had once fought them in the trenches?” “Shh! Not so loud. Your father will feel hurt if he hears what you’re saying.” “Don’t worry, Mother. How can he hear the world’s noises when he sits all day facing the wall like a Zen master? Even if he did, he wouldn’t do anything. That’s what we call the war syndrome.” “I didn’t know it. Then try to refresh your memory to fill in what he has told you.” “You don’t want to help me? I thought you knew by heart the name of every area Father has been to. Besides, didn’t you tell us Father volunteered to go south because he wanted each of us to have a good résumé? Now more than ever he should help us.” “That’s right. But I thought your résumé is better than your brothers’ and sister’s. Actually, you’re no better off than they are. All right then, just write down these bits of information: Father’s surname and name: Nguyen Thong Year of birth: 1935 Hometown: N. Profession: Obstetrician 1952: Joined the Revolution 1957: Nursing Certificate 1958: On special assignment at Heath Department, Province N.



A Worthy Résumé

Y Ban

1959: Married 1961: First child born 1962: Admitted to the Communist Party 1963: Second child born 1965: Attended Intermediate Physicians Training School 1966:Third child born 1970:Transferred to N. Province Central Hospital April 1972: Drafted for the B Front, Quang Tri Health Department September 1972: Fourth child born 1975:Transferred back to N. Hospital 1977: Enrolled in Medical Correspondence School 1980: On assignment at N. Hospital 1990: Discharged for medical reasons Currently suffers from a strange disease. He fears facing direct light, reality, relatives, and friends; all day he looks dejected and won’t let go of his diary while facing the wall. Are you finished, son?” Mrs. Tam recited every line from her husband’s vita as if she were in a trance, although in her mind there was a luminous area called the past. In 1972 Tam told her husband: “I am pregnant again, dear.” Thong was startled. “What did you say? We’ve got three kids already.” “Thai, Thom, and Lan are a year ahead of each other. When they grow up they will all leave home at the same time, leaving behind the old man and woman. It will be a great comfort if our youngest one can stay home with us.” “You’ll have a rough time. Listen, since it’s still early, let’s do some family planning. It’s not good for medical folks like us to have so many children.” “I wouldn’t want to have children if you didn’t like them.” “You don’t understand me, dear. Like you, I want to have many kids because it means prosperity. But I haven’t told you this: I am one of five doctors who have been assigned to the battlefield.” “O my God! Why didn’t you tell me before?’ “It was just decided at a meeting yesterday.” “Are you leaving under these conditions?” “It’s just because the military situation is getting critical that we must go. Cheer up, dear.” “What’s your decision?” “This afternoon, OK? I’ll do it for you myself.” But that didn’t happen that afternoon. Tam was on the operating table when she changed her mind completely. She wanted to keep the baby. That night, lying by her husband, she asked: “You’re not going to resist the Government’s decision, are you?” “No. Last time the hospital picked five for the B Front, but three resisted the order. I think this time only three will be going. I am sure those draft evaders won’t be disciplined much. There is a shortage of doctors both on the front and in the rear. If they are disciplined too harshly, who is going to serve the people?



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But I must go, darling. Our three children will need good résumés. I don’t want them to be marked with a black spot: Father was a draft dodger!” “Then we need to have four clean résumés! After you’ve gone, our youngest one will be the memory of our love. I’ll be waiting for your safe return.” “I’m concerned about you taking care of the kids alone in the midst of war. The city evacuation has been ordered. Our hospital also has its evacuation plans. You and the children can’t stay here too long. “What about you?” “I’ll leave in two months. While I am still here, I want to build a small house on the lot we bought for you and the kids to live in when you return after the evacuation. If we don’t do it now, we’ll lose our land to trespassers.” A week later, Tam and her family were evacuated along with the hospital staff. When he was not on duty, Thong used a wheelbarrow to move the dirt to the site of his future house. One day, he lost his balance and broke his right knee when the heavy wheelbarrow fell on him. His neighbors took him to the hospital where he was left unattended on a stretcher that morning and night. The nurses at the hospital showed their teeth: “Coward! You did it to yourself because you don’t want to get drafted.” Thong clenched his face, thinking of his kids’ clean résumés. Tam was notified of Thong’s accident. “Did he do it on purpose?,” she wondered, a little upset by her suspicion. She hurried to the hospital, her belly showing visibly beneath her shirt. She gritted her teeth when seeing her husband lying on a stretcher on the floor, alone. She shoved Thong onto her back and carried him all the way to the X-ray department. The nurses cast their disdainful looks at the couple. Some felt sorry for them. “Poor woman, she’s pregnant.” But they did not bother to give her a hand. It took a month for Thong’s injured leg to heal. Only God knew what he was thinking during that time. A week before his departure, the cast was taken off his leg. The young couple’s dream of having a home of their own didn’t materialize. Thong left home in April. His prediction was accurate. There were only three doctors in his group. The rest opted for being disciplined rather than killed in action. The Paris Agreements were signed. The Americans stopped bombing the North. Tam and the children came home. Her fourth child, a baby boy, was named Thuong, according to Thong’s wish. Because Tam was on the list of “prioritized families,” she was given an apartment. From then on, her family no longer had to live in temporary quarters. Before going South, Thong had wished to have a house for his wife and children. Now they had a private residence, even though it was an apartment. One day in May 1975, around 7:00 P.M., while Tam was on duty at the hospital, her oldest child came looking for her. “Dad is home,” he said excitedly. “Dad came home in a car packed with lots of stuff.” All the people in the apartment complex poured out to welcome Thong, and they helped him unload the car. The driver declined the couple’s invitation to stay with them awhile:



A WORTHY RE´SUME´

Y Ban

“Every minute is precious for me. I haven’t been back for almost ten years, so my family might think I’m dead. I must go now. God bless!” Thong was thin and swarthy. Tam wanted to reserve the first night of his return for her husband who had not seen the children, especially the youngest one, for years. She went back to the hospital to finish her shift. Thong was grateful to his wife for raising such healthy kids. That night he stealthily lay down by his daughter who was sound asleep with her younger brother wrapped in her arms. Thong kissed the thin shoulders of the little girl he loved dearly. “Poor thing,” he was whispering to her, “you have to take care of your little brother for Mommy.” Thong’s carload consisted of clothes, a bag of canned foods and milk, a bag of rice, a container of chicken, a used Sony radio, a trunk of books, a secondhand Japanese fan, and a Buddha statue. Frustrated by what Thong brought home with him, Tam told her husband: “I was told that goods in the South are very cheap. Why didn’t you buy me and the kids a bicycle or a sewing machine instead of that stuff ?” “Dear, our country has been reunified now. It will be as prosperous as Russia and Japan. It’s a disgrace to buy things that have been discarded by the Imperialists. Aren’t you happy that I’m home?” “Yes, I am very happy.” “I’m thrilled to know that all our kids are healthy and smart.” “Me, too. Now they need you more than ever.” But soon afterward, Thong was admitted to a sanatorium for six months. He had contracted TB as a result of his arduous months in Quang Tri. At the end of his convalescence, Thong was sent back to the Obstetrics Department of N. Hospital. His assignment was purely administrative, however, because the director of the hospital didn’t want men practicing obstetrics. Doctors returning from the war, he explained, were not normal. During the war, N. Hospital had provided a total of fifteen doctors for the Southern Front but only seven of them had obeyed that order. Of the eight draft evaders, three had been promoted to the rank of department heads, one was named deputy director, and four had completed their degrees through a correspondence school. Meanwhile, of the seven doctors who went south, two had been killed and five had been assigned administrative duties. “Because you’ve been on the battlefield for so long, your professional skills are deteriorating,” the hospital director said. “Now that diseases are getting more complicated, comrades, you should study more before you could be assigned for professional duties.” Thong didn’t know about the others, but his three years of service in Quang Tri had been the apex of his professional experience. He had performed as many operations then as during the years he had practiced as a medical doctor. He had also taught obstetrics to nurses at Vinh Linh, Quang Tri, and Hue. But the hospital director didn’t like male obstetricians. In 1977, Thong’s oldest son had passed the University entrance exam. That same year, Tam had succeeded in talking her husband into enrolling in a correspondence school. He had listened to her. As he was preparing for his exam, doctors at his hospital had completed



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Starting with the 1980s, the country’s economy was in deep trouble. Thong’s family was no better. He and his two older children graduated from college. He returned to his hospital, but his assignment was still administrative. His oldest son graduated from the College of Social Sciences and Humanities but couldn’t find a job at Hanoi Institute of Scientific Research. His daughter also graduated from the College of Foreign Languages, but turned down her appointment at Lang Son, a remote province in the North. Tam cooked meager meals for her family, using sweet potatoes and yucca roots as the main staple. The two children waiting for employment chewed their food unenthusiastically. Thong tried to instill optimism and confidence in the children by telling them his military experiences: “At Vinh Linh Hospital, I lived and worked underground all the time. Once I successfully delivered a baby. To show his gratitude, the husband presented me with a pair of chickens. I built a cage right on top of my bunker. The chicken laid a lot of eggs. Once I put the eggs in an incubator. A couple of days later, I checked on them only to find that they were all missing. In their place were a pair of boots, a small bag of MSG powder, and a note, which said: ‘Please forgive us, Dad. But we wanted to eat your eggs so much. Signed: Huy, Nam B20, C…, D…, E….’” The son slowly said: “I want to eat eggs, too. But don’t worry, Dad. Your past may very well substitute for the eggs.” Thong felt his food get stuck in his throat. The Buddha statue he had brought home from the war was the Laughing Buddha. It had a big belly and a string of beads and a gourd of wine in its hands. Thong told his family that he had found him on a river and used to put him on his desk. Since then, he had much luck. Tam built an altar for the god. Whenever the children studied for their exams, he would stay up late to get everything ready for them. Then he would pray to the Buddha and have his children’s school utensils touch the Buddha’s face for good luck. Thong and all three of his children graduated from college. One day, when returning home from work Thong saw his oldest son and his daughter floating the Buddha on the water. Seeing its head tilted downward, the boy told the girl: “His head is heavier than his trunk. There must be something in it. It could be gold, you never know. Let’s break him to find out.” “But Daddy says the Buddha will punish whoever desecrates him.” “I don’t care. Just look at Mr. Khot. Because he’s rich he gets jobs for his kids so easily. Daddy is just good-for-nothing. We’re starving because of him. As a saying goes, monks’ children will end up sweeping banyan leaves only. I hate Daddy’s romanticism.”



their training in the French language and were ready to be sent to Algeria and Angola to serve as specialists. The following year, Thong and his daughter had passed the University entrance exam. Thong took her up to the College of Foreign Languages, and his heart filled with indescribable happiness.

Y Ban

“I couldn’t agree with you more. I know he loves me but I’m tired of him. Tu’s dad doesn’t care for her but her mother gives her everything he sends from Algeria. We’re not that fortunate.” “Let’s break the Buddha right away. If Daddy asks, tell him we broke it by accident.” Thong snatched the knife from his son, giving him and the girl a slap in the face. Next morning, the boy left home. A few days later, the girl married a man her father’s age who helped her find a teaching job in the city. Thong no longer told his children about his war exploits. He grew quiet and smoked a lot. At the hospital, he was still not allowed to practice obstetrics. Because there were no administrative jobs for war veterans like him, he was transferred to the medical services department. But Thong still had two more children to worry about. His third son was a medical student. He encouraged him to specialize in obstetrics. “I know a lot about obstetrics. You don’t have to learn from anyone. To be a good doctor you only need to learn from me. This is the way to deliver a baby. The process includes these phases. . . . ” “That’s enough, sir. Did you ever hear people say, pediatrics is for the dumb, obstetrics for the stupid?” “Is that right, son?” “How romantic you are! Why don’t you just leave us alone to take care of ourselves.” The son took care of himself by courting the daughter of his college’s president so that he would be accepted in the Ear, Nose, and Throat Department. After he graduated, he jilted the girl. Those were the last years of the 1980s, when life was like what happens after the passing of a tornado. All values were turned upside down. Thong suffered a nervous breakdown. He acted like a shadow, smoking quietly all day. Rarely did he move around at work or at home. To boost her husband’s morale, Tam made every effort to keep the family above water, as she realized that she was its backbone. She kept from him the bad news about the children who had to scrape together a living all by themselves. Sometimes she thought about the time Thong was fighting in the South. His colleagues who had dodged the draft now lead comfortable lives. How to account for this? Clean vitae or money? Thong told his wife the day he returned: “When I decided to leave I thought only of our kids’ résumés, but when I was lying beneath barrages of bullets or by my fellow soldiers’ corpses, I thought about our country’s résumés. That was why there were such long columns of soldiers. Most of them had no children.” “Are you sure you’re not that romantic?” Tam does not exactly remember when he contracted the disease. But she does remember exactly the day Thong faced the wall. On that day there was a get-together at the hospital to bid farewell to their retiring colleagues. At the meeting, Mr. Tu, a nurse, rose and spoke: “I was born to a poor peasant family. When the light of Uncle Ho and the Party came, I accepted it immediately. I was directed by the Party to study med-



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icine. I’ve been in this career for almost forty years, although I’m only a nurse. I think my career is very noble but it’s the cause of my poverty. I’m retiring now but can’t afford to support my ailing wife and young kids. I’d appreciate it very much if you could help my son, who just graduated from nursing school, find a job here.” Everybody was moved by the old nurse’s plea. The hospital director rose with a cynical smile on his face: “I can address Mr. Tu’s request right away. Do you know the wisdom of the proverb: only the smart are fit for survival? If you don’t, you’ll have time to ponder its meaning, Mr. Tu. Back to your request, I don’t think I can accept it. We are short of doctors, not nurses.” Mr. Tu began to sob loudly. Right at that moment, Thong stood up, his hands making fists as he was marching toward the hospital director: “You, a draft evader and a crook. I’ll punch your face till you understand who is smarter than who.” He couldn’t punch the crook in the face because he was exhausted. He was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed as “suffering from war syndrome.” But his children have been successful in life. They send him money. They become more caring. Then all of a sudden, they returned. They held up their shining résumés and asked their mother to give them specific dates of their father’s military service. They said to each other: “Our vitae are very impressive. They are also protecting us. Now we know the importance of history. It will guarantee for us a comfortable life.” They put on their father his beautiful clothes. They took turns carrying him to the living room. “Father, it’s me, your oldest son. In a letter you wrote to tell me that only upon setting foot in Quang Tri could you understand the meaning of these lines of a poem: ‘When I first arrived, the land was only a location.When I left, it possessed a soul.’ Remember?” “And to me, your little Thom, you wrote that you would buy a soccer ball for me to shoot when you return. . . . ” “This is your youngest child. At that time you said you wanted Mother to give birth to a girl to have a balance in our family.” But the father was saying nothing. After he had found the wall, he put his face against it, his eyes open really wide. Translated by Qui-Phiet Tran



A WORTHY RE´SUME´




Qui-Phiet Tran

Y Ban is the pen name of Pham Thi Xuan Ban, who was born on July 1, 1961, in Nam Dinh, Vietnam. A 1982 University of Hanoi graduate, Y Ban taught at Nam Dinh College of Medicine and Thai Binh University School of Medicine from 1982 to 1989. In 1992 Y Ban began to attend Nguyen Du School of Creative Writing, where she graduated in 1992. Currently she is a reporter for Giao Duc va Thoi Dai (Education in Our Era). Y Ban’s literary career began in the mid-1980s. Her first story appeared in Van Nghe Quan Doi (Armed Forces Literary Review) in 1983. She won first place in the 1989-1990 creative writing contest sponsored by Van Nghe Quan Doi for her two stories, “Buc thu goi me Au Co” (Letter to Mother Au Co) and “Vung sang ky uc” (The Luminous Area of Memory). Her first collection of short fiction, Nguoi dan ba co ma luc (The Female Exorcist) (1993), was awarded second place in the writing contest in Hanoi organized by Hanoi Publishing House. Y Ban’s literary career has been very busy since 1995, with the publication of Dan ba sinh ra tu bong dem (Women Were Born from Darkness) (1995), Vung sang ky uc (The Luminous Area of Memory) (1996), Truyen ngan Y Ban (Y Ban’s Selected Stories) (1998), and Mieu hoang (Deserted Temple) (2000). Qui-Phiet Tran: Vietnam used to be known as a “cultured country.” With the onslaught of Western-style reforms, literature has been shifted to a minor role. What’s your reaction to this phenomenon? Y Ban: I don’t think literature is playing a minor role in Vietnam today. There was a time in the past when it was used as a means. But now it is returning to its role as literature because it is being elevated to a higher level—humanism. To me, regardless of whatever form in which literature exists—long or short fiction, poetry, middle-class or Socialist Romanticism, Critical Realism or Socialist Realism—a literary work must possess a humanistic value in order to win a place in the reader’s heart.



A Conversation with Y Ban

190

Qui-Phiet Tran

QT: You mention humanism as a salient trait of contemporary Vietnamese literature. What I heard is the opposite. YB: What I mean is Vietnamese literature is returning to its orbit as literature, and that it is reaching that humanistic level. I don’t mean all Vietnamese authors and their works have reached that level. If a work stands the test of time, that is, it has a humanistic value, it will be recognized by readers from all walks of life. Let me try to review a couple of works that meet these criteria. A Time far Past by Le Luu. The hero’s name is Giang Minh Sai, who once responded to the country’s call by going to war. Because Sai’s sole ideal is to serve the community, he’s the only one who is entitled to use the personal pronoun I in his curriculum vita. If Le Luu’s novel had been written in a previous period, its protagonist would have ended up working in a commune or being a manager for a firm in order to develop his us. Nevertheless, here Sai is engaged in a life with all its tragicomedy. Le Luu’s humanism, therefore, pervades throughout the novel. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh. A combat soldier like Kien who, instead of concentrating on fighting, dreams of narcotics and girls, should be court marshaled. He should also be court marshaled for his defense of deserters, even though he is not one of them. Nevertheless, The Sorrow of War possesses a humanistic value thanks to its vivid description of such a middle-class romantic hero. Belonging in this category are Duong Thu Huong’s Chuyen tinh ke luc rang dong (Love Story Told at Dawn), Nguyen Khac Truong’s Manh dat lam nguoi nhieu ma (The Land with Many People and Ghosts), and especially most recent short fiction by young authors. Also included in this category are short stories by Nguyen Quang Thieu such as “Mua hoa cai ven song” (Mustard Greens Blooming on River Banks), “Tho dao da truyen kiep” (Cursed Rock Diggers) by Ngo Tu Lap, “Dan se ri bay ngang rung” (Sparrows Flying across the Woods) and “Lua hat” (Murmuring Rice Fields) by Vo Thi Xuan Ha. Most of my stories which deal with women’s condition possess a very high humanistic value. For example, “La thu gui me Au Co,” “Dan ba sinh ra tu bong dem,” “Chu Ngoeo” (Man with a Crooked Neck), etc. QT: Are you writing as a woman for women? Can you integrate into the mainstream? Do you have to create “a literature of your own”? YB: I chose writing because I wanted to be a writer, not a woman writer. I forgot that I am a woman. But because I am a woman, I tried to explore as much as I



I am very pleased that contemporary Vietnamese literature has discovered its own identity. Even if it were playing a minor role, it would be an active minor role. Because literature is no longer conceived as a most important means, a tool that served the state, now more than ever Vietnamese writers should examine themselves and try to find for themselves a road that can lead them to a literature of permanent value.

WITH

Y BAN

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could all the issues and problems of life from a woman’s perspective. As far as I am concerned, I don’t see the necessity of fighting for women’s rights. I feel I am strong enough not only to be on equal footing with men but also to rise above men. Like men, women are capable of defending their rights. But because women are generally timid and confused, they are unable to fully develop this ability. Timidity and confusion are women’s most salient flaws. So, it is important that they fight for their rights; nobody can do it for them. Am I a woman writer? I don’t know if I should be excited or saddened about this label. When we first started our literary career, we were called “young writers.” After we have established ourselves as professional writers, we are referred to as “woman writers.” But what I have achieved doesn’t stem from the fact that I am a woman. I have won two national book awards. Can a female writer like me integrate into the mainstream? The answer will not come from me any more. Thus, it is likely that I’ll have to create a sort of literature (not literature proper) for myself. QT: In the last ten years you have published five collections of short fiction and have had over 70 stories anthologized. What accounts for such a great productivity despite the fact that writing is not your full-time occupation? YB: There are several reasons for this. First, this sort of indefatigability may be attributed to the prime of a person’s life. Second, in my opinion, in order to write a good book, an author should be influenced by the following factors: the turbulence of the period in which that author lives, his/her national culture, and his/her talent. There was much turbulence in the 1980s and 1990s which, because of its strong impact on Vietnamese writers’ thinking, perception, and consciousness, was the main cause of their creative outburst. Though the literary output of these periods didn’t reach the same level as that of the 1930-1945 period, it was an important hallmark in our national literature. There are also subjective factors that are involved in a writer’s creativity. In my opinion, an author’s talent is inborn. When I write, ideas flow from my pen as though somebody had placed them in my head. This current of thought, however, comes and goes. When it does come, you just sit down to render it and your literary work will eventually be born. My last reason for writing is both personal and practical. I write because of the pressures of life; in other words, to make a living. Contrary to the period of state-controlled economy when writers were subsidized by the government and didn’t have to worry about selling their work for a living, today we have to publish or sell our own books. But as you say in America, you lose some, you win some: because we are pretty well known, popular magazines often solicit our contributions for their special Tet issues. And they pay very well. QT: How do you see the West? Do you think an encounter between Vietnamese writers and their Western counterparts is necessary at this time?



A CONVERSATION

Qui-Phiet Tran

YB: According to me, Western authors do better than their Vietnamese counterparts in these genres: novels, detective stories, and science fiction. Nevertheless, Vietnamese authors can do as well as any writer in the West. I don’t think a contact between our writers and their Western colleagues is necessary. A writer is made by these two factors: (1) his/her talent and (2) his/her creativity. Not all writers have the same talents and creative experiences. Nevertheless, our writers need to visit other countries in order to broaden their vision. QT: As a young writer who didn’t directly participate in the Vietnam War, what’s your perception of it? Is there any impact of the war on your writing? YB: Though I didn’t directly participate in the Resistance, my childhood memories were greatly affected by it. Born in 1961, my childhood was marked by two evacuations and later by my father’s military service, i.e., going to the B Front, as a saying goes. For this reason, the war is reflected in most of my fiction. Because in my stories the war is refracted through the lenses of time, it does not mean fighting, instantaneous deaths, but it involves different kinds of pain. And to me, all pain should be respected and sympathized with. QT: How do you interpret the nation’s big celebrations of the new millennium? What are the prospects and challenges for Vietnam and Vietnamese writers? YB: I don’t think there is a millennium for writers because their art is created very quickly. Artistic creation can be compared to a flash of lightning that zigzags across the sky. If we look up we’ll see it; if we look down we won’t see it. In the new millennium writers should await flashes of lightning in their creative process. QT: Your story “A Worthy Résumé” was selected for presentation in this volume because the American audience is interested in knowing how Vietnamese women writers view the events the Americans refer to as the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese refer to as the Resistance against Americans. I also understand that the story is autobiographical. Can you explain how the war affects every Vietnamese family in this typical story? YB: Yes, “A Worthy Résumé” is a story about what my family went through during the war. My parents worked in a hospital. They had 4 teenagers to take care of. In 1972 my father was dispatched to Quang Tri to serve at a military hospital, and my mother was pregnant with her fourth child. After the war the returning soldiers were filled with romanticism because their belongings consisted of nothing but a knapsack and a doll. But following the renovation period, the country has changed at a giddy pace. These soldiers now realize that they can’t make a living with their romanticism. The physician who returned from the B Front brought with him his romanticism and 4 perfect CVs for his loved ones. The kids were born in deprivation because of war. Their most urgent job is to fight for a better life. The story dramatizes pretty well all the problems and tragedy happening to a returning soldier’s family as well as Vietnamese youth’s lifestyle and practical concerns.



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Nathalie Nguyen

Here yes and no are indistinguishable Like East and West at the Poles Here truth is a puppet That doubles in two roles. —Cheng Min

Ly Thu Ho moved to France as part of the 1950s Vietnamese diaspora. For three decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s, she was the only Vietnamese woman to write and publish novels in France. Returning to Vietnam frequently, she became an observer of postcolonial Vietnam. As a writer, she was shaped not only by her upbringing and education in colonial Vietnam, but by her long years of residence in Paris as well. In her work, she depicts a Vietnamese society destabilized by war and political unrest and still in transition, with its younger generation looking toward the West as its older one clings still to traditional cultural values. More specifically, Ly Thu Ho’s novels expose the condition of different generations of women in Vietnamese society over a period of six decades, from the 1930s to the 1970s. Rather than attempt to disrupt patriarchal discourse, as some women writing in the same period in France did, she examines the actual situation of women under patriarchy. Ly Thu Ho’s treatment of women’s lives is subtle and nonaggressive. Rather than show anger or the outward rebellion of robust female characters, she focuses on the bounded and bonded lives of the greater mass of women who conform. A store of residual anger lies just beneath the surface of her works, however, and it reveals itself in the self-defeating constraints suffered by her female protagonists and the fate she apportions her most conventional characters. Her mother figures repeatedly stress the traditional patriarchal message: women will achieve happiness and fulfillment by conforming to the roles society decrees for them; they will receive their just rewards if they behave in a proper manner. But the realities lived by her daughter figures are precisely the



Across Colonial Borders: Patriarchal Constraints and Vietnamese Women in the Novels of Ly Thu Ho

Nathalie Nguyen

inverse: by conforming or attempting to conform to this ideal, a woman loses whatever individuality she possesses and whatever chance of happiness a strong sense of self-respect would allow her. Thus, Ly’s conventional frame does not render her message less relevant: while describing traditional female attributes and interests, she succeeds in presenting a picture of stultified talents and deadened potential. Ly was a generation older than the angry young women writers of the 1960s in South Vietnam.1 Like women writers and poets of earlier centuries,2 she prefers to convey her views indirectly. In Vietnam, [a]ssertiveness is often seen as lack of respect. Traditional education advised women to ngam dang nuot cay which can be translated as “keeping the bitter in one’s mouth and swallow the spicy.” In other words, repressing one’s negative emotions and feelings was considered better than giving vent to them. (Nguyen, “Barriers” 5) This subdued approach has to be understood within the context of her time. Because of her circumstances and cultural background, Ly Thu Ho had not reached the stage of being able to express anger outwardly and openly or, for that matter, of having her female characters express it. She had few precedents for that. Books by women were banned in Vietnam in the late 1920s: The political situation of 1929 and 1930, a period of nationalist agitation and Communist activities, made the French very wary of any type of criticism. Women’s groups came under suspicion as the authorities were alert to their possible spread of subversive ideas. In Annam, about twenty books on women were banned and five books published by the Go Cong women’s press were banned in 1929, its woman editor Phan Thi Bach Van was fined, and the publishing house closed down for “disrupting peace and security in the region by means of literature and ideas.” ( Jayawardena 204205) Ly’s approach differs from that of contemporary male Francophone writers such as Pham Van Ky, whose denunciations of an oppressive familial and social system are dramatic and violent. Destruction, death, or escape are the only solutions. In Ly’s novels, escape is not usually an option, neither is death (with one notable exception). Instead, they present the slow destruction of women who struggle on, bear children, and endure the ravages of war. Written in a clear and simple style, Ly’s novels deal with gender roles and family relationships within the context of contemporary society. In this, they bear some similarities with the work of French women writing at the time.3 Her novels are written primarily for a French audience and for the expatriate Vietnamese community in France. Her treatment of the female condition reflects a combination of influences: the process of modernization and Westernization in Vietnam that accompanied colonization and decolonization, as well as her own exposure, as a Vietnamese woman living in France, to contemporary cultural and literary movements. This



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essay will analyze her work from a Western feminist perspective. It will explore three central issues: the representation of women in Ly’s novels, their reflection of social reality, and the subversive dimension to her works. Ly published her first novel, Printemps inachevé (Unfinished Spring) in Paris in 1962. This was followed by Au Milieu du carrefour (In the Middle of the Crossroads) in 1969 and Le Mirage de la paix (The Mirage of Peace) in 1986. Mirage won the Prix littéraire de l’Asie from the Association des écrivains de langue française in 1987. All three novels are set in South Vietnam. They form a loose trilogy and portray the politics and history of Vietnam from the 1930s to 1975. Characters occasionally feature in succeeding novels. Three categories of women appear in slightly altered form in all three novels—the mother figure prototype (whether mother, grandmother, or nanny), the virtuous daughter or wife, and the prostitute. Ly introduces a fourth category, the servant, in the last novel under consideration. Printemps inachevé Ly’s first novel, Printemps, stretches over a period of twenty years from the 1930s to the 1950s. The two female protagonists are Tuoi and her sister Tran. The novel is divided into three parts. The first deals with the upbringing of Tuoi, the elder sister. The second (and main part) relates the dramatic events around Tran, the younger sister, her engagement to Châu, a young man of good family, and her rape by a French soldier in 1945. The last part of the novel narrates the aftermath of these events. Parts One and Three are related in the third person; Part Two is a first-person narrative. I have discussed the close parallels between the story of Tran in Printemps and that of Kieu, heroine of the Vietnamese classical poem The Tale of Kieu, elsewhere4; here, I will examine the mother-daughter relationship and the generation gap between women. The older generation—the grandmother, the mothers, Mme Thai (mother of Tuoi and Tran), Mme Hai, and Vu Gia, the nourrice (nanny) of the Thais— conforms to the first category of women. Models of loveliness and gentleness, Tuoi and Tran conform to the second: “They had inherited from their mother an oval face, a light complexion, a profound gentleness in their expression” (Printemps 11).5 The third category is represented by Tran’s friend Nam, the daughter of Mme Hai. Tuoi is aware from a young age of the defined nature of her parents’ marriage. Her father is the undisputed head of the family, and her mother does not question this. She even walks behind her husband. Tuoi’s nanny informs her charge of the principles governing woman’s position in society: “As a young woman you have to submit to paternal authority, as a married woman, you will be subject to that of your husband, and as a widow you will depend on your eldest son. Above all, do not forget that you will never be man’s equal” (1920).6 In a society based on Confucian principles, women play a subordinate role to men, and girls are groomed for marriage from infancy. As Tuoi’s grandmother informs her: “Young girls are made to care for the house . . . to serve their husbands and give them many children in order to perpetuate the race”



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(35). In this matter, there were similarities between Confucian society and Western society. Miller and Swift indicate that “women are said to ‘marry into’ families and families are said to ‘die out’ if an all-female generation occurs. The word family, which comes from the Latin famulus, meaning servant or slave, is itself a reminder that wives and children, along with servants, were historically part of a man’s property” (quoted in Mills, Womanwords 146). As the Vietnamese saying goes: “One boy and you can inscribe a descendant; ten girls and you can write nil” (Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 193). Tuoi is a constant witness to her mother’s dependence on husband and mother-in-law. Mme Thai is the epitome of the traditional wife: housebound, submissive, and reliant on higher authority to justify her actions. All 3 mother figures—the mother, the grandmother, and the nanny—exemplify and seek to transmit the roles and duties of women to the young girl. In addition to passing on tradition, these women also dispense warmth and nurturing, a familiar theme and one that is repeated in the figure of another nanny, in the last novel of the trilogy, Mirage. They emphasize the difficulty women face in divorcing themselves from tradition, especially if it is the mother figure who is both victim and perpetuator of this mode of life.7 Mme Thai’s and Mme Hai’s summation of the female condition is the following: “For us women, our lives, our happiness, depend mostly on the man we marry” (Printemps 74). Regarding male infidelity in marriage, they relate to Tran that “according to ancestral tradition, a teapot can have several cups but one never sees anyone procure for themselves several teapots and only one cup” (74). The metaphor is apt. The teapot, large and bulky, occupies center stage on the tray while small, delicate, and peripheral teacups surround it: a group of fragile, dependent, delicate vessels waiting to be filled (by a man’s seed). This image is of symbolic relevance since traditional society decreed that a man was entitled to several concubines. Mme Thai goes on: “The infidelity of a man can be compared to drops of water on a water-lily leaf, they fall and slide. But the same fault committed by a woman makes one think of a piece of cloth soiled with tannin” (75). Again the imagery is vivid and powerful. The contrast is striking between the lightness of a man’s offence, which leaves no traces, and the severity of a woman’s, which leaves an indelible stain, a brand of shame and dishonor, something sullied and corrupted. The double standard of sexuality appears in both East and West. Rousseau writes in Emile: Doubtless it is not permitted to anyone to violate his faith, and every unfaithful man who deprives his wife of the only reward of the austere duties of her sex is an unjust and barbarous man. But the unfaithful woman does more; she dissolves the family and breaks all the bonds of nature. In giving the man children which are not his, she betrays both. She joins perfidy to infidelity. I have difficulty seeing what disorders and what crimes do not flow from this one. (361) The following extract from a poem in the Classic of Poetry (edited by Confucius)8 expresses similar sentiments:



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Eva Figes points out that “sexual taboos (or a code of morality) cannot be effective unless they are accepted by society as a whole, and that means both men and women: one of the reasons that a patriarchal society has been able to work for so long is that women are themselves ready to play the roles assigned to them, never having been made aware of any alternative” (86-87). This system endorses the safeguarding of a man’s property, including his wife and children, and the sanctity of patrilineal descent. Mme Thai is fully aware of this: Like your father said, the unfaithful wife mixes the blood of the family, because her husband risks raising other men’s children. Men view it almost as an honor to take another’s wife, but they never forgive wives who are unfaithful to them. You are going to tell me that this is unjust, but since this injustice is inherent in our rules of conduct, why do you rebel? (76) In this view, divorce is not an option, since “a divorced woman is criticized and exposed to public ridicule, even though she is the victim” (75). Moreover, the children have to be thought of, and in this as in all other areas of her life, it is a woman’s duty to sacrifice her own interests for the sake of others. In articulating her views, Mme Thai reveals an entire social code of morality and shows not only that the older generation reluctantly accepts that code, if after its initial misgivings, but that it transmits that code to the generation of daughters as well. Thus, although Printemps’ mother figures, Mme Thai and Mme Hai, are unhappily married, both unerringly convey to Tran the duties and responsibilities of married women. In so doing, they reveal the discrepancy between ideal and reality that Susan Stanford Friedman finds characteristic of women: “not recognizing themselves in the reflections of cultural representation, women develop a dual consciousness—the self as culturally defined and the self as different from cultural prescription” (39). Both older women are able to recognize the basic injustice of the sexual double standard, but they are incapable of voicing a logical objection to it. Torn between the perceived suitability of marriage for women and the actual distress and humiliation of their own married state, they are somehow unable to take the necessary step that would allow them to reject conventional assumptions concerning woman’s role. Interestingly, Printemps’ two generations of Vietnamese women perceive European women quite differently. Tran believes that they are emancipated and have access to education, professional life, and a public political voice, while Vietnamese women “live cloistered and lead a resigned life, too dependent on their family” (100). Her mother, on the other hand, believes that women who are free are also more open to temptation. In her mind, independence and



When a man dallies, He will still be excused; But when a woman dallies, No pardon will she have. (Liu 21)

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Is it not true, my dear daughter, that the smile of a pretty woman can go to a man’s head, and that the tears of an old mother can touch the heart of the most ruthless of judges! Why do you want to become man’s equal when, without winning a battle, you can be Madam the General? (101) Mme Thai may be aware of the inequities in the status quo, but she chooses it over what she perceives as the sole alternative: complete lack of power for women. If her daughter Tran is to interrogate this view, she must overcome the inhibitions amid which she grew up, including the perceptions and judgments by which her parents, teachers, and society at large generally abide. As Germaine Greer reminds us: It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who decides to go her own way will find that her conditioning is ineradicable, but at least she can recognize its operation and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more subtly deluded. (165) Her modern views notwithstanding, Tran internalizes her elders’ strictures on female virtue and honor with punishing results. In July 1947, her diary ends with a last letter to her fiancé Châu, whom she addresses as “My beloved older brother” (Printemps 165). Enlisting the traditional form of address, in which the male partner is referred to as anh (older brother) and the woman as em (younger sister), Tran uses a form that reflects the existing social hierarchy. The term anh connotes seniority, strength, and authority, that is, while em connotes youth, deference, and immaturity. These forms of address support a convention in which the woman looks up to the man, and he looks after her. Considered affectionate, these terms infantilize the woman and normalize patriarchal hierarchies. Terms for lovers or for husband and wife to use, they also desexualize the relationship. In her letter, Tran informs Châu of her rape at the hands of a French soldier; a rape the reader is invited to read as analogous to the rape of her country by the colonizers. As Chilean writer Isabel Allende puts it: “I think rape represents the worst humiliation and the worst transgression against a person, and this theme has become prevalent in the stories, novels . . . that are being [written] nowadays. It is as if in the collective unconscious the rape of a woman has come to symbolize the rape of all of us as a species, continent, and race” (13). In Tran’s letter, the term “older brother” takes on its literal meaning. Having internalized the guilt that a social code of morality imposes on women who transgress, even though she is the victim, she renounces Châu: “Farewell, older brother . . . I no longer have a right to your love. I am unworthy” (Printemps 167). When he returns 8 years later, after the signing of the



unconventionality are naturally allied with sexual promiscuity.9 She goes on to explain that while women in traditional society may be outwardly submissive, they wield great power behind the scenes:


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Why imitate my mother in giving myself a master similar to my father? I prefer to be the lover rather than the legitimate wife. As a lover, I am loved . . . my partner seeks to please me; if he does not satisfy me, I can change to another. The legitimate wife, on the other hand, inherits the name and the title, in other words, the official façade, but, in time, she is often abandoned, forgotten or even maltreated. (134) Nam does not, however, absolve herself from responsibility for her present way of life. She points out wryly to Tran: “It is through girls like me that people can recognize the moral worth of girls like you. But I am seeking neither excuse nor justification with you. The disagreement between my parents certainly affected my adolescence, but it is my own nature that led me towards the life of a demimondaine, which pleases me” (134). With these words, Ly Thu Ho lays bare, in a direct and nonjudgmental manner, the motivations that shape the prostitute’s consciousness. While Nam’s actions are presented as a reaction to paternal violence and abuse, they do not excuse her lifestyle, but rather explain her decision to lead such a life. Yet Nam is as much a victim of the system by rebelling against it as she would have been in acquiescing to it. Still rebelling through men, and standing not on her own but on the strength of her sexual attachment to them, she is equally vulnerable and marginalized. Her death by childbirth illustrates her vulnerability. Ly Thu Ho renders her death with considerable irony. Having defied society and tradition by asserting her sexual independence, Nam dies in what is considered a natural process and the key expression of female sexuality, a process that, as we know, often proved fatal before the advent of modern medicine.10 As the other women comment: “Nam, who, during her lifetime, in the full youth of a seductive and desirable woman, was surrounded by friends and admirers, could find no man, not even a husband, to weep for her upon her death” (175). Ly succeeds in conveying, behind the façade of conformity and the lives of ordinary women, the overwhelming and sometimes shocking sadness of these women’s lives. Both of her older women, Mme Thai and Mme Hai, have unhappy marriages and, while recognizing injustice, are resigned to it. Both daughters, Tran and Nam, die young. In Tran, Ly presents a heroine who encapsulates all the desired attributes of the feminine ideal: of good birth, gentle, loving, beautiful, and a dutiful daughter, she also has sufficient intelligence and independence to love where she chooses. But these talents and gifts are of little use to her, for in the end, her life is marked by distress, unhappiness, and toil. Most vividly in this novel, by way of close parallels between the figures of Tran and Kieu (the heroine of The Tale of Kieu), Ly Thu Ho translates into a modern context the concepts of virtue and obedience traditional patriarchal society



Geneva Accords, she steadfastly refuses to go back on her self-imposed word. She dies a year later. Tran’s diary also records her relationship with her friend Nam, who represents the third category of women: the prostitute. Nam consorts with Japanese officers during the war. Here, she confides her motivations to her friend:

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inculcates in women, all the better to criticize them by having them result in Tran’s early and needless death.11

Carrefour, Ly’s second novel, is set in the mid-1960s. Its main female characters are Lang, a woman in her mid-twenties, and her cousin, Xinh. War has been a part of Lang’s life since 1945. A sheltered bourgeoise, Lang is being purposefully educated about the realities of life in war-affected Saigon. The figure of Lang, the virtuous woman, is set against those of Xinh, of more robust temperament, of Thuy, a woman of considerable independence and enterprise, and of Liêu, a fleeting figure who works as a bar-girl and falls victim to the casual violence of war. These different categories of women interrelate and share their views and perceptions. In contrast to the earlier Printemps, this novel’s mother figure is hardly given voice. Its emphasis is rather on the younger generation and Lang’s courtship with Vân, a surgeon, which forms the central plot of this third-person narrative. One of Carrefour’s few comments on mothers describes a society wedding in Saigon: And in the group of ladies what chatterings! The provident mammas were in search of brilliant and highly placed sons-in-law. Fortune and University degrees were no longer enough. They also demanded a certain respectability in their family. And in the absence of honorable titles from the parents themselves, they would take into account those of close relatives, an uncle who was Minister or a cousin who was the wife of a General. (59) In traditional Vietnamese society, women expended immense energy plotting and scheming advantageous social and political alliances to enhance the family name by bettering the position of its male members, most often by bettering a husband’s political career or assuring a son’s rise to a prominent position.12 If a daughter was of marriageable age, then a suitable groom was to be provided. As Ly’s character Xinh remarks, “the political barometer of Saigon is so variable, coups d’état so frequent that situation reversals become commonplace” (59). The archetypal virtuous woman, Lang is a language student. More independent, her cousin Xinh works as a sales agent. Xinh observes with interest Lang’s growing love for Vân. The difference in qualifications and age between Vân and Lang recalls that between Châu and Tran in Printemps. A brilliant thirty-year-old surgeon, an accomplished sportsman, and a keen appreciator of music, Vân is an extremely personable catch. He is older, more mature and intellectually gifted than she, as tradition dictates. Moreover, paralleling the decision made twenty years earlier by Printemps’ character Châu, Vân informs Lang that he has decided to join the maquis, to observe for himself first-hand the reality of the tangled state of politics in Vietnam. She is naturally distressed since she does not want to see him killed. However, at the end of their talk, she says in a self-



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deprecating way: “Well, now that you have made up your mind, I do not want to go counter to your will by reasoning any further, because I risk appearing like a scared and brainless lover, a loving but selfish woman” (43). The vocabulary stresses the inherent stupidity or foolishness of the female stereotype. Vân plans to be away for a few months or a year and does not wish them to be married beforehand. As if embodying the patriarchal roles in which man is the active principle, woman the passive,13 he tells her: “I love you, Lang, and I have chosen you amongst all others” (44). Vân goes on: “I too am afraid of losing you, but, look, if the worst were to happen to me, you would become a young widow, a twenty-five-year-old widow. A young woman marries more easily than a widow; and what will people say of you?” (44). Like Printemps’ Tran before her, Lang resigns herself to an anxiety-ridden period of separation, knowing that Vân will be working with the enemy, even though he does so not out of political conviction but in order to observe the human reality behind the propaganda. In his absence, and fired by his ideas (in this as in every other area, she is led by him), Lang decides to inform herself about the politics of her country. Xinh later congratulates her in a tone the reader is invited to read as ironic: “In any case, I compliment Vân who lost no time in training you as a future doctor’s wife” (67). Consistently, despite her firm grasp of current affairs, Lang becomes strangely shy in the company of men. She listens without contributing to a long discussion between men on the political and military situation: “Having no knowledge at all of politics, Lang’s only weapon against this war was her love for her torn homeland” (115). Her hours of diligent research and analysis pass unrecognized. Encroaching on an area that is not traditionally acknowledged as a woman’s, she feels unqualified to express her views. Her words capture her supposed ignorance of the political realities of the time and also her “feminine,” emotive, and, it is implied, powerless response to the situation: her love for her country. There exists a curious demarcation between the world of men and that of women. Men discourse openly on the politics and economics of the country and on the progress of the war. They are instrumental in the running of the country. Most are mobilized, in the public service or professionals; women’s world is ancillary to and divorced from that of men: their discussions and assessments of the situation are related in private, indulged in with one or two close women friends. Finally, Carrefour’s third female character of note is Thuy. An enterprising woman in her thirties, she tries various ways of earning a living before eventually opening a bar. She is a woman of courage who, with minimal education, no family connections or husband, succeeds on her own: “She remains a good and simple girl . . . she does not hesitate to embark on daring enterprises” (77). In Carrefour, female characters discuss two main topics: the bar-girls of Saigon and interracial relationships. Regarding the bar-girls, Thuy asserts: “Whatever people say about our bar-girls, they are good girls, some of them are even very honest. They often refuse to go out or to spend the night with strangers” (80). Lang points to the notorious reputation of the city center as a giant brothel and insists: “This is a question of women’s dignity and national self-respect” (80). Her words provoke Thuy’s spirited defense of the bar-girls, in which she points




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When one is hungry and without money, one has to struggle by any means in order to survive . . . the girls who are here are not all loose girls. Some of them are married women who work to help husbands who have been mobilized as second-class soldiers and earn a miserable salary that does not even cover the rent. Others belong to families who were wellto-do in the past but are nowadays impoverished or ruined by revolution or war. Most of them come from far-off country areas where life in the bush is no longer possible. (81) Thuy comments bitterly that although the bars are reviled by both conservatives and revolutionaries, they are heavily used and taxed: “The people of the maquis consider us traitors, while those in Saigon label us prostitutes; everyone throws stones at us and yet no one has forgotten to impose very heavy taxes on our earnings” (85). Lang leaves the encounter in a sober and reflective mood, seeing Thuy and women like her as an entire class bred by continuous war and poverty and believing that once the situation that gave rise to them disappears, so will they.14 As for interracial relationships, Xinh’s relationship with John, an American marine, is a particular subject of debate. If they decide to marry, Xinh believes it is inevitable that she would have to leave her country and attempt to settle in his. Lang agrees. A Vietnamese woman marrying an American would have fewer difficulties than an American woman married to a Vietnamese, she contends, for while a Western woman would find it very difficult to settle into the constraints of Vietnamese society, “a well-educated Vietnamese woman with progressive ideas will adapt more easily to American society, which is very liberal in its concepts of social life and where women are treated equally to men” (120).15 Xinh and John’s relationship illustrates the concept that opposites are mutually attractive: “It is the law of opposites, the attraction of novelty. . . . The West is attracted by the East and vice-versa” (139). This notion implies a curiosity regarding “the other side,” an acknowledgement of gaps in cultural understanding, and an effort to bridge them. Unlike earlier Francophone novels such as Truong Dinh Tri and Albert de Teneuille’s Bà--Dâm (1930) and Ousmane Socé’s Mirages de Paris (1937), in which the man is dark and foreign and the woman European and fair, this woman is dark-haired and the man, the foreigner, is fair. If the couple’s female partner, Xinh, might be taken to represent her homeland and John to embody the outsider, the invader, this analogy is not straightforward. When he is badly wounded, his helplessness permits Xinh to take the initiative and propose to him: “If your feelings for me have not changed, this time I’m asking you to marry me” (187). This interracial romance differs from earlier Francophone narratives in two additional ways: set in postcolonial Vietnam, neither of its partners is French. Moreover, their relationship develops in Vietnam during wartime and, after she “rescues” him, they leave her homeland.16 Carrefour’s third category of women, the prostitute, is briefly represented by



out that virtue and chastity, essentials of the feminine ideal, are middle-class luxuries:

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Liêu, a bar-girl who is killed by a grenade explosion in the city, leaving behind a young daughter, one of the many civilian victims of casual violence. Xinh informs Lang: “Liêu had followed in her mother’s footsteps but she was taken in her full youth without having had the time to know, fortunately for her, premature aging in poverty and privation” (71). In Carrefour as in the earlier Printemps, Ly constructs a female protagonist who embodies the traditional attributes of femininity. Although there are many surface parallels between the couples in the two novels, Lang’s fate is happier than Tran’s. However, both Lang’s many attributes and her personality fade as the narrative proceeds. If she is studying English when she meets Vân, for instance, she soon abandons her studies to accommodate her life to his. Finally, she becomes a sounding board for the views he expresses through his letters. Crucially, however, Lang’s conventionality also serves to set off the minor but more vivid female characters in the novel: her cousin Xinh, who has a more robust and independent personality, and Thuy, the enterprising self-made woman. As we have seen, this novel’s conventional heroines can relate with unconventional ones. Thus, as Lang and Xinh discuss prostitution with Thuy, Ly Thu Ho manages to relate another viewpoint (that of a woman bar owner) by having the bar owner Thuy embark on a sympathetic examination of the bar-girls of Saigon. Like Ly Thu Ho’s treatment of interracial relationships and prostitution, this examination was radical for her generation and culture. For this reason, perhaps, Ly has incorporated both within an orderly account of a young couple’s love and eventual marriage at a time of civil war. Carrefour ends on a more positive note than Printemps. Both young couples marry in the end. Lang is reunited with Vân, who relates his experiences as a doctor in the maquis as a long series of human tragedies. He decides to return to work in Saigon. The novel ends on a note of hope that the war will end and simply become a memory. Le Mirage de la Paix Ly Thu Ho’s Mirage elaborates the widest characterization of women. In addition to the mother figure, the virtuous woman, and the good-hearted prostitute, it presents a sturdy servant girl. Set between 1970 and 1975, it presents two main female characters who are both virtuous women: Thu-Thuy, a refugee from the North, and Ngoc-Suong, the daughter of a southern landowner. Its three remaining female characters are Ba-Sau (Ngoc-Suong’s nanny), Kieu-Lien, a Saigon prostitute, and Manh, a peasant girl and servant to Ngoc-Suong. Mirage relates the romances between Thu-Thuy and Huu-Lôc, the landowner’s son and an army captain, and between Ngoc-Suong and Duy-Sau, the son of the estate manager who is also under Huu-Lôc’s orders. A third-person narrative, this novel ends in tragedy with the fall of South Vietnam. If the mother figure is quasi-silent in Carrefour, it reappears in this novel in the guise of Ba-Sau, who contends that women’s purpose is childbearing, and illustrates her view that young women’s unattached sexuality is dangerous with an ancient saying: “When one has a marriageable daughter at home, it is as if one has to watch a bowl of fermented fish whose lid could possibly blow off any




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day, letting out the bad odor that dishonors the entire family” (Mirage 119). Iterating the views of generations of women, Ba-Sau insists that only when women are promptly married and quickly bear children is their sexuality justified and their energies suitably devoted to the raising of children. Ly Thu Ho’s work reveals that this view has not changed in forty years, since her earlier nanny, Printemps’ Vu Gia, preached in the 1930s. The voice of generations of mothers before her, Ba-Sau articulated maxims such as: “Dry wood burns better, an ugly husband serves better,” and “I would have liked a son-in-law of mature years, a man who already had some experience of life before beginning a family, a solid and sensible man on whom a woman can lean with confidence to travel the long and difficult path of life” (120). There are no mothers in Mirage; both Thu-Thuy and Ngoc-Suong lose theirs at a tender age. The mother-daughter relationships that had been so fraught with tension in Printemps disappear utterly in Mirage. The effect is an enhanced freedom for the younger women. It is up to Ba-Sau, the nanny, to provide nurturing and a semblance of mother-care. Her beliefs on women’s role in society are just as oppressive as those of the mother figure, but because she is not the actual mother, the young women can observe her strictures from a greater distance and take them less to heart. Like Tuoi and Tran in Printemps and Lang and Xinh in Carrefour, Thu-Thuy and Ngoc-Suong are described as beautiful. Thu-Thuy’s life has been a succession of tragedies. When her father dies she decides to leave Saigon and move to the country where she seeks work on the plantation owned by Mr. Huu-Phuoc. Contrasted with the figure of Manh, “a strapping peasant with a slow walk” (Mirage 65), the well-bred and frail Thu-Thuy represents the ideal of Vietnamese womanhood as endorsed by patriarchal society: lovely, gentle, and biddable. So much so that the middle-aged wife of the mechanic exclaims: “She seems like a good girl and so gentle. What a pity I have no son to marry, otherwise I would willingly have chosen her as my daughter-in-law” (72). For her part, NgocSuong is a student at the Couvent des Oiseaux (The Convent of Birds), a wellknown girls’ college in Dalat, legacy of the French colonial system of education, in which young girls are taught to become perfect housewives. Her education and upbringing have tamed her natural impulses and desires. She is aware that she is repressed and inhibited, but the weight of her upbringing is so ingrained that she has to struggle considerably to show her love and passion for her suitor DuyCau. After their first embrace, she swears eternal loyalty to him: “However many months and years of waiting this means, I promise that I will be your wife for the rest of my life and I take Heaven as witness that I will love only you” (83). Importantly, both Thu-Thuy and Ngoc-Suong are the ones to allow or engineer sexual relations with the men. Thus, what is not possible for Tran in 1945 is possible for these two young women in 1971. Thu-Thuy and Ngoc-Suong are able to express their sexuality while still remaining virtuous. They are given greater self-affirmation than the figure of Tran in Printemps and Lang in Carrefour. Not surprisingly, their actions entail consequences, but they are at least instrumental in instigating these events. When Thu-Thuy becomes pregnant, her reaction shows the way gender and class constraints shape the perspectives



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of women. It demonstrates, most importantly, that external appearance and reputation are crucial to women of her social class. If getting pregnant was acceptable for a robust peasant girl like Manh, who never made a secret of her attachments, it was not for a respectable young woman like Thu-Thuy who, however impoverished, believes that she has a standard to uphold. It also underlines the vulnerability of her position. A woman alone and a mere employee on the property, she has no family and no male protector. Like Tran in Printemps and Lang in Carrefour, Thu-Thuy is vividly conscious of the difference between herself and her lover in rank and family background. She is a penniless refugee from the North with no surviving family; he is the son of a landowner who is also her current employer. Thu-Thuy and Ngoc-Suong fall into the category of virtuous, chaste women who become faithful and devoted wives. Described as frail and childlike, they are set against strong and decisive lovers and husbands, both of whom are soldiers. This category of woman has a third member in Mirage—Dr Vân’s wife, Lang from Carrefour, whose brief appearance elicits this description: “What a simple and tolerant nature, she was always even-tempered and smiling. She only opened her mouth to inquire after her husband’s health and to encourage him in his mission” (96). As a character, Lang has faded into near anonymity as the perfect accessory and helpmate of her husband, Vân. Her case represents the purported ideal of a Vietnamese marriage in which “like children to parents, and younger brothers to older brothers, wives . . . [are] expected to be supportive and compliant” ( Jamieson 27). At the same time, it also represents the ideal proposed by the heroines of classical Western fairy tales, which, Marcia Lieberman points out, “focus upon courtship, which is magnified into the most important and exciting part of a girl’s life, brief though courtship is, because it is the part of her life in which she most counts as a person herself. After marriage she ceases to be wooed, her consent is no longer sought, she derives her status from her husband, and her personal identity is thus snuffed out” (Lieberman 199200). Indeed for Lang, marriage is quite literally the end of the story. In Mirage, Ly Thu Ho’s fourth category of women, the good-hearted prostitute, is described by Kieu-Lien, a bar-girl, and the recognized mistress of HuuLôc (before he meets and loves Thu-Thuy): “All the same, a prostitute like myself does not have the same feelings as other girls. But I too have a soul, a heart, noble and pure sentiments” (Mirage 114). For her part, Kieu-Lien is just as keen to conform to a socially acceptable role as Thu-Thuy and Ngoc-Suong, but she recognizes that her profession is a means of livelihood that also allows her a measure of independence. Huu-Lôc charitably offers his mistress the use of his studio in Saigon; Kieu-Lien bears an unrequited love for him. Unlike Nam in Printemps and Liêu in Carrefour, Kieu-Lien is not automatically or visibly punished for rebelling so openly against the feminine ideal. Rather, her fate is not specified. In the meantime, history inevitably takes its course. Mr. Huu-Phuoc, the patriarch, dies at the beginning of 1975. He is thus spared the death of his son, HuuLôc, in combat, the Communist takeover of South Vietnam, and the change in Duy-Cau, his son-in-law, as a result of guilt and depression. Only the women are




Nathalie Nguyen

left to eke out what living they can on the property. Thu-Thuy turns from a glowing, fulfilled wife and mother into a haggard and prostrate widow, and NgocSuong feels herself to be “the widow of a living man” (297). Only Manh has lost none of her resourcefulness and holds the household together, using her peasant wit and cunning. Thu-Thuy slowly pieces her health together and sets down to hard physical work in the new conditions. She visits her husband’s grave regularly, reports all the latest happenings to him, and swears the following: I vow for the rest of my life, and in the hope of better days, to keep my heart intact and pure and to venerate your memory, not to embark on another boat however enchanting it may be, to keep my promise of eternal fidelity to you, and never to leave this land of the South where now your ashes lie, even though this land is enveloped by a veil of suffering and despair. (309) Of her own volition, she undertakes to remain eternally faithful to his memory, never to remarry and never to leave the country. She thus conforms to the Confucian ideal of the perfect wife, obedient and loyal: “Confucian morality required that the wife remain faithful to her dead husband so as to devote herself to her children. The term which signifies ‘widow’ (chung phu) means ‘faithful to the end’. . . . Another term more commonly used to designate widows is ‘tiet phu’, which means ‘virtuous woman’” (Tran, “La Femme vietnamienne” 65). On the surface, the description and judgment of women in Mirage are restricting and stifling. They echo ideals espoused by mother and grandmother and illustrate the subservient role of women under patriarchy. A woman has neither voice nor presence unless she is attached to a man, and unless she is catering to the needs of other individuals. Although she chooses not to marry, even a robust, capable peasant like Manh devotes her energy to looking after her mistresses and their children. Ly’s last novel, even more so than the earlier ones, depicts female stereotypes that conform to the roles assigned to them by society: the roles of virtuous and loving helpmate and self-sacrificing mother. There are few indications of women’s independence, free spirit, or outside interests. A woman asserts her will by getting herself a man. In the end, every path returns to catering for a husband and child. Her role and her duty are perceived as such, not only by men but also by other women operating under similar constraints. The cycle seems never-ending. In this last novel, the mother figure, represented by Ba-Sau, is the upholder of culture and tradition. As Kumari Jayawardena observes: “It was claimed that the women of the East were more spiritual; that they were heirs to the wisdom of centuries; that they . . . were still the custodians and transmitters of national culture” (257). Ba-Sau’s strictures have the most effect on the two characters that conform most closely to this ideal—Thu-Thuy and Ngoc-Suong. Predictably, both suffer loss and tragedy. Despite a greater measure of assertion in the sexual sphere than their earlier counterparts in Ly Thu Ho’s corpus (Tran in Printemps and Lang in Carrefour), both embody the traditional feminine attributes that characterized their predecessors. Their personalities stand in marked



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contrast to the figures of Kieu-Lien, the bar-girl and Manh, the peasant. As in Carrefour, it is these two women on the periphery of society who possess the more colorful and arresting personalities. The passivity and sweetness of the two principal female characters serve to underscore their eventual apathy and powerlessness in the face of great loss. In her earlier novels, Ly invested her female characters with traditionally feminine attributes and, at the same time, provided an analysis of the hidden tragedies of traditional feminine roles. Carolyn Heilbrun has commented on this: “Women writers . . . have articulated their pain. But they cannot, or for the most part have not, imagined characters moving, as the authors themselves have moved, beyond that pain” (Heilbrun 72). But Mirage is the most pessimistic of Ly’s novels. Constant, unremitting war has eroded society; women have become victims of circumstances. This novel permits the reader to surmise that in that context, it would be selfish of these women to think of their own fulfillment when so many are suffering and dying. Where would women’s intelligence and energy expand? What other avenues exist? Is it not best to conform to traditional notions of womanhood, to give some semblance of sanity and stability to society, to marry and bear children to make up for the losses? From today’s vantage, the prospect is horrifying. Conclusion Ly Thu Ho forms part of a minority of female writers in the Vietnamese Francophone tradition. Unlike her contemporaries—Vietnamese male writers such as Pham Van Ky, Nguyen Huu Chau, or Pham Duy Khiem—she does not engage in formal experimentation with, for instance, circular time or splintered perceptions or characterization. She is not interested in using innovative techniques, nor do the structures of her novels capture the breakup of personalities and societies. Easy to read, her narrative progression is orderly and linear. Her characters are shallowly drawn and conform to convention: the women are vulnerable, the men are strong. In this she also differs from contemporary women writers, both Vietnamese and French: her work does not openly challenge the status quo; it is not engagé. There thus exists a marked disparity between Ly’s experience and that of the women in her novels. Her expression as a novelist contrasts with the lack of expression of her main female protagonists. In this way, she shares traits with some of her Western counterparts at the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. Marilyn French has observed: It is remarkable that . . . women writers should have set aside their own experience in writing about women. Male writers have not done this, and such a difference must have import. Women writers, on the whole, have tried to write about women on the whole—that is, about the experience of the female sex, rather than that of an extraordinary member of that sex. And the experience of women in general, even those of the middle or upper classes, is one of constriction. (352)




Nathalie Nguyen

Paradoxically, then, in Ly’s novels, female protagonists who belong to the writer’s own social class and background are the least articulate on the political and military realities of the times, subjects upon which she, as the author, discourses at length and with confidence through the letters of her male protagonists. These same well-brought-up women are also the most vulnerable to the feminine ideal and suffer correspondingly. This does not mean, however, that Ly Thu Ho’s novels are not subversive. In fact, their apparent superficiality allows her to express unusual views. Using considerable irony, she locates the subversive aspect of her work in the fates of its female characters. Through apparent surface conventions in style, content, and characterization, she conveys the restricted boundaries and silenced identities of the truly feminine characters. Virtue and obedience result in stifled lives, or, as in Printemps, death. Female traits of filial and wifely deference, beauty, and gentleness go unrewarded. The women who conform to these ideals experience brief happiness, followed by tragedy or anonymity. Her intelligent, attractive, and sensitive female protagonists lose their personalities or their lives. Her virtuous females are punished, whether by fate or circumstance—by years of torment and an early death for Tran in Printemps, by the gradual anonymity of Lang in Carrefour, and by the sadness, bereavement, and breakdown of Thu-Thuy and NgocSuong in Mirage. In her most expressive novel, Printemps, Ly began her corpus by subtly reappraising the classic tale of Kieu for a modern context. In so doing, she clearly questioned traditional female roles. With Mirage, however, Ly adopts a subdued note of pessimism and resignation. In this, her work reflects in some measure the vigor of French feminism in the 1960s and 1970s and its fading visibility in the 1980s.17 But it is also clear that Vietnam and the condition of Vietnamese women in particular provide her central focus. It is not surprising, perhaps, that in Mirage, more than in the two earlier novels, the female characters stand as symbols of their country; a country at war. They have borne the cost of the war, experienced loss and despair, yet they survive. Beyond the immediate politics of the Vietnam War and the defeat of the South, these women, like the country at large, embody the abused yet still present state of their land. Vietnam has undergone centuries of turmoil, invasion, occupation, and rebellion, and many years of war. In the end, despite the reverses in their lives, the women in Mirage—like their country—remain and will endure. Notes 1. “One of the most dramatic events of South Vietnamese literary history was the controversial appearance in the 1960s of five young women fiction writers in their twenties: Nguyen Thi Hoang, Nguyen Thi Thuy Vu, Nha Ca, Trung Duong and Tuy Hong. . . . [They] were dubbed ‘Ngu Quai’ (Five She-Devils). The five plunged headlong into both feminine and feminist writings. . . . While the first type of writing subtly informs of the reality of woman, the second type suggests or demands changes that could render that reality less oppressive and more equitable” (Cong 176-177). 2. Earlier predecessors, such as the eighteenth-century poet Ho Xuan Huong, criticized political, social, and sexual hypocrisy through the double-entendres of their verses. 3. The work of Christiane Rochefort and Annie Ernaux for example.



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4. See Nguyen, “A Classical Heroine and her Modern Manifestation.” 5. All translations from the original French, unless otherwise acknowledged, are my own. 6. These are the “Three Obediences” to which a woman was subject in Confucian society ( Jayawardena 170-171). 7. Susie Orbach has examined the ambivalence of the mother-daughter relationship. She is referring to Western society, but there are points of similarity between the mother-daughter relationship in both Eastern and Western societies: “The mother-daughter relationship is invariably an ambivalent one, for the mother who herself lives a circumscribed life in patriarchy, has the unenviable task of directing her daughter to take up the very same position that she has occupied. Explicitly as well as unconsciously she psychologically prepares her daughter to accept the strictures that await her in womanhood. She needs to do this so that her daughter is not cast as a misfit” (23). 8. See Lin, The Wisdom of China and India, 867. 9. African women writers record similar perceptions in relation to women in postcolonial Africa: “Writers stress the woman as scapegoat, called ‘backward’ when she is traditional, called ‘western’ or ‘immoral’ when in an attempt to better her life she is perceived as invading male domains” (Christian, Black Feminist Criticism 147-148). 10. “Between the ages of twelve and forty, European men outlived women well into the twentieth century . . . maternal mortality remained high: until the 1880s, motherhood was fatal for one woman out of every twenty.” (Anderson and Zinsser 241). These figures, applicable to nineteenth-century Europe, were probably similar in nineteenth-century Vietnam. The issue of maternity is addressed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex: “It is in maternity that woman fulfils her physiological destiny, it is her natural ‘calling,’ since her whole organic structure is adapted for the perpetuation of the species. But we have seen already that human society is never abandoned wholly to nature” (de Beauvoir 467). 11. Printemps is a dark rewriting of the story of Kieu. There are close parallels between the figures of Tran and that of Kieu, heroine of the nineteenth-century Vietnamese classic The Tale of Kieu, composed by the scholar and poet Nguyen Du. Both women embody the Confucian ideal of feminine beauty and filial duty, both suffer misfortune and are separated from their lover for many years, but while Kieu is eventually reunited with her lover and gains a measure of happiness, Tran refuses this chance of happiness and dies an early death. For further details, see Nguyen, “Classical Heroine,” 454-462. 12. “If [Vietnamese women] wished to exercise power, it had to be via their men. This was reflected, for example, in the many folk sayings about wives slaving so that their husbands might become mandarins. If her husband were successful, a wife reaped some reflected glory. . . . Perhaps the entire relationship was summed up in the adage, ‘A man’s property is his wife’s work’. The same principle applied to mothers and sons. Vietnamese tradition abounded with mothers who made endless sacrifices for their sons” (Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 197-198). 13. As Mary Ellman writes: “By sexual correlation, all energy and enterprise is customarily assigned to male thought, and simple, accretive expectation to female thought” (13). 14. The same point is made by Tran Thi-Tuyet: “We could cite numerous examples like those women with children, who could not take the place of their mobilized husbands and were forced to become bar-girls, prostitutes . . . we would be wrong to believe that these practices are generalized the way an entire section of the Western media would like us to believe. It is only a temporary phenomenon, common to many other countries at war” (205). 15. Lang makes two assumptions here: first, that the woman is automatically expected to follow her husband and settle in his country; second, that a woman in Western society would not be subject to sexual discrimination. A woman living in the West might respond that such discrimination exists but operates in different forms. However, Lang’s view is consistent with that held by most Vietnamese women in the 1960s, who considered that American women enjoyed “equal” rights with men. “Asian women . . . were influenced by the myth that all Western women were ‘free’. To give one example, around 1900, Kartini, the pioneer of female education in Indonesia, was to envy the ‘free, independent European woman’” ( Jayawardena 11). 16. Bà--Dâm and Mirages de Paris were both set during the colonial period and involved foreign men falling in love with French women in the metropolis. 17. See, for example, Gildea, France since 1945, 120-126.







Vo Thi Xuan Ha

A week after Than and I were married, I have an argument with his parents. Than’s face goes pale, his lips pouting—so disgusting! He is an incarnation of contradictions. When he kisses me, he is so violent. But when he is supposed to speak up, he just stutters. “Than, you must punish that insolent slut,” my father-in-law roars like a butcher. Sitting in my bedroom, I dangle my naked legs, pursing my lips in defiance. “Please Mom and Dad, forgive her,” Than’s voice says ruefully. Than’s stupid mother grumbles as she carries her basket into the kitchen: “If your wife argues with me again, I’ll send her back to her parents. I can’t put up with her anymore, even though she is our first daughter-in-law.” I feel the urge to burst out of the room and jump on her for preaching to me about my duty as their senior daughter-in-law. Though aware of the difficulties, I married Than because I love him. Every night our bodies lock into each other like a pair of snakes. Our room, no larger than five square meters, reeks with the acrid odor of Than’s sweat, the fragrance of my hair, the breath of two passionate lovers. Now and then a gust of wind wafts into our small bedroom the pungent smell of the lotus pond, the phosphorous river teeming with fish and prawns, and the sleepy town. After our lovemaking, we disengage from each other, lying languorously at the edge of our bed, listlessly looking up at the glittering stars through the window slats. “Please, dear, do not argue with our old mother,” Than says. While Than pleads to me that way in the dark, I count the stars, nakedly. His steady voice sounds like a lullaby sending me to sleep. “Every rainy season my parents would whip me for losing a couple of ducks,” Than drones on. “In July the ducks would raise their bottoms and dip their beaks into the water to catch the phosphorus. In doing so they dropped their eggs into the river. I would dive to its bottom to pick them up. Sometimes



The Sparrows Fly across the Woods

Vo Thi Xuan Ha

I collected a basketful of them. I was so cold and wet my lips turned purple, my shorts burst open, revealing my balls. . . . .” I burst out laughing, wide-awake. Than is a handsome man, his skin dark and firm, his chest broad and muscular. His hair—thick, healthy, and dark brown— tumbles down his broad forehead, a sure mark of intelligence. Than could have at his disposal dozens of girls but he is crazy about me, worrying that I might run away. How stupid he is! He does not realize that I am also madly in love with him and would not allow any woman to get in my way. For these reasons I have come to hate my in-laws. There is only one man I do not hate, though. If he were here, my parentsin-law wouldn’t beat me because I wouldn’t have been their senior daughterin-law. He is sitting up there on the altar, smiling and sadly looking out the window onto the garden. There are a few sweetsops and grapefruit trees in the backyard. I often get bruised as I dig the soil with my bare hands. When I see worms squirm all over the ground, I run back into the house, frightened. He is still smiling and gazing out the window, absent-mindedly. Calling to Than, I point to the back yard. “Our soil is full of worms!” My father-in-law sucks in his water pipe, breathing out clouds of smoke and mumbling: “The slut is insane!” Only Nam could protect me. During the holidays Than would take me with him to the woods to shoot sparrows. The birds perched all over the sycamores pointing straight up to the sky. Holding up his rifle, Than explained: “Shooting sparrows makes you feel better than killing any other kind of animal.” Than’s gun, as it was discharged, gave him a jolt. I asked: “Why?” The sparrows shot out of the trees, flying thick in the sky. One went down, landed over a bush far beyond, its blood staining whitish thorny blossoms. Than lunged over to grab the little brown bird writhing on the ground. Slightly tugging at Than’s sleeve, I repeated my question: “Why did you say that?” Than looked at the blood stains on the grass and pointed to the sky, replying with a smile: “Because they are too many!” I started gathering dry leaves to build a fire. The bird sizzled over the fire, giving off such a fragrant smell as Than turned it over with his knife. Swallowing my saliva, I poked the tip of my knife at the meat, sliced off a piece and put it in my mouth. “You’re reminding me of the fox Emeline in The Adventures of Fox Emeline,” Than teased me. We rolled over in the grass, locked in each other’s arms, devouring each other’s greasy mouth. Unable to understand what was going on inside each other, I was hungry to see and touch for myself the tiny blood cells



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pulsating in each and every vessel of the body of the man lying on top of me, to understand the mysterious force that binds a man and a woman together. We killed and ate one sparrow at a time. Evening was drawing near. We were sprawling on the grass, looking up at droves of birds returning to their nests. The setting sun had turned purple; our blood was mixed with that of the sparrows Than had killed. In our excursions we would occasionally encounter heavy rains which tattered twigs and leaves and beat upon our flesh with its icy drops, quenching the burning desire inside of us. I took off my clothes and frolicked in the rain with Than, laughing like crazy. My naked body soaked with water was ivory-white. The rain made my flesh firm and voluptuous, soothing the everlasting pain of being a woman. After the rain, the forest grew greener. Young buds burst out of jagged bark to receive the late sunlight. Lines of ants were moving with patience over rotting leaves, some of them carrying on their backs a long leaf that had just fallen from its tree. Than observed: “These must be hungry ants because they have to eat bitter leaves.” I remember that before I got married, my mother used to make funny remarks about life such as “Ants are fated to starve.” She should have taught me to respect my parents-in-law, to fill and refill everyone’s bowl in my husband’s family with rice to the brim, to slave like ants. I looked at Than, thinking sadly: “To think that you are a starving ant!” A brook was rippling somewhere. The forest’s stillness was punctuated by the occasional snorting of deer and the rustling of fallen leaves. Underneath the mossy pebbles, hogfish were scurrying about, hunting their prey. Only the tigers were invisible, unless they sprang upon us from behind. “Let’s go home, Emeline,” Than said. I left the woods hesitantly. One year after we were married I got pregnant. Nine months later I gave birth to a baby girl who looked very much like Than. With a flourish the midwife cut the umbilical cord. I sprawled out, fainting on the delivery table. A man who was bigger and taller than Than was looking down from the ceiling first at my pale face, then at my belly where the umbilical cord just cut off was still hanging over my genitals. I heard my baby’s convulsive wailing then saw that man bend over to kiss her and fondle the bloody cord. He kept gazing at me and smiling sadly. I recognized the man as Nam, Than’s late brother. When Than took me from the delivery table to my bed I woke up and suddenly found him a total stranger. Being a new father, Than simpered and went about tidying things up with obvious embarrassment. I heard my father-in-law grumble on the porch: “When will I have a grandson?” Ah, just wait! I closed my eyes, exhausted. I felt a strong desire to see that man fondle the stalk of the umbilical cord popping out of my vagina. I was crazy about the man as if he had touched and seized all the minute blood vessels in my body that Than was incapable of touching.



THE SPARROWS FLY ACROSS

Vo Thi Xuan Ha

“If your father wants to have another son, find him another woman.” Fully awake now, I began to attack Than verbally. “Tut-tut, tut-tut, you shouldn’t have said that. Just take it easy, fox Emeline.” Than tried to calm me down. “Take another wife if you want a son that badly,” I said, still fuming. “This is what I anticipated,” Than said, dejectedly. “Once you have a baby, you no longer need me.” “You men better watch out!” I blew up. “Or you’ll have no descendants. Once you’re gone, we’ll drink water from the river to impregnate ourselves. You’ll see that we’re far better than you men are. Though we’re loud-mouthed and quarrelsome, we’re not that crazy about blood and guns.” Than sat still, dumbfounded and crestfallen. Relenting, I held his hand in mine, murmuring: “I’ve just seen Nam. He kissed our baby and saw me naked.” “Nonsense!” Than said with a start. “It’s true. He acted as if little Mai was his baby, not yours!” Convinced that I must be delirious, Than did not mind what I was saying. He calmly said: “The other day I received information about the location of Nam’s unit. After you get well, I’ll go look for him.” Nam was Than’s elder brother. At age seventeen, he enlisted in the army. My husband’s entire village saw him off and sang his praises. Later, though my father-in-law was arrested many times for smuggling, he was not sentenced to jail because his son was a volunteer. Nobody realized that it was his father’s cruelty that forced him to leave home by any means. People like Nam were fortunate because at that time there was a war for them to escape to; now during peace time if children do not like their parents, they will surely end up bumming. Than told me that his father used to hang Nam on a beam over the ceiling and beat him with a stout staff for not bringing home money. Two months after his enlistment and before he was sent to the battlefield, Nam was permitted to visit his family for one day. He knocked loudly on the door in the middle of that night, causing all the dogs in the village to bark loudly. Thinking that it was a robber, his father wedged his bundle of money into the thatch window, shouting at the top of his lungs. Nam stayed home for the whole day, consumed a castrated rooster, then said good-bye to everybody. Before he left, Nam gave Than, who was ten years old at that time, a brass cartridge the size of a jalapeno pepper. He also emptied out his pocket and gave his mother what he had saved from his salary. As he was stepping out of the gate, his mother kept looking at him in tears and with amazement. His father raised his voice, saying: “Humph! Why are you crying? Don’t you know a man has to tread the earth and carry heaven over his head?” Though Nam did tread the earth, he carried the shells instead of heaven over his head. He had been gone a year when his family received his death notification. His remains must be still lying somewhere in Quang Tri. When ransack-



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When little Mai turned two, a film crew went to Quang Tri to shoot a film about the war and about a couple separated because of the war. The story, which takes place at the old citadel, is about blunders and meanness as well as lofty sentiments. Though Than is a copyeditor, he writes for some magazines occasionally. He usually puts his published articles in a drawer and locks them up. As a journalist, Than knows many people, among them Mr.Vinh, head of the film crew, and the film director, whom Than praised in one of his articles. Both men insisted that Than accompany them in their trip so he could write advance reviews of their forthcoming movie. Than agreed, but said: “All right, but you must let me take Diem along.” “Can you just forget about Diem for a moment?” Mr. Vinh nodded with a snicker. “Did it ever occur to you that when you get old, you might not like each other as much as you do now?” I knew too well Than wanted me to go with him because he was afraid that in his absence I would cuckold him. Phuong, Than’s younger sister, a twentyfive-year-old girl with flat breasts, whose face was pale when she didn’t wear makeup, had a boyfriend that Than had seen devour me with his eyes. Each time Tu came to visit Phuong, she looked embarrassed and awkward, and often spilled tea when serving it to him. Taking advantage of this, I went over to clean up the mess, showing Tu the upper parts of my breasts. When hearing Tu swallow his saliva and seeing Phuong pale with anger, I smiled and walked out of the house. Than was angry and did not speak to me. If he had not been, I would have relented. I crawled into bed, facing the wall and imagining Tu and Phuong making love to each other and Tu’s eyes caressing the length of my body. I started sweating, feeling chilled to the bone when thinking of Nam’s sad eyes gazing at me. The film crew worked hard in the stifling heat of central Vietnam’s summertime. Monsoon after monsoon swooped upon the old citadel, condensing everything into vapor. The lead actress laughingly bragged about losing two kilos and worried that her dog might not recognize her when she came home because of the deep tan on her face. A well-known but unemployed actress, she was spending her time at parties when she was chosen to play a peasant’s humble wife. Against the background of Quang Tri’s old citadel the filmmakers recreated the bloody battles where soldiers tumbled down in the barrage of bullets. There was an acrid smell of gunpowder in the red dust. I was frightened. The war seemed to be happening in front of me. Mr. Vinh yelled to my ears: “This represents only ten percent of the horrors and brutalities. . . . ” Ten percent or one percent? I don’t care to know. At the bottom of my purse full of makeup things I found Nam’s smeared letter, which says:



ing the heap of Nam’s dirty toys and finding the cartridge, Than polished and hid it away in a secret place. He would take it out and show it to me, saying each time we made love to each other: “It’s a memento of Nam.”

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Than and I wandered all over the area. It was so hot nothing could grow here except fronds, reeds, and tussock grass. Glistening under the sun was the dead’s white city. I stumbled and paused occasionally. Casting his glance all the way to the end of the cemetery, Than murmured sadly: “So we couldn’t find . . . ” An old woman passing by remarked casually: “People don’t seem to stop coming . . . ” “Please ma’am, may I ask you a question?” I asked boldly. “About the dead or the living? I can only answer questions about the dead. The living are all gone.” “About the dead.” “I know it.” We followed her into an unsteady house with a corrugated roof. Inside were a divan made of palm leaves and a wooden table with a couple of broken cups. On the altar was the picture of a young man with a dim face, squinting vacantly. The old woman touched the bottom of the cups to check for dregs, then poured tea from a thermos into the cups. “Have some tea. When did he die?” she asked. Than was stunned for a moment, but then he told her the story as clearly as he had done before to so many people we had visited. She listened to Than attentively but shook her head: “Based on your story I know it’s hard to find your brother’s remains. I tell you what: Find the woman who loved him, and ask her to speak to him for you. After a person dies, he gives his flesh and skin back to his blood relatives, and only his spirit belongs to the woman he was destined to love . . . ,” the old woman explained, her voice thick and harsh. “That’s my son,” she said, pointing to the altar. “I couldn’t find a single bone of his. In that battle he led a commando squad. He was blown up by a mortar, mixed with sand and dirt.” She started to cough. We divided a bundle of incense and put its sticks everywhere on the cracked burners. Lying in our hotel that night, I saw innumerable glowworms glittering and fluttering outside the windowpanes. Stealthily I got up and opened wide the windows. Some of the glowworms staggered into our room. Than was squatting on the floor, gazing at them with intense attention. “In my dream I saw Nam wear a reddish insignia on his lapel, two of his buttons broken, another one almost falling off,” I reminded Than of the man I saw in my labor. “When Nam left home, he was only seventeen, too young to have a girlfriend . . . .” Than murmured absently.



“ . . . too quiet. We crave the crowing of roosters, the cry of children . . . ” Is there any portion of the film that can depict adequately the horror of quiet moments during the war? Who can tell where Nam’s remains are in these clumps of tall grass surrounding the old citadel?

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Unable to find Nam’s remains, Than spent all day writing for his newspaper in the hotel. I was asked to substitute for an actor who quit because her mother was gravely ill. My role was very simple—I did not have to say a word, but just watched the birds fly past the old citadel while strong winds were blowing. On hearing the mention of birds, Than put his pen down, grabbed his rifle, and rushed to the hill. Droves of sparrows perched all over the white reeds. Than spoke softly to the director. “Promise that you will let me shoot the birds when we finish this scene.” I crawled stealthily to the location indicated by the director and stood up all of a sudden. Frightened, the birds flew away. I looked up at the boundless sky, hearing Than’s voice wafted to me from afar: because they are innumerable. The camera clicked and stopped. Than shot his gun in the air. I shook slightly. A sparrow flapped unsteadily then went down. The smell of the roasting meat and Than’s body odor suddenly made me feel nauseated. Lying on the hill, we ate the roasted sparrows. When I finished, Than began: “You love Nam, don’t you?” “You’re insane,” I said, stunned by what I heard. “Are you jealous of him?” Than flung me down on the grass. I fought back, screaming: “I hate all your family!” “Then who helped you become a woman and have children?” “We will drink at the river to impregnate ourselves.” Than let go of me, turning his face away. There were tears in his eyes. “I’m not jealous of the dead,” he said. “Please ask Nam’s spirit to come back.” I burst into tears. “Dear Nam, I am Than’s wife and lover forever. Though we live in two different worlds, I want to be your friend. I promise I’ll bear all the hardship to care for your family. Come back and stay with us, let us know where your remains are.” The water on Thach Han River still flows on impatiently, depositing its alluvia, the color of blood, on its banks. Have the remains of so many young men who fell during the war become these alluvia? Amidst the immensity of heaven and earth, which speck of sand do Nam’s bones shine? “My dear Emeline,” Than whispered. Two years after the futile trip, I was pregnant again. My pregnancy this time was much more important to both Than and me, for I knew that Nam would come back to visit us. After an excruciating labor I gave birth to two cute boys. My God, two baby boys with two umbilical cords dangling! Oldsters, you got what you want! Two grandsons with two umbilical cords dangling. You’ll have plenty of time to clean up their shit! I fainted with the desire to see an appearance. . . . . I woke up, exhausted. Than stood by me. There were deep wrinkles on his weather-beaten face. Nam still sits up there, his sad eyes gazing out the windows. One day when Phuong was rude to me, I pointed to the altar and threatened her: “Behave yourself, or I’ll tell Nam.”




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Now and then Than takes the children and me to the woods. Instead of firing single shots as he did years ago, he waits until the birds alight on the low branches and shoots repeatedly. The sparrows that are hit fall to the ground. The two boys help their father pick up the dead birds, frolicking. Only little Mai stands quietly at a corner. Instead of helping me build a fire, she shades her eyes with her hand, gazing at the blue sky, at the flock of sparrows flying past the woods, upward, higher and higher. And she smiles. Translated by Qui-Phiet Tran



She cringed. As for Than, whenever the children asked him about Nam, he said: “Uncle Nam has turned into a star, up there.” The children looked at the night sky full of stars. I thought about the nights we spent in Quang Tri when the glowworms were just as innumerable and the stars were as red as blood, not this green.

Qui-Phiet Tran

Vo Thi Xuan Ha was born in 1959 in Hanoi. A graduate of Hanoi College of Education in 1978 and valedictorian at Nguyen Du School of Writing in 1992, she is currently editor of Bao dien anh kich truong Viet Nam (Vietnam Motion Pictures and Theater Magazine). Her publications include five collections of short stories: Vinh biet giac mo ngot ngao (Farewell to a Sweet Dream) (1992), Bay huu nhay mua (Dancing Deer) (1994), Co tich cho tuoi hoc tro (Fairy Tales for School Children) (1994), Ke doi dau (The Opponent) (1998), Gia nhang den va nhung truyen khac (The Price of Candles and Incense Sticks and Other Stories) (1999); and two novels for children: Chiec hop gia bao (The Family Treasure Box) (1997) and Chuyen o rung soi (Tales from Oak Forests) (1999). She was the recipient of the 1999 Association of Writers Best Fiction Award. Vo Thi Xuan Ha has directed the following films: Chiec hop gia bao (The Family Treasure Box) (1997 Winner of Vietnam Motion Pictures and Theater Awards), Chuyen o rung soi (Winner of Motion Pictures Department), Dat lang le (Quiet Land), Gio thoi qua rung Muong Ma (Winds Blow across Muong Ma Forest), Lua va dat (Rice Plants and the Soil). Currently Vo Thi Xuan Ha lives with her two teenage daughters in Hanoi. Qui-Phiet Tran: Vietnam used to be “a cultured country.” With the onslaught of Western-style reforms, literature has been shifted to a minor role. What’s your reaction to this phenomenon? Vo Thi Xuan Ha: It is good to know that Vietnam’s traditional culture still remains intact in the face of Western-style renovation. To Vietnamese writers, intellectuals, thinkers, and even a majority of workers, literature is a special corner of their soul. Never have the Vietnamese people ever relegated literature to an inferior role or elevated it to a high status. Like Vietnamese history, Vietnamese literature has played an important role in protecting and building the country. When guns and swords have been put aside, the violence of war is



A Conversation with Vo Thi Xuan Ha

Qui-Phiet Tran

replaced by a feeling of softness, as when we lie on the green grass, watch white clouds in the sky, hear birds singing in the trees, see worms gently leaving their cocoons in the humid spring climate. Those things, including our laughter and our tears, our happiness and our sighs, mean much to us. That is what I call the essence of literature that a writer tries to put in his or her work. If TV, the Internet, and other sophisticated means of communication were not dominating the world, Vietnamese writers would be treated like heroes. Western lifestyles adopted by some Vietnamese, especially members of the young generation, might make Vietnamese literature at a certain period of time look inferior, or obsolete. If this happens, we should not worry about it. Vietnamese culture has stood the test of time, and nothing can replace it. QT: Are you writing as a woman for women? Can you integrate into the mainstream? Do you have to create “a literature of your own”? VH: I think that I am writing about and on behalf of human beings. But because I am a woman, my way of exteriorizing my feelings tends to be female. Being a writer, you must struggle for human rights. If my work contributed to the general struggle for a woman’s or many women’s happiness, it would not be hard to understand because I am a writer. I do not intend to divide the world into two parts and declare that I fight for the half of the world that consists of women. I do not need pity from anybody who sees women as weak, inferior creatures. And it is for this reason that I am saying I can integrate into the mainstream and always hope to create a literature of our own or, if you wish, a literature for our times. QT: How do you see the West? Do you think an encounter between Vietnamese writers and their Western counterparts is necessary? VH: To me, Western culture is characterized by its new trends of thought, new ways of conceptualizing. If a writer knows how to derive the best from both Western and Eastern cultures and safeguard and develop our national culture, then he/she has met our new era’s standards. Therefore, it’s important to have an encounter between Vietnamese writers and their Western counterparts. If a face-to-face meeting of these writers or a contact through the Internet are unavailable, we should find other ways to reach Western audiences through translation, criticism, and written texts. QT: As a young writer who didn’t directly participate in the Vietnam War, what’s your perception of it? Is there any impact of the war on your writing? VH: Like other writers of my generation, I didn’t participate in what Americans call the Vietnam War, but I was born and grew up during the war. What do I think of it? I only hope that bombs and guns will never be used in my country again. Why did they give themselves the right to destroy our people’s lives and



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place, on our land maimed by their bombs and bullets, the halo of the splinters of an alien civilization? My works hardly deal with the war, but they all were born from the pain of a life that is still impacted by the war though it ended a quarter of a century ago. Imagine a large Vietnamese family like this: the oldest son defected to the Revolution; his three younger siblings were forced to serve in the Saigon puppet army; the oldest daughter-in-law also fled home to join her husband; her three younger brothers also had to fight for the Saigon puppet government. One of the three brothers graduated from Dalat Military Academy when Saigon was liberated. Their father was killed by a stray bullet shot by Saigon puppet soldiers during the Tet Offensive. After the Liberation, one half of the family stayed in Vietnam to rebuild their life while the other half left the country, wandering in strange lands just because of their suspicion of and complex about the new regime. Occasionally they meet in their native land and talk about life and Buddhism. None is courageous enough to mention the painful past when, you never know, brothers might have pointed their guns at one another. Politically, they are opposite like day and night because they are living under different systems. That’s the picture of my family, of my parents who are my grandparents’ oldest children, of my uncles on my father’s and mother’s side who are exiles in America. If I tell you that I am not affected by the war because I didn’t participate in it, I am just hiding my own losses. QT: In less than ten years you have published five collections of short stories and two novels in addition to making five films. What accounts for such a robust creativity? I understand that writing is not your full-time preoccupation and that you have two teenagers to take care of. VH: Personally, I don’t feel I have achieved as much as I would have wanted. I started to write in 1988. It took me a year to see my name on various literary magazines as a young writer. Since then I have pursued journalism for a living and in order to maintain my writing career. I always feel in me a terrible longing to write much more. Writing is my karma that I always wish to fulfill in my present life. I appreciate your comment that I’m a productive author. It’s a reward that motivates me to keep trying to realize my goal. QT: How do you interpret the nation’s big celebrations of the new millennium? What are the prospects and challenges for Vietnam and Vietnamese writers? VH: That means there will be a significant increase in readership. I know it for sure. Although entertainment may take many forms, our way of seeing it is the same. But literature is our soul because it is right in our very existence. QT: Does the narrator of “The Sparrows Fly across the Woods” represent your view of Vietnamese women’s condition and Vietnam’s postwar era? I understand that you’ve been criticized for writing this story.



A CONVERSATION

Qui-Phiet Tran

VH: Diem, the narrator of the story, is my ideal female character. Whereas contemporary Vietnamese society prefers a Confucian woman, i.e., one who is trained to exemplify her four virtues—industry, decorum, demureness, and gentleness—I prefer Diem’s humanistic naughtiness. She stubbornly bears her condition as a daughter-in-law. On a higher level, the story dramatizes the tragedy of the Vietnamese people who have just got out of a most devastating war. We can’t find the remains of so many young men and women who died for their country even in our own land! “Have the remains of so many young men who fell during the war become these alluvia? Amidst the immensity of heaven and earth, which speck of sand do Nam’s bones shine?” Furthermore, right in the land that was just free of war’s destruction, people—how frightening it is—have become so callous. “Shooting sparrows makes you feel better than killing any other kind of animal,” Than, Diem’s husband, declares. He explains, “Because they are too many.” I’ve been criticized for making my husband’s family a laughingstock. People just don’t understand that you can’t make fun of your pain. Reality is more painful than what I describe in the story.



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Protest in front of Truong Van Tran’s video store, Westminster, California, March 1999. Photographer: Jerry Gorman.

Jack A. Yeager*

Introduction Most readers of Duras know of her birth and childhood in Indochina during the colonial period. As in other colonies, the official presence of the French in Southeast Asia (1860s to 1954) provoked cultural production from both indigenous and colonial populations. The emergence of a Vietnamese literature in French was a direct result of this French presence in Viet Nam. Not surprisingly, this literature draws on existing political, cultural and historical contexts. This is especially true in the novel, whose narratives are often underpinned by direct references to, say, the evolution of Vietnamese society in Tran Van Tung’s BachYên or Pham Van Ky’s Frères de sang (Blood Brothers), or to the wars for independence in Cung Giu Nguyen’s Le Domaine maudit (The Accursed Land) and Ly Thu Ho’s Le Mirage de la paix (The Mirage of Peace). Given their saturation and even obsession with the “other,” it is no less surprising that novels written by native French speakers also draw strongly on the ambient political, cultural, and historical contexts. Marguerite Duras’s Goncourt prize-winning L’Amant (The Lover)1 provides a case in point. Set in colonized Cochinchina (southern Viet Nam) during the interwar years, this novel recounts the involvement of a fifteen-and-a-half-yearold French girl and a Chinese businessman almost twice her age. The Lover takes on special significance within the Duras corpus as a rewriting of earlier autobiographical works including The Sea Wall and the more recent play Eden Cinema. Most readers of Duras have discussed this characteristic retelling of stories.2 But if numerous critics have remarked on Duras’s repetitive and transformational writing, her representation of colonial politics remained largely unexplored until the 1990s. Some readers have touched on the colonial situation presented in the early text The Sea Wall or made passing references to this context in Eden Cinema and The Lover.3 Still, the latter text remained largely unexamined from this important perspective until rather recently. Critics of Duras and The Lover especially chose to focus their energies away from the larger polit10.1057/9780230107410 - Of Vietnam, Edited by Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier


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ical questions at the heart of many Francophone texts.4 One of the first to present this fundamental issue in any depth was Christine Holmlund in her paper “Outer Limits: The Colonization of Sex, Race, Body and Voice in the Films of Marguerite Duras” at the 1986 Modern Language Association in New York. At the same time that I presented a paper reading Duras’s The Lover through the lenses of colonial theory,5 Mireille Mai Rootham was doing parallel work in her master’s thesis, “Marguerite Duras et le colonialisme.” Later, Janine Ricouart analyzed colonialism under the rubric of “political violence,” using examples from the three texts mentioned above in addition to The Vice Consul,6 and Suzanne Chester examined the complexity of colonial relations with the overlay of gender in “Writing the Subject: Exoticism/Eroticism in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and The Sea Wall.” In addition, Panivong Norindr reads Duras in a colonial context in Phantasmic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature. Still, Jane Winston is the first to attempt to explain the relative silence with regard to Duras and colonialism. In two articles and a forthcoming book, Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France,7 she shows, in a compelling way, how a conservative literary establishment conspired to depoliticize readings of Duras, beginning with The Sea Wall, the writer’s first trenchant critique of colonial authority. I would add that nostalgic memories of a lost Indochina and lost wars, in both France and the United States, may also help account for resistance to reading Duras in context. In academic communities, the second-class status of Francophone studies would account for Duras’s appropriation as a French writer, with only the casual passing reference to her birth and childhood in French Indochina. However, the ascendancy of Francophone and postcolonial studies in the 1990s has changed attitudes considerably, as witnessed by the emerging voices exploring Duras’s politics and biography in relation to her creative work. My own reading of Duras’s The Lover is informed by my sustained studies in Vietnamese language and culture, as well as an extensive scholarly inquiry into narrative texts in French by Vietnamese and Eurasian writers. These explorations permit me to analyze The Lover within the larger context not only of Duras’s early cultural setting, but also of narratives in French by Vietnamese writers during the colonial period, in the two post-1954 Viet Nams, in France, and in imagined and remembered Viet Nams elsewhere. Vietnamese Writing in French The diverse corpus of Vietnamese literary texts in French includes work in all genres. The first monographs appeared in 1913: a collection of short stories, Le Van Phat’s Contes et légendes du pays d’Annam (Tales and Legends from the country of Annam) and Nguyen Van Xiem’s Mes Heures perdues (My Lost Hours). These two publications inaugurated a literary manifestation comprising for the most part novels, books of short narratives (especially legends and folktales), and poetry collections.8 The predominance of poetry and narrative was culturally determined in Viet Nam. The importance of poetry in a society so influenced by Confucianism



COLONIALISM AND POWER

Jack A.Yeager

cannot be overemphasized; composing improvised fix-form verse on a given theme, for example, was a key component of the examinations leading to the high status of mandarin, or public servant. The composition of verse romances—long narrative poems grounded in Confucian values—would herald the classical age of Vietnamese literature. Even today, it is probably still safe to say that the so-called Vietnamese national poem, popularly titled by a reference to its three principal characters, Kim-Van-Kiêu, by Nguyen Du, is known to most Vietnamese, many of whom can cite its lines at will.9 In addition to a desire for public service, Confucian values instilled an appreciation of literature. The oral recounting of folktales and legends, retold in French for Francophone audiences, honed the art of narration. These two strands—short narrative and poetry— came together in the prose novel, a genre introduced during the colonial period and adapted by those Vietnamese writers who would then create their own novels, both in their native language and in their newly acquired French. These texts, many of them autobiographical, strikingly register the context of colonialism, education in French-language schools, living between linguistic and cultural worlds, and a resultant psychological ambivalence as the tension-filled nexus that drives the narrative forward. In many, descriptions of Vietnamese culture, sometimes in set pieces (chapters on Têt or the ancestor cult, for example) are counterposed to French cultural manifestations presented to the Vietnamese as examples of the superior, developed, “civilized” society of the colonizer. Main characters may discover the classic texts of French literature, learn to appreciate French food and eating habits, long for Paris, and, if male, become fascinated with blond Western women. Young women characters will challenge the submissive roles of wife and mother embodied by their own mothers, keepers and perpetuators of traditional values and practices. Cultural depictions are mirrored politically in those novels, which support their narratives with documented history—the specific circumstances of colonialism, the desire and subsequent open struggles for power and freedom, the violence of over thirty years of war. In reading these texts, then, one is constantly reminded that they would not exist were it not for the colonial period. Reading Duras in Context If it is impossible to detach Vietnamese novels in French from their historical, cultural, and political contexts, it is just as impossible to read what Norindr calls Duras’s “Indochina” novels outside of theirs. In this regard, one is tempted to make the distinction between the literature of the colonizer and that of the colonized, with some of Duras’s work qualifying as “colonial literature,” works written by the French, according to this taxonomy. Sara Suleri’s 1992 study The Rhetoric of English India, however, would inspire a reading of Duras’s bestselling novel in the context of what I term Vietnamese Francophone narratives. Suleri makes a compelling case for consideration of all literary texts in English from India as products of the colony, challenging what she deems the unproductive line dividing these texts and the concept of otherness itself in such a distinction. Discussing her term “English India,” she writes: “Such a cartography attempts



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to break down static lines of distinction between the indigenous and the foreign, but at the same time continually questions any synthesizing conflation of this duality” (Suleri 21). In some ways recalling Albert Memmi’s theorizing the essential mutual attachment of the colonizer and the colonized, she writes: “[the] trajectory [of English India] is extensive enough to include both imperial and subaltern materials and in the process demonstrates their radical inseparability” (3). I would argue that Suleri’s contention would hold true in Southeast Asia as well. Although thematics, concerns, and problematics may differ—among them, whether one writes in one’s primary language as opposed to a second acquired language or the position one holds within the colonial hierarchy with prestige, power, and wealth unevenly distributed—the fact remains that neither would exist without the fact of the colony. The Lover The story The Lover’s narrator recounts in the novelistic “present” takes place in the context of a watershed moment in the development of Vietnamese nationalism, when a premature uprising in 1930 inaugurated a period of yet unsurpassed cruel and bloody repression.10 This effectively cleared the stage of moderate nationalist leaders, paving the way for the official assertions of Vietnamese power and open warfare after World War II. It is significant that Duras’s story of racial boundary crossing is set at this pivotal juncture in Vietnamese history, especially in light of its apparent challenge to a tightening of the French colonial grip with an accompanying reaffirmation of role, status, and power determined by race. In The Lover, the narrator’s privileged space is the colony. Within that space other “spaces” are reserved for her and other Europeans, institutions such as the lycée français, the Collège de Saigon, or the Club Sportif; special sections of buses, restaurants, etc.; and the best places to live such as the former palace of a Cambodian king overlooking the Mekong River in Phnom Penh. Indigenous servants wait on Europeans. In The Lover, the domestic help associated with the narrator’s family becomes emotionally attached to its employers. Dô, the mother’s maid, for example, returns to France with her mistress, a classic example of dependency. The mother, a school teacher, is invited to parties at the Administration générale despite her precarious financial status and past problems with colonial authorities over a land purchase, which are recounted at length in The Sea Wall. Even when in dire straits, the narrator says almost defensively: “we weren’t hungry, we had a houseboy and we ate. Sometimes, admittedly, we ate garbage—storks, baby crocodiles—but the garbage was cooked and served by a houseboy, and sometimes we refused it, too, we indulged in the luxury of declining to eat” (6-7; 13F). A Communist jailer in Nguyen Tien Lang’s 1953 novel Les Chemins de la révolte (The Paths to Revolt)11 summarizes for his prisoner, a former mandarin, the colonizer’s position of power and an instant access to power based on the mere fact of being French: “a regime in which the poorest French woman or man became, by the very fact of colonialism, a fine lady or a great lord in get-




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The distinction between deed and intent has no great significance in the colonial situation. In the eyes of the colonized, all Europeans in the colonies are de facto colonizers, and whether they want to be or not, they are colonizers in the same ways. By their privileged economic position, by belonging to the political system of oppression, or by participating in an effectively negative complex toward the colonized, they are colonizers. (130) Memmi echoes the jailer in Les Chemins de la révolte: “All they need do is set foot on the colonized’s land” (Nguyen 158, my translation). For Memmi, all Europeans in the colony will thus help perpetuate colonialism, despite any good intentions.12 This would presumably include even those without much ostensible power in the colony; even those, it would seem, sold a piece of unarable land by colonial authorities. Thus, despite what Duras said to the contrary about considering herself more Vietnamese than French as a child and about speaking both languages and despite her apparent criticism of colonial authorities in The Sea Wall, Eden Cinema, and The Lover, the fact remains that even The Lover’s narrator and her family, financially destitute as they are, enjoy a kind of privilege that sets them apart from indigenous populations.13 Indeed, in recounting the story, the narrator casts the debate in the language of power, French,14 and its attendant structures of colonial hierarchy. In a sense, then, she reasserts the superiority of colonizer over colonized, of the girl over the Chinese man, and finally of the narrator over her own young self and her story.15 Within the context of these colonial structures, any and all stepping out of the privileged spaces and assigned roles in the colony, crossing boundaries, attracts attention from all quarters. The Chinese businessman mentions at the outset the narrator’s routine use of indigenous means of public transport: “it’s very surprising, a white girl on a native bus” (33; 43F). She is all the more noticeable, being a girl of fifteen and a half. Of no surprise, then, is the profound reaction by all others to her association with this man, to her having crossed a line. By the same token, the incongruity of the girl outside of her “place” seems to lie at the core of the Chinese man’s desire for her, of his desire to be other, seen already in his cultural affectations. Her double displacement attracts him as much as the perceived possibility of his own displacement in linking up with her. The Chinese man’s presence in Viet Nam adds another layer of complexity to this relationship. As a rich merchant, he has certain privileges that come with his class, if only because of his accumulated wealth. At the same time, he is also an outsider in Viet Nam. In fact, he represents a culture and a political power in conflict with the Vietnamese for over 2000 years. For more than a millennium (111 B.C.-939 A.D.), the Vietnamese ethnic group lived on land that constituted a protectorate of China. As Lea Williams points out, indigenous cultural traits—



ting off the boat in Saigon or Hanoi” (62, my translation). In The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi develops this same idea:

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animism, the cult of the ancestors, festivals, a language—helped the Vietnamese resist being absorbed by the Chinese and also transformed the basic characteristics of Chinese culture into Vietnamese adaptations (Williams 41-42). As a result, during the time in which they lived on a Chinese protectorate, the Vietnamese adapted the Three Religions of the Middle Kingdom—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, known collectively as the Tam Giáo in Vietnamese—in addition to the Chinese value placed on learning and civil service. Once free of the Chinese, the Vietnamese imitated the administrative system they knew best, that based on Chinese Confucianism according to which filial piety as an abstraction outside the family justified, in principle, a strict hierarchy from family, village, and mandarins to the emperor. Even though the Vietnamese integrated certain Chinese traits or customs into their culture, purely Chinese traditions represent yet another kind of exclusionary system, another system of privilege in Viet Nam, ranging from Chinese administrators during the period when Viet Nam was a protectorate of the Middle Kingdom, to the Chinese merchant class in modern Viet Nam.16 Nonetheless, both the Vietnamese and the French would view the Chinese lover in The Lover as culturally and politically inferior. Symptomatically, the French characters in The Lover perceive all Asians as the same; there is little distinction on the racial level, for example, between the Chinese lover and Dô, the novel’s only Vietnamese character. The suppression of Asian actors, even secondary ones, in a novel set in Viet Nam is especially problematic. It would seem to counter Duras’s own pronouncements concerning her affinities and sympathies with the Vietnamese. In the absence of Vietnamese characters, and in the flattening of Asians in general, Duras presents a near textbook example of the view of the colonized outlined so well by Memmi, that is, the colonized as an indistinguishable, undifferentiated mass. In the Duras text the Asians, with the exception of the lover and Dô, are anonymous and thus dehumanized, characterized generally, lumped together by their shrill voices, or seen only as shadows on the blinds of the lover’s apartment’s windows. This representational flatness actually extends to the Chinese lover, as we shall see. A heightened sense of race and class—if not to say racism—accounts for the response of colonial society to what it views as an inexplicable transgression in The Lover. From the start, the Chinese man betrays his own awareness and fear of the potential impact of getting involved with this girl.17 In recounting the story, the narrator writes: “There’s the difference of race, he’s not white, he has to get the better of it, that’s why he’s trembling” (32; 42-43F). Society would never sanction this mixed-race relationship, an impossibility also seen in Vietnamese Francophone novels such as Bà--Dâm by Truong Dinh Tri and Albert de Teneuille, as well as in Nam et Sylvie by Pham Duy Khiem. Marriage is thus out of the question. The Chinese man’s father, as Confucian tradition dictates, has the authority to decide whom the son may marry, and a white woman, here depersonalized as “une blanche,” would bring dishonor to the family. Without material wealth and no longer a virgin, she is far from the match he has in mind for his son, the daughter of another well-to-do Chinese family. The arranged marriage would solidify the fortunes of both families, while providing for Chinese




Jack A.Yeager

heirs to carry on important social and cultural traditions, taking care of the aging parents, ensuring a proper legacy. In a sense, this outright and categorical rejection of the white girl parallels a form of resistance to the outsider, the interloper in Viet Nam. On the surface at least, the narrator’s mother and brothers similarly reject any serious thought of marriage. Yet, they are quite willing to accept the Chinese man’s hospitality, “devouring” the meals set before them in the restaurants of Cho-lon, but wordlessly, with neither acknowledgement nor response to his attempts at conversation, as if the man did not exist or were invisible: “His attempt founders in silence. My brothers go on gorging. They gorge as I’ve never seen anyone else gorge, anywhere” (50; 64F). Note how Duras establishes “gorging” (dévorer, devouring) not merely as an act of consumption but also as an act of negation, as she hammers away at “never,” “anyone,” and “anywhere.” She continues: “My brothers never will say a word to him, it’s as if he were invisible to them, as if for them he weren’t solid enough to be perceived, seen or heard” (51; 65F). The brothers do not even consider marriage. They merely assume that she does not really love him, that she is only with him for the money, that she is not capable of loving him, “because he’s a Chinese, because he’s not a white man” (51; 65F). Again, the narrator both insists upon this “absence” in the Chinese man and identifies him as Chinese. He is even less than merely inferior: he is transparent, lacking in substance, nonexistent. In a sense, the sister’s position parallels that of the Chinese man in that her weakness and sex are exploited by her own family and especially by her older brother, the male authority figure who harasses his younger brother (generational privilege), routinely robs the mother and sister and later becomes a pimp in Montparnasse (gender privilege), and tries to rape Dô (colonial privilege doubled by gender privilege).18 In The Lover, the brother encapsulates the malign force that is colonialism and its parallel dominations. In the micropolitical and patriarchal space of this family, these analogous and mutually reinforcing power structures have traumatizing physical and psychological effects. However, if unfairness exists, “that’s how it is” (80; 99F), recounts the narrator through the words of her brother, showing herself, resigned, accepting, powerless to change something so overwhelming, even in silence and refusal. There is nothing to be done. To those familiar with the colonial literature of Viet Nam, The Lover might seem to be a variant on a well-known genre: the con-gái novel. The interracial nature of the affair appears to recall the male colonizer’s exploitation of indigenous women and to offer another model of oppressor and oppressed. This phenomenon, common in colonized countries, gave rise in Indochina to a whole series of novels centering on the issue of the concubine or con-gái, a Vietnamese term meaning young girl, but used pejoratively by the French. This is a situation we find references to in The Lover (wives deserted for female servants [19; 27F]). In a short 1922 text published in Le Paria called “Annamese Women and French Domination” (reprinted in On Revolution), Ho Chi Minh writes of colonialism as an act of violence, especially odious when perpetrated against women and children. “It is bitterly ironic,” he writes, “to find that civilization—symbolized in its



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various forms, viz., liberty, justice, etc., by the gentle image of woman, and run by a category of men well known to be champions of gallantry—inflicts on its living emblem the most ignoble treatment and afflicts her shamefully in her manners, her modesty, and even her life,” citing a particularly horrifying example as an illustration of the mission civilisatrice (Fall 13-14). The novels written by French men in Indochina carry such revealing titles as Mademoiselle Moustique (Eugène Jung, 1895), Thi-sen, la petite amie exotique (Thi-sen, the Exotic Girlfriend) ( J. d’Estray, 1905), Thi-ba, fille d’Annam (Thi-ba, Girl from Annam) ( J. d’Esme, 1922), and Thi-Nhi, autre fille d’Annam (Thi-Nhi, Another Girl from Annam) (H. Caseville, 1922). Anyone thinking that this fascination might be a thing of the past might well look at one of Michel Tauriac’s more recent novels, Jade (1986). Rather than repeat or reverse the oppressor-oppressed con-gái model, however, Duras transforms its relations and in so doing seemingly blurs the colonial categories in portraying a particularly complex interplay of desire. The participants here are not in clear-cut positions of power.19 The French girl may be visibly powerful in relation to the Asians in the colony because she is white and French; but on the other hand she has no money. And while the Chinese man possesses great wealth, he is Chinese, a social and political outsider to the Vietnamese, and Asian, an outsider to the French colonizers. The French girl’s relationship with the Chinese lover thus becomes a complicated variant of this “exotic” emotional dynamic. An obsession with the other sharpens desire and drives the Chinese man toward the Western girl initially. These intricate dynamics of power and desire play a key role in motivating both the Chinese businessman and the narrator to transgress their roles in becoming sexually involved. The narrator explains the Chinese lover’s function in Vietnamese society: “He belongs to the small group of financiers of Chinese origin who own all the working-class housing in the colony” (33; 44F). He has purchased his Western affectations, from his clothing and English cigarettes to his black limousine. And yet his social position in Indochina has not really changed. He still fulfills the role of entrepreneur, a function traditionally held by the Chinese in Southeast Asia. Cho-lon, the location of the “flat” (8) and Saigon’s twin city “across the river,” is primarily Chinese; the words themselves mean “big market” (cho-lon in Vietnamese), a place that exists for consumption and the amassing of capital.20 The French girl may offer the Chinese man the chance to transcend his class and race. This would account to some extent for his obsession with “what is irresistible here in the French colonies . . . this little white tart” (92; 113F), the objectified other.21 The clothes she chooses add to her mystery and attractiveness. The man’s felt hat she wears, mentioned repeatedly in the narrative, recalls the businessman’s status and a grounding that is both Western and male. The narrator links the hat linguistically to the brother in a reference to his “voix feutrée” (L’Amant 73) (“his voice is lowered” [58], muffled), a description that stands out since it is the only other context in which the word “feutre” (L’Amant 19) (“fedora” [12], felt) is used. The gold lamé shoes with rhinestone patterns, another obsessional article of clothing, symbolize the feminine, the upper class, the easy life. Both the hat and shoes are conspicuously absent from




Jack A.Yeager

the scene when the man undresses the girl (39; 49F), the seeming removal of all ambiguity as the man finally possesses her. These items of clothing, as symbols of privilege and power, recall the previously cited statement of the Communist jailer in Les Chemins de la révolte (“a regime in which the poorest French woman or man became, by the very fact of colonialism, a fine lady or a great lord in getting off the boat in Saigon or Hanoi” [Nguyen Tien Lang 62]), but the issues here are not as straightforward as this pronouncement would seem to imply. The girl’s ambiguous clothing does not refer to gender alone; it relates to political and social ambiguities as well, signifying the tensions between the Chinese man and the French girl. These tensions both heighten and threaten desire, sharpen and blunt it, paradoxically, in a way seemingly so complex as to defy analysis, refusing closure in the same way as the impossibility of attaining the “bout de cet amour,” the logical conclusion of this love. Like her circulation in indigenous spaces, the girl’s clothes heighten desire between them. Adding gender ambiguity, they install a homoerotic dimension that transgresses patriarchy’s (colonialism’s) compulsory heterosexuality and is further enhanced and nuanced in the scenes between the white girl and Hélène Lagonelle. The Chinese man’s attractiveness to the white girl also resides in this question of difference. When she first sees him, she notices the car, then the occupant; “He’s not a white man” (17; 25F), an immediate recognition of the racial other, expressed in the negative, of his status and of the incongruity of his race and the car. Other Asians all seem to resemble each other, as we have seen, like those portrayed in the retouched photographs for the ancestral altar. This “racializing discourse” recurs in the narrator’s reference to the beautiful women she sees on the streets of Saigon (18–19; 26-27F). Only later in the paragraph do we learn, though it is not mentioned initially, that they are, in fact, the European women in the colony “[who] save themselves up, save themselves up for Europe, for lovers, holidays in Italy, the long six–months leaves” (18–19; 27F). In the end, for the girl, the relationship means both access to physical comfort befitting her status as a colonial but never before available (pleasure?) (“Never again shall I travel in a native bus” [34; 44F]) and self-degradation, an exchange of sexual favors for material goods and the occasion to be doubly disenfranchised by a man and by an Asian in the colony where she ostensibly enjoys some privilege: “He calls me a whore, a slut” (42; 54-55F). In his Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire unmasks colonization as the downfall of the colonizer and, given the colonizer’s cruel treatment of indigenous peoples, the end of all hypocritical pretense to a mission civilisatrice. He writes: “colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism” (Césaire 13); and again: “[c]olonization: bridgehead in a campaign to civilize barbarism, from which there may emerge at any moment the negation of civilization, pure and simple” (18). Finally, for Césaire, colonization will dehumanize “even the most civilized man” (20). Indeed, the shoes are, in fact, cheap-looking, out-of-place in the lycée, false. And the hat, a “clown’s hat” (72; 90F). Rhinestones and fake gold figure yet again the illegitimacy of colonial privilege, the hollowness and



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hypocrisy of the mission civilisatrice. The symbol is as ambiguous as the brother’s “voix feutrée,” the blade of colonialism sheathed in velvet. In The Lover, the ambivalence of the girl in this colonial context is underscored by her sexual ambiguity as revealed in the man’s hat (“The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat” [12; 19F]) and in the description of Hélène Lagonelle (71-74; 89-92F), a clearly homoerotic passage, noted by other readers, that immediately becomes more complex with the girl’s imagining Hélène with the Chinese lover, a scene in which the narrator controls their imagined lovemaking. This ambivalence occurs even at the level of the narrative itself, as Sharon Willis points out in her Marguerite Duras:Writing on the Body. What she calls the “narrative vacillation between ‘I’ and ‘she’” clearly contributes to the ambivalence in L’Amant” (Willis 5) and foreshadows the disintegration of colonialism from the perspective of 1930, now a fait accompli in its 1980s retelling. In the end, the relationship described here, like colonialism itself, cannot endure: marriage is impossible: “we couldn’t possibly have any future in common” (49; 62F).22 The narrator returns to Europe, shedding all the privilege accruing from colonialism. Her face ages, and she has her hair cut, losses of physical beauty that symbolize this loss of power. The family, too, does not survive the inner psychological and physical violence, “that common family history of ruin and death” (25; 34F), this portrait of colonialism and destructive power in The Lover.23 In the unforgettable closing words of this novel, the Chinese man, now married, is visiting Paris many years later and phones the narrator. After the exchange of formalities, the narrator writes: “And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he’d love her until death” (117) (“jusqu’à la mort.” [L’Amant 142]). The imbrication of colonizer and colonized, their inextricable interdependency, is captured perfectly in the “he said/she said” structure of this closing paragraph. An ambivalent affective link, a perpetuated discontinuity, like the psychological trauma of colonialism itself, obsessional, inescapable, enduring “jusqu’à la mort.” Notes * A preliminary version of this article was presented as a paper at the Wichita State University Conference on Foreign Literatures in April 1987. I am grateful to those who critiqued my presentation at that conference and to the members of the Seminar on Sexuality at Williams College who also offered their valuable comments on an early revision of this piece. In addition, I thank Bernard Arésu, Germaine Brée, Mary Jean Green, Christine Holmlund, Françoise Lionnet, and Mary M. Rowan, as well as Leakthina Ollier and Jane Winston for their invaluable suggestions. My gratitude, as always, to Timothy Cook. 1. Quotes within text and footnotes come from The Lover. For emphasis, quotes in French come from L’Amant. Other references to the original French will be indicated by “F” within the essay. 2. To cite but one example, see Marilyn R. Schuster’s analysis of Marguerite Duras’s “retold tales” in Le Marin de Gilbratar, L’Amante anglaise, and L’Homme atlantique in The French Review. 3. Examples would include: in her Continuité et discontinuité dans l’oeuvre durassienne, Yvonne GersVillate touches upon the reality of colonialism presented by Duras in The Sea Wall as it relates to what she has determined as the characteristics of the writer’s early work (19-21). Gers-Villate also discusses the condemnation of colonialism in The Sea Wall and Eden Cinema (130-34). In her study Marguerite Duras, Micheline Tison-Braun presents her analysis of the mother in The Sea Wall in relation to the peasants living near the “concession” (13). In discussing The Lover in




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4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras: Love, Legends, Language, Susan D. Cohen trains her perceptive vision elsewhere; her analysis of the novel is entitled “Fiction, ‘Ignorance,’ and the Photographic Image in L’Amant” (89-102). For Cohen, Duras subverts the “ . . . fixed classifications of race, class, and gender, so that the text portrays love between two subjects, marginal and ‘feminized’ in different, actually complementary ways” (146). Sharon Willis in Marguerite Duras:Writing on the Body, discusses the ambiguities and “duplicity” (5) in The Lover as a possible explanation for the novel’s success. She also refers to the book’s “exotic” side, its setting, place and time (5) and to Duras having been raised in Indochina, where she spoke Vietnamese until age eighteen, when she left for studies in France: “She is thus the ‘Other’ within, a strangely familiar, or familiarly estranged, figure—a ‘non-Western’ Western woman. In this double-faced figure of Duras, we might then read our own anxiety about the Other, as well as our desire to incorporate the other, to reduce difference. However, given the text’s strategy of veiling and unveiling, where ‘I’ veils herself as ‘she,’ but where ‘she’ just as frequently masquerades as ‘I,’ we cannot maintain a rigid and secure separation of same and other, interior and exterior. Nor can we as readers determine and fortify a fixed vantage point, and the reassuring distance that that would entail. We are implicated in the issues the text raises and refuses to put to rest” (6). The American reviews of L’Amant are characteristically silent on this issue. See, for example, Bettina Knapp’s or Diane Johnson’s review. At the Wichita State University Conference on Foreign Literatures in April 1987; this conference, organized annually until 1995 by Ginette Adamson, was devoted to the work of women writers and often had panels on Marguerite Duras. See Janine Ricouart, Ecriture féminine et violence: Une étude de Marguerite Duras, 40-55. See also Jane Winston’s “Forever Feminine: Marguerite Duras and Her Critics,” “Marguerite Duras: Marxism, Feminism, Writing.” See Jack Yeager’s The Vietnamese Novel in French:A Literary Response to Colonialism and Vietnamese Literature in French. Nathalie Nguyên convincingly shows how Ly Thu Ho adapted the Kiêu story in her novel in French, Printemps inachevé. See also Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, “Between East and West: A Study of Selected Works by Vietnamese Francophone Writers between 1930 and 1990” and Nathalie Nguyen, “A Classical Heroine and Her Modern Manifestation: The Tale of Kieu and Its Parallels in Printemps inachevé.” For more information on Vietnamese history and culture and especially the colonial period, see, among others: Le Thanh Khoi, Le Viêt Nam: Histoire et civilisation; David Joel Steinberg, ed., In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History; Lea Williams, Southeast Asia: A History; Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution; Nguyen Khac Vien, Histoire du Vietnam; David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925; David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam:A History; and my The Vietnamese Novel in French: A Literary Response to Colonialism, chapters 1 and 2. For more on Nguyen Tien Lang and this text, see The Vietnamese Novel in French, 105-109, and 168-171. Memmi puts forward similar ideas elsewhere in The Colonizer and the Colonized. The chapter entitled “Does the colonial exist?” is pertinent in reading Duras. See especially 10-17. Memmi expands upon this separation and the wholesale refusal of the outsider by those colonized: “Considered en bloc as them, they or those, different from every point of view, homogeneous in a radical heterogeneity, the colonized reacts by rejecting all the colonizers en bloc. The distinction between deed and intent has no great significance in the colonial situation. In the eyes of the colonized, all Europeans in the colonies are de facto colonizers, and whether they want to be or not, they are colonizers in some ways” (The Colonizer and the Colonized 130). In his Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire echoes Memmi, saying: “For my part, I make a systematic defense of non-European civilization” (22). Obviously, writing in the French language meant something different for a native speaker like Pierre Loti, André Malraux, or Marguerite Duras than to such Vietnamese Francophone novelists as Pham Van Ky or Ly Thu Ho, both of whom learned their French in school and then chose to create literary texts in French. That choice and the act of writing may then capture a whole array of contradictions: allegiance to France and colonialism, betrayal, treachery, rejection of Viet Nam, loss, nostalgia, longing, loyalty to Vietnamese traditions in fulfilling the desire to learn and to serve, in creating literary texts in French that recalls the poetry written in Chinese in the past.



Jack A.Yeager

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

IN


For those Vietnamese born in Viet Nam and emigrating at an early age to France, or born in France to first or second generation Vietnamese parents, French may be a primary language and the relationship to it is very different from that of their forebears. At the same time, in Viet Nam the Vietnamese also appropriated and adapted aspects of French culture, in this instance, the prose novel, for example, and French words, transliterated into Vietnamese, which then became part of the linguistic and psychic realm of that language: ca-phê (café, coffee), xà-phòng (savon, soap), ô-tô (auto, car). See The Vietnamese Novel, chapter 3. Suzanne Chester concludes: “Despite Duras’s overt anticolonialism in The Sea Wall and her occasional contestation of the discourse of colonialism in The Lover, in which the narrator both satirizes and explicitly denounces the racist doxa espoused by her family and by French colonial society, she nonetheless also reinscribes a variety of Orientalist/colonialist themes in order to transform her own marginalized position as Other and to achieve a position of power and dominance in relation to her Chinese lover. Through her participation in colonalist politics in service to a ‘white’ female subjectivity, Duras engages in textual strategies that have disturbing implications for the politics of women’s autobiography” (452). Mireille Mai Rootham elaborates on the complex role of the Chinese in Viet Nam and of the Chinese characters in The Lover in her thesis; see 118-119. As Mireille Mai Rootham points out, several factors are established at the outset of The Lover: the colonial setting “in which racism is inscribed and the racial difference between the lovers” (110), in addition to their socio-economic difference and their age difference, the young girl being a minor. For Rootham, the relationship is pursued under the sign of race (111). See Suzanne Chester for a compelling analysis of the colonial patriarchal order. In her study, Suzanne Chester refuses what she terms the Manichean division of colonizer and colonized: “My analysis of two texts written by, and dealing with, the female Other in the patriarchal society of French colonial Indochina [The Sea Wall and The Lover] examines how the intersection of gender and colonialism in Duras’s writing avoids the trope of Manichean allegory, thereby generating readings that escape the moralistic tendencies of Manichean interpretation. In The Sea Wall and The Lover, the factors of gender and class problematize the relationship of the colonizer to the colonized, and consequently disrupt the economy of colonial discourse as defined by [Abdul R.] JanMohamed” (437). The name “Cho-lon” is misspelled in the novel—memory lapse, narrative distortion, irony?—as “Cho-len,” creating yet another kind of ambiguity. Without the diacritical marks essential to Vietnamese (diacritical marks account for phonemic differences in this language), the words themselves lose any precise meaning, but may gain others, creating yet more ambiguities. Replacing “o” with “e” in the word “lon” is the equivalent in Vietnamese of suppressing the diacritical marks, degrading the language by undermining its ability to signify. “Len,” in one of its possible meanings (“lên”), denotes a rising up, referring perhaps to the prevailing of a market economy, of Western-style capitalism in Southeast Asia. That the Chinese lover is a businessman, that the lovemaking takes place in Cho-lon, and that the Chinese traditionally play a commercial role in Vietnamese society all seem to reinforce this interpretation. Mireille Mai Rootham indicates in her thesis that the French in Indochina pronounced Cho-lon as Cho-len (118, note 26). The roles of French women in the Vietnamese Francophone novels reveal this fascination with Western and especially French women. Pham Van Ky said as much in an article in Samedi Soir. See The Vietnamese Novel in French, 210-11 (note 16). Compare, for example, the endings of Truong Dinh Tri and Albert de Teneuille’s Bà--Dâm and Pham Duy Khiem’s Nam et Sylvie. Janine Ricouart also discusses the family as microcosm, torn apart by colonialism. See 146-147, note 13.







Isabelle Thuy Pelaud

I haven’t slept again. In a few hours morning light will fill the room. The window has no shutters, no curtains, nothing to protect the fading white walls from the sun. I lie still. There is no clock. The absence of annoying beats breaking the darkness into chunks of nothingness is unsettling. Silence here is dry, blinding almost. I close my eyes. I want to ignore the questions rushing into my mind. How on earth do they sleep with a single sheet? How can they possibly dream without the weight of wool wrapping them into the night? Lying sleeplessly somewhere at the bottom right of Los Angeles at 5:00 AM, I breathe on one side of my body and sink onto the other. Next to my bed, on a thin mattress thrown to the floor the evening before, lies my uncle’s sister. From where I am, Lan is a large curved shadow with sharp corners and deep holes from which an eiderdown grows and then vanishes on both sides. I envy the ability Lan has to shut down her world on the count of a good night. In a couple of hours she will stretch and smash her jellyfish nose in small circles with the palm of her hand. She will turn her feet into feathers and leave the room. I will nearly doze off, imagining what her day will be like, waiting for the water to hit the porcelain of the bathtub, hoping that the sound will rock me to sleep. Today, it is her fingers that I see. Fingers racing precisely from one computer chip to the next, melting into minuscule crests of silver circuits. It is the scent of gray pus that I smell, freezing with the contact of ventilated air. Suddenly, I become the small green Lego passing between her swollen fingers, silver wings growing on my back. I slip away. And before I have a chance, Lan’s fat fingers pin me down with the twist of a screw. I open my eyes, yawn, stretch, shake my head. I lean against the wall. On the ground, the last cockroaches are rushing underneath the bed. I lean toward the night table, grab my watch. 5:30 AM. I could get up, feel the warm wood under my heel, stroll across my uncle’s office and step over his large body snoring into the fuzz of the carpet, stop where the kitchen begins. If I did this, I would be waiting for the cockroaches to vanish into the corners of the



Morning Light

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud

cabinets, glance at the yellow Formica table sticky with grease. On the fridge, I’d stare for a moment at a long red and yellow plastic bag with slices of white bread that never ferment. Tiptoeing toward the stove, I’d then look at the teapot, its black handle chipped at the point where the plastic and metal meet. I’d pour water into its spout and turn on the gas. A blue flame would light up the brown metal with a low whhsh. I’d search for a cup, and would finally give up at the sight of undone dishes, a worn-out-looking sponge floating underneath a film of murky water. Grimacing, I’d turn off the stove, run back to my room and jump under the sheet. Back in my body, I’d finally relax, and fall asleep. Leave my body leave me now monster stuck inside my throat I want you out cough you out of my lung spit you out in my saliva my suffocation my nostril whoever you are I am ordering. Go. Now. As you tighten your grip I convulse lift my chest to the sky I’d rather die than be your eternal prey my legs shaking underneath your grasp this time I will be stronger than you and you will depart because it is you I want to see, death that I face, you that I destroy. Gasping for air I am strangled dry tongue blackout inside my head an invisible force pure hatred and pure love. Murder. I cannot see whose hands lie behind the pillow whose hands wish me dead who at this very moment suffers more than I do you who are making the ultimate sacrifice whomever you are all I sense is blinding dark lack of air limbs shaking my fears your love your hatred greater than life pushing against my throat.And as I fight you it is with terror that I wonder whether I have earned my freedom or whether I have become you. No! I open my eyes, sweat dripping from beneath my arms. Where does this come from? Is it you French grandmother? Is it you Vietnamese mother? It is not only my coming to this place that makes me anxious. It is me finally resting. I do not quite understand. Back home, life was not bad. A home, two parents, a cat, a yard. I hear Lan turning off the shower knobs in the bathroom. A silence, then the friction of her towel around her hips. A small scratch from her throat, an expected sniffling. Something on the counter moves as she picks up her nightgown. I close my eyes. Lan enters the room. I peek through the length of my eyelashes. The house is quiet and all I hear is the beat of my heart, racing. My pink towel is tied around her waist. She looks at me and, assured of my laziness, takes on the entire space. The towel drops to her feet. She steps over the pink lump and sits at my desk. I look for her breast. Breasts half formed. Once, I heard them call her half woman. As months pass by, she will whisper to me under the protection of the night that she never had her period. When she first heard of her friends bleeding, she thought she was lucky not to have her body cut open in ways she could not heal, appalled at the idea of blood dripping down her legs to be swallowed by the ground. Volcano ashes burning underneath her skin. First, she felt more gifted than her girlfriends who by now had stopped running, shortened their footsteps, sat cross-legged, walking as if a sharp needle had suddenly pierced their backs. But then she waited, waited every day, jumped on her bed, looked with a mirror, attended the temple more frequently. But nothing ever came. And nothing ever came of her. Somehow people sensed that she was not full, not ripe. An empty cocoon, and no matter how fast she ran, she carried in her walk the transparency of a mosquito net. Her



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life was never altered. Lan stayed home and did what she had always done. Being her mother’s aid, cleaning, cooking, dreaming, the willing recipient of all tasks necessary for them to live. She became the well of everyone’s tales. She gained weight. In the evening, she sat at the kitchen table, watching geckoes crawling on the walls, unseen in spite of their insistence on surviving, the spirits of the home. Sometimes, she fell inside their heads before chasing them away with the sweep of her broom. Even her mother stopped seeing her. Half woman, she was half daughter. No one would ever marry her and all that remained of her held tight to walls she could never own. Lan’s shoulders are whiter than I thought. They are whiter than mine. And yet, it is me who is sleeping on her bed, and she who is sleeping on the floor. I do not question the fact that she has been living here for ten years and I for ten days. My portion of French blood gives me the right to accept and the audacity to scrutinize. When I will wake up, we will smile at each other without a sound. I am the woman she would kill to become. I have just arrived and the entire house is upside down. Everyone’s telling me who I should be, what I should do, spoiling me. For love. For the potential of high return. And you too had to yield. I look at the corner of the ceiling, the point where three planes touch and divide, biting my lips. If only you knew that where I come from I too am half woman, a wandering shadow, the target of their insatiability, their unquenchable passion and boredom. I too was an insect without a soul that could be crushed without shame. A beetle whose wings could be repeatedly cut, blending into the imperfections of their tables, of their walls, their trees. I too was coughing at night, suffocating underneath a skin thrown over my body like plastic wrap. And for those nineteen years of crawling, I too have murky feelings when our eyes meet. Our secrets hiding underneath our tongues. You envy my exotic French look? I envy your walk, the walk of someone who has grown up among her people. And yet we cannot compare, one to the other. Lost in my thoughts, I do not notice that Lan has stopped writing at the desk. She is standing in front of the bed, examining my body without a blink. Behind her is a shadow softly disappearing into the morning light, sending a chill into my spine. I sit up. We smile. Not a word.



MORNING LIGHT





Citing an aphorism by the Polish writer Stanislaw Jersy Lec, Ook Chung, in an interview with Linda Lê, asked: “Can the cannibal speak in the name of those he ate?” to which she answered: “I would not say ‘in the name of those he ate’ but I would say that the cannibal is the consumer of that which is silent, and literature is at once the grinder of that which is mute and the spit-up bowl of that which is digested.”1 Such remarks have often earned her comments from the critics’ part on the “promising darkness” of her style (Mireille Sarrola), the lyricism of her scathing pen, her raging prose “stripped of all superfluous fat” (Marie-Hélène Martin). For a thirty-seven-year-old author, Lê has to her name a rather impressive corpus of work: two collections of short stories, Solo (Solo) and Les Evangiles du crime (The Gospels of Crime); a collection of essays aptly titled Tu écriras sur le bonheur (You Will Write on Happiness); and seven novels, Un Si tendre vampire (Such a Tender Vampire), Fuir (To Escape), Calomnies (which has been translated into English under the title of Slander), Les Dits d’un idiot (The Saying of an Idiot), Les Trois parques (The Three Fates), Voix: Une crise (Voice/s: A Crisis), and Lettre morte (Dead Letter). In 1990, she was awarded the Prix de la vocation, and Les Trois parques figured on the list of the twenty best novels of the magazine Lire and was officially selected for the Prix Médicis. Considered one of the young rising stars of contemporary French literature and regarded by many as an exceptionally gifted writer, her work has regularly been reviewed in papers and periodicals such as Le Monde, Libération, and Critique. Critics greeted each successive book with an increasing downpour of praise, tinted by a mixture of admiration, bewilderment, and malaise. With each successive review, the reader is also reminded, again and again, that this young author, born in Vietnam, fled to France at the age of fourteen as one of the “boat people,” thus heralding her as a representative of the Southeast Asian refugee plight and a spokeswoman for the Vietnamese diaspora in France; in sum, a “writer,” as Lê herself sardonically puts it in Slander, “who is native of the former colonies,” a “little starving bird,” a “fragile young woman” (28). Lê has been quoted as saying that she abhors the term “boat people,” which reeks of “commiseration and condescension” (Martin), and in her



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It depends on what one means by autobiography. . . . An autobiography is generally a story of one’s own life, a quest for one’s origin, a search for one’s own identity, which is the point of departure of the novel [speaking of Slander], but the idea of the novel, and that is the reason why I gave it this title, is rather an autobiography which is unhinged, unsettled, and which tries to give some ideas of an itinerary but also seeks to blur the trails and to give just as many false trails and implausibilities. . . . Actually, it is an autobiography with the idea that after all, truth is part of the lie. (Chung, “Entretien”) Upon the publication of her collection of short stories Les Evangiles du crime, Linda Lê was one of Bernard Rapp’s guests on the set of his televised literary program Caractères. While the eye of the camera presents to us a young woman dressed in black, Bernard Rapp first asked the author whether her name should be pronounced “Linda Lê or Linda Li” and then continues his introduction by warning the public that “one should not rely on her apparent innocence, she has ideas of her own.” Indeed, Les Evangiles du crime would in turn be labeled, by the host and the three other male guests on the program, as a magnificent and extraordinary, but disturbing and even terrifying, book; one that would provoke nightmares. One of the guests on the program, Erich Segal, the author of Love Story, contends that he did not dare, and would not recommend, reading it before going to sleep. Undoubtedly, one cannot but notice all the burlesque of these diverse reactions: it is the frightened pack of wolves trembling in fear of being devoured by the little lamb. But scoffing aside, these reactions toward the author of Les Evangiles du crime are also symptomatic of a certain mixture of fascination, terror, and desire figured in the encounter between the Occident and the Orient, the encounter with the other, reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin,White Masks’ s little boy’s exclamation upon seeing a black man: “Look a Negro. . . . Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened. . . . ” (110-12). These reactions embody the multitude of inscriptions that mark her being as the other in the Western imaginary: sorceress, childlike, witch, man-eater, deceitful; duplicity of an appearance which does not coincide with reality; appearance upon which one cannot rely. The interview with Linda Lê, which would later be retelevised in the rubric of Caractères’ “failed interviews,” underlines a split in communication, a miscomprehension of the other. Compared to the eloquence and the verve of the orators who share center stage with her, the silence, the hesitation, and the meander of her voice create a feeling of discomfort that the host, in a paternalistic fashion, attempts to remedy with an overflow of words, often interrupting sentences that are barely formulated, ideas that seek to materialize, reminding us of what Pham Quynh said about the Vietnamese who speak



interview with Chung, she admits that there is in her a will to escape all forms of conformisms, including “the conformism in writing, for instance, which consists of exploiting the figure of the exiled writer who exploits the clientele of the exile, the notion of the métèque [dirty foreigner] who narrates exotic tales.” To those who try to uncover the share of autobiography in her narrative, Lê would answer:

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French: “We think . . . as hybrids. Our thoughts struggle within approximation, in vagueness” (Yeager, Vietnamese Novels 90). Though she may have earned the right to figure on the literary scene among her contemporaries, Linda Lê’s presence marks a note of dissonance. In this shared community of writers and intellectuals, she stands at a liminal space, at the site of Fanon’s évolué, whose difference and doubleness make him/her “the same, but not quite.”2 On the other side, she also admits that she has always “felt rootless in [her] own country” (Slander 153): In Vietnam, I did my studies in French, which follows that I already felt like a stranger in my own country. And I am not very familiar with the Vietnamese culture, in fact I know very little about it. I know French culture much better. . . . A deracination and a sort of loss of identity and madness accompany all of that (Chung, “Entretien”). In our “race for theories,”3 we often hear critics urging the postcolonial, the dislocated subject, to celebrate the margin, as Ricin, a character in Slander, reminds his protégée, “the little starving bird native of the former colonies”: “cultivate the margins,” he says, “work the edges. Make sure you always have something undesirable inside you, something uncongenial, irreducible” (23). While there is no denying that these theories have played a crucial role in examining, reevaluating, and subverting Western hegemonies, and greatly reshaped our thinking, we should bear in mind that the métèque need not cultivate the margins: she is living it, she is breathing it, she reeks of it. In writing this essay, different voices often came to remind me that in any attempt at questioning realities, one must not forget the real pain and suffering of lives lived on the margin. Voices like that of Alice Walker that ask: “what could [all of this] mean to people who have never had a home, or a remembered home country? . . . issues such as exile and the right to belong, the right to enter, the right to asylum, are too serious merely to be metaphorized into a new ideal” (Braidotti 21). Voices like that of Edward Said warning us that “to think of the exile informing this literature as beneficially humanistic is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts on those who suffer them, the muteness with which it responds to any attempt to understand it as ‘good for us’” (357-58). And voices like that of Linda Lê that whisper: “our roots go no deeper that the water’s surface” (Slander 144). Between the figure of the linear roots with its firm hold in the earth, representing the centered subject, and the shallow horizontal roots of Deleuze’s celebrated rhizome, recuperated by Rosi Braidotti as a metaphor for the nomadic subject who “blurs boundaries without burning bridges” (4), there is also the water hyacinth, with its scrawny roots, which goes where the current leads it. It is the embodiment of the métèque with a drifting identity, the métèque écrivant en français (the dirty foreigner writing in French) as both Lê and the narrator in Slander call themselves, who has never found her voice and her place in her culture of origin and her native tongue, but does not yet quite have access to the new host culture (as in both the French culture and the literary culture). She is thus condemned to remain midway between silence and an overflow of words,



CONSUMING CULTURE: LINDA LÊ’S AUTOFICTION


“at once very cultural and very savage” to borrow Roland Barthes’s expression (Pleasure 49). Now let us turn to another métèque, Vinh L., who is one of the two central characters of a short story by the same name found in Lê’s fourth book, Les Evangiles du crime, and the subject of Bernard Rapp’s interview. Les Evangiles du crime takes up many of the same topos that can be found in her other texts, though she has dismissed her two earlier novels, Un Si tendre vampire and Fuir, for she admits to have “approached the French language with respect and intimidation in the face of its authority, writing out of submission to it” (Yeager, “Culture” 264). Les Evangiles, therefore, represents a departure from her earlier works in its narrative technique and style, with the use of repetition, excessive chatter interspersed with haunting silence, a voice at once resembling the legendary scream of the mandrake when it is pulled from the earth and muffled whispers that testify to a suffering so unbearable that it can no longer be spoken. Like the three other stories in the collection, “Vinh L.” is inscribed under the sign of doubleness—an intertwining of two voices, two characters who come together only to conclude a pact of destruction and self-destruction. It is also a story that speaks to the necessity and the impossibility of expressing oneself; of revealing a secret at the same time as living; the desire and the incapability of being oneself and other. In a series of letters, the story’s eponymous protagonist, Vinh L., narrates to his correspondent, an unnamed plagiarist author, the incidents of his voyage. While Lê never mentions Vinh’s origin, one can surmise that he is a Vietnamese living in France, that the event he refers to is situated several years after the fall of Saigon, and that he left with a wave of boat people in a makeshift craft that took him out of his native country. To survive during the crossing, he and his chance companions killed and ate a fellow being. As it is revealed in the introductory chapter (which is written by the plagiarist author), Vinh, after being the first to have identified all the stolen passages in his correspondent’s books, began writing to him, for he saw in him his double: “to exist, the writer’s book had eaten other books. To survive, Vinh L. had eaten human flesh” (176-177). The inspiration for this story came to Lê after she read, in a newspaper, the narration of a similar plight in which the “authors of the tragedy tried by all means to absolve themselves by saying ‘well, it happened, let’s not talk about it anymore’” (Caractères). If guilt stands at the origin of writing for Lê, as she claims in her interview with Chung, it is, therefore, not surprising that this news story has provided her with a dreamed material, a golden opportunity to ward off, through the act of enunciation, of writing, not only her own guilt but that of others as well. Speaking of the people in that news story in Caractères, she explains: I wanted to assume their guilt, which did not want to express itself, which wanted by all means to spare the additional pain of having to express itself. In taking this upon myself, I felt a bit like a plagiarist writer recapturing the events that have been lived by others.



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“The plagiarist is the way in which civilization has accepted the anthropophagous,” Vinh’s correspondent would write nonchalantly, still borrowing his expression from another author without the use of quotation marks (176). And the anthropophagous, would echo Linda Lê, “is the consumer of that which is mute.” Through the televised literary program, the author herself, and the short story, one can partake in a network of cannibalistic acts, of incorporating “that which is mute,” be it by desire to cannibalize others’ guilt, or out of habit of speaking for the Other. But if guilt can be seen as a symptom of subordination, thus prefiguring a locus of resistance, one should also keep in mind that “every discourse that breeds fault and guilt is a discourse of authority and arrogance” (11) as Trinh Minh-ha so rightly points out in Woman, Native, Other. Linda Lê is well aware of that. Her fictional world is inhabited by many once-silenced characters—women, immigrant, marginal, and mauled—who, in a derisive and bilious overflow of words, lash out at the West’s frenzy to get a taste of the “Third World” testimonial narrative of oppression and victimization, as well as the “ethnic” experience and immigrant’s successful tale of acculturation, by undermining any attempt at identification, guilt for, or self-pity from, the dislocated subject, and polarization—colonizer/colonized, East/West, civilization/barbarism, appropriator/appropriated. Contrary to the Western literary tradition which, during and after the period of colonization, has principally inscribed its representation of the Other based on the notion of “fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference” (Bhabha 66), one finds, in “Vinh L.,” the attempt of a Vietnamese to inscribe his own story. However, it is not merely a reversal of role, of voice, of point of view. Linda Lê offers us the complexity of a narration that transcends all dualities. “Vinh L.” is located in a confused sphere of sentiments in which it is impossible to distinguish the saint from the criminal, the guilty from the innocent, those who eat from those who are eaten. Likewise, though the reader is led to believe that the letters are written by Vinh to the plagiarist author, in this postmodern writing sieve, one cannot name their real author, since the latter, in his odd habit of plagiarist, and using his old tricks to perfection, has rewritten the original letters because he found them too “precise,” too “cold” for his discerning palate, and thought that Vinh has delivered “a frozen crime wrapped in cellophane” when he would have wanted him to bring “flesh that still tastes of blood on a platter” (177). Afterward, to erase all evidences of his crime, he destroyed the original letters. However, he quickly had to face the fact that his own version sounded wrong, and that he had to try to remember Vinh’s original wording. He had to give in and admit defeat: “in rewriting for the first time Vinh L.’s letters, I wanted to eat him. I had to resign myself to be eaten by him” (178). In the first movement, he is conforming to the Vietnamese’s desire, eager to make a sacrifice of himself, to see him become a cannibal, his double, an eater of words that belong to others for lack of human flesh. If Vinh sent these letters to the plagiarist author, it is in the hope that the latter would claim them, thus passing off his guilt and his crime onto him. But then, to retrace the story, the writer had to put himself in Vinh’s place, to get under his skin, to “belong to





him from within” (191), and to become his victim. As for Vinh, since his arrival in France, he has indulged in a bulimia of culture in order to “purify himself of his barbarism” (185), to quench his thirst in books the same way he has appeased his hunger by killing his victim on the boat. His feelings, if they are actually his, derive principally from the literature of the West, and his confession itself remains foreign to him for the fact that it has been written and regurgitated in a language that does not belong to him. Whether one doubts the authorship of the letters makes no difference, for literature and the act of writing itself distance him from himself, his being, his identity, which is reduced to, and can only be defined in relation to, the act he has committed on the boat, an unspeakable act—he is a man-eater. The short story is located in the creation of the paradoxical image of identity and alterity, junction and separation. It is located “in the liminal space” that Homi Bhabha speaks of, “the in-between which allows and prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities” (4). The narration vacillates from Vinh’s pen to that of the plagiarist author and vice versa: if the latter was able to bring Vinh to a confession, it is only at the price of surrendering his own secret. He had to confess his own crime, his plagiarism. But the secret, which allows its keeper to realize that he has a self, is also that which destroys and kills by virtue of its inexpressibility. The revelation of the secret, on the other hand, allows one to live but leads to the loss of a part of the self. In sum, it is the sine qua non of the colonized’s condition: to exist, he has to correspond to the image of the other, an alienating image formulated by the colonizer, which prevents access to the so-called authentic self, but outside of which he cannot survive. Thus, secret separates, but once it is secreted, it eliminates the barriers that distinguish self from other, authorizes the self to disappear into the other, to commune and to be one with him. It is the round of cannibalistic metaphors: to disappear into the other and to contain the other within oneself; the secret, that consumes and gnaws, is secreted in an ejaculatory movement, staining the blank page with traces of ink and blood in the ultimate act of consumption. Another cannibalistic metaphor: the correspondence undertaken by Vinh is also a gesture toward communion, precipitated by the desire for and of the other. However, it is by fully assuming his position as “savage,” as “cannibal,” that he opens up to the Occident, entertains the Occidental imaginary, and leads to the appropriation of images that have always escaped the colonizer/plagiarist author, knowing full well that these images would always escape him, thus deriding his fear, his fascination, his desire, and his fantasy. As for the “fantasy of the native,” maintains Homi Bhabha, it “is precisely to occupy the master’s place while keeping his place in the slave’s avenging anger” (44): “I have not yet taken up your habits” writes Vinh, “I have the honesty of the métèque who gorges himself on culture but spits back to everyone his vomit” (Lê, Les Evangiles, 191). In his insightful article on James Cook’s voyage in the Pacific, Gananath Obeyesekere suggests that the British discourse about the practice of cannibalism testifies to “the relations between European and Savage” rather than “the nature of Savage anthropophagy itself” (Obeyesekere 7-8). For on the one side, the British ethnographers, eager to confirm their hypothesis, quite naturally



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assumed that the Hawaiians they came in contact with were cannibals; and the Hawaiians, on the other side, upon seeing these “ragged, filthy, half-starved [sailors] arriving on their island, gorging themselves on food and asking questions about cannibalism” (11), “thought that it was the British who were out to eat them” (10). Though the Hawaiians did not practice cannibalism, they nevertheless threatened the British with it. Thus, “cannibalistic discourse,” Obeyesekere concludes, was used by both sides and “was compounded by the ludic and the serious: the ludic since they seem on occasion, at least, to enjoy the discomfiture of the Europeans; and serious, because it was a weapon to terrify them in the context of unequal power, where their real weapons were nothing in comparison to Europeans guns” (23). Another method of self-preservation is also found in Creole literature, one that Mireille Rosello examines in her book Littérature et identité créole aux Antilles (Literature and Creole Identity in the Caribbeans). Speaking of the condition of the Caribbean people seen as France’s and Africa’s bastard children, she explains: Between betrayal, abandonment by history, and the passive acceptance which leads to indigestion, sets in nausea, the only form of speech which belongs exclusively to the child and allows him to systematically refuse what is given him even if he does not have the means to invent something other. (130) Vinh’s correspondence is also this vomiting, this spitting back, but one that perversely transforms itself into love letters that he sends to his double, his foe: “you probably did not keep these first letters; anyway, you will never reproduce them for they are awkward, full of rage and moan, let’s face it, they are in bad taste, as all love letters are” (Lê, Les Evangiles, 225). This correspondence is indispensable to him inasmuch as it represents a possible recuperation of this unspeakable act, which gave access to such an intense pleasure that it “emasculated” him: My penis finds nothing that would wake it. I am a man exhausted by too violent an orgasm. When I lay down, I only press between my legs a piece of cold meat that nothing could stimulate. When I look at myself in the mirror, I only see an appendage disdainful of stimuli. Don’t think that this abstinence is a form of punishment I inflict on myself. I do not lapse into the lament of the castrated cannibal. Since the crime, my sex has found nothing that could give it an erectile sensation. Eating human flesh provided once, only once, so penetrating a pleasure that it emasculated me. (195) While the act of writing allows him to regain his masculinity, his virility, thereby to identify with the colonizer, the pen no doubt replacing the knife that killed and cut up the victim on the boat, and the penis that no longer responds to stimuli, one could also posit that he willingly, and even defiantly, surrenders himself to the plagiarist author, as to a lover, while retaining “the practice of disabused





cannibalism” (189). Indeed, Vinh pleads with him: “Plagiarize me. Strip me. Skin me. You do not cause me any pain, for you would only remove my intellectual skin” (226). The lover’s discourse, however, as a site of recuperation, consumption, and communion (in both senses of confession and communication) is a deceptive discourse. Although correspondence represents one of the privileged forms of communication, it is performed in solitude and symbolizes absence. As such, it brings us back to the crime scene on the boat. While tragedy struck the entire community, each member, nonetheless, had to assume his or her guilt and responsibility alone. And to kill, then to consume human flesh, they had to “take leave of themselves in time enough to chew the meat and to appease [their] hunger” (194). To quote another “fragment of a lover’s discourse,” that of Barthes this time, it can be said that “absence can exist only as a consequence of the other” (A Lover’s Discourse 13), to which one might add “the other in oneself.” And to endure absence, one must “behave as a well-weaned subject”; feeding oneself, “meanwhile, on other things besides the maternal breast” (14). In incorporating the other’s culture, Vinh, indeed, behaves as a “well-weaned subject,” while waiting, as one will see at the end, the return to the mother, to renew the imaginary ties that link him to his homeland. But meanwhile, “absence” is also, according to Barthes, the “creation of a fiction” (16). Writing is at once a form of alienation and disalienation. It constitutes a formation as well as a deformation. In the same way he maintains that “to make love is to content oneself with an ersatz of food” (196), Vinh is aware that secret is both inter-spoken and prohibited in writing (in the sense of the French inter-dit), because if it allows a semblance of relief, it does not absolve; and should it absolve, it would no longer give access to the original act, the “raw” account: I write to tell you my story, three words sum it up: I have killed. I say to you: my crime is not ordinary, three words sum it up: I have eaten. Nothing more to relate. Anything else that one might add to it would be mere reconstruction. One can only testify once the guilty feeling has been conquered. One gives away to others only crumbs, reheated food, cold meat. In this, crime resembles love: as long as feelings are sincere, they shroud themselves in silence. One begins to jabber when the feeling is dead. (206) Vinh has “let himself be taken on a round of words” (223) by the plagiarist author only to arrive at the painful realization that if words nourish the mind, they can do nothing for the body, this savage and untamable part of the self: “my body is shriveled and decrepit, my head bloated with a knowledge that poisons me. I have my head in high spheres and my body in mire” (219). At the end, after receiving a letter from his mother informing him of his father’s death, he decides to return to his home country to relearn silence, to live in a country where women like his mother do not have “loud thoughts” and do not have “the taste . . . for long-winded self-destruction and empty prattling” (225). To return to the mother is to return to the pre-Symbolic space, to the state of plenitude where language is superfluous. To return to the mother, in this case, is also



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an act of transgression that transcends the politics of assimilation, the economics of eating and being eaten, the dialectics of good taste and bad taste. Vinh never saw his mother eat. She has no taste or is beyond all taste. If it is true that “to speak, and above all to write, is to fast” (20) as Deleuze and Guattari assert in Kaf ka:Toward a Minor Literature, fasting being the necessary condition for writing, and writing, the substitution for eating, Linda Lê, on the other side, seems to suggest in her conclusion, that to live does not constitute a substitution or a condition of or for anything; living can, and must, be intransitive. Several questions, however, remain to be answered: How can someone, like Vinh for instance, return to the mother when “he has devoured the umbilical cord that links him to the homeland” (226-227)? How does he stop drifting and find his way back when “[his] roots go no deeper than the water’s surface” (Slander 144)? How does he go home when this refrain from a familiar song comes to haunt and to remind him: “I’m a stranger here / I’m a stranger everywhere / I would go home, but / I’m a stranger there” (Slander 22)? Surely the ending of “Vinh L.” might seem problematic at best, and at worst utopian. But I would suggest there are at least two other ways of interpreting this ending. First, in reading Lê, one must constantly be on the alert for her use of irony, one must remember her talent to “puncture” and to undermine “every grand illusion,” including her own,4 and the uncanny laughter that hides underneath a most entrancingly beautiful prose: the end could very well be a parody of the diaspora’s dream of return. Second, I believe it is necessary to remember that this short story represents but a stage in Lê’s personal and literary evolution. The question of return is certainly a legitimate one, for who, among exiles, émigrés, migrants, or refugees, has not, at some point or another and to some extent, thought about or fantasized a return, even if only to realize its impossibility as the narrator in Slander finds out after what one might consider an allegorical foray into her homeland. In this novel, which was published after Les Evangiles, the last line simply reads: “I am leaving” (150). Similarly, in Voix and in Lettre morte, Lê’s most recent works, the narrators repeat this familiar ending; one says: “I must get going again” (Voix 69) and the other “I must leave” (Lettre 105). Both have come to the conclusion that, to quote the Chinese Canadian author of L’Ingratitude (Ingratitude), Ying Chen, [t]he most important thing is to go towards and not really to arrive. Those, who want to arrive somewhere, seek a particular land. However, all lands have the tendency at first to push us away, and then to imprison us. Wherever we go, we end up being buried more or less in the same way. (“La Charge” 62) Vinh L.’s initial voyage, as a symbol of passage from one culture to another, from the Orient to the Occident, is performed through murder and anthropophagy. The crime that is directed toward the other turns upon oneself, and the desire to consume the other like the desire to appropriate the culture and the language of the other, takes shape only through the loss and annihilation of the self. However, if having eaten human flesh alienated him from society and





barred him from all interactions with others, it is also a strategy that enables him to resist appropriation and to have access to a new voice, a new silence; a silence that leads the Occident to prattle uncomfortably and frantically in its own destabilization during the encounter with the other, and to settle itself within the blurred space of approximation. Paradoxically, the unspeakable act escapes discourse but gives birth to a subject who struggles in the in-between, in vagueness, and cannot be captured and imprisoned in Occidental discourse. It allows him to “leave the country of madmen without entering the land of normal people” (71) as the uncle, the Chinamad, in Slander, would say. There is no doubt, however, that the reader, unaccustomed to this type of stammering, must be left hungry for more: indeed, who is Vinh L. but an illegitimate and criminal subject who is located everywhere and nowhere and manages to escape the rule of fixity; a murderer and a man-eater who does not exactly seek repentance; an “aspiring writer” “at once very cultural and very savage” who steeped his pen in gall; a métèque, a dirty foreigner, with a disquieting look, though nothing, and yet everything, about him betrays his past as a cannibal, thus challenging all the bases upon which “civilized” people were able to distinguish themselves from the “uncivilized”; an appearance upon which one cannot rely; a name that claims no country’s affiliation, but sounds strange and foreign nonetheless, and whose proper pronunciation one cannot be sure of. In fact, isn’t Vinh L. also elle (she), the author, Linda L., Linda Li, or Linda Lê, this young woman dressed in black sitting quietly on the French literary scene, of whom one is afraid that she might hide behind her “apparent innocence” not only the fate of a plagiarist5 but also a certain propensity to be a man-eater. Notes 1. I would like to thank Ook Chung for providing me with a transcript of his unpublished interview with Linda Lê and for granting me the permission to “cannibalize” pieces of it in this essay. Excerpts from the interview can also be found in Chung’s review of Lê’s Calomnies in Liberté. All translations from the French of this interview and of all texts, which have not previously been translated into English, are my own. Page numbers inserted within the text of this article are from the original texts in French. 2. See Homi K. Bhabha’s “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (86). 3. See Barbara Christian’s article “The Race for Theory.” 4. See Esther Allen’s afterword in Slander. 5. Although it has not acquired all the publicity surrounding the infamous Calyxthe Beyala affair in France, where she has been accused of and sued for plagiarism, there was suspicion that Lê’s first novel, which ironically enough also centers around the theme of plagiarism, was written by one of her ex-boyfriends. I would like to thank Jack Yeager for providing me with this information.



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Linh Dinh

Mudman in earth cafeteria, I eat aardwolf. I eat ant bear. I eat mimosa, platypus, ermine. “White meat is tasteless, dark meat stinks.” (The other white meat is pork, triple X.) Rice people vs. bread people. White bread vs. wheat bread. White rice vs. brown rice. Manhattan vs. New England. Kosher sub-gum vs. knuckle kabob. “What is patriotism but love of the foods one had as a child?”* To eat stinky food is a sign of savagery, humility, identification with the earth. “It was believed that after cleaning, tripe still contained ten percent excrement which was therefore eaten with the rest of the meal.”** Today I’ll eat Colby cheese. Tomorrow I’ll eat sparrows. Chew bones, suck fat, bite heads off, gnaw on a broken wing. *Lin Yutang **Mikhail Bakhtin



EARTH CAFETERIA

EARTH CAFETERIA

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A Pekinese is ideal, will feed six, but an unscrupulous butcher will fudge a German shepherd, chopping it up to look like a Pekinese. Toothless man sucking a pureed porterhouse steak with straw. Parboiled placenta. To skewer and burn meat is barbaric. To boil, requiring a vessel, is a step up. To microwave. People who eat phalli, hot dogs, kielbasas vs. people who eat balls. To eat with a three-pronged spear and a knife. To eat with two wooden sticks. To eat with the hands. Boiling vs. broiling. To snack on a tub of roasted grasshoppers at the movies.



Anise-flavored beef soup smells like sweat. A large sweaty head bent over a large bowl of sweat soup.





Ho Chi Minh City, July 2000. Photographer: Jerry Gorman.





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——. “Primitive Partisans: French Strategy and the Construction of Montagnard Identity in Indochina.” In Imperial Policy and Southeast Asian Nationalism. Ed. Hans Antlov and Stein Tonneson. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1995. ——. “The King of Fire and Vietnamese Ethnic Policy in the Central Highlands.” In Development or Domestication? Indigenous Peoples of Southeast Asia. Ed. Don McCaskill and Ken Kampe. Chiangmai, Thailand: Silkworm, 1997. Sarrola, Mireille. “Les Délits de Linda Lê.” Le Monde des livres (March 20, 1992). Schrauwers, Albert. “Returning to the ‘Origin’: Church and State in the Ethnogenesis of the ‘To Pamona.’” In Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and the Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Ed. Joel Kahn. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 1998. Schuster, Marilyn. “Reading and Writing as a Woman: The Retold Tales of Marguerite Duras.” The French Review 58.1 (October 1984): 48-57. Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Seguret, Olivier. “Poussière d’Empire.” Libération (September 1983): 12-13 Selous, Trista. The Other Woman: Feminism and Femininity in the Work of Marguerite Duras. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. Smith, Gordon H. The Blood Hunters: A Narrative of Pioneer Missionary Work Among the Savages of French Indo-China. East Stroudsburg, PA: Pinebrook Book Club, 1942. Smith, Martin. Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity. London: Zed, 1993. Steinberg, David J., et al., eds. In Search of Southeast Asia:A Modern History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Tauriac, Michel. Jade. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1986. Taylor, Nora. “‘Pho’ Phai and Faux Phais: The Market for Fakes in Vietnam and the Appropriation of a National Symbol.” Ethnos 64 no. 2 (1999): 232-249. ——. “The Artist and the State: Painting and the Politics of National Identity in Hanoi, Vietnam, 19251995.” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1997. The Scent of Green Papaya. Dir. Tran Anh Hung. Perf. Tran Nu Yên Khê and Lu Man San. Productions Lazennec, 1993. Tison-Braun, Micheline. Marguerite Duras. Amsterdan: Rodopi, 1984. Tollefson, James W. “Indochinese Refugees: A Challenge to America’s Memory of Vietnam.” In The Legacy:The Vietnam War in the American Imagination. Ed. D. Michael Shafer. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. Tonnerre, Jêrome. “L’eau et le rêve.” Cinématographe (May 1983): 70-71. Trân Tê Xuong. “Les idéogrammes chinois.” In Anthologie de la littérature vietnamienne III. Ed. Nguyên Khac Vien and Huu Ngoc. Hanoi: Edition en langues étrangères, 1975. Tran Van Tung. Bach-Yên ou la fille au coeur fidèle. Paris: J. Susse, 1946. Tran, Anh Hung, and Laurence Trémolet. Cyclo. Arles: Actes Sud, 1995. Tran, Anh-Thuan. “Certain de vaincre de Tran Dan: un renouveau littéraire 30 ans avant le Doi Moi.” Mémoire de DEA, Paris: INALCO, 1999. Tran, Barbara, Monique T. D. Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi, eds. Watermark:Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose. New York: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998. Tran, Thi-Thuyet. “La Femme viêtnamienne à travers la littérature populaire.” Ph.D. diss. University of Brussels, 1974. Trankell, Ing-Britt. “The Minor Part of the Nation: Politics of Ethnicity in Laos.” In Facets of Power and Its Limitations: Political Culture in Southeast Asia. Ed. Ing-Britt Trankell and Laura Summers. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Department of Anthropology, 1998. Trinh, Minh-ha T. Woman, Native, Other:Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Truong Dinh Tri and Albert de Teneuille. Bà--Dâm. Paris: Fasquelle, 1930.



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Truong, Monique Thuy-Dung. “Kelly.” Amerasia Journal 17:2 (1991): 41-46. ——. “Notes to ‘Dear Kelly’ [sic].” Amerasia Journal 17:2 (1991): 47-48. ——. “The Reception of Robert Olin Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Ventriloquism and the Pulitzer Prize.” The Viet Nam Forum 16 (1997): 75-94. ——. “Vietnamese American Literature.” In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Ed. King-Kok Cheung. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Villemagne, Alix de. Hors de sa race. Paris: E. Figuirè et Cie., 1912. Warren, Kay B. Indigenous Movements and their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Weigman, Robyn. American Anatomies:Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. West, Richard. Sketches from Vietnam. London: Trinity Press, 1968. Williams, Lea. Southeast Asia: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Willis, Sharon. Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Wilmington, Michael. “Dust of Empire.” L. A.Weekly ( July 6-12, 1984): 10. Winston, Jane. “Autour de la rue Saint-Benoît:An Interview with Dyonys Mascolo.” Contemporary French Civilization 18:2 (Summer/Fall 1994): 188-207. ——. “Forever Feminine: Marguerite Duras and Her Critics.” New Literary History 24 (1993): 467-82. ——. “Marguerite Duras: Marxism, Feminism, Writing.” Theatre Journal, 47 (1995): 345-65. ——. Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France. New York: Palgrave, forthcoming, 2001. Wolters, O.W. History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, revised ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1999. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Woodside, Alexander Barton. Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Nguyên and Ch’ing Civil Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. Yeager, Jack A. “Culture, Citizenship, Nation: the Narrative Texts of Linda Lê.” In Post-Colonial Cultures in France. Ed. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney. New York: Routledge, 1997. ——. The Vietnamese Novel in French.A Literary Response to Colonialism. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1987. ——. Vietnamese Literature in French. New Orleans, CELFAN Edition Monographs, 1999. Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995. Zinoman, Peter. “Nguyen Huy Thiep’s ‘Vang Lua’ and the Nature of Intellectual Dissent in Contemporary Vietnam.” Viet Nam Forum 14 (1994): 36-44.



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Michèle Bacholle is Assistant Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her research interests are in French and Francophone women writers. She has published articles on Linda Lê, Ly Thu Ho, Annie Ernaux, and Malika Mokeddem, among others. Her article on Indochine and The Scent of Green Papaya appeared in spring 2001 in The French Review. Her book on Annie Ernaux, Agota Kristof, and Farida Belghoul entitled Un Passé contraignant: Double bind et transculturation was published by Rodopi in 2000. Karl Ashoka Britto is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently completing a book on interculturality in Vietnamese Francophone texts and is also at work on a study of the body in contemporary immigrant literatures. His recent publications include “History, Memory, and Narrative Nostalgia: Pham Duy Khiem’s Nam et Sylvie” (Yale French Studies 98). Renny Christopher is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Stanislaus, where she teaches multicultural American literature, poetry writing, and film. Her book, The Viet Nam War/The American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) was named Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North America by the Gustavas Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Her poetry collection, Viet Nam and California, is from Viet Nam Generation/Burning Cities Press, 1998. Linh Dinh is the author of a collection of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and a chapbook of poems, Drunkard Boxing (Singing Horse Press 1998). A poem of his has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, and he is also the editor of the anthology Night,Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996).



C O N T R I B U T O R S

268

CONTRIBUTORS

Hjorleifur Jonsson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University. He has done research in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, primarily among ethnic minority populations in the hinterlands. His research interests include the politics of culture, identity, and environments. Among his publications are “Yao Minority Identity and the Location of Difference in the South China Borderlands” (Ethnos 2000), and “Serious fun: minority cultural dynamics and national integration in Thailand” (American Ethnologist 2001). Hoang Hung was born in 1942 in Hung Yen. He is the author of three volumes of poems, Land of Sunlight (1970), Seahorse (1988) and Man Looking for a Face (1994), and three volumes of translations, 100 Love Poems (1987), Poems by Lorca (1988), and Poems by Appolinaire (1997), which won an Award for Excellence from the Vietnamese Writers’ Union. He has also published translations of Ginsberg, Simic, and Pasternak, among others. One of his poems has been translated into English and published in Filling Station. Andrew Lam is an associate editor with the Pacific News Service in San Francisco, a member of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a regular commentator on NPR All Things Considered. He was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and came to the United States at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 when he was 11 years old. His articles have appeared in numerous newspapers across the country including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Chicago Tribune. Lam is currently working on his first short story collection. Patrick Laude was born in France in 1958. He is an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. His interest in nineteenth-century poetry, exoticism, and intercultural studies has led him to study the French and Francophone literature of Southeast Asia. He is the author of Exotisme indochinois et Poésie (Paris: Sudestasie, 1985) and one of the contributors to Littérature de la péninsule indochinoise (Paris: AUPELF-Karthala, 1999), edited by Bernard Hue. He is currently an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. Nathalie Nguyen completed a B. A. (Hons) at Melbourne University, Australia, won a Commonwealth Scholarship to Oxford University, and obtained her doctorate in 1994. She is currently Assistant Professor of French at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has published on the subject of Vietnamese Francophone literature and continues to carry out research in that field. In addition, she has begun to engage in research on Vietnamese women’s autobiographies in both English and French.



Jerry Gorman is a photographer and a camera operator from Venice, California. He has spent the last five summers traveling in Southeast Asia with a couple of cameras, seven T-shirts, three pairs of pants, a pair of sandals, and a hundred rolls of film. Summer 2001 will find him again in Southeast Asia on an extended stay to witness and capture the living spirits of Cambodia.

CONTRIBUTORS

269

Nguyen Dang Thuong was born in Battambang, Cambodia, in 1938, and now lives in England. He has translated poems, plays, and short stories by Neruda, Cendras, Prevert, Beckett, Claude Simon, and many others into Vietnamese. Panivong Norindr is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature (Duke UP, 1996). This essay is part of a book-length manuscript entitled (Post)Colonial Screens: Reframing Indochina in French Cinema. Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier is Assistant Professor of French at Bowdoin College. She has written on women’s autobiography, Asian women writers of the diaspora, including Ying Chen and Linda Lê, and narratives of displacement. Her future project will focus on Cambodia and the questioning of testimonial narratives. Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation is on Vietnamese American narratives. Pelaud is committed to teaching and to promoting Vietnamese American writings. Some of her essays have been published in Making More Waves and in Tilting the Continent. She has been reading prose and poetry periodically throughout the Bay Area since 1993 and is currently working on a manuscript. Erica J. Peters conducted archival research in Aix-en-Provence and Hanoi for her Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation is entitled “Negotiating Power Through Everyday Practices in French Vietnam, 18801924.” This project examined alcohol, food, gambling, and charitable practices in the colony, reevaluating questions of collaboration, resistance, and the role of the colonial state. Phan Huyen Thu was born in Hanoi in 1972. A journalist by trade, she has published poems and short stories in many journals in Vietnam, France, and the United States. She was awarded First Prize in poetry from the prestigious Hue journal, Perfume River, in 1997. One of her stories has been translated into English and published in The Literary Review. Phan Nhien Hao was born in 1970 in Kontum. He immigrated to the United States in 1991 and now lives in Santa Monica, California. He has a B.A. in Vietnamese Literature from The Teachers College of Saigon and a B.A. in American Literature from UCLA. He has been publishing poems, stories, and translations in literary journals since 1989, and is the author of a collection of poems, Paradise



Nguyen Quoc Chanh was born in 1958 in Bac Lieu and now lives in Ho Chi Minh City. He is the author of two collections of poems, Night of the Rising Sun and Inanimate Weather. His poems have been translated into English and published in The Literary Review and Filling Station.

270

CONTRIBUTORS

Nora Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State University. She teaches Southeast Asian Art History and Vietnamese Art and Culture. She has published numerous articles on Vietnamese modern and contemporary painting and is currently working on a book that traces the history of Vietnamese art from the colonial period to the present. Qui-Phiet Tran received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently a Professor of English at Schreiner University. His publications include a book-length study of William Faulkner (Carollton Press, 1980) and articles on American and Asian-American literature. He has recently completed a three-semester appointment as Senior Fullbright Scholar at Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City, where he taught American literature in the English Department of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. Monique T.D. Truong is a writer and intellectual property attorney based in Brooklyn, New York. Her first novel will be published by Random House in the Spring of 2002. “Welcome to America” is a commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.’s Revisiting America radio documentary series. The commissioning of this work was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The piece aired on selected NPR stations around the country on July 4, 2000. Van Cam Hai was born in 1972 in Hue, where he still lives. He is a writer for Hue television and has contributed poems to all the leading Vietnamese-language journals in Vietnam and overseas. His poems have been translated into English and published in The Literary Review. Vo Thi Xuan Ha was born in 1959 in Hanoi. A graduate of Hanoi College of Education in 1978 and valedictorian at Nguyen Du School of Writing in 1992, she is currently Editor of Bao dien anh kich truong Viet Nam (Vietnam Motion Pictures and Theater Magazine). Her publications include five collections of short stories and two novels for children. She was the recipient of the 1999 Association of Writers Best Fiction Award. Currently Vo Thi Xuan Ha lives with her two teenage daughters in Hanoi. Jane Bradley Winston is Associate Professor of French at Northwestern University. She has published articles on Marguerite Duras, Vietnam, and radical politics. Her Postcolonial Duras is forthcoming (Palgrave 2001). She has completed a manuscript, “White Borders and Cultural Change: the groupe de la rue Saint-Benoît,” and is at work on a book on contemporary Francophone women writers and the issue of utopia.



of Paper Bells. His poems have been translated into English and published in The Literary Review and Filling Station.

CONTRIBUTORS

271

Jack A. Yeager is Professor of French and Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. He has written The Vietnamese Novel in French: A Literary Response to Colonialism (University Press of New England, 1987) and Vietnamese Literature in French (CELFAN Review Monographs, 1999). In addition, he co-edited Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers (University of Minnesota Press, 1996).



Y Ban is the pen name of Pham Thi Xuan Ban, who was born on July 1, 1961, in Nam Dinh, Vietnam. A 1982 University of Hanoi graduate, Y Ban taught at Nam Dinh College of Medicine and Thai Nguyen University School of Medicine from 1982 to 1989. In 1992 Y Ban began to attend Nguyen Du School of Creative Writing, where she graduated in 1992. Currently she is a reporter for Giao Duc va Thoi Dai (Education in Our Era).




acculturation: and anxieties, French colonial, 43; Asian women, catalysts of, 36; defined, 35; and disindividuation, 41–2; v. encongayement, 41; failure of, 38; and “motionless happiness,” 43; and transformation, 41; as transgressive, 36; women, European, resistance to, 47 n1. See also literature, French colonial; Lê, Linda Accuracy in the Media, Television’s Vietnam: The Real Story, 2 Allende, Isabel, 198 American national identity. See identity, American national American War/Vietnam War, 53–7, 69; 220–1: in contemporary Viet Nam, 163; historical erasure of, 55; in global ethnoscape, 54–5; mediascape of, 54; from the “other” side, 76–7; terms, defined, 63 n1; Vietnam v. American War, 63; war syndrome, Vietnam, 181–7; in writing, Vietnamese diaspora, 105–6. See also literature, of the American War/Vietnam War American, becoming, 160–1: and disowning, 104; and disavowal, 9 Annaud, Jean-Jacques, The Lover, 4, 146, 150 anti-communism, 131 anxieties, French colonial, 22, 25, 30, 43 Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 2 Appadurai, Arjun: globalization, and the nation, 10, 55; on nations, reimagining of, and difference, 124 art, Vietnamese, 111; and anticolonial ideologies, 113; diaspora, 114–25; before Doi Moi, 114–5; Doi Moi, 10–1,13, 116; ethnic labels on, 124; and globalization, 10,124–5; identity markers, negotiating, 124; and national identity, 113–4, 123–4; Orientalist traditions in, 113; production: in Vietnam, 112; Southeast Asia,

57, 60; and the international art market, 10, 113–4; and tourism, 115; and Vietnam as exotic travel destination, 113; Vietnamese art market, 113–4; and Western collectors, 10–1, 115–7. See also identity, Vietnamese ARVN (Army of the Republic of Viet Nam), 72, 76, 83 assimilation: Indochina, French colonial, 21–3, 30 n5, 31 n14; of the other, 36; politics of, 249; and Viet Kieu, 70, 161. See also cannibalism; borrowing, cultural Au Milieu du carrefour (Ly Thu Ho), 195, 200–3, 204; and earlier Francophone novels, 202 autobiography, 192, 226; unhinged, 242 Bà-–Dâm (Truong Dinh Tri and Teneuille), 202 Bachelard, Gaston, La Poétique de l’espace, 147, 149 Bacholle, Michèle, 11–2 Bao Ninh, Sorrow of War, 79; “Wandering Souls,” 77 Barthes, Roland, 244, 248 Bataille, Georges, 7–8 Baudenne, Antonin, Sao tiampa, épouse laotienne, 36, 40, 45, 46 Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, 12 Bhabha, Homi, 5; The Location of Culture, 14, 143; on translation, cultural, 156; on fixity, 245, 250; liminal space in, 246; the “unhomely,” 144 Billotey, Pierre, Sao Kéo ou le bonheur immobile, 36, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46 Blue Lotus,The, 148 borders, cultural: dialogue in, 5; crossing, 6, 228; and desire, 228; heterosexual, transgressing, 232–3; the in-between, 250; and the métèque, 243–4; screen as, 153



I N D E X

INDEX

borrowing, culinary, 21–31; as subversive, 23–5; and alienation, 44; ambiguities of, 44; by Vietnamese elite classes, 21–5; by Vietnamese lower and middle-classes, 23; effects on Vietnamese, 22; French reaction to, 23–9 borrowing, cultural: v. acculturation, 43–4; from the other, 44; of Confucian-Taoist principles, 44; of Vietnamese lifestyle, 44; Vietnamese reaction to, 26–7 boundaries. See borders Bourdieu, Pierre, 3 Braidotti, Rosi, 243 Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, 58, 61 bricolage. See Le, Lam Britto, Karl Ashoka, 9–10 Brogan, Kathleen, 77 Buddhism: in French colonial literature, 44–46; and decadence, 46; doctrine, 46; as pretext for passivity, 44; and samsara, 45; and su-su, 45; in Tran Anh Hung, 178 Bui Xuan Phai, 123; and the loneliness of urban life, 116 Butler, Judith, 6 Cambodia, as pioneering frontier, 39 Cambodia, ethnic minorities, 53 Cambodia, primitivist images of, 63 Cambodian women. See women, Southeast Asian cannibalism, 13, 241; cultural, 248; and plagiarism, 244–5 Cartesian logic, breaking, 145–7 Cartesian subject, 11 Casseville, Henry, Sao, L’amoureuse tranquille, 36, 38 categories, colonial: 2, 7, 21; 233; subversion of, 37; imaginary, transgression of, 30; culinary, subversion of, 22, 23, 27, 30 censorship, 120; of sadness in art, 117–125; in Vietnam, 164; of women’s writings, 194 Certeau, Michel de, 6 Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, 232 Chen, Ying, L’Ingratitude, 249 Chester, Suzanne, 225 “Chinh Phu Ngam,” 144 Christopher, Renny, 9,105 Chung, Ook, 241 cinema, “appropriate,” 155 civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice), 231–233 Clément, René, This Angry Age, 3 Co Cong women’s press, 194 colonial divisions. See categories, colonial colonialism, 11; as conflict over the sacred, 151; French, and cinema, 153; colonizers, in eyes colonized, 228; of the imaginary, 151;

privilege, European, 228; and religion, 153; as a spatial praxis, 11; and the sacred, 11; French, 53–93; projection of identities, 57. See also identity, projected, under French, British, and Dutch colonialism con-gai (congaie). See also acculturation; literature, French colonial; The Lover (Duras) Confucian tragedy, 138 Confucianism: perfect wife, ideal of, 206; role of women, 195; and poetry, 225–6; “Three Obediences,” 206, 209 n6; marriage, 229–30; and evangilization, 156–7 Confucius, 196 Coppola, Frances Ford: Apocalypse Now, 2 Cu Chi tunnels, 153 cultural encounters. See relations, cross-cultural culture, Chinese, in Vietnam, 228; Vietnamese adaptations, 228–9; as system of privilege, 229 culture, Vietnamese: “difference” of, 157 Curbstone Press. See literature, of the American War/Vietnam War; in translation Cyclo, 12, 136, 170–9; Vietnam in, 12; rhizomes in, 176 Daney, Serge, 155 Dead End (Nguyên Công Hoan), 26 Deleuze, Félix, 12, 243, 249 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, 12; Kaf ka: Toward a Minor Literature, 249; becominganimal, 176; becoming-imperceptible, 176; rhizomes, 12, 176–7, 243 Deleuze, Gílles, 12, 176, 249 diaspora. See exile and diaspora Dien Bien Phu, 4, Dien Bien Phu, Schoendorffer, 146 difference: postcolonial, as legacy of colonialism, 57; racial: and desire, 232 Dinh, Linh, 6, 7, 14 disavowal. See identity, American national; literature, Asian American; literature, Vietnamese American Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire), 232 discourse, racializing, 232 dislocation. See exile and diaspora displacement. See exile and diaspora divisions, social, in French colonial Indochina: construction of, 21; subversion of, 22 Do Huu Phuong, 24–5, 30 n11 Doi Moi, 76; 83 n12; Nguyen Van Linh on, 76; 124. See also art, Vietnamese Dông Khánh, 23 double, motif of: in Asian American literature, 103; in Lê, Linda, 244; role of disowning in formation of, 103; the self and its repudiated shadow, 103. See also Kingston, Maxine Hong Doumer, Paul, 25



274

INDEX

Elsewhere, exotic, 55, 146 Emerson, Gloria, 77 Emile (Rousseau), 196 encongayement. See acculturation epistolary genre: and communication, lack of, 100 erasure, historical. See identity, American national; literature, Asian American; literature, Vietnamese American Eshleman, Clayton, 167 ethnicization, of social life, 57. See also identities ethnoscapes, global, in precolonial period, 60–1 everyday life, French colonial Indochina, 21–31 exile and diaspora, 6, 159–60, 243; and home, diaspora’s dream of return: 248–9; exile, internal, 123; “zigzagging,” 17–8; life in, 73; narratives of displacement, 98–9. See also identity, mistranslated; identity, in-exile Existentialism, 7 Fanon, Franz, Black Skin,White Masks, 242–3 fear, French. See anxieties, French feminine ideal. See ideals Figes, Eva, 197 “forgetting,” historical. See identity, American national; erasure French, Marilyn, 207 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 197 gaze: exoticizing, 157; racist and nationalist, 99, 100; cross-cultural, 103; postcolonial, 11, 153 gender: ambiguity, 231–2; roles, Vietnamese v. Western, 196; constraints, 204–5; double standard, 196–7; heterosexuality, compulsory: 232–3; roles, traditional Vietnam, 195, 200–1, 206; roles, tragedies of, 207 Giai Pham ( journal), 117 globalization: and the nationalization of difference, 53–4. See also art, Vietnamese Gorman, Jerry, 5 Gosha, Christopher, 59 Greene, Graham: The Quiet American, 4 Greenwood, Davydd, 57 Greer, Germaine, 198 grief. See identity; re-visioning through

Grosselier, Georges, Retour à l’argile, 40–1, 42, 45–6 Guattari, Félix, 12, 176, 249 guilt: and self-hatred, 74–5; and subordination, 245 Hantover, Jeffrey, 116 haunting, trope of, 9, 77–82; in “ethnic” American literature, 77; and ethnic identity, 77; and the recuperation of history, 77; skeletons, as literary figure of war, 80; in literature, American War/Vietnam War, 75–82 Heinemann, Larry, “Paco’s Dream,” 78–9 Hergé, 148; see also Tintin Heston, Charlton, 2 Hickey, Gerald C., 52, 60 history, Vietnamese: representing, problems in, 97–107 Ho Chi Minh, 3, 4; “Annamese Women and French Domination,” 230–1 Hölderlin (Friedrich), 5 Hollywood, projected images of U.S. See images, projected Holmlund, Christine, 225 hybridity, culinary, in French colonial Indochina, 21, 25, 28; filmic,145; cultural: 7, 22, in Viet Kieu literature, 81 See also identities, hybrid ideals: American feminine, and Vietnamese women, 98–100; Confucian woman, 222; Vietnamese woman, 199–206; marriage, Vietnamese, 205 identity markers, negotiating, 124 identity papers, 123 identity politics, 8, 63, 64–5 n16 identity, American national, 9; and disavowal, 71; and erasure historical, 71, 97–100; and national historical narrative 9; Vietnamese, place in, 99 identity, ethnic, 52–63; as relational, 8, 59; ethnic designations, 53; Jarai, 57; Lawa, 62; Moi, 54, 60, 62; “Pemsien,” 57, 64 n15; Sedang, 57; Yao, 62 identity, Montagnard, 10; and anticommunism, 54; and Dega, as global identities, 56; as a deterritorialized identity, 8; as an identity-in-exile, 56; as a projected identity, 8, 56; associated imagery, 53; and nostalgia, 55–6, 58, 62–3; connotations, 55; debates over, 8, 52–5; European connotations, 58; historical erasures, 54–5, 59, 62; and Indochina, phantasmatic constructions of, 63; projection of, 56; relation to Vietnam, 8; in the global ethnoscape, 8. See also identity; annd the Internet



dualities, transcending all, 245 See also categories, colonial DuBois, Thomas A., 99 Dubus, Andre, “Dressed Like Summer Leaves,” 74 Duong Thu Huong, 76 Duras, Marguerite, 11, The Lover, 224–35; Un Barrage Contre le Pacifique (The Seawall), 3, 15, 224–5, 227–8; Eden Cinema, 224, 228; The Vice Consul, 225

275

INDEX

identity, Vietnamese: anxieties and historical crises, 112; diasporic challenges to, 112–125; in global world, 113; Vietnameseness,124; Vietnameseness, as defined in art, 114; Vietnameseness, diasporic challenges to, 114–7; Vietnameseness: negotiated identity, 124–5 identity: 22; abjected, 9, 105–6; and alterity, 246; in Butler, 6; colonial, ambiguities of, 22; in de Certeau, 6; colonial, subversion of, 10; construction of, 8; in contemporary Vietnam, 19; cultural, in crisis, narratives of, 37; defined, 22; and displacement, 159; deterritorialized, 55; and displacement, 159; drifting, 243; ethnicization of, 64 n16; fabric of, 6; fluid, urban, 21, 30; French colonial, 24; in French colonial Indochina, 6; global, 10, 56; grounding of, 8; hybrid, 24; identityin-exile, 56–7; imagined, 57; and the Internet, 52–3, 56–8, 62, in Lefebfre, 6; misrecognition and disavowal, 10; mistaken, 50; (mis)translated, 6, 17; and mixed race women, 237–9; mobile and modulating, 6; naming, 167; and practices of everyday life, 6; and place, 56; projected, 2, 8–9, 12; projected, of Asian as enemy, 99; projected, under colonialism, British, Dutch, and French, 57; projected, as means of control, 57; and projected images, 9, 11, 98; regional, 28; routinization of, 54, 55, 60; 64 n8; and state control, 62; and statemaking, 60; subversive, 30; translocal frameworks of, 63; transnational, 56; urban, French colonial Indochina, 30; of Vietnamese art(ist), 10. See also Buddhism; globalization images, projected: of U.S., in Vietnam, 98 imaginary, French colonial, 3 Immigrant Acts (Lowe), 99 indigénisation. See acculturation Indochina (representation), 3, 56; and cultural hybridity, 3; and historical erasure, 4; in international culture market, 3; and neocolonialism, 3; phantasmatic, 63; postcolonial era, 3; restaurant marketing, 3; and the Western imaginary, 4 Indochine (restaurant), 3 Indochine (Wargnier), 146, 150 influence, cultural, on colonizer. See acculturation Jayawardena, Kumari, 206 Jonsson, Hjorleifur, 8–9, 10, 12 Kaf ka:Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari, 249) Karlin, Wayne, 9 Karlin, Wayne, 71–2; “Point Lookout,” 77–8; and Le Minh Khue and Truong Vu, The

Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers, 71–82 Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam: A Television History, 2–3 Kham la Laotienne (Royer), 36, 39, 40, 41 Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior, 104; and doubling, 104 Kureishi, Hanif, The Buddha of Suburbia, 13 L’Ingratitude (Chen), 249 language, as home, 161 Lao women. See women, Southeast Asian Laos, ethnic minorities, 53 Laos, primitivist images of, 63 Laude, Patrick, 7–8, 10–1, 12–3 Le Colonial (restaurant), 3 Le Luu, “The Rucksack,” 77 Le Minh Khue, 9, 71–72, 76 Le Mirage de la paix (Ly Thu Ho), 195, 203–7 Le Phat Thanh, 25, 27 Le, Lam, 11; L’Atelier de l’Epée de Bois, 156; cinema as “total art,” 156; on Confucianism and evangilization, 156–7; Rencontre des nuages et du dragon, 155; Poussière d’Empire, 11, 14, 143–56 Lê, Linda: on acculturation, tale of success, 245; on “boat people,” 241–2; on “ethnic” experience, 245; on the exiled writer, figure of, 242; Les Evangiles du crime (“Vinh L.”), 13, 241–2, 244–50; as the other, 242–3; Slander, 241, 243; on Third World testimonial, 245 Lec, Stanislaw Jersy, 241 Lefebvre, Henri, 6 Lefebvre, Lucien, 151 Lefèvre, Kim, Métisse Blanche, 26, 28 Les Chemins de la révolte (Nguyen Tien Lang), 227–8 Levinas, Emmanuel, 153, 155 Litérature et identité créole aux Antilles, (Rosello), 247 literature, Asian American: characteristics of, 98. See also double, motif of; literature, of American War/Vietnam War literature, Francophone Vietnamese, 13, 224–6; novels, 224, 229; first monographs, 225; poetry in 225; novels, French male authors, 231 literature, French colonial, 35–48: acculturation, novel of, 7, 35–47 ; colonial novel, 7; con-gai novel, 13, 38, 230–1; colonial v. exotic novel, 7, 35; cultural encounters in, 35–48; exotic novels, 35; named for females, 36; of acculturation, identity in, 8; Cambodian (see Grosselier, Georges) literature, of American War/Vietnam War, 69–83; by Euro-American writers, 69, 74–5;



276

and American masculinity, 74; “literature of return,” 72, 82 n10; by SRV writers, 69; similarities, Euro-American and Viet Kieu, 72–73; in translation, 69; and Vietnamese American literature, 69; by Vietnamese American writers, 69–70; by Viet Kieu writers, 72–74; hybridity, in Viet Kieu narratives. See also haunting literature, refugee v. immigrant. See literature, Vietnamese American; literature, Asian American literature, Vietnamese American; and American national narrative, writing against, 97; compared to Asian American literature, 9, 70; and disavowal, 9; as refugee, 70; transpacific influences, 71. See also literature, of the American War/Vietnam War literature, Vietnamese: contemporary authors and titles, 189–90; Vietnamese national poem, 226; verse romances, 226; novel, 226; autobiography, 226; and cultural borders, 226; prose novel, women characters in, 226; in Vietnamese culture, 189–90, 219–20; Vietnamese, essence of, 220; and Westernization, 220 Lowe, Lisa, 9, 70–1; Immigrant Acts, 99 Ly Thu Ho, 12–3;193–209, 224; and Beauvoir, 12; compared with Western women writers, 207; daughters in, 193–5; and French feminism, 208; influences, 194–5; Au Milieu du carrefour, 195; Le Mirage de la paix, 195, 203–7; novels, as subversive, 208; Printemps inachevé, 195–200; 200–3; Prix littéraire de l’Asie, 195; the prostitute in, 195, 199–200; representations of mothers, 193–5, 200; the servant in, 195; textual politics, 208 Mandel, Georges, 2 Mascolo, Dionys, 5 McGuinness, Stephen, 115 Mee, Wendy, 10, 56, 112 Memmi, Albert, 2; The Colonizer and the Colonized, 227–9 Métisse Blanche (Lefèvre), 26, 28 MIAs, 79–80, 83 n17 Miller, Casey, 196 Mnouchkine, [Ariane], 89, 156 Montagnard identity. See identity, Montagnard Montagnard, organization, 56 Murneau, F. W., Nosferatu, 150 My, Michel, 28–9 Nam Xuong, Ông Tây An-nam (Mr. French Vietnamese), 27 national identity, Vietnamese. See art, Vietnamese neo-lacanians, 8 Ngo Tu Lap, “Waiting for a Friend,” 78–9

277

Nguoi nguoi lop lop (Tran Dan), 117–8 Nguyen Mong Giac, 76 Nguyen Quang Thieu, “Two Village Women,” 77 Nguyen Qui Duc, 83 n10 Nguyen Tien Lang, Les Chemins de la révolte, 227–8, 231 Nguyen Xuan Hoang (Viet Kieu writer), “The Autobiography of a Useless Person,” 73 Nguyên Công Hoan, Dead End, 26 Nguyên Huu Dô, 24–5 Nguyen, Nathalie, 12 Nietzsche (Frederich), 7 nomadic subject, 243 Norindr, Panivong, 2, 10–1, 116, 225. See also Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Art, Film, and Literature Nosferatu, Murneau, 150 nostalgia: French colonial, 3, 116; in Tran Trong Vu, 116–7; of Hanoi foreign community, 116; and social engineering. See also Vietnam (representation); identity, Montagnard O’Brien, Tim, 76 Obeyesekere, Gannath, 246–7 Ollier, Leakthina Chau-Pech, 13 Ông Tây An-nam (Nam Xuong), 27 Orientalism, postcolonial, 123 Orlando Furioso, Ronconi, 156 other, the; 248, colonial, encounter with: 242; desire for, 246; rewriting, 9; identification with, undermining, 245; misapprehension of, 242; obsession with, The Lover, 231; obsession with, Vietnamese Francophone literature, 224; racial, 232; re-visioning, though grief, 72; the Western imaginary, in, 242; in Western literary tradition, 45; passim othering, 3 otherness: Asian, 99; in Asian American literature, 104; in colonial literature, 35–47; racial, 101. See also women, Southeast Asian Palcy, Euzhan, Rue Case nègres, 144 Peters, Erica J., 6–7, 10–1, 14–5 Pham Quynh, 242–3 Pham Thi Xuan Ban (pseud. Y Ban): on writing, 190–1; on literature in Vietnam, 189–90; on Western writers, 192; on “A Worthy Résumé,” 192 Pham Van Ky, 194, 224 Pham, Andrew, 83 n10 Phan Huy Duong, 80–1 Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Art, Film, and Literature (Norindr), 2, 225 Philip Caputo, “A Soldier’s Burial,” 74 plagiarism. See cannibalism



INDEX

INDEX

Plum Blossom Gallery, 114–5 Poétique de l’espace (Bachelard), 147 Poussière d’Empire (Lam Le), 143–156; and the Bible, 150; bricolage, 155–7; Cartesian logic, breaking of, 145–47; and colonial archetypes, 147; compared with Tran Anh Hung, 157; cross-cultural resonances, 148; and cultural identity, blurring of, 153; and the gaze, postcolonial, 153; and German expressionism, 150; and globalization, 11; hybrid cinematic aesthetic, 11; hybridity of, 145; and the mimetic impulse, 155; and the other, absolute, quest of, 157; reception, 146, 155; stylization, Chinese-painterly, 150; and Tàpies, 146; and the sacred, 150; theater, influence of, 148–149; and Titus Carmel, 148; and the uncanny, 146; Vietnamese space, veiling of, 151–2; Vietnamese space, desacralizing, 153; and Western pop cultural forms, 148 Pouvourville, Albert de, “Le geste révélateur,” 37–8, “L’homme à la ceinture,” 43–4; colonial corpus, 47 n2 practices, cultural, in French colonial Indochina: 24–9; banquets, 23–5; weddings, 25; Lao, popular, 40, 42 Pratt, Mary Louise, 2 Print Press, Vietnamese language in United States, 82 n1 Printemps inachevé (Ly Thu Ho), 195–200, 204 propaganda, French colonial: images of Indochina, 2; and the French colonial subject, 2 PRVN (People’s Army of Vietnam), 76, 83 Puipia, Chatchai, “Siamese Smile,” 123 race, and racism, 161, 166; in The Lover, 229–30; perceived abstractly, 104 Rapp, Bernard, Caractères, 242, 244 Reading Asian American Literature (Wong),103 refugee, 77 relations, cross-cultural: in colonial literature, 35–48; and prelapsarian state, 43 relations, interracial, representations of, 200–2; in The Lover, 229 Retour à l’argile (Grosselier), 40–1, 42, 45–6 rhizomes. See Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix; Cyclo Ricouart, Janine, 225 Ronconi, Orlando Furioso, 156 Rootham, Mireille Mai, 225 Rosaldo, Renato, 5 Rosello, Mireille, Litérature et identité créole aux Antilles, 247 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile, 196 routinization. See identity: routinization of Royer, Louis-Royer, Kham la Laotienne, 36, 39, 40, 41

Rue Case nègres (Palcy), 144 RVN (Republic of Viet Nam), 70 Said, Edward, 243 Salemink, Oscar, 57 Sanda, Dominique, 145–9, 150 Sao Kéo ou le bonheur immobile (Billotey), 36, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46 Sao tiampa, épouse laotienne (Baudenne and Starbach), 36, 40, 45, 46 Sao, L’amoureuse tranquille (Casseville), 36, 38 Schoendorffer, Pierre, Dien Bien Phu, 146; La 317e Section, 157 Segal, Erich, Love Story, 242 self-immolation, 130 Silliman, Ron, 166 Socé, Ousmane, Mirages de Paris, 202 Socialist Realism, 120; in art, 115 Sorrow of War (Bao Ninh), 79 Southeast Asia, representations of: as European self-representation, 46 Southeast Asian Women. See women, Southeast Asian SRV (Socialist Republic of Viet Nam), 69, 71; filmic aesthetic, 154–5 Starbach, Gaston, Sao tiampa, épouse laotienne, 36, 40, 45, 46 stereotypes: avoiding, in art, 124; of outside, in Vietnam, 162; and silence, 123; smiling Asian, 120, 123; of Taiwanese, in Vietnam, 163 Stévenin, Jean-François, 145–7, 150 Stone of Waiting (pierre d’attente), 150 Stone, Robert, “Helping,” 74; and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, 74; “Helping,” 78 subject, the: dislocated, 245; French colonial, 2, 8; Western, 13; relation to its other, 14 Suleri, Sara, 13; The Rhetoric of English India, 226–7 Sulfur, see Eshleman, Clayton Swift, Kate, 196 Tale of Kieu,The, 195, 199–200, 208, 209 n11 Taylor, Nora A., 10–1 Television’s Vietnam:The Real Story (Accuracy in the Media), 2 Thailand, ethnic minorities, 53–4 The Buddha of Suburbia (Kureishi), 13 The Location of Culture (Bhabha), 5, 14, 143; on translation, cultural, 156; on fixity, 245, 250; liminal space in, 246; the “unhomely,” 144 The Lover (Annaud), 4, 146, 150 The Lover (Duras), 224–35; ambiguity, gender, in 231–3; ambiguity, political and social, in, 232; Asians, treatment of, 229; and the congai novel, 13, 230; and Francophone Vietnamese literature, 226; and Memmi’s



278

colonial categories, 229; and privileged space, 227; and Vietnamese nationalism, 227 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, (Braudel), 58, 61 The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers (Karlin, Le Minh Khue, Truong Vu), 9, 71–82 The Quiet American (Greene), 4 The Scent of Green Papaya (Tran Anh Hung), 11–2, 144, 150, 170–9; representation of Vietnam, 11; and colonial identities, 11–2; and silencing of history, 12. See also Buddhism The Second Sex (Beauvoir), 12 Third Cinema, 154 This Angry Age (Clément), 3 This Angry Age (Clément), 3 Thom Jones, “The Pugilist at Rest,” 74, 76 Tintin, 11 tourism. See art, Vietnamese Tran Anh Hung, 11–2, 170–9; The Scent of Green Papaya, 11–2, 144, 150, 170–9; Cyclo, 12; exoticing gaze, 157; fatherlessness, cultural, problem of, 170; Tran Dan, 10, 117–123; anticommunist dissidence, 117–8; Nguoi nguoi lop lop, 117–8; “Nhat Dinh Thang,” 120. See also Tran Trong Vu Tran Dieu Hang, 82 n1 Tran Trong Vu, 10–1, 112–25; “La Chambre pluviale,” 118–9; debt to Tran Dan, 117–23; “Document Intime” (“Intimate Document”), 120–2; “Lampes aveugles,” 120; and Vietnamese identity, 112. See also nostalgia; censorship; stereotypes, identity papers; art, Vietnamese Tran Vu, 82 n1; “The House Behind the Temple of Literature,” 73 Trân Tê Xuong, 26, 27 Tran, Qui-Phiet, 189–192 transgression, in colonial literature, 41; 168; 156 transnational identities. See identities; transnational Trinh T. Minh-ha, 6, 245 Truong Dinh Tri and Teneuille, Albert de, BàDâm, 202 Truong Hong Son (pseud.Truong Vu), 9, 71–2 Truong Van Tran, 4–5 Truong Vu. See Truong Hong Son Truong, Monique Thuy-Dung, 9–11; “Kelly,” 9, 97–107 University of Massachusetts Press. See literature, of the American War/Vietnam War; in translation urban liberation, 7 urbanization, in French colonial Indochina, 21–31

279

VC, Viet Cong, 54 Viet Kieu, 71, 159–68; assimilation of, 70, 161; defined, 82 n6; art production, 112–25; women, and abjection, 98; women, and otherness, 98; writers, 69–74, 76–7, 80–1; writers, in France, 80. See also Phan Huy Duong Vietnam (representation): and American national identity, 2–3; associated imagery, 53; discourses of, 1–3; as an imaginary and cultural tableau, 1; as a lost object of desire, 1; representations of, 1–3; and the colonial subject, 1; recoding of, 4 Vietnam Studies Group (e-mail discussion site), 8, 52, 57 Vietnam War. See American War/Vietnam War Vietnam, Central Highlands (Tay Nguyen), 52–63 Vietnam: A Television History (Karnow), 2–3 Vietnam: north/south relations, 163–4; social relation in, 162, U.S. embargo, 115. See also censorship Vietnamese society: ambiguities, social and political: in colonial Indochina, 232; gender roles and family relationships. See also Ly Thu Ho Vietnamese women. See women, Southeast Asian; women, Vietnamese “Vinh L.” (Lê), 244–50 Wargnier, Régis, Indochine, 146, 150 water hyacinth, the. See identity; drifting Williams, Lea, 228 Willis, Sharon, Marguerite Duras:Writing on the Body, 233, 234 n3 Winston, Jane (Bradley), 225 Wolders, O. W., 60 women, European, in French colonial literature, 39 women, Southeast Asian, in French colonial literature: 12; “Asian Eve,” 7, 36–39; assimilation of, 41; Cambodian and Lao (pou sao), as ‘uncivilized,” 39–41; Cambodian and Lao, and “contemplative repose,” 40; Cambodian and Lao, as embodiment of otherness, 39; Cambodian and Lao, perceived by Vietnamese women, 47 n4; as catalyst of acculturation, 36; as emblem of Asian culture, 7; objectification of, 40; as same and other, 58; as subversive, 40; and the “uncivilizing pull,” 36; Vietnamese v. Lao and Cambodian, 39; Vietnamese, 55; Vietnamese, as national symbol, 208; Vietnamese, in Tran Anh Hung, 12; Vietnamese, in Ly Thu Ho, 12. See also congai; Ly Thu Ho; The Scent of Green Papaya; Cyclo



INDEX

INDEX

women, Vietnamese: double consciousness, 197; and national culture, 206; perception of European women, 197–8, 209 n15; and social and political alliances, 200, 209 n12; and tradition, 196; writers, 194, 208 n1. See also women, Southeast Asian Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, Reading Asian American Literature, 103 Writers’ Association Publishing House, 114 writers, Euro-American. See literature, of the American War/Vietnam War

writing: and the (dis)alienation of identity, 246, 248; and fasting, 249; as a woman, 220; in U.S. v. Vietnam, 164–5 Xuan Thieu, “Please Don’t Knock at My Door,” 74–77; and haunting, 75 Y Ban. See Pham Thi Xuan Ban Yeager, Jack A., 13



280

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